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 Medley: Seven Lessons from Promoting the 103rd Annual Drake Relays

By Aaron Jaco, Paul Kirk and Holly Worthy 

We communications professionals look forward to developing and executing social media strategies for high-profile campus events. At Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, events don’t get much bigger than the Drake Relays, a track-and-field experience that touches all of the university’s key audiences in very real and very different ways. Alumni flock to campus for the festivities, including reunions; local sports fans fill the stadium to see the world’s best track-and-field athletes; and even prospective students pay attention to events like Street Painting.

To engage these audiences and others, we have initiated an integrated, collaborative social media strategy for promoting all aspects of the relays. Here are a few lessons learned as the university prepares for Relays Week, which will be held April 21-29:

(1) Collaboration is key to promoting an event that spans more than one office. At Drake, the relays involve the organizational and marketing efforts of our marketing and communications office, athletics department and alumni relations office.

We share a common audience in the Drake Relays and can do much to benefit each other. The week of the track meet, which draws more than 40,000 attendees to Drake Stadium, doubles as an unofficial student homecoming, a centerpiece for major alumni reunions and a draw for community events such as a parade, an indoor pole-vaulting competition and the world-famous Beautiful Bulldog Contest.

(2) Partnership is only achieved through a clearly communicated shared vision and goals. Before a social media plan took shape, our alumni office held meetings with the athletics and marketing teams to establish a shared vision for a “Relays Week.” For the first time, that vision intentionally encompassed everything that occurs in and out of Drake Stadium. The meetings resulted in a community website, the first visible sign of our new collaboration and a major step forward for Relays fans’ online experience.

From there, the marketing staff drafted a social media plan that advanced three primary goals and a series of tactical objectives. The work of a few minds set the basis for productive conversation while a team of 10 staff members worked through the details.

(3) Streamlining communications is also key. In the past, we’ve promoted the relays through at least four Twitter accounts (@DrakeRelays, @DrakeUniversity, @DrakeAlumni and @DUBulldogs), but this year @DrakeRelays is the focal point. We have gained a lot of positive engagement by following Relays athletes and fans who mention our event; they often follow back and keep in touch. We also created an official Facebook page for the relays, and a Facebook event with nearly 1,200 invitees. We are sharing the most important and engaging content via those “main” feeds. Content specific to one sub-audience (such as alumni-only news) still gets promoted via audience-specific pages/feeds rather than the official Relays outlet.

(4) Institutions need to lay a foundation of content. After setting initial social media and content strategies, we created a shared account on Hootsuite that we can use to schedule tweets in advance. Ticket information, event times, parking details and other logistics are set to broadcast at varying intervals between now and the end of Drake Relays—giving us the freedom to work on fun and engaging content like trivia contests, photo galleries and videos. 

We built up the Facebook page by using the new Timeline functionality to enter dozens of historic milestones from Drake Relays’ history. The page is no longer just a bulletin board, but also a valuable archive—a sort of digital museum. We intend to provide a place for fans to explore, learn and build friendships.

(5) Teamwork fosters creativity and experimentation. This year, we’ll try our hand at Foursquare and Pinterest—neither of which we’ve used for event promotion. We created a Relays profile on Foursquare with event venues, attractions, parking lots and plenty of tips, photos and lists with the goal of helping fans navigate the Relays via mobile devices. Our Pinterest presence is a collaborative pin board on the Drake University profile. This year’s experience with these platforms will help inform our strategy for 2013. 

(6) Don’t forget to promote social media via traditional media.  While we’re hard at work curating web and social content, we need to remember that our audience doesn’t live online. Traditional media promotion is critical to awareness-raising in any social media campaign. Make sure to use hashtags, URLs and icons in print advertisements, banners, sandwich boards and other tangibles as appropriate.

And finally:

(7) Social media feels like a sprint, but it’s really a marathon. Set a reasonable pace and keep at it. Push through obstacles. Build your audience (and skills) over time to reach the finish line—or, at least, to accomplish your objectives.

Aaron Jaco is digital media specialist in the Office of Marketing & Communications at Drake University.
Twitter: @aaron_jaco.

Paul Kirk is assistant athletic director for media relations in Drake’s Athletics Department.
Twitter: @PaulKirk_Drake.

Holly Worthy is assistant director of Drake’s Office of Alumni Relations, where she specializes in digital media.
Twitter: @hworthy.

A Crisis Communications Case Study: Snowmageddon at Seattle U

Sarah Hyde is the social media coordinator for Seattle University.

A snowstorm hit Seattle over MLK, Jr. weekend that resulted in our campus closing from Tuesday night through the rest of the week. Snowstorms in the city are rare and can shut down the entire public transportation system. At Seattle University, our inclement weather communications plan includes protocol for posting updates on our website, general phone line, local news websites, campus-wide email blasts and social media. During the week of “Snowmageddon,” as we dubbed it in our office, our social media outlets turned out to be a vital source of information sharing.

Seattle University campus during the January snowstorm. Image by Chris Joseph Taylor.

Each day of the snowstorm, as other universities announced closures and cancellations, people flocked to our Twitter and Facebook channels seeking information.

The pros:

• Facebook and Twitter are easy and fast to update and allow for rapid exchange of information. It’s easier to update Facebook several times with small updates and news than it is your website.
• News outlets, hungry for content, scan social media for images and videos, which can lead to greater exposure for the university. This can be a great opportunity to get your campus in the local media.
• Social media gives a platform for opinions, which can be helpful in determining the mood in the community and future planning.

The cons:

• It’s a lot of work for your social media manager and communications team. During Snowmageddon, Seattle University was closed from Tuesday night through Friday but many of our team members worked 12-hour days, staying up late waiting for updates and decisions and then rising before six a.m. to share information and answer questions.
• Social media gives a platform for opinions. Above, this was listed as a pro— but it can also be a con.  Those opinions are often negative, and users are easily frustrated when information is not shared quickly enough or decisions are not to their liking. Comments can stack up fast, so Facebook, in particular, requires constant moderation. As much as you might want to delete a negative comment, you can’t as this could lead to increased backlash.

Should your university find itself in a “snowy” situation this school year, don’t hesitate to make Facebook and Twitter your go-to places for news and updates. Of course, you’ll want to cover all your bases regarding your website, phone line, etc., but  more audiences are turning to social media for current information and also to compare you to your neighboring schools.

Be ready when the storm hits! Here are some suggestions for weathering the storm:

• If you don’t have a social media manager, identify someone on your communications team who can take the reins of moderating your university’s social media accounts. This person should be comfortable handling a variety of comments—positive and negative. Give this person a lot of caffeine and pats on the back as he or she won’t be sleeping much for a few days!
• Maintain good communication between your social media manager and the person who makes decisions about closures and cancellations. The social media person is going to be on the front lines answering questions and fielding criticism, so he or she needs to be well-informed and up to date.
• Have some official language drafted that’s approved by your school’s decision makers that the social media person can share on Facebook and Twitter. Be sure to think ahead and have language prepped for multiple situations.
• Be prepared to supply the local media with images and video of your students enjoying the snowy weather.

With a little organization, you can maximize a rare opportunity to capture a different aspect of campus life and share it with the world!

The Seattle University campus under a blanket of snow. Image by Chris Joseph Taylor.

 

Opportunities to Delight

Sarah Hyde is the social media coordinator for Seattle University.

In a key scene in the classic holiday film Miracle on 34^th Street, a customer is frustrated because she can’t find what she’s looking for at Macy’s, and Santa—the real Santa, as it turns out—directs her to another store for the item. Soon the gesture yields positive hype for Macy’s and business booms.

Last month, Seattle University experienced a similar “everybody benefits” situation when it did something unusual and honored a competitor. We published a full-page ad in the Seattle Times wishing the University of Washington, our neighbor a few miles to the north in Seattle, a very happy 150^th birthday.

The University of Washington is recognized by many as one of the nation’s finest public universities and a global leader in healthcare research. Founded in 1891, Seattle University is an independent Jesuit Catholic university. Seattle is home to many people who hold degrees from both institutions.

We social media advocates are usually the first to say, “Do it online!” When we do print, we’re mindful to drive people back to the website. So why spend the money on a big ad praising our competition? Answer: because it’s a good idea to applaud the good work being done around you, and sometimes, as it turns out, a simple gesture in print can come back to benefit you online.

Years ago, there would have been little consideration given to Seattle University investing in a celebration of the University of Washington. But in recent years, Seattle U has undergone a transformation—in academic programs, student services, campus improvements, entry into Division I athletics—and enjoys a significantly enhanced profile. We are comfortable with our status and with recognizing the University of Washington for its contributions and for 120 years of friendship and partnership. In some instances, we compete for students and we compete in athletics. But in many more ways, we work together, and we share a passion for educating future leaders.

When the ad ran in the Seattle Times, the response was overwhelming. After receiving our digital file, staff from the Times called us to say how much they loved the ad. The UW answered back by posting a thank you to Seattle U on its Facebook page, along with an image of the ad itself. This post became a sensation as Twitter and Facebook lit up with discussion with hundreds of UW and SU users liking and resharing the item.

The UW’s digital response to our printed olive branch was a real testament to the power of tipping your hat to your neighbor. Additionally, the conversation that took place on social media platforms illustrated the full benefits of transparency in today’s crowded media market and the potential power combo of print and web. What began as a print ad that reached hundreds of thousands of Seattle subscribers became an item shared electronically across the nation. By posting the ad online, UW really maximized the impact of the ad, carrying a print success one step further via social media.

Anyone who operates a social media site is looking to engage an audience. We spend a good amount of time brainstorming and planning campaigns for social media outlets, hoping to start a fire, but time and again the evidence shows that online audiences respond the most to content that suprises and delights them. Our gesture of friendship with UW, when re-posted on social media sites, was acknowledged and magnified by both the UW and SU audiences.

The success of our print ad via social media serves as a reminder to be opportunistic and look for chances to re-post or share information from other platforms that engage your audience, much like the Macy’s Santa pointing that shopper to another department store. Whether you’re sharing an article about a faculty member, a photo of campus or an ad praising another school, never forget to delight your audience.

Social Media in a Mobile Context

Joel Pattison is associate director for creative services at William & Mary.

Social media and mobile—both are popular topics for anyone involved in web communications. While it's easy to find opinions on both subjects, there seems to be less commentary about their intersection and overlap. Social media and mobile are closely related, but it takes guidance and planning to make them work together in harmony. How do you engage using social media on the mobile platform? I'll give you some insights from our efforts at William & Mary.

Some social media, like Foursquare, are inherently tied to mobile devices. William & Mary embraced Foursquare from an early date—the college opened an account in September 2010. To facilitate interaction with our Foursquare community, we created and consolidated check-ins for campus venues and added photographs to our most popular check-in spots. We worked with the campus bookstore, computer store and coffee shops to offer specials and discounts to anyone who checked in using Foursquare. And with the cooperation of undergraduate admission, we borrowed interesting facts from our campus tour for prospective students and placed tips in the relevant buildings. Foursquare is just one piece in the rapidly expanding geo-location space—Michael Stoner recently blogged about the use of SCNVGR for admission events.

But what about social media platforms that aren't directly tied to mobile devices? At William & Mary, we pursued several strategies for promoting social media interaction with mobile users. Our most successful method was promoting campus-wide events—and associated hash tags, photographs and Facebook commentary—through a button on our mobile website. During homecoming this year, we placed a special event button on our mobile site for the two weeks surrounding homecoming weekend. The button served as a mobile aggregator for tweets, pictures, Facebook posts, videos and blog entries related to homecoming. We also provided buttons on our mobile site for commencement and orientation. We know from observation and analytics that these social media event buttons are some of the most popular content on our mobile site, despite being available only for short periods of time.

Cross promotion between social media and mobile works both ways—social media channels can also be used to build momentum for mobile websites and mobile applications. In early 2011, William & Mary released a game that allowed students and alumni to dress up the school mascot in different outfits. Users could save their creations and post them to Facebook, thus generating social media buzz around the newly released app.

Social media and mobile devices should work hand-in-hand, but it doesn't always happen automatically. With a mix of careful planning and experimentation, you can leverage mobile devices to expand your social media footprint.

How to Use Facebook Insights for Better Engagement

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

Ah, another Facebook change. But this is one to be excited about—an update to Facebook Insights for your Facebook Pages.

Insights, the analytics suite Facebook provides for page admins, is now more focused on helping marketers track fan engagement. If you can see which of your posts resulted in more engagement, then you can craft better posts to get your fans talking about you.

You can find Insights on the left side of the page under your profile picture. The overview is a great summary of how your page has been performing in the past four weeks. The four numbers across the top tell you your total number of fans, the total number of friends your fans have, how many people are talking about you this week, and the number of unique people who have seen your page’s content this week. A chart shows the number of posts each day, the number of people talking about you and the number of unique people you reached.

Two new stats to point out are “people talking about this” and “weekly total reach.”

• People Talking About This—The number of people who have interacted with your page in the past seven days. It includes likes for your page, likes for posts, comments, shares, tags and check-ins.
• Weekly Total Reach—The number of unique people who have seen content from your page in the past seven days. This may include fans seeing your content in the news feed or on your page, or friends of fans seeing that their friend interacted with your page.

These are important numbers for tracking fan engagement. The more people who talk about you, the more people you reach. When posting updates, think about how you can get people to talk about you. If homecoming is approaching, start asking alumni questions about their college days. Ask for photos of homecoming events and share fun school trivia. With the new Facebook Ticker, your fans’ friends will see when they comment on your posts, which means you reach more people.

The next chart on the Insights page shows you how your recent posts performed individually. It shows reach, engaged users, talking about this, and virality for each individual post.

• Reach is the number of people who saw that post.
• Engaged users tallies the number of people who clicked somewhere in your post.
• Talking about this shows number of people who liked, commented on or shared your post.
• Virality is the percentage of the people who saw your post and then talked about it.

This chart is a huge development in the tough task of trying to understand how posts compare in reach and engagement. The goal here is to look at which posts performed well and which performed poorly, and then work to optimize your future posts so that they are more engaging.

With Facebook constantly changing the news feed and keeping its EdgeRank algorithm a mystery, it’s always been a struggle for page admins to craft optimized posts to reach their fans and create some type of engagement. But now you can see for yourself which posts reach more people and get people talking. Looking at Park Tudor's data, I see that sports updates and photos are popular. Interestingly, all of our links are at the bottom of the chart—they don’t seem to show up in the news feed and reach as many people as our status updates and photos. I’m curious as to whether other institutions have noticed this?

The new Facebook Insights should help you to create a better strategy for posting to your Facebook Page. You can better understand how your fans interact with your content and you can optimize it to encourage fans to talk about you. As with any analytics package, the goal is to use the numbers to drive your content.

For a more in-depth look, check out the Facebook Page Insights Product Guide, created by Facebook.

Building a Community with Superfans

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

You’ve been working hard on your Facebook page for a while now, adding more fans each week and posting interesting photos, links and status updates. And you’ve gotten a significant number of fans who have clicked on that little “like” button at the top of your page. But what do you do with your army of followers? How can you make them work for you?

First of all, you need to understand the different ways in which people engage on Facebook. There are varying degrees of engagement, from simply liking your page, to liking some of your content, to commenting and posting on your page. On average, a post gets about a 3 percent rate of interaction on Facebook, meaning that only 3 percent of your audience will like or comment on a post—and that’s only if it’s a good post in the first place. Post boring content and your rate drops significantly.

A friend of mine, Robby Slaughter, uses the 90-9-1 rule to describe social media audiences. Ninety percent of your audience are lurkers; they “like” your page, but they will never say anything or interact with you. Nine percent are intermittent contributors—they will say something once in a while. The remaining one percent are your heavy contributors, or superfans. They are constantly interacting with your Facebook page.

The key to using your Facebook fans to your advantage when creating an engaging community is to first identify your contributing fans. Who are the 10 percent who like or comment on your posts, post to your wall, share photos and tag you in their own status updates?

One of Park Tudor’s superfans is a young alumna living 1,700 miles away in Phoenix, Ariz. She not only reads our posts but also comments on them, and she occasionally shares her own stories on our wall, such as this one.

Pay attention to your superfans because they can be great storytellers for your institution. Also, look for ways to drive engagement with your fans by turning your intermittent contributors into superfans and your lurkers into contributors. Ask questions through your Facebook posts. Post pictures and videos. Start contests. Share updates from teachers or professors. Talk about traditions. Be conversational.

How do your contributors help build your Facebook community?

A Very *Social* Media Orientation

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

As a young alum working at my alma mater, each fall, I'm awash with memories of my orientation at the same time as the new class begins flooding campus. My own orientation was filled with names and faces and meeting people in person who I had so happily met and fallen head-over-heads in friend-crush with through our Class of 2010 Facebook group.

Even as an administrator, I have been deeply involved with the incoming class on Facebook. I knew I had to do something to try and meet as many of these fascinating new students in person as possible, so I pulled out my trusty dragon backpack, filled it with the necessities (camera, iPad, water bottle and business cards) and informed my audience of my outfit on Facebook and Twitter. My plan was to embrace the "social" part of my social media coordinator job title.

I began with the northern part of campus, popping my head into as many rooms in as many dorms as I could—my only criteria was that the room contain first-years. My basic spiel was, "Hi! I am from the Internet! I answered your questions all summer, I blogged about you and I just wanted to say hello in real life and see that you're a real person. What's your name?"

This turned out to be a magical introduction. Most students (and parents!) recognized my name or identified my outfit from my Facebook post and were really excited to become involved with the two social media projects I had created for move-in day.

The first was a simple photo project, a snapshot of a new student (or students, if a roommate was also around) plus something to represent Oberlin or the class of 2015 in the photo. I got shirts (worn, held up to smiling faces or modeled on a sibling who was helping move in), sweatshirts, blankets, bracelets, IDs, lanyards and the ubiquitous hand signs for OC or 15 if it was too early in the unpacking process to have the Oberlin swag unpacked.

Why a photo project?

• Parents love photos of their kids. My mom is guilty of this. Each time I blog or post photo albums, she's always looking for photos of myself or my brother and points it out when she doesn't see either of us. I managed to get photos of about a tenth of our incoming class—and moms and dads everywhere are happy.

• "I wish I had taken more pictures." My (and Avenue Q's) mantra of making the most of college is to take lots and lots of photos. Getting our students started and smiling for the camera on day one encourages them to continue smiling for four more years.

• Class unity (and campus pride) is important. By having students represent their year or their connection to Oberlin, it made for a really cohesive album of images that clearly state these students' connections to our school.

The second project was a video with a simple concept—grab as many new students as possible and have them say one sentence for the camera. The sentence had to include answers to the following questions:

• What is your name? Secret: This was also so I would be able to learn the names of as many people as possible. It was a mild success. I can identify a great number of students by name and face at this point!

• What is your class affiliation? This allowed me to talk to transfers and double-degree students without getting into a confusing class year discussion. Most students said 2015, first year or freshman.

• What is one thing you're most excited about for the upcoming year? After a few students were unable to choose just one thing, I asked students for a sentence's worth of exciting things, which actually gave me content to work with later.

I had planned to shoot videos just on move-in day, but many other interview opportunities arose during orientation so I extended the interviews through the end of the week. What emerged were a few gigabytes of spectacular videos of glowing incoming students in a variety of dorm rooms as well as inside, outside and hanging out in groups, grinning like their lives depended on it and with their voices dripping with the most natural enthusiasm possible. Need proof? See for yourself.

Why make a video?

• Our students are cool. Very few of our current Obies, alums or faculty and staff have met these students yet—this video serves as an abbreviated introduction to our new class. Also, this was a great way to invite our new Obies into the family. (My repeated line was, "From one Obie to another, you're allowed to be excited! I'm bouncing around telling you about Oberlin, be excited with me!")
• New students are willing and ready to talk to practically everyone. It helps that I had a reason to be popping around and saying hi. Everyone already knew my name and it was time for me to do my part and start meeting Internet people in real life.
• Parents like to know that their kids are in good hands. Having an administrator pop in and say, "Hi! We're happy you're here!" is invaluable and good for curbing separation anxiety.
• Getting students involved on day one is a good, good thing. What better way to get people involved and excited about social media than telling them that they're a movie star and they should watch themselves on Youtube?

What sorts of activities did your campus have planned to welcome the new class?

Educating the Educated: Conversations on Social Media

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

Within the past month, I have transitioned into my new position as social media coordinator. With a year's worth of hands-on social media experience under my belt, plus ever-important audience observation, I've been a part of several conversations in the past few weeks about best practices and using social media around campus. In some cases, I was a consultant and brainstormer, in others, a mediator for conversations. But overall, I was a happy sponge: absorbing as much information to learn what is working and what we can improve around campus.

As a campus, we have been subscribing to the megaphone theory of social media: We use most of our platforms as the soapbox we stand upon to broadcast our messages. The next step, for many of our offices and departments, is engagement toward online conversation.

Using what we have

Bonner Center for Service and Learning. An incredibly dedicated summer intern set the Bonner Center up with a dream combination of social media platforms, way ahead of the current social media curve. The accompanying guide to new media strategy did an excellent job in delivering a comprehensive crash course on the different platforms. Slowly but surely, the Bonner Center has been embracing social media. After several individual and team meetings, the center will be regularly updating its Tumblr with photographs, videos and profiles of different community service sites and its Facebook page with service opportunities in Oberlin and Lorain County.

Allen Memorial Art Museum. A past intern at the museum set up a Tumblr blog and Facebook page two years ago and began populating with event updates, podcasts and collection features, making the museum one of the media-savviest places on campus at the time. The Allen has been undergoing renovations for the past year and a half, and its online presence has been an incredible asset while the museum was closed: video updates of the renovations, podcasts by docents and professors on pieces from the collection and photos from the increased outreach efforts were posted several times a month.

With only weeks before the museum reopens, there are sneak previews of the installations going up and of the new sustainable features in the renovated galleries. There will be a soft opening during orientation, and the grand opening the first day of classes. In gearing up for the big day, the museum is planning for a huge social media kickoff the week before everyone arrives back on campus.

Timing: How do we get things out there?

The Conservatory of Music. Conservatory communications, a subset of the office of communications in charge of the Conservatory of Music's internal and external communications, is new to the social media sphere with fledging Facebook and Twitter presences. Together, we created a schedule to keep the conservatory's online presence constantly updated with new and compelling media and worked on ways to make each entry engaging with more user contributions. Brainstorming with some student workers and the director and assistant director of communications led to strategizing special features for its Facebook page, including a weekend concert schedule and related polls, discussion questions and photo features.

Day of Service. An enormous service kickoff event for incoming first years, the Day of Service usually manages to enroll more than half of our incoming class in a day of civic engagement and community service in Oberlin and around Lorain County. After a few hiccups, the coordinator managed to effectively recruit students via our Oberlin 2015 Facebook group, and to date, we have enrolled more than 400 students to lend a hand at my favorite orientation activity. Additionally, this year's coordinator had set up a wiki to collect yearly contact information, service site progress and post-service reflection, to better explain the goals and products of service in the community from year to year.

Taking the next step

College Lanes. Our campus bowling alley, College Lanes, began leaping and bounding through the social media world midway through the summer. I responded to one of its tweets regarding its location on Foursquare, and promptly ended up setting up a meeting with the assistant manager. In addition to daily updates to its Twitter and Facebook accounts, College Lanes has added daily blogging to its regime, with topics ranging from visual content to updates as the bowling team goes to tournaments. It is planning on recruiting student lane attendants to post updates from behind the desk and on the lanes once the school year begins.

Summer has a good time for me to catch up with social media efforts and progress around campus at a time that people have to meet, talk, discuss and strategize for the upcoming academic year, and our returning students, faculty and staff will be pleasantly surprised.