An Interview with Sara Adamson, University of Sussex

Members of the CASE social media task force are interviewing colleagues at institutions they thought were using social media effectively. Below, Marina Pedreira-Vilarino, deputy development director at the University of Sussex, interviews colleague Sara Adamson, corporate editor with the university’s publications and branding team.

MP-V: What social media initiatives is the University of Sussex currently engaged in?

SA: We have a presence on Facebook, including a general Sussex fan page, an alumni fan page and a library page. We also have a YouTube channel and a number of Twitter feeds, including a general Sussex feed, a feed for staff and a feed for students.

We are currently developing a Flikr stream, and will be adding digg and reddit buttons to our website soon. We also have our own internal social networking site, SPLASH.

The Development and Alumni Office (DARO) also has a group on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Within Facebook, DARO has a fan page for the American Friends and also links to other other university pages and Sussex alumni geographical subgroups created by and large by alumni themselves.

MP-V: Which initiatives do you think are the most effective or successful, and why?

SA: Our Facebook pages are currently very popular, with a lot of alumni, prospective and current students interacting with the pages to ask questions, contact each other and start discussions. I think they’ve been successful because we keep them updated with interesting content and interact with our ‘fans.’

MP-V: What have you tried that you think hasn’t worked, and why?

SA: We do have a profile on other social networking sites (e.g. Bebo, Orkut) but it’s impossible to keep on top of all of these, especially since they can fall out of fashion so quickly. Using Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn is the most time-effective way we can use social media, as they are all such popular sites. The development and alumni relations office had a presence in Xin but it wasn’t as popular and we needed to focus resources on the sites that appealed the most to our audience.

MP-V: Looking forward, what social media initiatives are you considering or exploring?

SA: We’ve have recently formed a social media networking group from across the university so we can have a joined-up approach to our communication in this area. The group is made up of colleagues from the library, web team, other departments (e.g. student recruitment) and is fairly informal. We just get together and share knowledge, thinking about ways we can work together, and sometimes invite external guests in to share their ideas about what we could be doing in social media.

MP-V: Do you have social media policies or guidelines or common practices?

If there are any negative comments posted, for example, on our Facebook wall, we don’t delete or censor as this often causes many more problems than it solves. We try to reply to (and rub) the negative comment if we can, or in a pinch we add more content on top so it moves down the wall!

The Sussex Alumni Facebook group does not censor content either so that it is seen as a place for alumni to post anything they want openly. We respond to comments to show we listen and to create a genuine and meaningful dialogue with our alumni.

MP-V: How are your social media initiatives organized and resourced?

SA: There is no specific budget at the moment. It’s pretty ad hoc with different areas of the university managing their own social media presence. When revising the job description for the alumni officer post, the development and alumni office has made this area of work the responsibility of this post-holder. The director of communications has the ultimate responsibility for social media.

MP-V: What do you wish you knew when you were first exploring social media initiatives that you know now?

Not to be afraid! Embrace it -- it’s not going to go away. Also, that it’s worth starting small rather than trying to have a presence in too many social media sites and not being able to maintain it and keep content fresh.

MP-V: What are the most important pieces of advice you would give to someone planning to launch any type of social media initiative today?

Have a think about who you’re trying to communicate with and what social media will be best to reach them so that you stay relevant and targeted. Tone of voice is also important – you can be more playful in social media than you would in other media. Don’t forget it’s interactive, so it’s a useful tool for listening to your audience as well and communicating to them.

Measuring what matters. It takes time.

Am I wrong or is the conversation about social media metrics stuck in the mud? We are confronted by a preponderance of data that points to social media as something a lot of people use. To wit, on Friday, the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project reported that “the percentage of U.S. adults ages 50 and older nearly doubled from 22% in April 2009 to 42% in May 2010… During the same timeframe, the percentage of adults from 18 to 29 years old using social media rose from 76% to 86%.”

 

Not too surprising. In fact, I would be bold enough to say that we can officially declare social media as "used" by our various constituencies, in the broadest sense. Where we may very well be missing the boat is in the balance of output and acquisition-based vs. outcome-conversion-based metrics being used to measure the effectiveness of social media efforts. Reflecting on the results of the CASE/mStoner/Slover Linett Strategies social media study, the three most frequently cited tools for measuring social media effectiveness were, number of friends who make a post, sheer number of participants, and click-throughs. Lower down on the list were things like event participation, donations and, the golden ticket in my opinion, surveys. How can we know if we are changing opinions and attitudes and inspiring action without testing the waters?

 

Having a strategy, complete with goals and associated metrics, behind your social media program is essential. Further, tying that strategy into your overall communication, engagement and institutional initiatives is critical to the internal relevance of your program. If someone at your institution asks "How's our social media program working?" we need to not only have the tools at hand to provide an informed answer, we should have the analysis to back it up and a plan to repeat the parts that have been successful.

 

Pointing again to the social media survey, the biggest challenge we have is likely resource-based. Nearly every respondent noted that they are using in-house resources to measure the effectiveness of their programs. This means that, in all likelihood, staff are either being asked to fit measurement into their already busy schedule (which was probably the same case when they were asked to take on social media responsibilities!), and have very little time to take a thoughtful approach to measurement. Sound familiar?

Welcome to the CASE Social Media Blog!

Welcome to CASE Social Media, a blog exploring trends and best practices in the use of social media in educational advancement. Our goal for the blog is to extend the work of the CASE social media task force by engaging a wide variety of members of the advancement community in the discussion.

The blog is for advancement professionals who:

• Work in advancement services, alumni relations, communications, fundraising, marketing or an allied field
• Work at independent schools, community and technical colleges, or public and private colleges and universities
• Are based in North America, Europe, Asia or elsewhere around the globe

In short, we hope to talk about social media best practices across the advancement landscape. We don’t want to talk to ourselves, so we invite and encourage you to join the conversation.

About the Task Force

The Joint CASE Task Force on Best Practices in Using Social Media was the brainchild of Kim Manning, chair of the CASE Commission on Communications and Marketing, and Andy Shaindlin, chair of the CASE Commission on Alumni Relations. The commissions serve as think tanks of advancement practitioners who advise CASE on trends in the profession and develop resources to help serve it.

Kim and Andy wisely realized that since both commissions were wrestling with the topic of social media, CASE had an opportunity to integrate perspectives through a joint task force. The task force now includes current and former members of the alumni relations, communications and marketing, and philanthropy commissions. We, the co-chairs, are Charlie Melichar of Vanderbilt University and Andrew Gossen of Cornell University.

Task Force Goals

Many advancement professionals are interested in leveraging social media on behalf of their institutions, but we realized that there is no reliable roadmap. Our hope is that the task force will develop resources to help people at CASE-member institutions grapple with social media issues in a relatively coherent, organized and rational way so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time.

We also hope to develop CASE-wide content for conferences, CURRENTS magazine, white papers, etc. and raise the bar of conversations about social media in general. Task force members realize that everyone’s at a different place in the conversation, though, so we know will lose people quickly if we end up saying “here’s what we have that will work.” Instead, we know we need to be and stay at the strategic level and engage the entire profession in the discussion.

Why a Blog?

Here’s how we respond to the question in CURRENTS:

Andrew: As we thought about what the end product of the task force was going to look like, we realized there was no way we could issue an authoritative white paper on best practices without having that white paper be obsolete as soon as we hit “save.” The environment is evolving so rapidly that our product has to evolve in recognition of that as well. And that’s why we’re focusing more on the notion of sharing the material at conferences in CURRENTS, and in a blog.

Charlie: There aren’t just easy mathematical answers about where this is going, so I think the way to go is to have the conversation out in the open with as many voices participating as possible. If the philosophy is that this is something that should evolve and be participatory, then why not open that up in the process?

CASE Social Media will be active throughout the life of the task force or as long as it meets the needs of the advancement community. We plan to talk about best practices, tools, guidelines, resources, organizational structure and more.

What are the social media topics and issues on your mind? Let us know and we’ll feed them into the work of the task force and the blog.