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?

 

Book Review: Digital Leader by @equalman

Many people read author Erik Qualman's (@equalman) first book, Socialnomics. If not, you may have viewed one of his videos on YouTube regarding the social media revolution such as this one:

 

Qualman has aided several companies in building leading digital strategies, focusing heavily on the use of social media.

His latest book is Digital Leader. In it, Qualman provides an easily digestible (if not necessarily easily launchable) strategy for individuals to maximize their leadership potential in the social media/digital space.

Digital Leader breaks down into five main parts, each set around what Qualman sees as a truth that will help you develop your own digital STAMP. They are: Simple, True, Act, Map and People.

I personally enjoyed reading Digital Leader. Qualman writes with a style that is both conversational and motivational. Professionals who have spent time trying to articulate a vision for social media to supervisors and colleagues will find several "a-ha" moments in the ways that Qualman distills transformative technology into parallels with the non-digital world.

Qualman uses the book to challenge the reader to assess who they are currently in the digital world and to recognize the potential of who they could be in that same space. His suggestions are also quite realistic. Although Qualman wants people to take full advantage of the full spectrum of social media possibilities, he does recognize the need to power down and go offline. In fact, he recommends committing to checking email only twice a day. This is welcome advice for those of us who check our email with the fervor of Pavlovian dogs.

I have only two criticisms of the book. The first is that Qualman appears to implore people to use the digital space for only “big” moments. In parts of the book, he shows impatience for using time to talk about the TV show you watched as opposed to spending it creating content for a blog about changing the world.  He does this because he feels that every step we take in the digital universe leaves a lasting footprint—with the theory that we would want our footprints to stand out.  I agree with this to a point.  However, if our digital persona and our "IRL" (in real life) persona are indeed one and the same, authenticity only comes when we share all of ourselves. I think Qualman underestimates the long-term value of future generations knowing some of the day-to-day things that we found interesting in the present day.  For purposes of future research, we are all now primary sources. 

My second quibble is that at times he tends to remind the reader about some of the famous people he has shared the stage with or worked with.  His ideas are strong enough to stand on their own without him needing to seek an imprimatur from a well-known CEO or world leader.

This book is full of great ideas without being dense. It is the perfect read for an airplane trip (although I recommend the hard copy so you do not have to power down below 10,000 feet).

Qualman is on Twitter @equalman, and he interacts often with readers and answers questions.

If anyone else has read Digital Leader, I would be curious to know what your own assessment of this book is in the comments.

Social Media: The Haze is Lifting and the Landscape is Coming Into Focus.

Susan T. Evans is a senior strategist at mStoner and chair of the 2012 CASE Social Media and Community Conference. Before mStoner, Susan was the first director of creative services at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va.  

I think things are starting to clear up on the social media front:

• Experimentation? Check.
• Senior administrators understanding what a hashtag is? Check.
• Facebook and Twitter icons on your home page? And, check again.

Let me offer a bit more evidence about my assertion that most educational institutions have a sharper focus on how to use social media:

Most of us are using the right tool for the right job. Perhaps you saw the "social media explained" photo I'm including in this post. I saw it first on @ThreeShipsMedia. Let's face it, for a while, social media channels were generic. The only goal—the simple intent—was to have a conversation. While it's still about conversation, the Twitter post is not the Facebook update is not the Pinterest pin. And there seems to be less reliance on an approach that simultaneously publishes the same content to all social channels. Most of us are packaging content differently depending on the channel or we are using certain channels for certain types of communication.

Thanks to mobile, social media is now a push technology. The first time I suggested social media as an official communication channel, many resisted it because they preferred to "get it in their email." There was a fear that if we didn't use a push technology, the audience simply would not bother to come to us for a message. Mobile changes all of that. I've characterized mobile as social for quite awhile now. And, the proliferation of mobile devices (some claim that 50 percent of undergraduates have smartphones) and apps means we can be almost certain that our social media content streams are being regularly pushed to the audiences we want to reach. Nowadays, our audiences always have their small screens with them.

People, not brands, use social media. There is social media noise but we've learned that the authentic voices are more likely to get attention and responses. Why explain this further when Lori Packer's recent post provides an excellent summary? Enough said.

Bring the campus life section to life with social media. These days, integration of the official web presence with social media content streams is default; it's expected. Back in the day, the lighthearted content of a college or university website was contained in its campus life section. Do you think you could crowdsource the campus life section of your website? Do you think official higher education websites have improved because of the "external pressure" from the looming social media content on the periphery?

Humble, anyone? Many social media strategists recommend that content produced for your social channels should not be all about you. Instead, your institution should use social media to contribute to the broader conversation. Enter tools like Pinterest where, according to Oberlin social media coordinator Ma'ayan Plaut, recommendations to the community of users suggest "avoiding self-promotion." Take Ma'ayan's advice: "Use social media to help you tell your story."

If your view is still hazy, sharpen your focus by consuming the best of what's out there. Blogs like this one and conferences like CASE Social Media and Community are tremendous resources for sharing ideas and keeping your communication strategy rich and relevant. Hope to see many of you in Chicago for #casesmc.

Progress? Check.

The Jury’s Out on QR Codes

Theresa Walker is a senior editor at CURRENTS. She covers the communications and marketing beat for the magazine.

I began thinking about the need to include a CURRENTS article about QR codes after I started seeing them pop up more frequently last year in the catalogs I received in the mail, on tourism ads in Washington, D.C., metro stations and in the pages of The Washington Post. (This Poynter Institute article about using QR codes to drive traffic to newspaper content offers useful tips for anyone looking into using QR codes.)

I came across some interesting and not very user-friendly examples. Sears ran one in TV commercials during its holiday ad campaign last December and is, to my mind at least, still the most notably useless example. I paused my TV and tried several times, unsuccessfully, to scan the code. I don’t know how many other people made an attempt, but I can’t imagine that there were too many.

A couple of months later, I saw an interesting newspaper ad for a Picasso exhibit at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. A portrait of the artist was rendered entirely in QR codes. It was a cool concept, but it wasn’t as easy to scan as I thought it would be. And once the code successfully scanned, it was a bit of a letdown because it took me to the VMFA’s regular website rather than a mobile website or video. I felt kind of like Ralphie in the movie “A Christmas Story” after he successfully decoded the message with his new Little Orphan Annie decoder ring.

These and other experiences with QR codes led to the article “QR Codes: Use Them … or Lose Them?” in the October Issue of CURRENTS. The article offers two points of view on the topic.

Pro—Chuck Cunningham outlines the experiences of the University of Guelph, one of the first institutions in Canada to use the codes in student recruitment. He explains how, through the use of QR codes, the university successfully created a media buzz designed to raise the university's profile and, ultimately, increase the number of applicants to Guelph.

Con—Cassie Dull of the Park Tudor School in Indiana, on the other hand, believes that while QR codes have great potential, they currently aren’t that valuable because they:

• are too much work for users and don’t provide enough value.
• need a strong message behind them to make them effective; they are just a tool and require a strong communications plan.
• are trendy but there’s no real proof that they make a difference.

With so many available methods for generating free QR codes, it’s easy and inexpensive to test whether they will work for your institution’s marketing efforts or campaign before deciding to go the route of having a QR code specially designed for your campus.

Is your institution considering using QR codes? How have you already used them? Let us know how you’re using—or thinking about using—QR codes and whether you think they’re here to stay (or not) by posting a comment.

Takeaways on the Web, Social Media and Student Recruitment

Michael Stoner is the president of mStoner (mStoner.com), a marketing firm that works with education institutions.

At least 80 percent of prospective college students have a Facebook account, as do 48 percent of their parents, and they use them to view college Facebook pages. This data from the 2011 Noel-Levitz E-Expectations Report suggests how important social media is for student recruitment.

But "The Online Expectations of Prospective College Students and Their Parents," also confirms the importance of some more-traditional channels. More about that in a moment.

The report is based on research conducted by Noel-Levitz, which partners with National Research Center for College & University Admissions (NRCCUA) and OmniUpdate on the E-Expectations series. Researchers conducted phone interviews about the use of e-communications in the college search with more than 1,043 college-bound high school seniors throughout North America and 517 of their parents in February 2011.

Here are some of my takeaways from it:

1. Don't drop traditional recruitment channels right now. More than a third of prospective students said that an institution's, ". . . website isn't really an important resource for me." And 25 percent of their parents agreed.
2. If your website isn't in shape, you'd better take steps to improve it. Now. On the other hand, nearly one in five prospects said that if they couldn't find the information they needed on a website, they'd drop a college from consideration. And 57 percent said that they could think of an occasion when web content was so compelling that they became more interested in attending a college. When they visit a college website, prospects and their parents want info on academic programs and enrollment first. Cost is much less important.
3. Don't bother texting prospects. Or tweeting them. E-Expectations data confirm what I've been told by prospective students—they don't want text messages from colleges. And, neither they nor their parents are on Twitter.
4. Integrate social content with your website and move visitors to your social channels from there. Don't expect them to search social sites to find your institution. While teens and their parents are using social channels, they aren't using Facebook to search for colleges: only 27 percent of teens have viewed a college Facebook page. And they also aren't visiting college YouTube channels to any great extent: only 27 percent reported visiting YouTube or other video sites to look for college videos. But embed that same video on your own site and visitors will watch it—55 percent of students reported watching video on websites of schools they were considering.
5. Don't dump email just yet. Many pundits have sounded the death knell for email. And when Facebook launched its integrated messaging app, we were told that teens would abandon email for it. Well, guess what Noel-Levitz found? Of the teens they talked to, 86 percent used email and 93 percent of those were willing to give email addresses to colleges. [And just in case you missed it, in this survey, a higher percentage of teen respondents used email than had Facebook accounts.]
6. When you're fixing your website (see #2, above), make it mobile-friendly. While only 14 percent of teens said they looked at a college website on their cell phone, all data point to burgeoning use of smartphones and tablets for web access. Be in a position to surprise mobile visitors to your site, including early-adopting prospective students and parents.

During the same week that Noel-Levitz released these results, I saw data from a Nielsen study of shoppers conducted in July 2011. Nielsen found that materials mailed to home addresses and emails from retailers both had high usage among consumers (67 percent) as opposed to ads on social media sites (45 percent). Maybe teen behavior when shopping for colleges is more a reflection of the larger culture than we often believe.

Of course, your prospects may differ. Which is why it's always smart to know your own applicants, rather than relying totally on aggregate research data, no matter how trusted the source.

Social Media Books - Oxymorons or Valuable Resources?

Julie Schorfheide is director of books publishing at CASE and is always on the lookout for new, relevant and well-written books that will help CASE members in their professional lives.

Some people might file the phrase "social media book" with other oxymorons such as "jumbo shrimp" or "electric candles"—or they might just laugh at the thought of a slow medium having any relevance at all to the fast-changing world of Twitter, blogs, Facebook and the other usual suspects in the social media lineup.

Herein lies the challenge for those of us who seek to sort through a rather overwhelming list of books on the topic of social media: Which ones are relevant, and will they still be useful in another six months?

I came right up against this challenge when trying to find books to send to CASE's Social Media & Community conference next week. As I began the selection process, I kept these questions in mind:

• Will this book help the reader craft a social media policy?
• Will it help the reader maintain a strategic outlook?
• Does it seem forward-looking?
• Does it address questions of community, relationships, reputation?
• How recently was it published?
• Is it well written?

And here's what determines if any publication makes the final cut: How readily adaptable to the advancement profession is the message and focus of the book?

The good news is there are many books about social media. The bad news is … there are so many books about social media. Do you read any of them? If so, what criteria do you use in selecting which ones to read?

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.

Beth Kanter Shares Social Media Tips with CURRENTS

Gayle Bennet is deputy editor of CURRENTS magazine.

Recently, I interviewed Beth Kanter for the March issue of CURRENTS, and we had a wide-ranging forty-five minute chat about social media and non-profits.

For those of you who don’t already know of her, Beth makes her living writing, consulting, and presenting about how nonprofits can best use social media to better achieve their missions. She works and collaborates with some major players in both the nonprofit and social media sense: the Red Cross, the National Wildlife Federation, and the Institute of International Education, to name a few.

In the interview, Beth provides concrete examples of social media rights and wrongs and, naturally, provides links for further information on some points. Following are some topics that we discussed that might be of particular interest to alumni and other advancement officers dealing with social media:

1. How nonprofits have learned to let their advocates outside their organizations help them achieve their missions through social media.
2. How working with social media tools requires an ability to deal with failure.
3. How a leader can interact with social media even if he or she hasn’t embraced it personally.

Something to add? You know how to use the comments! 

What are you Reading? A Blog List for Advancement Professionals

Several months ago, CASE asked members about their go-to advancement blogs. CASE social network members gave a great mix of responses. (It should be noted that we did allow people to promote their own blogs.)

Here are the responses, organized by category—maybe you’ll find some new resources to add to your feeds!

Advancement

• CASE’s modest (but solid) advancement blogroll
• Alumni Futures
• University Advancement

Education & Campus Issues

• Academica Group Top Ten
• Blog High Ed
• College Web Editor’s list of higher ed bloggers
• HiceSchool

Communications & Marketing

• Adaptivate
• The Allied Group’s Rondeau’s Roundtable
• College Web Editor
• Educational Marketing Group’s Brand Manager’s Notebook
• Higher Ed Communications
• Higher Ed Marketing
• Intermedia
• Mediapost
• mStonerblog
• Pickle Jar Communications Blog and the Pickle Jar social network
• School of Thought
• Symplicity Corporation Blog

Communities & Social Media

• edSocialMedia
• The Association for Social Media and Higher Education’s blog
• .eduGuru
• Mashable
• SchneiderB

Fundraising

• The Annual Giving Exchange
• The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s blogroll
• CoolData
• Donor Relations Guru
• Getting Giving
• Supporting Advancement
• Tactical Philanthropy

Do you have any blogs to add to the list? Additional input for the ones already there? Let us know in the comments section!

Digital Natives aren’t Necessarily Social Media Literates

By Jen Doak, online communications specialist, CASE

The students at your institution may be considered “digital natives” – that is, social media and technology tools come naturally to them and are part of their day-to-day lives. But knowing how to use these tools doesn’t always mean that students use them in a smart way, as a quick image search on Facebook will attest.

Just as with traditional communications tools, being a skillful user of new technology requires some measure of social media literacy—a trait not necessarily characteristic of all digital natives.

The magazine Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education  recently had an article on social media literacy that featured social media expert Howard Rheingold, lecturer at the University of California-Berkeley and author of Smart Mobs. In a similar article for EDUCAUSE Review, Rheingold specifies five aspects of social media literacy:

• Attention: Knowing when to focus and when to multitask as well as acting with others in mind.
• Participation: Not just in social networks as a medium, but for broader social organizing.
• Collaboration: Putting together or learning information with the help of others online.
• Network awareness: Understanding how networks work and function, at both micro and macro levels.
• Critical consumption (or “crap” detection): Both determining who is trustworthy online, and effectively sampling the endless flow of information available. Here’s Rheingold’s video on crap detection.

“When it comes to social media, knowing how to post a video or download a podcast…is not enough,” he writes. “Productive use of Twitter or YouTube requires knowledge of who your public is [and] how your participation meets their needs (and what you get in return)…Ultimately, the most important fluency is not in mastering a particular literacy but in being able to put all five of these literacies together into a way of being in digital culture.”

This means that effective online organizing – be it for alumni reunions, fundraising or campus events – isn’t just about putting together a glossy website. It’s about knowing that the Internet isn’t actually a series of tubes, and that people will not immediately flock to your Twitter account just because you have one. It’s also about being conscious of issues like network organization, fair use, trolling and privacy.

Fortunately, since we’re talking about the Internet, this information is easily obtained.

• Rheingold has many other articles about social media literacy on his website. You can also visit his Social Media Classroom for how he uses these principles in higher education.
• If Rheingold’s article was a bit too text-heavy for your tastes, here’s a six-minute interview.
• American University’s Center for Social Media, besides being a generally excellent resource, has a code for media literacy that includes fair use (which all social media literate people should be aware of).
• CrissCrossed blog has a great article on the topic, and SocialMedia.biz has seven tips to increase your literacy.