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Social Media & Alumni Affairs
What do we mean when we say we want to “engage our alumni”? It depends on the institution and where you sit within the institution. If you’re operating your social channels from a Public Affairs or a campaign perspective, you may be trying to get university messaging about campaign priorities in front of alumni. If you’re doing it from an Annual Fund perspective, you could be taking baby steps towards actual solicitation via social channels, or you could be conveying stewardship messaging. If you’re doing it from an Alumni Affairs perspective, you might be trying to generate a critical mass of audience around a particular affinity or help promote an upcoming reunion. The point being, of course, that each of these units has goals that contribute toward broader institutional priorities. And unless you’re using the social platforms to advance these goals, you’re always going to have a hard time answering questions about ROI. It’s very easy to get distracted by new tools that are bright and shiny and treat them as ends in-and-of themselves, but as Andy Shaindlin has observed, your ultimate focus needs to be the behavior you want to cultivate, not the technology.
…Despite the current court battle that’s trying to quantify the value of a follower on Twitter, I don’t think we’re ever going to get anywhere trying to persuade people that there’s an innate value to a “like” on a fan page or a follower on Pinterest. If we’re being strategic, we need to ask the follow-up question of “Great. So how does that follower help you advance your unit’s goals?” From my team’s vantage point in Alumni Affairs and Development, we’ve concluded that we need to focus on using our suite of tools to enhance the footprint and amplify the impact of things that our organization is already doing well. For instance, we’ve spent lots of time and energy over the past year figuring out how to livestream live events to our Facebook audience. These are events that are already aligned with strategic priorities – if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be happening to start with. With just a modest, incremental investment of effort, we can take that event and make it available to an audience that is much broader than the live audience. The content that is already important enough to warrant an event is now accessible in real time around the globe.
Being able to report that we increased the size of the audience for an event by 175% and had viewers in 24 different countries lines up with existing metrics and goals in a way that saying that we increased our number of followers on Twitter by 8% simply does not. Sure, the two are related – the larger the audience on the social channels, the larger the audience for livestreams in that space – but one deals with priorities around which there is already consensus and one does not.
Social Technologies & Value Creation
Social technologies “may become the most powerful tools yet developed to raise the productivity of high-skill knowledge workers — the kind of workers who help drive innovation and growth, and who are going to be in increasingly short supply.
This is one of the surprising takeaways from our recent research on the economic impact of social technologies. The business world knows (or thinks it knows) a lot about how social technologies are changing the world. With consumers spending gobs of time in online communities (more than 1.5 billion consumers around the globe have an account on a social networking site and almost one in five online hours is spent on social networks), marketing departments have increasingly shifted their attention to social media. They’re not only advertising and creating their own social sites, they’re engaging with consumers, listening in on unfiltered conversations, and soaking up huge amounts of data on consumer behavior — all of which is producing nifty new insights for fine-tuning product requirements and marketing messages.
It’s powerful stuff that will continue to evolve and change the way that companies market to consumers and B2B customers. But, it turns out that there’s something even more powerful at play: the potential for value creation when social technologies are used to improve collaboration and communication within and across enterprises is twice as big as the value that can be created through all other uses across the value chain.
What Else Would You Like to Talk about?
It’s as if your clients or customers had called you on the phone to tell you how awesome they thought you were, and you said, “Hey thanks!” and then hung up.
In social media, your audience can’t see that you’re actually still standing there waiting for the next engagement volley. “Thanks!” pretty much says, “We’re done here,” so they move on. In order to get them to stick around, it’s up to you to add cues or prompts to your initial answer to keep the conversation moving forward (now, or in the future).
For example these are door opening comments …
Thanks for your comment! What’s the link to the post you wrote on this topic?
LOL! Next time you’re in town, let me know. I’d love to buy you coffee.
That’s a great suggestion. What else can we do to improve our site?
Too true. You have such great insights on this. Ever consider guest blogging?
You can find that info on our website. Are there any questions I could answer for you right now?
The Platonic Version of the News Tweet
Steadiness — compelling news expressed in straightforward, not hyperbolic, language — is actually a component of maximally shareable content, the algorithm suggests. And this particular tweet is also sent from a credible source, The New York Times, which makes it extra-spreadable. It’s about technology, the most popular, shareable category of news story. It’s engaging without being insistent. And it stars a company — Apple — with high name recognition.
The algorithm comes courtesy of a fascinating paper [pdf] from UCLA and Hewlett-Packard’s HP Labs. The researchers Roja Bandari, Sitram Asur, and Bernardo Huberman teamed up to try to predict the popularity — which is to say, the spreadability — of news articles in the social space…
To develop their algorithm, the researchers hypothesized that four factors would determine an article’s social success:
- The news source that creates and publishes the article
- The category of news the article belongs to (technology, health, sports)
- Whether the language in the article was emotional or objective
- Whether celebrities, famous brands, or other notable institutions are mentioned
Via Why the World’s Most Perfect News Tweet Is Kind of Boring
Facebook’s Future?
The amazing thing here is that business keeps trying to improve advertising — and always by making it more personal — as if that’s the only way we can get to Michael’s “sweeping, basic, transformative, and simple way to connect buyer to seller and then get out of the way.” Three problems here:
- By its nature advertising — especially “brand” advertising — is not personal.
- Making advertising personal changes it into something else that is often less welcome.
- There are better ways to get to achieve Michael’s objective — ways that start on the buyer’s side, rather than the seller’s.
…In The Cluetrain Manifesto, which Chris Locke, David Weinberger, Rick Levine and I wrote in 1999, we laid into business — and marketing in particular — for failing to grok the fact that in networked markets, which the Internet gave us, individuals should lead, rather than just follow. So, since business failed to get Cluetrain’s message, I started ProjectVRM in mid-2006 at Harvard’s Berkman Center. The idea was to foster development of tools that make customers both independent of vendors, and better able to engage with vendors. That is, for demand to drive supply, personally. (VRM stands for Vendor Relationship Management.)
Imagine being able to:
- name your own terms of service
- define for yourself what loyalty is, what stores you are loyal to, and how
- be able to gather and examine your own data
- advertise (or “intentcast”) your own needs in an anonymous and secure way
- manage your own relationships with all the vendors and other organizations you deal with
- … and to do all that either on your own or with the help of fourth parties that work for you rather than for sellers (as most third parties do)
Signal
5 secrets to building your LinkedIn presence
Use LinkedIn Signal for prospecting.
Signal is a feature on LinkedIn that is rarely talked about, but it is powerful. You can access it by selecting “Updates” in the master search menu or by selecting “Signal” in the drop down menu on the “News” tab.
Basically, Signal is an aggregated feed of all the status updates, groups posts, and any other content posted on LinkedIn.
Why is this powerful? Because you can essentially see every status update from every person on LinkedIn. Not just your connections, or those within a couple degrees of you, but every person on LinkedIn.
You can then use a targeted keyword search to sort through the statuses to find people talking about topics with which you want to engage. You can even sort the results by company, location, and many other parameters.
I just learned about Signal & I’m going to explore it.
Engage in the Conversation
Why GM And Others Fail With Facebook Ads
The dirty secret social-media gurus won’t reveal is that Facebook likes are becoming a devalued currency. Facebook now receives 1.17 trillion likes and comments from consumers annually, which works out to 3.5 per Facebook user per day. Forty-two million Facebook pages now have 10 or more likes. In a world where liking is as common as blinking, a like no longer signals that a consumer loves your brand.
The third, most glaring challenge regarding Facebook is that most brands stink at maintaining coherent conversations with Facebook users after they are liked. I recently tested a dozen big brands, including Apple (AAPL), Bank of America (BAC), Starbucks (SBUX), and others, “liking” them on Facebook to see how they would respond. I then checked into Facebook 31 times over the next week, each time scrolling back through several hours of friends’ posts, to see which brands would reach out to me. On average, the brands I had liked engaged with me 0.6 times over seven days—an awful performance, given the basic marketing precept that three or four interactions are required per week to trigger consumer response. I liked you, Zappos (AMZN)—and you didn’t return my call.
Finally, personalizing brand interactions on Facebook is difficult. When brands respond to Facebook users who like them, what consumers typically get is a one-size-fits-all promotion for everyone. University of Phoenix (APOL) showed up in my Facebook feed after I liked them; the school offered teaching certification, while my Facebook profile says I work in advertising. Um, no thanks. Pepsi (PEP) popped up with an extended version of its latest TV ad. Thanks, Pepsi, but if I want your TV spot, I’ll turn on the tube. Liking these brands and receiving this level of “engagement” felt like asking a girl for a kiss and being handed a business card.
What is Social Media? Why Do We Care?
Social Media. Hate it or love it, everyone talks about it. And has an opinion about it.
While everyone is exposed to it daily, how many people really know what it is?
You, being a self-selecting audience, would likely be able to provide an informed response. Others, however, might simply blurt, “Facebook!” as if that alone explained all.
For my first blog post, I wanted to consider the basics of what we’re discussing. Together, the words “social” and “media” form fabricated jargon which appeared sometime after the advent of Web 2.0, as explained on Wikipedia:
…web applications that facilitate participatory information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design and collaboration on the World Wide Web. A Web 2.0 site allows users to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators (prosumers) of user-generated content in a virtual community, in contrast to websites where users (consumers) are limited to the passive viewing of content that was created for them. Examples of Web 2.0 include social networking sites, blogs, wikis, video sharing sites, hosted services, web applications, mashups and folksonomies.
Social media became inextricably tied to the internet sometime after 2004. Nonetheless, I argue that social media has existed as long as mass media has reacted to reader submissions and/or called readers to action. Media being a tool for information delivery; social defined as any form of interaction between two entities, corporations or individuals. Reprinted letters to the Editor? Social media. Paper flyers for organizing protests? Social media.
Communication + Collaboration = Social Media
Continue reading article at Social Media Week.
Originally posted 17 January 2012
The French Job
Help me win a 2 week blogging assignment to travel to the Côte d’Azur with Maurice Lacroix for in June, and write about diver, Sébastien Murat as he attempts to break the free diving world record, diving 703 feet beneath sea level.
Please VOTE & REPOST >>> http://ht.ly/aAPTq <<< on Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn, etc. (Just click on all the share buttons below!)
Merci Beaucoup!!
Brush Your Teeth!
Apparently there are 600 million more people that own a mobile phone compared to those who own a toothbrush.
Some research reveals that there are 4.8 billion mobile users but only 4.2 billion people with a toothbrush.
Does that mean that every mobile should be sold with a free toothbrush or should you need to produce your toothbrush before you are given possession of your new mobile phone to ensure that future personal close encounters are engaging and pleasant?
Another interpretation of those statistic is that toothbrushes are too expensive.
48 Significant Social Media Facts, Figures and Statistics Plus 7 Infographics
While I wouldn’t be surprised that some people don’t own a toothbrush (YUCK!), I hope that those who can afford a mobile phone would also invest in the simplest of dental hygiene. Given that benefit of the doubt, I want to believe that difference in numbers is attributed to people who have 1 toothbrush & multiple phones. Please, yes??
If not, I may have to disregard the otherwise interesting statistics in the same report for faulty data collecting.
Trust Needs to be a Two Way Street
Jeff Bullas writes a great article with 7 Reasons Why Companies Should Blog.
- It helps your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as Google loves new content!
- You can engage and understand your customers better.
- You are seen as an expert in your field, a ” Thought Leader”
- Great new content gives people a reason to keep coming back to your site.
- Blogs are a much more trusted source than companies press releases and official company PR.
- It moves customers to a conversion point where enough trust is created for people to take the next step and buy.
- By writing you are learning.
Fantastic list. However, I’d modify reason 2 to read, “You can engage and understand your customers better. & vice versa.” As a customer I want to engage and understand your company better by being able to ask questions & offer feedback. Show me that you want my input, not just ear. User experience is so important. This type of two way street is the is the strongest way to bullet point 6: Moving customers “to a conversion point where enough trust is created for people to take the next step and buy”.
Once your company has decided to blog, what functions and features should a blog include?
After stellar content, definitely give users a way to share that content via share buttons from the following:
- Digg (Over 20 million people visit this site every month)
- Reddit (Alexa rank of 664 and a Google page rank of 8.. this means one of the top sites in the world with a large number of inbound links and over 6 million unique visitors a month)
- Delicious (nearly 2 Million unique visitors per month)
- Stumbleupon (over 5 million unique visitors a month)
- Facebook ( over 250 Million subscribers)
- Twitter (No 2 Social Media site and is monitored by search engines and becoming more important for SEO)
Lisa Green
GothamGreen212 