Sorry, I Don't Do Impressions: Metrics Under the Microscope

In my past life as a Los Angeles stand-up comic, I was always envious of comedians who could do good impressions of celebrities and public figures. I was never any good at masking my voice, which became evident at an early age when I would fail attempts to prank call my friends. However, as I spent more time around the comedy scene, I learned that impressionists were not always held in high regard as many saw it as a cheap way to get laughs. Take a look at the casts of Saturday Night Live and you’ll notice there always seems to be one person who is really good at impressions…and they’re also really good at not appearing in any other movies or television shows. When it comes to comedy, impressions fall under short-term engagement with the audience and don’t have much staying power.

These days, I stand face-to-face with impressions of a different kind. As a community manager working in alumni affairs, I grapple with Facebook and Twitter impressions on a daily basis, and while the venue is very different, the evolution of how I look at them isn’t much different from the world of comedy. Facebook defines impressions as: 

“[T]he number of times a post from your page is displayed, whether the post is clicked on or not. People may see multiple impressions of the same post.”

Back in January, I started compiling a monthly social media report for our alumni networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Livestream) and quickly wore out my shoulder from patting myself on the back. According to Facebook, we had racked up more than 600,000 impressions! Break out the bubbly; this was SERIOUS engagement with our alums!

Now, it didn’t occur to me at first that the number of living Cornell alumni is only about 250,000 and that this number might be a little misleading. Unfortunately, as I continued to dig into our metrics, I discovered the harsh reality of impressions. 

I came across the amount of post feedback we received and the number of stories created off of the posts. These numbers were far lower than the number of impressions, and I became suspicious of what impressions were really telling me about our engagement. I decided to compare these two numbers directly to the number of impressions our Facebook page compiled in the same month. Below, you’ll see the slide I constructed to demonstrate the percentage of our impressions that actually engaged with a post.

I’m not sure this is an absolute apples-to-apples comparison because none of these numbers represent unique users. However, I think it provides a general idea for how many of those 700,000 impressions really count as engaged users. You could build the same slide for a Twitter account by looking at your number of impressions, then comparing it to your number of replies and re-tweets. 

Okay, that’s enough bad news. Let’s talk about the positive side: Even though I concluded that less than 1 percent of all impressions are actually engaging with our content, that’s still almost 10,000 stories and other pieces of feedback created within one month. That’s a solid total considering how many events you would have to put on in one month to interact in-person with 10,000 alums. Now again, this is not a unique number of engaged users, so it would most likely be less than 10,000, but I think you get the idea. 

Like funny impersonators, impressions within social networks are not completely useless. Impressions do provide a general snapshot of how far your content is being spread. It is certainly worth tracking impressions from month to month to see what type of content results in your page/handle having a further reach. But when you really want to be honest with yourself and determine how much you have engaged your followers, look beyond the giant impressions number that Facebook hopes will entice you to spend some dough. We have to fight the temptation to take advantage of internal naïveté and report these falsely impressive stats. 

Saturday Night Live alum Darrell Hammond is a funny guy. He set the record for the most character impressions (107) in the TV show’s history during his tenure from 1995-2009 (another record). Yet how many truly memorable Hammond sketches can you recall? Conversely, it probably takes fans little time to recall a classic Will Ferrell moment. Ferrell’s characters were original and complex while Hammond simply mimicked someone we already know. We can’t be content with a number just because it’s large if we want to boast about our engaged community. We have to dig deep into the actual interactions we’re having with our followers, find out what makes them tick and use that to map our strategy. The complex and original content that triggers sharing and feedback is what we need to concentrate on if we hope to become a household name to our followers.

Then again, maybe I’m just a bitter ex-comic who lacks the ability to change the pitch and tone of his voice…

Community Standards and Social media

Matthew Herek (@mherek) currently serves as the associate director of young alumni engagement in the office of alumni relations and development at Northwestern University.

Back in 2000, during my former life as a residence hall director at Michigan State University, the department decided to implement a “community standards” model from Syracuse University.  Briefly defined, community standards were rules initiated and enforced by students that determined how they would live together in residence halls. Certain items were non-negotiable—for example, students could not initiate a standard that lowered the legal drinking age. The theory behind community standards was that they were developed and refined by the community itself, within reasonable boundaries set by the university.

Does this sound at all familiar? Isn’t this exactly how most places have been developing social media policies? Taken a step further, isn’t this how social media outlets have gained their own identities?

For example, I’ve scoured LinkedIn looking for one shred of a policy that says “this is a professional website; please include only resumes and no pictures of your vacations.”  Likewise, I cannot find anything on Facebook that gives a brand page a maximum number of posts per day before the network will block posts from being seen by users. 

In the era of hard-to-understand privacy agreements, where it can feel like social media sites are taking more and more of our information and perhaps using it for ethically fuzzy ventures, I believe the users of these sites have more power than they realize. The users set the stroke for what is and isn’t acceptable in many cases. My hypothesis must be somewhat true: Look how quickly Facebook parrots the features of another website (think Google+ circles) when it senses users are enjoying a piece of a competitor’s user experience.

I bring this up because I get the impression that many social media community managers, who often come from a marketing background, are locked into a paradigm of “managing the message" or “creating the whole user experience.”  I would suggest that we are simply wasting precious time on endeavors that will not bear much fruit. 

Years ago, the makers of TurboTax spent time watching how people did their taxes with pen and paper. They answered questions about how people put their receipts together, what sections of the complex tax form they worked on first, etc. The programmers allowed the user to develop the standards for the program. It is a powerful example of listening to your customers/community members.

Two years ago at Northwestern, our LinkedIn group was getting a little out of control.  During the economic downturn, the discussion board was becoming a “work wanted” display. Consultants wanted to make sure others knew about their services. Many community members were upset and made a point to tell us that the discussion board was no longer a space they wanted to be in. After a conversation between group members and moderators, a simple standard was established: People could market themselves only once a month. Additional posts on the same topic would be flagged and removed.  Since that time, the issue has not come up again. Note that it was not a heavy-handed reading of LinkedIn or university policies that brought about this compromise.

I really believe we are exhausting ourselves by not reading the signs of the times in our social media spaces. During his thorough and excellent presentation at the CASE Social Media Conference, Andrew Gossen gave compelling evidence that spaces like Facebook will help with fundraising in two to four years. Yet I would bet the change in my pockets that the only way for many advancement shops to maintain support of social media is if they can show a return on that engagement right now. However, today’s community of users is rejecting the attempt. That does not make them unwilling to donate; it means they do not look at Facebook as a philanthropic channel…yet. Let that message resonate and redirect your efforts to channels that support philanthropy tools like Kickstarter. 

Does it make sense to tout the fact that you have 20,000-plus users on LinkedIn if you don’t listen to them? How about treating 5,000 Twitter followers like disciples instead of partners? Or 9,000 Facebook likes as a passive audience for whom the “like” button is an online standing ovation?

Social media is clearly creating new kinds of communities. They are asynchronous and can be messy.  Those of us in advancement circles have a professional obligation to foster standards that make these smaller communities part of the more broadly defined “university community.”  You don’t have to give your community more control—they already have it. Now it’s just a question of whether or not community managers recognize this.

Social Media for Young Alumni - A #CASESMC Preview

Matthew Herek (@mherek) currently serves as the associate director of young alumni engagement in the office of alumni relations and development at Northwestern University.

We need to talk about young alumni and social media. 

The need to engage young alumni seems to be on the agenda of most development operations today, the theory being that compelling young alumni to be part of the larger alumni community from the get-go is easier than convincing someone who disengages to reengage later in life.

Next month at the CASE Social Media and Community conference, I’m doing a presentation about young alumni and social media. It’s based on my own experiences as someone who was once a young alum and is now in charge of the engagement strategy for 20,000 of them. I’m using my space in the blog to offer a sneak preview of what I plan on discussing:

(1) I know more at 32 than 24: “Young alumni” is a massive demographic term when it comes to social media. If you’re older than 29, you actually didn’t have Facebook in college. If you’re older than 25, there’s a good chance you didn’t have WiFi in college. If you’re like me, in 2001, you used Dreamweaver to create a website that pretty much does what LinkedIn can do for you today.

(2) Avoid being the awkward guy at the cocktail party: We make the assumption that because people have clicked the "like" button they don’t mind us showing up in their Facebook feed non-stop.  

(3) Don’t put young alumni in a box before they are dead: It’s important that social media does not become the only place that we want young alumni to volunteer (Thanks for your interest in the club of Tulsa, how would you like to run our Facebook page?). 

(4) Larger-than-life figures are not scalable: In 2008, President Obama used social media in unprecedented ways to galvanize volunteers and raise a huge sum of money. Universities are not the same type of transformative force as a presidential candidate. We spend too much energy trying to create a replica of that moment instead of learning lessons from it.

(5) Engage the flux capacitor: Young alumni have specific memories of their time on campus (we all do really). We often fail to use social media to shake an emotional response out of young alumni and there are ways to do this!

(6) Young alumni need a social media Yoda: Young alumni will care about what you know once they know that you care.

(7) First listen to understand: The temptation to use the social media megaphone is great. How often are you using the tools in question to truly listen to what young alumni are saying?

(8) Transmit the story, but don’t control it: Young alumni in particular put tons of content on social media. Think about using it to tell their story to a wider audience.

As the conference is still a month away, I’ll be fiddling with this presentation until then. Maybe you’re coming and have something specific you want to see discussed. Let me know in the comments section.

The World Has Gone Viral: Get Busy Tweeting

Matthew Herek (@mherek) currently serves as the associate director of young alumni engagement in the office of alumni relations and development at Northwestern University. He works to integrate social media in ways that increase engagement and participation in the alumni community.

OK, perhaps that title is a little dramatic. I suppose it would be something if the plot of Contagion 2 centered on the one Twitter holdout who could retweet the cure for an awful disease, but instead destroys the world.

Now that it’s 2012, and five years since Twitter came on the scene, it’s safe to say the platform is way beyond the "early adopter" stage and has grown past its awkward "what everyone had for lunch" years. Twitter has become a national treasure. It can be used to topple political regimes, gauge reaction to major events and force telephone service providers to reverse course on fees. Many companies employ people to monitor Twitter and respond to questions and complaints.

With all of these functions, surely there must be a way for alumni and development professionals to use it. I offer the following observations:

1. You don’t have to be on Twitter to use Twitter:  Twitter is a very open resource and the search functionality alone makes it worth a visit. Go there and search for hashtags, like #casesmc or #higheredlive. Perhaps you’re a prospect manager heading into a huge meeting with a big shot from United Airlines—use Twitter search to see what people are saying about his/her company (if nothing else, you might know what kind of mood they’ll be in). This has potential for career services shops as well. Using Twitter search, you could teach job-seeking alumni how to research potential employers.

2. Growing Your Network: Would you ever think that following a presenter from a conference would lead to great restaurant recommendations? Is that even useful? Sure it is! As an alumni professional, you would be amazed at how connecting with professionals on Twitter can help you when you need a personal recommendation for the perfect place in a far-off city to take a prospect for dinner. Remember: Research shows we are far more likely to listen to recommendations from our friends than from strangers. This makes Twitter more useful than Yelp.

3. I sense much anger in this one: Do we even need Jedi knights anymore? Telepathy is not necessary to gauge the mood of your alumni base after big news hits. Just check in on Twitter after any major news event for your institution and there will likely be a dedicated base of promoters who are making statements about it. My feeling is that these raw 140-character primal screams are more of a mood indicator than one alum’s well-thought-out email sent five days later. You have to be on top of this.

4.    Filters are so 1990:  Remember when institutions relied on press releases and university communications were carefully crafted to “control the message”? Those days are dwindling. Arizona’s athletic director tweeted the announcement of the institution’s new football coach. Popular student athletes like Kirk Cousins at Michigan State and Alexander Netter at Northwestern are offering opinions on the events of the day without going through sports information directors. University presidents are developing dedicated fan clubs on Twitter talking about everything but the university.

As an alumni professional, you need to decide if you want your alumni to be more informed about the university than you are. If you want to wait until news is properly disseminated through your communications office, you may have to spend extra time addressing the rumors, false information and unconfirmed reports that have already piled up online.

If you have not used Twitter before, try it now. If you have some other ways professionals can use it, share them in the comments section.

Authentic Perspectives

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

College football at U.S. institutions seems to dominate news headlines in the fall. Some of us work on campuses where whether the team is a success or not determines more than bowl position, but also how happy alumni will be when a brave student makes a phoneathon call.

Earlier this month, my alma matter Michigan State, pulled off a last second and somewhat miraculous win against the University of Wisconsin. I want to talk about how my numerous viewings of the big play on YouTube led me to connect with our alumni relations work.

With respect to Michigan State's win, user-generated content helps tell a more complete story than any one camera angle could.

In 1984, Doug Flutie, playing for Boston College, threw a similar touchdown pass, winning the game against the University of Miami. If you search YouTube, you will find exactly one video of this pass. It has been uploaded multiple times by multiple people, but you'll find only one angle.

I’m sure the two institutions have that image seared into their institutional memories, for better or worse. I’m also certain that if we could see a video of the reaction from the fans in the stadium, we'd have a more complete picture of what happened.

Fast forward 27 years. If you watch the Michigan State vs. University of Wisconsin game below for about 45 seconds, it will give you a good idea of how many different angles from which the play was viewed within the stadium. The many angles were filmed through handheld cameras, phones and other video-supporting media.

Following the play, there was a video review. Numerous videos of fans waiting for confirmation of the touchdown have cropped up, but this one is my favorite. It's what I think it would be like to be in the middle of a sonic boom.

As an alum of the school, I can tell you that it’s the poorly shot video of the crowd waiting in anticipation that I could watch over and over (and 24,000 people agree with me). On that Saturday night, 72,000 people might have been in the stadium, but many more felt a strong connection to the event. The connection did not happen because the marketing team was ready to produce content about fan reactions. The fans reacted and produced their own content, providing numerous perspectives that when combined created a panorama of emotion.

There are a couple of lessons here about social media. Social media allows us to engage our alums in the moment in a more authentic way than the most well planned marketing piece could ever hope to. From my own point of view, the videos of fan reactions stoke memories of similar reactions I had in the same stadium and remind me that passion is an important driver for inspiring alumni to engage and participate in meaningful ways.

A second lesson is to rememember that our obligation to tell the story supercedes our desire to own the story. There are moments in the lives of our alumni that should not be edited or made more palatable for wider consumption. If you decide to view the world through the lens of your alumni, make sure the view is authentic.

Practically speaking, isn't this an opportunity for your alumni magazine to provide a QR code linking back to some of these exciting videos? And, why not alert your campus archivist to alumni content?

The motto of the state of Michigan where the game took place is “If you seek a pleasant peninsula look around you.” Fellow social media curators, if you seek engaging content look around YouTube.

Ask The Experts: What Do Alumni Want?

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

Over the past year, I have sat in many meetings as my colleagues and I try to find the right places to be in social media. Then we spend time trying to figure out the right way to utilize virtual embassies on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Sometimes we end up right on the money, other times we miss the mark.

There is a certain amount of soothsaying that goes into a social media strategy. Predicting the behaviors and reactions of the alumni who interact with us in these forums is often based on a best guess rather than hard data (now that there is more surveying being done on social media behavior, we hope to become more fully grounded in fact rather than cheery optimism).

Rather than continue to peer into my crystal ball, I thought it might be interesting to ask for the perspective of two Northwestern alumni who work with social media daily.

• Rob Campbell is a 2008 graduate who is now the coordinator of digital media for baseball’s Cleveland Indians. Rob talked about his role with the Indians in this 2010 interview.
• Noah Chestnut is a 2007 graduate who is now the director of digital media at Hamilton Place Strategies in Washington, D.C. He was also the man behind @jfkturtles on Twitter, and he learned some interesting lessons that are worth reading.

Now, the thing you all hoped to learn about from this post….what do alumni want?

1. What are your expectations of us in social media? What sites should we be on? How should we be using them?

Rob: I think sharing information on the university and what alums are doing is key on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Google+ could be a viable option, too, depending on the brand roll-out (Q3 for brands). YouTube interviews could be cool content.

Noah: Safeguard the university's brand on all platforms. If a new network launches, I expect NU to survey it, see if people can use it to discuss Northwestern and make sure to stake a claim with an official Northwestern account. For example, Northwestern may not be active on Quora, but I would like NU to register and have an official account.

Stay in touch with distance. I want my school to keep me updated, but I do not expect to have a daily relationship with my school. I am probably in the minority on this, but I prefer to get two to three messages a week at most. I am more likely to take the time to read them and engage when there is less content. As a student, I would expect a daily engagement.

Be honest and personable. I want to feel like I am speaking with a person, not a PR feed for NU or a development associate. Hit me up for money, but do so in a way that is respectful of our overall relationship.

I think NU should experiment with all social media sites so they can see how students/alums use them. Should Willie the Wildcat have a Tumblr? Give it a shot during football season. Should Northwestern be active on Instagram and share pictures of the campus during the school year? Try it out. I am a fan of letting your alumni market determine where you should invest resources. There is an expectation to be active on FB/Twitter, so you should meet those. But I think the real success will come in targeted experiments and campaigns.

2. What’s something Northwestern has done in social that really appealed to you?

Rob: I really like something as simple as seeing re-tweets from Northwestern on what alums or the university are doing in my news feed (keep up the good work!). It definitely makes me feel closer to what I experienced and what is going on at Northwestern.

Noah: I really like the NU daily news (via paper.li) with featured alums as the source for news. That is a great way to use a service that I usually find annoying. It actually turned me onto the NU Alums twitter account.

3. What kind of behaviors in social media do you see as turn offs? What makes you want to unfollow, hide and unfriend us?

Rob: I think trying to inject too much personality is a turn-off. I think alums all have positive connotations with the school and social media communications need not be overtly positive or edgy.

Noah: Too much content. Be respectful of my time. Not listening. Ignoring questions from alums. Common sense stuff really.

4. Name a way that you have used social media in the "real world" that could be applied to a university successfully?

Rob: Hashtag chats with alumni for specific disciplines at set times (tap key social media users to participate), Twitter lists of alumni users in specific cities for networking (potentially host on web, too), conduct a small figure social media donation push and allow for donations to be shared via social media, triggering a small incremental match (i.e.percent of donation or small set dollar figure), alum of the week with possibly a short profile on Facebook or just a username on Twitter.

Speaking with alumni like Rob and Noah has been incredibly helpful to me. First, it’s always a good thing when alumni share their expertise with you. Second, I’m finding more and more alumni are working in roles that are social media specific. As many development operations move slowly but surely towards establishing their own staff persons in social media, the knowledge alumni share can help bridge the knowledge gap between the university conference room and main street.

FIU Community Manager's Weekly Videos

Karine Joly is executive director of Higher Ed Experts, a professional development company, and editor of collegewebeditor.com.

I'm a big fan of Betsy Soler's "Betsy Reads Your Comments," YouTube videos. Betsy is the community manager in charge of social media at Florida International University and she hosts this video series.

These weekly videos offer a review of FIU latest news and feature comments from students and other members of the community, comments posted during the week on other social media platforms.

Haven't watched one of these yet? Do it now!

 

While the videos are well-produced, fun and engaging, what I really love is the fact that they fully integrate (in a meaningful and smart way) all the different pieces of the FIU social media puzzle.  

This is a great example of how to scale community management while keeping the human dimension crucial to the success of any social media initiative.

Betsy agreed to answer a few questions about these videos.

1. Why did FIU decide to launch these weekly videos in the first place? 

Our goal was to find a new way to engage our readers and commenters on all of our platforms. It's another way to show that we are listening. It also provides another avenue to reach people who might not read our news website. We are targeting a younger demographic.

The FIU News website evolved from a faculty and staff newsletter to a university community news site and this content helps address the student audience. Students seem to relate to someone closer to their own age and it offers a different face for the university rather than just administration.

News at FIU - Florida International University

2. How are they produced?

We go over the weekly news stories and select those that elicited the most comments and feedback. We may also include any stories we want to highlight as a university. It is created by a three person team: a writer, a video producer and myself. Our current team includes Sissi Augila (who initiated the concept), Chris Necuze and Doug Garland who alternate video production duties. It's an in-house production.

It takes us approximately an hour to assess our content and develop a script. Afterward, it can take us anywhere between 45 minutes to an hour and a half to film. Editing and post-production is anywhere between four to five hours.

3. What kind of impact have the videos had on audience engagement on other social media channels such as Facebook or Twitter?

Since we started producing these videos, comments on our news site and social media channels have been steadily increasing. It's too early to make the correlation between overall comments and the popularity of the series. However, BRYC videos consistently gets more views than our average upload to Youtube. It has made the university more connected, increasing suggestions for news content to our office.  

4. How do you measure your return on investment?

We have been measuring our return on investment by tracking engagement (views, comments, subscriptions, interactions, etc.) and this show is one of the tools to allow us to reach our goals. Our goal for next year is to double views, comments and fans alike.

Taking the Geosocial Leap

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

When Foursquare debuted at South By Southwest in 2009, the concept of "checking-in" at different venues was a novel one. A close circle of friends could keep tabs on each other via an app. My own experience was that people were hot and cold on the concept. Either you thought it was fun and worthwhile or you thought it was a gigantic hassle and an invasion of your privacy.

As often seems to be the case with new apps, colleges and universities began toying with the idea of using geosocial apps like Foursquare on their campuses. At Northwestern, we had a long conversation about its potential, but could never quite find a solid reason to use it for alumni engagement, other than that "all the cool kids seem to be doing it." In a world of limited resources and time, that was not the best argument.

So we waited in the tall grass, curating our Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn spaces while keeping an eye on the growth of geosocial with Facebook Places, Gowalla and SCVNGR. It was SCVNGR that got my attention at the CASE Social Media & Community conference earlier this year. The app combined two of my favorite things, social media and a healthy sense of competition. SCVNGR allows you to set up a directed, asynchronous scavenger hunt (or trek) through several places or events. As a participant in the conference, I took part in a SCVNGR trek throughout our three days in San Francisco.

SCVNGR resonated with me as a tool with strong potential for alumni engagement for these reasons:

1. It does not require a person to build a network of friends and followers to participate. A person can download the app, participate in the trek and never log on again until the next trek.
2. There is an actual competition involved. Social gaming is huge (just check the latest valuation of Zynga, creator of Farmville and Words With Friends, if you don’t believe me). By injecting a competition factor into the app, a purpose is created for the user.
3. The treks can be asynchronous. There is no need for everyone to start together at point A and move en masse to point B. SCVNGR allows for fluid entry and exit points.

Given the low barrier to entry, we made the decision to use SCVNGR during our annual senior week, which our office co-sponsors with the division of student affairs.

We announced, in advance, that the winner of the SCVNGR trek would receive an Ipad2 as a way to increase participation.

The trek was designed to cover approximately 10 of the senior week events. Each event had 1-3 challenges. Some examples:

1. Get your picture taken with the president of the alumni association.
2. What was one thing you learned at Last Lecture? (Last Lecture is an event where a professor, selected by the students, addresses them at a local bar.)
3. Find the assistant director of young alumni and get the secret password! (I am the assistant director. This gave me a chance to meet some of the constituents for whom I am responsible.)

Approximately 75 students took part in different aspects of the SCVNGR trek. I was impressed, considering this was our first use of the software. I give a lot of credit to the staff at SCVNGR who are incredibly helpful when it comes to designing treks. They recently launched a microsite for higher education institutions that use the app.

As with any new endeavor, I did learn a few lessons that will inform our future use of SCVNGR:

1. A smaller trek will have a better chance of gaining traction. I built 23 challenges spread over 10 events. Many of our students choose to attend 1-5 events during senior week. Those that did not attend a lot of the events did not enter the trek because they did not think they would have a chance at winning it. A better plan would have been to have a higher number of challenges at fewer events with higher attendance.
2. Find an effective way to market the trek. Having a prize certainly helped us, but I think there was confusion as to why we were asking people to use the app. Students need to hear from their peers why it can be a fun thing to do. Those who participated enjoyed doing so, but many just didn’t get it.
3. Take the same amount of time planning a trek as you would any alumni event. Yes, it’s asynchronous, but you are still putting your organization's name on it. We decided a little late in the game to pilot this with senior week. The first meeting you have about a SCVNGR trek should not involve a computer, it should involve a pen and paper to design an effective trek.

Going forward we have two specific ideas for using SCVNGR:

1. Utilize it at our reunion activities for graduates of the last decade to encourage alumni to generate photos and connect with one other.
2. Develop treks in cities with large alumni populations that point out the "places you need to know" as a new graduate living in a particular city.

If you use geosocial apps or are thinking about it, what other potential uses can you think of?

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?

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.