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…

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.

The World Has Gone Viral: Get Busy Tweeting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Why Higher Ed is NOT There Yet with Social Media Marketing

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

Last week, Kyle James reminded us that the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachussets Dartmouth had just published the results of its latest study on social media use in higher ed.

With 456 interviews performed from November 2010 to May 2011 among a representative sample of 4-year institutions in the United States, the findings of this study are valid within a +/- 4 percent range.

While they confirm some widely-shared assumptions on the state of social media in higher education, these results also reveal some surprising trends.

• According to this study, 100 percent of colleges and universities now use some form of social media–be it blogs, Facebook, Twitter, message/bulleting boards, videoblogging, podcasting, Foursquare, MySpace, LinkedIn or YouTube. Unsurprisingly, Facebook is the most widely used by institutions–only 2 percent aren't present on the most popular social networking platform.
• YouTube follows with an adoption rate of 86 percent, just before Twitter with 84 percent and blogging with 66 percent.
• What's a bit more surprising is the jump in podcasting use compared to the previous year–from 22 percent to 41 percent. I really don't understand what could explain this surge and this makes me question the reliability of this specific data point. (How was podcasting defined to respondents?)

Is success in the eyes of the admissions officer?

When asked how successful institutions are with the different types of social media channels they use, more than three-quarters of the respondents reported all channels (with the exception of the dying MySpace platform) as successful.

So, all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds when it comes to social media in higher education?

Not so fast.

 

A closer look at the results of two other recent studies, namely the 2011 E-expectations Study from Noel-Levitz and the State of Web and Social Media Analytics in Higher Education I conducted for Higher Ed Experts, raises several questions about the very rosy picture painted by the study of social media use in admissions offices.

• When only 9 percent of prospective students and 5 percent of their parents have a Twitter account, according to the Noel-Levitz survey, how can 72 percent of the institutions see Twitter as a successful channel?
• When 66 percent (a 15-point increase from the previous year) of admissions offices use blogs and three-quarters of students and parents said they never or only rarely looked at college blogs, how good can the social media strategy of the admission office be?
• When 95 percent of admissions offices pat themselves on the back when asked to evaluate the success of their efforts on Facebook yet only 49 percent of the institutions–according to the Higher Ed Experts study–track Facebook activity, what does Facebook success look like for almost half the institutions?

Obviously, I don't have the answers to these questions, but I believe there's a real need to go beyond the "social media checklist" tactic and adopt a more strategic and measurable approach in higher education.

Now that everybody is on board, it's time to find out what works for the institution and stop what doesn't.

Don't YOU think so?

Ask The Experts: What Do Alumni Want?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tweeting a Day in the Life of a College

Pamela Agar is the Head of Digital Media at Imperial College London in the UK.

Several of my colleagues at other universities raised an eyebrow when I suggested that we would be placing a live twitter feed on our institutional homepage for a day. What if people abused the opportunity to get rude content published? Or an over enthusiastic tweeter took over? What if no-one tweeted at all?!

June 13-17 marked Universities Week 2011 in the UK—a national campaign demonstrating the benefits of universities within UK society. To close the week, the campaign aimed to bust some of the myths about 21^st century campus life by inviting institutions and their supporters to contribute to a 24-hour twitter stream sharing what they were doing—using the hashtag #uniweek.

We’d been keen to try something more interactive on our homepage and are lucky to enjoy lively and popular engagement on Twitter, so we jumped at the chance to participate.

I spoke to J-P Jones, our press and communications officer who coordinated the day at Imperial, about how he planned it:

Why did you decide to take part?

We thought the "day in the life" Twitter idea was a good way of building a greater sense of community among Imperial’s regular tweeters and connect with new ones. In addition to providing insight into College life it allowed us to better understand who the other Imperial tweeters are.

Why did we run a second hashtag?

We used #ImpCol in addition to #uniweek to clearly identify the tweets from our own staff, students and alumni, so that these could be pulled into the live stream on the College homepage.

Why the College homepage?

We felt it was important that the entire Imperial community could participate and read the content being generated, rather than just those already engaged with Twitter.

Were you worried that placing the feed on the homepage was too risky?

It was a risk, but preserving the authenticity of a live feed was key to the spirit of the exercise, so our digital team created a homepage design which regularly refreshed to show the most recent #ImpCol tweets, whether they were positive or not. The only moderation was a limited filter for offensive language. Communications staff monitored the feed throughout the day though, and we had a backup plan in place in case it was hijacked—which was to change the homepage to show @imperialcollege tweets only.

How did you engage with the College community to encourage participation?

We created a webpage in advance of Twitter day, outlining our aims and the kind of content we were looking for and promoted that page though ads in College publications and mailing lists. We also pulled together a list of all the tweeters we knew well and informed them, as well as approaching alumni. And, of course, we tweeted!

What did people talk about?

We had a great mix of staff, students and alumni getting involved. People were talking about what they had to do that day—whether it was lab research, lecturing abroad, revision for finals or staying in bed!

What were your favourite contributions on the day?

Two in particular stood out for me:

@limeytweet Half listening to a chap on train (#impcol PhD student) educate communters on physics thesis work. To his credit, they're totally into it!

@mattallinson: I've been working for 6 months in a lab and not once have I accidently turned myself into a superhero #impcol #uniweek

Was it worth it and will you try it again?

Definitely, though we heard that productivity across the College was probably a little lower that day as staff became engrossed in the feed! It was particularly satisfying to see people who never normally use Twitter getting involved via the homepage. We had over 600 tweets using our hashtag and even trended on Twitter in London at one point during the day.

We would really like to try something similar again, perhaps around Welcome Week at the start of the next academic year to engage new students.

Read the full archvie of #impcol tweets from Universities Week 2011

Read a full analysis of #uniweek on Twitter on Brian Kelly's UK Web Focus blog.

Tweeting Statues? Everyone Loves Squirrels.

The Twitter and Facebook lineup on my campus includes statues and a rodent. This is why I love higher ed.

About a year ago, we were brainstorming about ways to expand the use of Twitter at William & Mary. We expected to land on a student Twitterforce that would be comparable to the legion of students who write for W&M Blogs. When we audience tested this idea, it was clear that Twitter use among students was, at the time, pretty low. And, the students in the focus groups seemed skeptical about Twitter as a way to tune into campus life. Frankly, these students talked a lot about Facebook and seemed confused about Twitter.

When we described a second idea, using personas to comment on the W&M experience, we knew we were onto something. The students in the focus group were enthusiastic about the idea of two personas commenting on the life and times of the William & Mary campus. Cue @lordbot and @wmsquirrel.

My creative team spent some time devising personalities and context for these two new personas and we established Twitter feeds and Facebook pages for both.

@wmsquirrel (Twitter | Facebook) is a campus resident, nut aficionado, territorialist, specie supremacist, quip enthusiast, and one helluva guy. He has the run of the campus and acts like he owns the place.

@lordbot (Twitter | Facebook) is a statuesque, 'greatly loved,' former Governor’s Palace resident, and occasionally annoyed by squirrels. His stationary life includes the oldest part of William & Mary's 318-year-old campus and a view out toward Colonial Williamsburg.

We launched @lordbot and @wmsquirrel using a grassroots approach. We didn't reveal that W&M Creative Services was behind them and, for a while, the other top-level William & Mary channels didn't follow the two personas. We had an enormous amount of fun watching the numbers inch up.

We waited six months to reveal that W&M Creative Services was behind the personas. I gave the scoop to a student reporter who came to talk to me about what our office does for a piece she was writing for The Flat Hat.

So, less than a year later, how's it going with these two? @wmsquirrel is popular, with nearly 500 Twitter followers and well over 1,000 Facebook likes. @lordbot has a dedicated, but much smaller following: nearly 250 on Twitter and about 335 on Facebook.

Much of what I know about social media was reinforced by the experience of developing and using these personas. Here's what I mean:

• It's easy to start.
  Keeping the momentum up on a social media channel takes good, old-fashioned hard work. To support a successful launch of @lordbot and @wmsquirrel, we sat in a room for a few hours and left with a list of posts for each persona. We knew we'd be using whatever was current on campus as fodder for the commentary from these two but we wanted to queue up some posts that would explain their personalities and be immediately available during a creative dry spell.
• Watch what you start.
  It's no suprise that there are a lot of history buffs in and around Williamsburg. We try our best to make @lordbot historically accurate. Also, a persona that represents a real person from the past is more likely to get this sort of question, "Did Lord Botetourt own slaves?"
• Make engagement your goal and try to measure your success.
  Of course, there are followers and likes and insights. But you should also watch for indicators that your social media channels are influencing campus culture. We knew we were there when a reporter from a student newspaper told me that she had seen more than one student point to a squirrel on campus and say, "I bet that's @wmsquirrel." Another proof point came from an alum, who on his way to campus for homecoming, offered to bring a treat for @wmsquirrel.
• Social media is a unique form of communication.
  A few more statues and personas are making an appearance in the social media lineup at William & Mary. Statues in our library and business school are speaking out and making the conversation richer and more fun. You can see a full list of personas on William & Mary's Social Stream.
• Social media channels should support the central messaging in the university communication plan.
  It's not all fun and games. Engaging with your campus and your alumni stakeholders is serious business. For example, the William & Mary personas reflect a strategy to juxtapose our history with current culture. This post from @lordbot demonstrates the interesting tension between the past and future, "You know I haven't been the same since they buried that magnet on campus @williamandmary. I'm drawn to the sciences."

Embrace what's different about social media. Realize it's communication and that many of the same rules apply.

The Anatomy of a Twitter Audience

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

When we started using Twitter at Park Tudor two years ago, I immediately became curious about the types of people who were following us. I assumed that our follower base would be 90 percent Park Tudor families and alumni and 10 percent spam. I was wrong. Here's the breakdown of our Twitter followers:

One-third of our audience is made up of people or organizations in our local community in the city of Indianapolis or the state of Indiana. Almost another third is made up of schools, teachers, education bloggers and people who work in the education industry. Then we get to the 22 percent of our followers who have a direct relationship with the school— alumni, students, parents and faculty and staff. Only two out of every nine followers are school constituents. The male-female ratio is evenly spread out among our followers, excluding Twitter accounts that represent an organization or company.

So what does this mean for our Twitter strategy?

First, it means we have to adjust our messages to fit a wider audience. If we tweet a reminder about the kindergarten program that parents are invited to attend, it's not going to matter to most of the people following us. Instead, we've turned to Twitter as a tool for community outreach. It lets people in the community get a real glimpse of what life is really like at Park Tudor. We tweet photos and videos of everyday life on campus. And we listen. When someone talks about Park Tudor online, we want to know what they're saying and we want to have the chance to respond, whether it's a positive or negative comment. (Most of the time, it is a positive comment.)

Second, it means we need to establish ourselves as a leader in the education industry. Whether it's people in the community, in the education industry or in our school community, they all are looking to us as a knowledgeable source for education information. I will admit this is an area that I would like to improve on. I think it would be beneficial to our followers if we shared more articles and blogs about news in the education industry as well as parenting tips and learning strategies.

Finally, it means that we need to better promote our Twitter account among our school community. We don't just want to increase our numbers by asking them to follow us on Twitter, we want to increase engagement with our school community members.

Do you know how your Twitter audience is spread out? How do you tailor your content for your audience? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.