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Twitter Chat Recap: Content Curation

Not Comfortable with Social Media? Now's the Time to Start

Teresa Valerio Parrot (@tvparrot) is principal of TVP Communications, a boutique public relations agency focused on issues specific to higher education.

Recently, I was talking to a group of higher education senior executives when I mentioned a particularly funny Twitter string I’d read. I was surprised to hear, for the most part, they’ve delegated most, if not all, social media monitoring and posting to their staff members.

If you delegate the management of your institution's social media efforts, I’m challenging you to spend a few minutes this summer getting comfortable with the various platforms and posting to each. Ask whoever is in charge of your online presence to spend an hour or two teaching a social media 101 overview—I guarantee that you aren’t the only one with questions.

As a start to your journey, I asked three staffers with social media responsibilities to share their top tips for beginners. Below is their advice:

 Lauren Smith, assistant director of digital media at the University of West Florida, suggests:

• “It is easy to become overwhelmed with all the changes happening in social media on a daily basis. If you’re like me and like to research things before getting started, be careful not to get stuck in the trap of researching instead of engaging. You can do both. Social media isn’t complicated—it just seems that way when you overthink it.”

Becca Ramspott, public information specialist: technology and new media at Frostburg State University, said a casual approach works for her institution:

• “Treat social media like you’re hosting a party—be entertaining and memorable, respond to your guests’ questions/comments/ideas, and let them talk to each other. It’s much more interesting when an alum or student chimes in to answer a question someone posts on your Facebook page’s wall than when YOU (the official brand or voice of the institution) answer the question."
• “If they like your party, they’ll be back for more, and eager to ‘attend’ future events you host on your social media site. This also relates to your social media voice. At FSU, we try to keep things fun, light and casual with how we write and communicate on our social media sites, not overly official and stodgy. Check out our voice on our Pinterest account.”

Finally, Aaron Jaco, digital media specialist at Drake University, believes, “Your users will appreciate knowing that, behind your social media platforms, there's a human who actually cares about them.”  You do this, Aaron suggests, by engaging with others through social media.

• “Spend time getting to know the people who respond to your posts, mention your institution or otherwise show interest in you via social media. Learn what current students are studying, ask what prospective students are interested in studying and figure out where your alumni work. This is the first step in leveraging social media relationships for valuable relationships 'in real life'—for example, arranging for an alum to speak to a class (in person or via Skype) about his/her area of professional expertise."
• “I once had a lengthy Twitter conversation ('as' Drake University) with a prospective student who asked about an admission deadline. Over the course of an hour, our conversation moved from the student's preferred area of study, to his interest in pro wrestling, to professional use of social media. A few months later, the student was back in touch to let me know that he'd applied to Drake (...which reminds me to check in about whether he was accepted and enrolled!)."

My tips? Don’t be afraid to take a leap into the social media universe, but arm yourself with three things:

1. Understand how to “undo” a posting (but know your post is still out there even if it no longer appears on your profile/page);
2. Arm your campus with a social media policy or guidelines so that a campus-wide code of conduct/expectations exist; and
3. Read sites like www.mashable.com to add to your knowledge.

Good luck with your summer tutorial and investigation. Use the comments to let me know what you learn and if you’re hooked once you stop overthinking your social media entry. 

Will Work for Follows: Hiring a Community Manager

Keith Hannon is the assistant director for social media at Cornell University.

During the past few months, several peers at other institutions have asked me for my job description. Typically, I just forward the job description my supervisor posted when he was hiring for my position, but lately I have been thinking about how hard it is to determine whether or not someone would make a good social media or community manager. There aren’t too many people out there with a bachelor’s in social media, so determining who is worthy of owning the keys to your institution's social media castle can be a challenge.

While living and working in Hollywood for seven years, I met many talented people whose jobs couldn't be further from their career aspirations. I'll shoot straight with you—I was one of those people. With a degree in video production and ambitions to write and perform comedy, I spent my days working as a production assistant for Nickelodeon. If you're not familiar with the entertainment industry, production assistant is short for "shut up, do what you're told, and feel lucky we're paying you." The skills I had developed in college grew dustier with each passing year. Just when I thought my life would be devoted to meeting the demands of 10-year-old divas, something interesting happened.

(Keith Hannon circa 2005)

Facebook and Myspace were just beginning to fight it out for online social supremecy, Youtube was starting to heat up and most relevant to me, social gaming was creating online communities at an unprecedented rate. Anxious for a change of scenery, I decided to roll the dice on a new gig with an online game publisher looking for someone with sports journalism experience.  I would be the new community manager of its sports-themed virtual world. In college, I was the voice of the Ithaca college football team for four years, a sports anchor for the school’s TV station and an intern at the "Best Damn Sports Show Period." I was excited to be back in a sports-centric industry. My only experience with virtual worlds was the five minutes I had spent in Second Life before a guy approached me and asked if I knew where he could get a gun. I was hoping this position would be a little more wholesome.

What I thought would be a sports writing job turned out to be much more. Learning the online community management business opened my mind to a whole new world of entertainment possibilities. All of a sudden, that dusty communications degree was alive and well as I began crafting content to engage more than 300K monthly uniques! Fast forward a couple of years and I'm staring down the barrel of parenthood. Instantly the City of Angels becomes undesirable. Luckily for me, Cornell's alumni affairs office was looking for a community manager and was willing to take a chance on a Hollywood drop-out.

Most community managers agree that each social network requires its own unique touch. Spreading one piece of content across all of your networks is a sure way to scare off your followers. While the content should be different, the goal is usually the same—to tell a compelling story. Whether recapping an event, highlighting an alumnus in the news, spreading a campus press release, gamifying a piece of nostalgia or producing a video, community managers are storytellers. The specific platform dictates HOW we tell the story and that's the real challenge.

Certainly enthusiasm and familiarity with the tech sector and with social media are important, but I'm of the opinion that it's crucial to find someone who can tell a story both in 140 characters and in a 1:40 video. In alumni affairs and development, we frequently talk about how we have to compete for donors with other nonprofits. In social media, we're not comepting directly for an alum's wallet, but we are competing for their attention—which is a much more daunting proposition. With an endless number of distractions on social media platforms, mobile devices and the web, it's imperative that we craft an engaging story to draw them in. To be successful, you need someone who knows how to not only communicate but also entertain.

Am I a tad biased? Probably, but I think you have to consider what we're after. We want Facebook posts that generate comments and likes. We want tweets that are catchy enough to be clicked on and retweeted. We want videos that strike a chord in the hearts of our constituencies and that have the potential to go viral. The frontier of alumni events is clearly livestream and that requires someone who is both video production-savvy and story-minded.

Social media is a serious business but there are skeptics out there who fail to understand how important these channels of communication are to institutions. If social media is going to be taken seriously in higher education, we need people who can produce compelling content on a regular basis.

If you're looking for a community manager, don't look for someone with a lot of social media experience, because you could be looking for a long time. Instead, look for someone who has the production training, creativity and personality that enables them to convey the story that is unique to your institution.

Twitter Chat Recap: Summer Social Media Engagement

Here's a recap of this week's #casesmc Twitter chat, on summer social media engagement. The co-moderator this week was Gretchen Edwards, assistant director of digital engagement at Wake Forest University.

2012 Circle of Excellence Winners: Websites and Social Media

Jen Doak is the online communications specialist at CASE.

The bar has been raised higher," a judge remarked during an intense two-day Circle of Excellence submission evaluation process for website and best uses of social media categories.

And indeed it had. When judging institutional websites, the judges discovered that beautiful design and a dedicated social media presence were no longer enough to merit an award. The best-quality websites had to be impressive under the hood. Did they gracefully cater to all audiences? Was it evident that extensive user testing had occurred? Were calls to action, social media integration and navigation created in a way that was clean and intuitive? And did the website clearly represent the institution's brand and mission?

Demanding questions, but ones the 2012 Circle of Excellence awardees answered abundantly. Here are this year's winners:

• Gold: The University at Buffalo
  This site won the top award for "an impressive, comprehensive rethinking and redesign of its top-level website," the judges reported. "The site's content, architecture and research-based approach are absolutely award-worthy." The institution reports that bounce rates have dropped from 75 to 37 percent, average time on page has doubled—and more users go to admissions pages than ever before.
• Silver: DePauw University
  Not only is this site beautiful, noted the judges, but it was rebuilt as a key component of the university's brand strategy. "Aside from its compelling design, we appreciated many aspects of the site: [for example], the 'Share a Photo' feature is impressive."
• Bronze: Boston University School of Engineering
  This site does a great job of "showcasing the programs at the College of Engineering, through biographical stories via videos, photo galleries and slideshows through conversational, accessible content that's easy to find," said the judges.

We also gave awards to sub-websites, which are sites designed for an institutional department or project. Here are just some of the sub-website winners:

• Gold: American University's WONK website
  This website was created to support American University's WONK campaign, posters for which you may have seen in D.C.-area airports and metro stations. "There are many aspects of this site to like: its sense of humor, the use of maps to locate wonks in the world, the ability to share content"—not to mention its success: Featured "Are you a Wonk?" quizzes had more than 23,000 pageviews, for example.
• Silver: Columbia College, The Four Stages of Paying for College
  This site was created to help Columbia College students apply for and understand the often-confusing financial aid process. The site guides users through a four-stage process that "makes financial aid clear by developing smart content [that] mirrors the FAFSA page," the judges observed.

• Bronze: The Republican Presidential Debate at Wofford College
  This is a good example of a best-practice microsite for a high-profile event, such as the debate held on Wofford's campus. "We appreciated how thorough the site was," wrote the judges. "Kudos for the college's attention to mobile integration and also to the fact that social media were integrated into the site."

Lastly, the judging team gave awards to social media campaigns. We looked for strategy, channel integration, creativity and measurements of success. “In the third year for CASE’s Best in Social Media category, it seemed that overall the entries were better than in previous years,” the judges said. “In general, we observed that when institutions clearly defined the problems they wanted to solve, they could use social media to develop innovative solutions.”

Here a few of the award winners in social media:

• Gold, Alumni Programming: Johns Hopkins University Fantasy Reunion
  Fantasy Reunion is an engagement tool designed after fantasy football. Alumni captains submit a team of 15 fellow alumni and earn points for each week based on how many of their team members register for Alumni Weekend; their points double if that member also gives or pledges. "We noted the incredible numbers that Hopkins had already tracked, including a marked increase in attendance to alumni events, high participation and good engagement," wrote the judges. "And the approach was novel: it's 'social' without using a traditional social platform."
• Gold, Alumni Programming: MIT-Cornell Fictional Alumni Face-Off
  MIT and Cornell alumni adopted fictional characters like Tony (Iron Man) Stark and Sideshow Mel from The Simpsons and pitted them against each other in a 15-week elimination tournament. By the end of the face-off, winner MIT had 462 new Facebook page likes, 94 shares and 326 comments.
• Silver, Other: Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University Flashmob
  In order to raise the profile of their six-year institution, NMMU staff and student choir members staged a flash mob in a busy South African shopping center. "Within weeks of its release, the flash mob was the most-watched South African video on YouTube and recieved some 18 pages of messages and extensive media coverage." But judges were particularly impressed with hard results: "The number of applications from undergraduates increased by 27 percent, from 23,756 to 30,141."

A full list of winners and judges’ reports can be found on the Circle of Excellence section of the CASE website.