Social Media that Gets Results

Michael Stoner is the president of mStoner (mStoner.com), a marketing firm that works with education institutions.

In April, I spent several days locked in a room with more than a dozen other folks judging the websites and social media initiatives entered in the 2011 CASE Circle of Excellence awards program. Imagine looking at hundreds of websites, Facebook pages, blogs and Twitter feeds—and then arguing over what works well and what doesn't with a bunch of smart, plugged-in and opinionated people. It's inspiring and, at times, stupefying.

Here are some characteristics of the award-winners that are worth emulating if you want your social media initiatives to be effective.

1. When you define your challenge, be as clear as you can about it.

Last year, William & Mary's mascot search won a gold medal. The challenge faced by Susan T. Evans, who led the initiative, was a directive from President Taylor Reveley to pick a mascot for the college's Tribe athletic teams and to make it fun.

One of this year's gold award winners was the University of Nottingham's Election 2010 blog, created to draw attention to the university's political scientists as expert commentators on the elections in the U.K.

2. Determine who your target audience is.

Are you targeting prospective students? The media and influencers? Your internal community? Your strategy and tactics will differ depending upon your answer to this question.

Consider St. Edwards University's socially connected graduation, which was powered by Whrrl, a location-based game. St. Edwards understood that although people know Facebook, they wouldn't be familiar with Whrrl. To address this, they conducted trial runs and provided simple instructions on how to use the tool. That led to audience participation—and amusement from those who didn't participate as the Whrrl stream was displayed on large screens during graduation ceremonies.

3. Don't rely on a single social channel.

For many institutions, it's essential to have a well-administered presence on Facebook. But, having an excellent Facebook page or a president or chancellor who tweets or blogs, isn't a social media strategy.

Effective social media programs usually rely on multiple channels. The University of Nottingham used a blog, YouTube—and good, old-fashioned media relations—to achieve stellar results with its Election 2010 program. William & Mary's mascot search involved blogs, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, email and even some print ads.

You could say that William & Mary's blogs—a gold award winner this year—are a "single channel." What makes them particularly impressive is their scale, including the number of participants and how the college integrates blog content within relevant areas of WM.edu.

One of the big differences between entries for the "best in social media" category this year versus previous years was the fact that many institutions entered programs that relied on multiple social channels. We took this as a clear indication of the growing sophistication of social media use.

4. Muster the power of your internal community as well as your external audience.

One of the impressive characteristics of William & Mary's blogging program was the fact that there were 63 active bloggers including students, staff and faculty. The blog posts were authentic while being on message.

The University of Nottingham's Election 2010 effort involved 14 professional and academic staff members who were blogging, tweeting and publicizing both the blogs and the university's experts to the appropriate media.

5. Develop yardsticks that will determine the success of your effort.

We know that it is difficult to project the success of a social media-based campaign, but jumping in without a sense of what you'd like to achieve is not a wise approach. Here are a few of the University of Nottingham's objectives for the Election 2010 project. Note that some don't pertain to social media at all.

• involve at least four new academics in media activity by the end of the campaign
• position Nottingham academics as key political commentators
• generate at least 20 pieces of national and international coverage
• support recruitment activity and help increase admissions applications by at least five percent

It helps that the university exceeded all these goals. But without explicitly stating them up front, who would know how successful the Election 2010 program was?

Much of this sounds like smart strategy for just about any successful effort whether a media relations campaign or a recruitment program—and to a large extent, it is. Institutions are still learning how to manage Facebook communities effectively or use Twitter to its best advantage. But that doesn't mean that what we've learned about being successful in public relations or alumni relations doesn't transfer to social media. It does.

Storify Your Institution

Jen Doak is the online communications specialist at CASE.

There's been a lot of buzz on Storify lately, so I thought I'd try it out to demonstrate how it can be used for advancement:

How to Live-Update a Commencement/Reunion Weekend

Ma'ayan Plaut is the social media coordinator at Oberlin College.

Mission: In four days or 84 hours, try to connect as many people as possible.

Campus: Oberlin is usually a campus of 2,800 students during the school year; during commencement/reunion weekend there are over 600 graduating seniors, around 2,000 visitors (in the form of family, friends, and alumni) returning, and several hundred students working for the entire week/weekend.

Commencement week is a wonderful time at Oberlin. A confluence of generations, happiness and sadness, families, friends and a conglomeration of amazing events culminates in the degree ceremony on Monday morning. The weekend is full of Oberlin's finest: onstage in the form of recitals, plays and musicals; panels of alumni experts; historical walking tours; and graduation parties, dinners and senior sendoff events.

A team of photographers, writers and communications staff covered events in shifts throughout commencement weekend on May 27-30. The booklet of weekend events numbered 50 front-and-back pages and that was only the publicized events. As a former commencement photographer and now social media coordinator, my role was to be present in as many places as possible over the four-day period.

Photography is my dominant passion and my go-to approach to connecting people around the world and generations of Oberlin alumni to each other. For our weekend, which is a mashup of a handful of reunions and the festivities revolving around the commencement exercises, I decided to do photo updates through Facebook and Twitter.

We kicked off our weekend with the debut of our Friday parody video at the senior supper on Thursday evening and then on YouTube a few hours later. Our seniors and alumni (returning or otherwise) were completely pumped for the whole weekend, with their eyes on us. The video worked well and got the buzz surrounding Oberlin commencement going so that our audience was on the lookout for updates throughout the weekend.

To pull all this off, I focused on the following:

• Have a detailed and organized schedule. The nice thing about trying to update everything over a weekend is that you're attempting to quickly capture the essence of any given event. You don't have to stick around if you don't want to. I hit 2-3 events each hour and then, at the last event of the hour, updated all the photos to Facebook and Twitter at once. Lesson learned: The schedule saved me. I will definitely be creating a schedule again in the future.
• Have your essentials on you at all times. I had business cards, a press pass, extra batteries, chargers and a water bottle with me non-stop the whole weekend. I also brought sunscreen and a bike helmet for personal safety. Bring some snacks, too, in case your detailed schedule doesn’t plan for meals. Lesson learned: I forgot to eat one day and realized it at 1 a.m. I’ll be planning meals into my schedule in the future.
• Carry around your mini-office. I achieved this with a backpack. To be exact, a blue, children's backpack with dragon wings and a hood. It was the perfect size to hold an iPad, a camera and extra lenses, a business card case, a water bottle and a small case with chargers, batteries, and card readers. Lesson learned: Maximize your time by minimizing your belongings. A small bag is ideal for quick traveling.

I decided to scrap the wings and hood for fast traveling between events. I also didn't want to be a conversation starter at every location I visited (not conducive to the shoot-and-dash nature of my weekend). Photos by Brandi Ferrebee.

• Know your technology and always have them handy. I planned to use an Eye-Fi card (the most advanced piece of technology I've ever seen; it turns a camera into a wireless port and can send things directly to a mobile device or an internet site of your choice), but it didn't cooperate with our campus network. I ended up with an iPad and a memory card attachment that attached to the dock connecter, combined with my Nikon D90 and an iPod touch for fast retweeting. Lesson learned: Test everything before you go out in the field, and be nice to the folks who know how to fix things.
• Know your own limitations. Can you get from one side of campus to the other for three different events in an hour? I accomplished this with a bicycle with lots of baskets. Can you work a 15-hour day, three days in a row? Lesson learned: sleep well, save your voice and have some mode of transportation at your disposal.

These baskets came in handy over the weekend.

Overall, the weekend was a wild success. Our Twitter account, @oberlincollege, only recently reclaimed from a defunct account, gained many new followers and valuable endorsements from influential alumni over commencement weekend. I realized that there are far more alumni on Twitter than we had previously thought. Next year, we’ll create a dedicated hashtag for the weekend rather than just the #oberlin tag we used this year.

In the future, it would be valuable to recruit volunteers to help get information out via social media. A member of the alumni association was updating to Twitter and Tumblr a few times a day, with a bit more content than just captions, which I was able easily retweet and reblog to give a grander perspective. If even more people were doing this, it would have been stunning. There's always next year.

What did you do for commencement at your institution? What lessons did you learn about what worked and what didn’t?

What Should I Say?

Susan Evans is the director of creative services for the senior strategic communication team at the College of William & Mary.

Content is king. And if you are just getting started with a social media channel, it can be daunting to figure out what to say. Even those of us who have been doing this for a while experience an occasional dry spell or suffer through good, old-fashioned writer’s block. Whether you are a newbie or a seasoned pro, coming up with good stuff to use on your institution’s social media channels is sometimes challenging. The point of this post is to present a few suggestions.

1. Photos are content. People consistently respond well to campus beauty shots and pics from events. A superb piece of photography, like the one I’ve included here, needs no words. Well, maybe a caption and photo credit. (Photo by Stephen Salpukas.)
2. Ask a question. It is, after all, a great way to start a conversation. Besides, teasing out content from the community you are building is completely appropriate in the social media realm. The more they say in the form of comments and retweets, the less you have to create.
3. Take advantage of bragging rights and tell stories about your students, your alumni, your faculty, your programs and any and all of the other gems you’ve got.
4. Use bits of teaser copy to tee up links to web pages that have more detail. This approach works well when using events and announcements as content for your channels.
5. Comment about other people’s stuff; say a few words followed by links to news stories, blog posts, etc.
6. Create regular features that people enjoy and will come back to see on a regular basis (e.g., a photo of the day, featured faculty profiles, video of the month, trivia, etc.).
7. Include little known facts about your school. Perhaps something along the lines of  “best kept secrets” would be a well-received regular feature.
8. Offer updates before, during and after athletic competitions. Nothing brings out pride for your college or university like game scores or a rivalry with other campuses.
9. Share info about campus goings on. Luckily, the rhythm of the academic year is chock-full of opportunities (e.g., students are moving in, exams start today, enjoy winter break).
10. Feature the social media channels of others. We often use the William & Mary Facebook page to promote, and give a bump to, the streams of individual programs, units and organizations.
11. Post quotes from others. Perhaps you will stumble upon a perfect paragraph in an email message from a parent or in a phone conversation with an alum.
12. Encourage integration of your channels by including content from one social media outlet on another (e.g., post video links from a YouTube channel on Twitter).
13. Consider posts that evoke emotion and encourage a trip down memory lane (e.g., Congratulations, Class of 2011! We send you off with much pride and expectation. Go do great things!).

When all else fails, talk about the weather. Not kidding here, when we reference the weather in Williamsburg, responses are guaranteed.

Activate Your LinkedIn Lurkers

Matthew Herek currently serves as the assistant director of young alumni in the office of alumni relations and development at Northwestern University.

“Join LinkedIn,” is a phrase that many alumni relations professionals have used in the past several years when asked for job hunting advice from constituents. At Northwestern, constantly imploring people to do so seems to have worked. As of today, there are over 20,000 alumni in the “official” Northwestern group. That’s not a bad number when you consider we work from an alumni base of roughly 200,000 people.

And yet, what purpose does the group serve? Is it a place to advertise yourself? The “19^th hole” to discuss the events of the day? A marketing tool for events (career and otherwise) around the country? It certainly could be any of these things, but one area where we have found success is using the LinkedIn group as a junction of knowledge bases for mutual enrichment between students and alumni.

For the past three years, the Northwestern Alumni Association has partnered with instructors teaching an experiential and interdisciplinary course called NUvention. The students in the class are exposed to the entire product and business development life cycle in the course of a 12 week class. Towards the end of the class, the students take their products to alumni for refinement of their business models.

This spring, the class has been taught by Todd Warren, a Northwestern Trustee and former Microsoft vice president, and Professor Mike Marasco. The focus this quarter was on web apps. Students from five different schools on campus, representing engineering, journalism, liberal arts, communications and business, have formed eight different teams.

The abbreviated timeframe of the class would make taking these product ideas out to alumni impractical. Instead, as the owner of the LinkedIn group, the Northwestern Alumni Association has created a specific subgroup for the NuVention class. We then invited all of our LinkedIn members and Facebook fans to join us in the subgroup. Approximately 500 alumni joined the group beyond the 500 who had participated in the past.

The discussions between the students and the alumni have been interesting and helpful. It is proving to be a great way for alumni in business to give back to the school by interacting with students. Promotion of this group has caused alumni to move from lurking to engaging with community members. At the same time, the students find out exactly what refinements their products would need before they could consider taking them to market. (In some cases these groups will take their ideas and look for angel investors or venture funding.)

LinkedIn groups can be utilized to a higher level than what most schools are currently doing. Consider taking a step back and using this prime real estate as a spot for engaging students and alumni in unique ways. Is your institution doing anything interesting with LinkedIn?

The Anatomy of a Twitter Audience

Cassie Dull is the online communications specialist at Park Tudor School, an independent school in Indianapolis, Indiana.

When we started using Twitter at Park Tudor two years ago, I immediately became curious about the types of people who were following us. I assumed that our follower base would be 90 percent Park Tudor families and alumni and 10 percent spam. I was wrong. Here's the breakdown of our Twitter followers:

One-third of our audience is made up of people or organizations in our local community in the city of Indianapolis or the state of Indiana. Almost another third is made up of schools, teachers, education bloggers and people who work in the education industry. Then we get to the 22 percent of our followers who have a direct relationship with the school— alumni, students, parents and faculty and staff. Only two out of every nine followers are school constituents. The male-female ratio is evenly spread out among our followers, excluding Twitter accounts that represent an organization or company.

So what does this mean for our Twitter strategy?

First, it means we have to adjust our messages to fit a wider audience. If we tweet a reminder about the kindergarten program that parents are invited to attend, it's not going to matter to most of the people following us. Instead, we've turned to Twitter as a tool for community outreach. It lets people in the community get a real glimpse of what life is really like at Park Tudor. We tweet photos and videos of everyday life on campus. And we listen. When someone talks about Park Tudor online, we want to know what they're saying and we want to have the chance to respond, whether it's a positive or negative comment. (Most of the time, it is a positive comment.)

Second, it means we need to establish ourselves as a leader in the education industry. Whether it's people in the community, in the education industry or in our school community, they all are looking to us as a knowledgeable source for education information. I will admit this is an area that I would like to improve on. I think it would be beneficial to our followers if we shared more articles and blogs about news in the education industry as well as parenting tips and learning strategies.

Finally, it means that we need to better promote our Twitter account among our school community. We don't just want to increase our numbers by asking them to follow us on Twitter, we want to increase engagement with our school community members.

Do you know how your Twitter audience is spread out? How do you tailor your content for your audience? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Social Media Fails: Five Mistakes and the Lessons Learned

Elizabeth Allen is a blogger and consultant, advising educational institutions on social media and communications.

I’ve come to enjoy the Fail Blog, an online repository for all things ridiculous, outlandish, and frankly, immature. While its content is far from intel "win," I see many schools and organizations trying to win at social media, but falling short when it comes to a few simple things—and ultimately, earning a "fail."

Here are a few of those fails, and more importantly, what you can learn from them.

#Fail 1: The False Start
An organization sets up a Facebook Page, a Twitter feed and a blog. It posts loads of content and Tweets like mad for about a month. Then...nothing. The presences fall silent, never to be revived.

• The Lesson: Be prepared to "feed the beast" once you set your mind to creating a new social media presence. Ask yourself if you have the content and the staffing to sustain a new presence long term. It’s better to have never started using a tool than to start and abandon it mid-way through.

#Fail 2: The Auto Follow
Setting up your Twitter client to automatically follow anyone who follows you or anyone who mentions your name.

• The Lesson: It’s great to engage with new people, but be selective and deliberate about who you follow back. Develop a policy around the users you follow and why (alumni, parents, students, news agencies, etc). Then, stick to it. Auto-following will just tie you in with spammers and other undesirables and could come back to haunt you.

#Fail 3: The QR Code to Nowhere
QR codes have a prominent place in your printed materials and link back to your website.

• The Lesson: The whole point of a QR code is that it makes it easier for your users to access content on the go. A QR code should, at minimum, link to a mobile-optimized site or other content that is designed specifically for the small screen. Directing traffic to a "regular" website doesn’t do justice to the power of QR codes. And, more to the point, "you are actually showing people that you don't understand why QR codes exist," said Andy Shaindlin of Alumni Futures, in a recent email thread, "thereby alienating or disappointing the very audience most interested in your success with mobile."

#Fail 4: The Twitter “Set It and Forget It”
Scheduling outgoing tweets all at once and not logging in again until the following week...when it’s time to schedule the next round of tweets.

• The Lesson: This ignores a fundamental benefit of using Twitter: interactivity. Using Twitter (and really, any social technology) as a broadcast tool defeats the entire purpose. Schedule tweets, but also use @replies, RTs and other engagement strategies to make full use of the tool’s potential. Twitter and other social tools are about listening more than disseminating.

#Fail 5: The “Carpet Bomb” Update
Posting the exact same update to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

• The Lesson: Each social technology has its own personality, language and nuance. Posting all of your Twitter updates to LinkedIn just clutters your connections’ timelines—if they want to get your Twitter updates, they already follow you there. And Facebook is built to handle way more than 140 characters...so use them! And why not add a photo for good measure? You can post similar messages on all of your social media presences, just be true to the language and the capacity of the channels themselves.

What are some of your examples of social media fails or wins? Leave a comment!

Note: This article is cross-posted to the Adaptivate blog.

Why I Still Like Facebook Check-In Deals

Patrick Powers is an interactive media manager at Webster University.

It could be easy to get glum on the future of Facebook check-in deals — so few businesses seem to take the time to set them up and, in return, so few people use the service to claim them.

So why am I still keen on the idea of setting them up in higher education?

Facebook check-in deals are easy to establish, help a location stand out from the crowd and reward people for telling others about a business. They may never be “the next big thing,” but they’re still worth the minimal effort it takes to get them up and running.

Here’s the basic rundown on the four types of Facebook deals:

• Individual deals. Check in at the university film series and gets a free bag of popcorn.
• Friend deals. Get five friends to attend a lecture, check in, tag each other and they all get copy of the lecturer’s latest book.
• Loyalty deals. Reach a set number of check-ins at a specific university cafeteria and earn a free meal.
• Charitable donations. For every check in at the “Local Big Business” lecture hall, the “Local Big Business” donates $1 to fund university scholarships.

Establishing a Facebook check-in deal is easy. If a Facebook page includes an address, it’s already a “place” in Facebook and should be available to launch a deal. Choose the deal type, define the offer, specify run dates and promote it across Facebook. It takes about as much time as it did to read this sentence.

It is important to remember, however, that while a deal can be created in minutes, the goals and strategy behind the deal may take some time to flush out. These important details are worth spending some time on.

Check-in deals help a location stand out. It may be subtle but the little yellow icon that floats next to a location plays a role in drawing users’ attention. If users know that little yellow icon can unlock value, they’re more likely to investigate.

It’s an icon that begs the question, “What does that location have going on that others don’t?” And who wouldn’t want inquiring minds taking the time to see what else is out there?

Deals reward people for telling others. When a person checks in to claim a deal, it pops up in the news feed of all his or her friends, becoming a link to the location’s Facebook page. The average user on Facebook accumulates 130 friends.

Check-in deals, therefore, can be a great way to build brand awareness those friends of friends.