How Have We Grown? The CASE Social Media Conference, Then and Now

Jen Doak (@jpdoak) is the online communications specialist at CASE.

A lot has happened in social media and advancement since April 2011 when the second Social Media and Community Conference took place in San Francisco. It was a different time then: Facebook had not yet discovered chronology, people were posting pictures of lunch without fear of faculty-member retribution and most folks were struggling with questions like getting staff on board, letting go of control and how to measure return on investment.

I had written a semi-serious post from that conference on my favorite quotes taken from the hashtag, and there are still many insights that I think  hold true and will for some time. For example:

• “Technology has created an environment where we don’t tell them what’s important: They tell US what’s important.”
• “If you don’t pay students, you may also exclude high-quality low-income students from being able to work for you. Pizza is not pay!”
• “What’s the ROI on social media? I don’t know; what’s the ROI on our phone system?”

But the state of social media at institutions has evolved in those 360 short days. Facebook’s got an IPO (and Instagram), Google+ has become the empty new McMansion development across the street, and attendees at the 2012 conference in Chicago have moved from “How do we get on board?” to “What do we do next?” and “How do we sustain engagement?”

Our stellar 2012 faculty had key insights on crisis communication, content strategy, social media in alumni affairs and fundraising, and recruiting students using social and mobile. Now that their colleagues have started to realize the importance of social media, attendees were looking at how to get their presidents tweeting.

Here’s a Storify of just a few of this year’s insights, again thanks to our enthusiastic #casesmc Twitter community. If you’d like to join in on the discussions (and often-wacky side discussions), you can do so on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. And check out mStoner marketing manager Mallory Wood’s post on resources, live-blogs and presentations.

How have you seen the social media and advancement landscape change over the last year? Which insights have you found evergreen and which need to be amended—or discarded?

 

Using Social Media in a Crisis: A Snapshot

Chris Syme is a former higher education communications associate who now heads her own agency, CKSyme.org, based in Bozeman, Montana. The agency specializes in crisis/reputation communications, social media integration, and training.

A majority of higher education institutions have had one or more potential reputation-damaging events discussed in traditional and social media channels in the last 12 months, according to a new study. In addition, while 85 percent of reporting schools have crisis communications policies, only 59 percent of those policies address the use of social media in a crisis. 

The study was conducted by CKSyme.org in partnership with CASE in the fall of 2011. Highlights of the survey findings are below, reports for higher education and independent schools can be found on the CASE website and a full set of survey results can be seen on CKSyme.org.

The State of Crisis in Higher Education 

• In the last 12 months, 49 percent of responding institutions have had to enact crisis communications plans at least once. In that group, 7 percent had to enact their plan four to six times.  

• In the last 12 months, 66 percent of institutions reported that potential reputation-damaging events about their institutions were discussed in social media channels. Of that group, 7 percent reported four to six events, and 3 percent reported seven or more events discussed in social media channels. Five percent did not know if there were any conversations about them on social media channels.

The State of Social Media in Higher Education

• All reporting institutions had an official presence on Facebook. Other official channels used were: Twitter (94 percent), YouTube or Vimeo (92 percent), LinkedIn (55 percent), official blog (31 percent), location-based check-ins (18 percent), and MySpace (3 percent).  

• Respondents reported having several other "non-official" social media channels operating under the institution's umbrella. Heading up the list was alumni relations with 84 percent. Only 26 percent of institutions reported requiring registration or training for users who represent the institution on social media channels.

The State of Crisis Communications in Higher Education 

• Eighty-five percent of the respondents have a crisis communications policy. 

• Only 59 percent of the institutions with policies address the use of social media in that policy. Only 17 percent of the reporting institutions have a plan for “unofficial” social media channels that represent the university. Both of these statistics are troubling. Given that social media is the real-time channel of choice for public and news agencies for breaking news, schools would be wise to include social media in their crisis plans and to include a plan for all channels that represent the university.

• Respondents with crisis communications plans were asked about what elements were included in their plan. Ninety-nine percent have an emergency email notification system. Other elements included were: media relations crisis plans (90 percent), text message alert systems (89 percent), dark or emergency websites (59 percent), a social media monitoring plan (56 percent), message templates or talking points (50 percent), and campus electronic signage (38 percent).  The statistic that stands out here is the lack of a social media monitoring plan that can keep institutions aware of breaking news, online and traditional media mentions of their brand and help manage misinformation.   
  

Best Practice Takeaways

1.       Implement a social media monitoring system--now. A social media monitoring system can help you keep track of what is being said about your institution in the social media universe, alert you to issues you may not be aware of and help you gauge public understanding and sentiment around an issue.  See the CKSyme.org blog on the survey for more information.

2.       Develop a social media policy. There is a misunderstanding among many that a social media policy is a prohibitive document. The best social media policies operate as a guide to empower people to use social media channels responsibly in a way that builds the organization’s brand. CASE has a collection of sample social media policies available to members as well as a previous post on the CASE blog.

3.       Implement a social media management system. A social media management system (SMMS) should have multiple functions that can facilitate monitoring, publishing, lead and conversion tracking, measurement and customer relationship management, depending on what your institution’s social media strategy is (see Jason Falls’ report on management systems).

4.       Establish registration or affiliation of campus social media accounts. Establishing a database of administrators and passwords held by a community manager allows the university to remove old accounts or delete or post to any university-related account in an emergency.    Best practices for affiliated social media accounts are emerging from institutions like the University of New Hampshire and Tufts University.

5.       Establish a community manager for campus social media. Even though this last takeaway may seem redundant, many reporting institutions did not have one single supervisory department for all campus social media. This does not imply that one department should handle all campus social media, but that there should be a centralized resource that acts as a hub to the campus “spokes” so there is continuity in branding and messaging, especially in the event of a crisis.

Five Fundamentals of a Social Media Strategy

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

Whether you already have a clearly defined social media strategy in place at your institution, or you’re just trying to keep your head on straight with all these new tools popping up every week, it’s always a great idea to review your plan for using social media on a yearly basis (and write it down if you haven’t already).

Here are five fundamentals to keep in mind while crafting your institution’s social media strategy:

Audience

As I mentioned in my last post on the CASE Social Media blog, Park Tudor’s Twitter audience is largely comprised of people in our local community and the education industry. However, our Facebook audience is mostly comprised of current families and alumni.

Identifying your audiences is the first step to creating goals for your social media strategy. Once you know who is listening to you or talking about you, you can then tailor your content to be interesting to your audience in each particular channel.

Resources

Know what your limits are. Time, staff and money to dedicate to social media is different at every institution. Work within your means and be realistic about the time you can efficiently spend on social media. If you have a team of people working on social media, set responsibilities for each team member. If you’re going to invest time or money into a new tool, do your research and make sure it is something that will bring value to your school community.

Content

Post content that is interesting to your followers–blogs, videos, school or department news, “did you know” facts, events, photos, student and alumni stories, etc. If you’re running the Facebook page for the career center, get a student to write a blog about her internship and post the link.

Make a timeline for publishing content. If you’re running a blog, decide if it should be updated weekly or daily. Admissions should take on an aggressive schedule in the fall recruiting season. Alumni should be engaged heavily during homecoming and reunion seasons.

Measurement

Measurement is still a tricky subject when it comes to social media. The admissions cycle could start with a single tweet and end in an enrolled student, or it could end with the tweet. It’s difficult to measure how social media directly affects any specific area of the institution.

If it’s within your budget, you can subscribe to social media analytics services that will give you great stats on your social media efforts. At the minimum, you should be tracking your Twitter follower counts and Facebook page insights. Take it a step further by keeping track of each mention of your institution, and make a conscious effort to turn each mention into a meaningful conversation.

Goals

The final part of your social media strategy should be to craft some attainable and specific goals. These goals should align with your overall marketing strategy and your school’s mission. For each goal, define the desired result, then define which tool(s) and resources you will use, who you intend to reach, who on your staff will have responsibility, what types of content are relevant, how often you should publish and how you will measure the results.

Good luck on crafting your social media strategy! I’d love to hear any tips or questions you might have.

Photo credit: Strategy by Waponi on Flickr (CC BY license).

Organizing Social Media in .Edu

Michael Stoner is president of mStoner. He co-presented the key findings of the 2011 social media survey at the CASE Social Media and Community conference in April 2011.

Organizing social media in .edu sounds like an oxymoron if there ever was one.

Many institutions have some degree of difficulty managing marketing and brand activities.  Social media is much newer and some leaders doubt its value—and perhaps don’t see a reason to manage it.

Participation in social media is baked into the culture on many campuses, with faculty, staff and students participating in social media via blogs, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and many other tools. This cacophony of voices shares many disparate views, using social media for personal and professional purposes, mixing it up, incorporating it in learning and teaching activities, and conducting research via social media.

It’s more important than ever that institutions find ways to manage some of this activity.

Successful Institutions Manage Social Media

The 2010 Survey of Social Media in Advancement found that institutions that considered themselves to be successful in social media generally spent more time managing their social media presence.  Our 2011 findings are similar.

A major area of focus for our 2011 white paper will be exploring how institutions organize their social media activities. We’ll focus specifically on social media for marketing, advancement, recruiting and other external relations purposes. 

To guide my thinking, I’ve relied on work done by the inestimable analyst, Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang), a partner in the Altimeter Group (with Charlene Li, the author of Open Leadership). Jeremiah has identified five different models for managing social media. Three in particular apply in education: the distributed (organic) model, the centralized model and the coordinated model.

Distributed (Organic)

This model of social media management is typical of organizations where social media activity develops in many areas at once and empowered staff members throughout the organization would find other types of social media appealing, too, and be free to explore them. In this kind of organization, there isn’t much “management” of social media—it simply happens, bubbling up from everywhere.

In .edu innovations begin at the edges and may flourish there long before they are taken up by the institution as a whole.  This is the way social media developed on most campuses: individuals or offices began to blog, then launched Facebook pages or groups or began tweeting. There was no thought to coordinating or asking from input from anyone with overall institutional responsibilities for marketing or communications.

Many institutions continue to function this way today. Other institutions haven’t been able to come to terms with the importance of social media and therefore don’t see a need to manage it, or have difficulty managing anything across units.

Centralized

In contrast to the organic model, the centralized model reflects organizations where social media is controlled by a central office, often a marketing department.

The major advantage of this model is that by adopting it, an institution can achieve an incredible amount of consistency in tone and voice across social media. 

But you can see the problems inherent in adopting this model in education.

First, there aren’t many institutions where it would work.Too many people would question the control that the central team would have over social media and many of them would simply continue to do exactly what they’re already doing. It would be very difficult to police or shut down rogue social media accounts—the result would be too much ill will.

A major drawback with this model is that it won’t scale: large institutions like Ohio State or the University of Michigan will never be able to staff a centralized office to manage social media and even colleges would find it difficult.

Finally, while the centralized model may seem appealing to some, it could easily result in social media that appears way too controlled and inauthentic: too much like advertising or broadcasting rather than engagement.

Coordinated

In this model, one office develops policies, guidelines and other procedures and is responsible for communicating them across the institution. The central unit may continue to play a role as a coach, helping to establish and communicate best practices.

You can see the appeal of this model immediately. Because various units control their own social media, there’s likely to be less push-back against guidelines but there can be quality control over messages, usage, frequency and tone. This model is the only one that is likely to provide any ability to scale—it can work equally well at a small college or a large university.

What’s Your Model?

What model does your institution use? How’s it working? What are its advantages and drawbacks? We want to know: we’ll include information from institutions that have a story to share in our 2011 white paper. Please leave a comment below.

An expanded version of this blog post is cross-posted at mStonerBlog.com. 

Social Media & Advancement Survey 2011: Changes, But Not Big Ones

Michael Stoner is president of mStoner. He co-presented the key findings of the 2011 social media survey at the CASE Social Media and Community conference in April 2011.

While advancement offices at many institutions are engaged in using some social media platforms (especially Facebook, which 96 percent of institutions utilize), institutions are still struggling with how to manage social media. And there weren't significant shifts in usage, management or other trends since our first survey was conducted in April and May, 2010.

These are key findings from the 2011 survey of social media in advancement, which mStoner conducted in February and March in partnership with Slover Linett Strategies and CASE. The first survey was released in July 2010.

I'll report briefly on some of the findings in this post. You can download the topline findings and a presentation about them that Cheryl Slover-Linett and I did at CASE's Social Media and Community Conference last week. We're working on a white paper further analyzing the data, which we'll release at the CASE Summit in July.

What Institutions Do

Institutions utilize an array of the most popular social media platforms: 75 percent use Twitter, 66 percent use LinkedIn or YouTube, 40 percent have blogs, use Flickr, or offer a social community developed by an outside vendor. Only 4 percent don't use social media at all.

Top goals for social media remain alumni engagement (at 84 percent of institutions responding) and strengthening brand image (75 percent); also engaging prospective students (68 percent of respondents), admitted students (63 percent), increasing awareness and rankings (61 percent). But only 38 percent of development offices use it for fundraising.

Staffing for social media varies across institutions. At the institutional level, 25 percent of institutions have at least one person working full-time on social media. It's far more common for staff to have social media responsibilities incorporated into their jobs, along with other responsibilities: at the department level, roughly .5 FTE focuses on social media.

There were some changes since 2010:

• The use of Twitter has increased.
• While institutions struggle with social media, they believe that it has value and that it's here to stay.
• More institutions have the IT and content management resources they need to augment their social media activities.
• More institutions have policies on legal and privacy issues and negative postings.

Success with Social Media

Again this year, we asked institutions to report how successful they are with social media and 62 percent reported that they are moderately successful with their social media initiatives, measuring success by the number of touches (friends, fans, comments, likes, etc.) they receive. Facebook is viewed as the most successful social media platform (by a large majority, 87 percent of institutions). They're still challenged by staffing, lack of full support and buy-in from senior staff and lack of readily available expertise and funding.

Institutions that are successful report a number of characteristics: they have specific goals for their social media; they are less spontaneous and plan more; they have institutional buy-in and support for their social media activities; they control social media content and staff with their own department; they use multiple social media platforms and target multiple audiences; and they are more likely to have policies. They are also more likely to evaluate their success in multiple ways.

Looking ahead to 2011, we'll see institutions creating social media plans (51 percent), expanding their activities to new audiences (46 percent), adding new social media tools to current programs (44 percent), and developing formal policies (37 percent).

Has Advancement Advanced in Social Media Use?

Michael Stoner is the president of mStoner and a faculty member for the CASE Social Media & Community conference.

Last year, CASE members reported that nearly all institutions (94 percent) were using Facebook to connect with important audiences. Their main purposes for using social media were engaging alumni (86 percent), strengthening their institutional brand (72 percent) and increasing awareness/advocacy/rankings (58 percent).

These were just some of the findings from the first survey of social media in advancement, conducted through a partnership between CASE, mStoner, and Slover Linett Strategies. We've reported on the results elsewhere and wrote a white paper, "Succeeding with Social Media: Lessons from the First Survey of Social Media in Advancement," that digests what we learned and provides some additional insights.

We're now busy analyzing the results from the second survey, which launched in February and closed in early March. I'm not going to share too many of our findings—we'll release the results on April 13 at the CASE Social Media & Community conference in San Francisco. Cheryl Slover-Linett and I will open the conference with a presentation of findings from the new survey.

What I will say is that it's interesting to see what's changed in a year. And how much hasn't. In general, the shifts are smaller than I would have anticipated.

Not surprisingly, the vast majority of institutions consider Facebook the most successful social tool for meeting their goals (87 percent in 2011 vs. 85 percent in 2010). There are a few shifts in the ranking of other social tools, but not big ones. I could say much the same thing about the changes in other areas of the survey.

Here's an example of a place where I expected to see more change occurring in the future: "Is the use of social media developing spontaneously or is it the result of planning in your unit?" In 2011, 7 percent of respondents indicated "highly spontaneous" and 17 percent "highly planned." Last year? It was 8 percent "highly spontaneous" and 13 percent "highly planned."

It looks as if the majority of institutions are still relying on counting measures (number of comments, tweets, etc.) as indications of social media success. Compare that with the Altimeter Group's research on the measures corporate social strategists are using to measure social media engagement:

 

So what does this mean? We are still combing through the data and don't have all the details yet. Stay tuned for the results of the second survey in April.

Don't let your campaigns become social media outlaws

Karine Joly is the editor of the blog www.collegewebeditor.com. 

Have you ever read Facebook Terms of Services or promotion guidelines, Twitter Rules or LinkedIn User Do's and Don'ts?

If you have, congratulations! You are among the happy few.

How can I be so sure?

I regularly come across examples of institutions (and companies) conducting social media initiatives on these platforms in breach with these rules. And, if you have a closer look at social media practices in higher education and elsewhere, you can also easily spot several of these campaigns breaking the TOS or other guidelines supposed to govern the use of these services.

Don't want to take my word for it? How about a couple of real examples?

• The University of Iowa Foundation has been running a great social media campaign on Facebook to help build a culture of philantrophy on campus for almost two years. In July 2009, the Foundation established a Facebook profile for "Phil Anthropy" as part of the campaign "Phil Was Here". With more than 1,600 friends before its transfer to a Facebook page, it's fair to say that Phil was quite popular on campus. While the Foundation decided to use a page - and not a profile - to go beyond the limitations on the number of friends, it was definitely a wise move as the campaign was indeed breaking the TOS. According to the terms of use, Facebook users should provide their real names and information. By signing up for the service, they also agree to not "create an account for anyone other than (themselves)."
• You might have heard about the success of the Mercedes Benz Tweet Race just before the Super Bowl because it was won by 2 higher ed professionals. They got a lot of help from the higher ed web and social media community to win this race as their car was "powered" by their tweets. Yet, some of the race rules set up by the automaker were an invitation to break the Twitter rules for trending topics. The rules call for filtering out tweets for search or even suspending accounts in case of "repeatedly Tweeting the same topic/hashtag without adding value to the conversation in an attempt to get the topic trending/trending higher."

Both social media campaigns were very successful and, in a way, got away breaking the TOS or guidelines of the social media platforms they used.

But, your next social media campaign might not be that lucky. And, should you really invest your time on an initiative that could be shut down overnight without the possibility of any appeal?

Social media might be a new territory, but it's not a digital Wild Wild West. So if you're planning a new social media program on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, don't just follow your own social media policy. Make sure your initiatives also comply with the following TOS or guidelines:

• The Twitter Rules
• About Twitter Trending Topics (see last section "Stay Trendy" for rules)
• LinkedIn Do's and Don'ts
• Facebook TOS - Statement of Rights and Responsibilities
• Facebook Promotion Guidelines

An Interview with Heather Sullivan of Northfield Mount Hermon

Northfield Mount Hermon is a private boarding school for students in grades 9-12 located Massachusetts’ idyllic Pioneer Valley. The school’s strong sense of tradition hasn’t limited its exploration into social media: NMHbook.org, its beautifully designed, interactive network site, placed silver in the 2010 CASE Circle of Excellence Awards. Amanda Holdsworth talked with Heather Sullivan, director of communications and marketing at Northfield Mount Hermon School, about NMHbook.org and other new media initiatives.

AH: What social media initiatives is your institution currently engaged in?

HS: Our Facebook fan page is about three years old and has over 4,800 fans and more than 2,000 active monthly users. It’s the third greatest source of traffic to our website, so it’s hugely important to us. We also have Twitter, YouTube and Flickr accounts. In the first half of this academic year, we created and posted about 25 new videos that show life on campus.

Flickr holds more than 40,000 searchable NMH images, and we use it to feed images directly into our website. Our Wordpress blogs are integrated  into the main website; we have 35 active blogs ranging from students studying abroad to college counseling and campaign blogs. And NMHbook.org houses all of these initiatives.

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

HS: NMHBook.org has been very successful. Within that, Flickr gets thousands of hits and works well with both photo-sharing and storytelling. We’ve found great success with our blogs and with our Facebook page, which points back to the NMH website and is useful for building and maintaining relationships.

AH:  What have you tried that you think hasn’t worked, and why?

HS: We decided not to focus our efforts on LinkedIn, since that didn’t seem to be where our target audiences were spending the most energy. We’re finding that Twitter is useful and flexible, but we took some initial missteps in our use of Twitter.

AH: Looking forward, what social media initiatives are you considering or exploring?

HS: With Facebook, we’re wondering if we need to do segmented pages: Do we need to divide pages by alumni, admissions, etc.? [Ed. note: NMH now has pages for its basketball team, soccer team, and archives.]

We’re also thinking about how we should be deliberate about messaging for social media, and how to more clearly define and properly evaluate social media goals.

AH: Do you have social media policies or guidelines and, if so, can you share them?

HS: Yes, and we’ve shared them with the community. Our social media manager, Rachael Hanley, has developed a series of tips and guidelines, including “10 Steps to Blogging.” People have good judgment. Communications has editing rights, but we rarely control community content.

AH: How are your social media initiatives organized and resourced?

HS: NMHBook.org hosts all social media initiatives, and content development is done by communications in collaboration with admission and advancement. But we need to ensure consistency of institutional voice. Communications has the final say.

 

So you need a social media policy ....

The following post is by Jennifer Doak, who joined the CASE staff as online communications specialist in September after working in communications for the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. Jen holds a master’s degree in communication, culture and technology from Georgetown University and will contribute to CASE’s growing efforts to engage members online through the website, communities and more.

So your institution boasts an official Facebook page, a Twitter account and a YouTube channel, and people are taking notice. But then you find out that there are several other fan pages, a rogue alumni LinkedIn group, and some student-generated blogs. And now your colleague wants to set up a campus Flickr account. What do you do?

You need to get yourself a social media policy. The purpose for an institutional social media policy is to guide users toward establishing online presences responsibly while representing the school brand—without being overly draconian or negative. Ball State University, the University of Oregon and DePaul University all balance this tension well.

People will inevitably want to understand why you’re establishing these rules, especially in new media, where both transparency and intellectual freedom are high priorities. Answering “because” may work for your kids, but it won’t work for your colleagues, faculty or students. Duke University’s social media policy does a good job of providing rationale in a succinct, reasonable way.

The policy should then provide a series of questions to get the reader thinking about why and how he or she intends to use any given tool. No matter what shiny new toy becomes the next viral preoccupation, you and your colleagues always need to start by considering who their audience is and what they’re trying to accomplish.

Many policies offer students, faculty and staff guidelines rather than hard-and-fast-rules suggesting, for example, that to be successful in social media you should be transparent, respectful, and discreet. Others advise reviewing posts carefully to make sure it’s what you want to say.

After that, your policy can incorporate any number of issues. I’ve included a list of readily available social media policies below, but the best include:

• A directory of the institution’s social media accounts and how groups can add to the list.
• Best practices that include tips about monitoring, responding to comments and correcting mistakes. Some policies even provide information on social media strategy.
• Differences between personal and institutional use of social media.
• Privacy recommendations for both personal and institutional social networking.
• Copyright and fair use resources for images, video, text and other content.

Amanda Vandervort, a former director of online marketing for Women’s Professional Soccer, has an excellent post outlining 15 university social media policies. She highlights three (the University of Oregon, DePaul University, and Vanderbilt) as having especially comprehensive guidelines. The excellent .eduGuru also has a nice list of resources for social media policies.

Here are some examples:

Ball State University
Central Community College(Nebraska)
Colorado State
DePaul University (also includes alumni guidelines)
Duke University 
Grand Valley State
Hamilton College
University of Michigan
University of Oregon
Seattle University
St. Edward’s University
University of Essex (UK)
University of Texas
Vanderbilt University
Washington University in St. Louis

CASE includes a list of online social media policies that have been submitted by members on its website and welcomes additional submissions.

And lastly, here are some resources from outside higher education: Corporate social media guidelines, other miscellaneous organization social media guidelines, social media participation guidelines (via Social Media Today), and an online disclosure best practices toolkit.

 

An Interview with James Cooper, Brock University

Brock University’s “Both Sides of the Brain” social media campaign won a bronze medal for best uses of social media in communications and marketing in the 2009 CASE Circle of Excellence awards program. James Cooper, Brock’s social media coordinator, discussed the Ontario institution’s award-winning connectivity with Nancy Seideman, associate vice president for university communications at Emory University.

NS: What social media initiatives is Brock engaged in?

JC: I’ve been at Brock 3 years and its social media coordinator since September 2009. In that time we’ve grown our Facebook page and Twitter account, created a YouTube channel, collected photos on Flickr, and developed a solid presence on LinkedIn. I oversee all of these central operation accounts for Brock, and I also offer support and advice to Brock community members engaged in social media activities outside of the central operation.

NS: Which initiatives do you think are the most effective?

JC:  We provide training, either in groups or one-on-one, to go through applications and platforms, showing their capabilities and what can be most effective in the central office operation.

We’ve also fostered a culture of mutual support among members of our web communities, especially on our Facebook pages. Our community members often answer each other’s questions and share information.

We have a Facebook photo contest that features our “Both Sides of the Brain” campaign. This is the second year we’ve run the contest. In 2009, it received over 800 submissions and 35,000 visits. We’re on track to surpass those numbers in this year’s contest.

NS: But what does that mean? What is the conversion factor?

JC: It’s difficult this early on to know what the conversion factor is for our social media program. We expect that it will take about five years of running an extensive program and gathering data before we’ll be able to truly evaluate its effectiveness and success. Social media is organic. It takes time. And because of that, it can be difficult at this stage to prove success to a leadership that’s looking for hard numbers, a hard return, quickly.

However, we do know that, in the past year, Facebook has become the number 3 source of referral traffic to the Brock University website. We feel that this emphasizes the need for having a strong and growing presence in the social network.

NS: What have you tried that you think hasn’t worked?

JC: We’ve found that Twitter is not widely used among high school students so it doesn’t play much of a role in our high school recruitment program. That said, it is a useful tool for community outreach and communicating to other audiences, such as current students and alumni.

NS: What are the next social media initiatives you are exploring?

JC: We’re experimenting with mobile social media using tools such as foursquare and Facebook Places. We will also be looking into the development of a mobile app in the coming year.

We’re also developing instructional resources on how to use Facebook and other social media tools, and educating the community on how Brock uses these tools and what its policy is in responding to comments and inquiries. Continued education and knowledge transfer will be vital to our strategy as we move forward. To help in this, we’re creating a social media dashboard that will allow for aggregation and sharing of all social media across campus.

[Editor’s Note: Brock now has a wonderful social media strategy form for faculty and students to help them determine their audience and goals.]

NS: Do you have social media policies in place, and if so, can you share them?

JC: Yes, that was my first project when I assumed this role. You can find them here.

NS: Are social media initiatives integrated into your strategic communications plan?

JC: Yes, they’re within the strategic communications and marketing plans. We have multiple strategic goals related to donor and alumni relations, student engagement, etc. Social media changes and develops so quickly, though, that it can be difficult to keep strategic plans up to date.

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

JC: I wish I had a better appreciation of how rapidly information spreads through social media, and had been better prepared for how much it takes to monitor social media in regards to an institutional brand. All information, good and bad, needs to be monitored: the exceptional to lift up and apply; the negative that potentially needs to be addressed.

NS: What social media resources would you recommend to your peers?

JC: Hootsuite is useful to manage groups of people and assign permissions and update accounts. TweetDeck is another useful aggregator. And I swear by Google Reader to help monitor what is said about the brand. RSS feeds are invaluable, in terms of cross-pollinating multiple accounts with essential information originating on the institutional website. I read Mashable.com and BlogHighEd.org on a daily basis to stay informed on what’s new in social media.