Student Generated Content: Part One

April 27, 2011 5 Comments

This is the first post in a series on integrating student-generated content into communications, particularly in social platforms.

What is Student Generated Content?

Student Generated Content is photos, videos, podcasts, tweets, blog posts and more supplied by current students that are intended to enhance and augment your communications. You can implement student content in a variety of ways. The key is to integrate student-generated content into your overall communications strategy – not tack it on to a pre-existing approach.

In the coming weeks in this space, you’ll see a series of blog posts on working with students. I’ll cover topics including identifying, training, compensating and managing student content creators, examples of projects you should and should not assign to students, and provide some examples of institutions and organizations with great student content.

To kick things off, here’s a brief look at some of the pros and cons of working with students to create content for your social platforms.

Pros:

  • Students are a low cost workforce. You can employ a team of student content creators for less money than professionals.
  • Students can speak first hand about life on campus – they know your culture and community better than anyone.
  • Alumni, prospectives and parents love to hear from students; give your audiences a window into the student experience.

Cons:

  • Students are students first! They have midterms, labs, projects, papers and more at any given time. Your content deadline may not be the highest thing on their priority list.
  • Students are on an academic calendar. Summer, spring break and winter break mean time off for them and a content drought for you.
  • They require a significant amount of up-front direction and management. Ultimately, though, this leads to a working relationship built on trust and a strong fundamental understanding of your institutional voice, strategy and goals.

Ready to take the plunge? Stay tuned for more in the coming weeks.

Filed under General Posts, Student Generated Content Tagged with , , , ,

Social Media Staffing

March 31, 2011 3 Comments

Where do social media staff belong on the org chart?

Social media is still relatively new, and many organizations are trying to manage the inherent tasks and responsibilities. Job titles like “Community Manager” and “Social Media Strategist” are popping up all over the place, but there doesn’t seem to be consensus on where these roles fit in preexisting org charts and structures.

Some schools consider social media and communications to be a “tech” job – it involves computers, and therefore goes under Information Technology. However, with the rise of social technologies, any average non-IT person with an Internet connection can create a blog in seconds (grab your mobile device right now and try it for yourself). Social tech has also given the masses an opportunity to engage with brands, celebrities, alma mater and more by simply posting a comment or writing a tweet.

What does that mean for the “social media experts” on your staff? They may not be programmers or hardware experts. But they do know a lot about building relationships and engaging in conversations – those conversations just happen to take place online. They have strong, high-level understanding of your organization’s mission, values and goals. They are trusted and valued members of your team.

So, where do social media staff belong on the org chart? Short answer: everywhere.

In a large, university setting, content managers should be peppered throughout your organization, communicating and collaborating amongst one another across departments and silos. Working laterally across campus means that the community managers in admissions, public relations, athletics, alumni relations and more work together to promote cohesive branding and messaging. Community managers wear many hats; give them the tools and resources they need to fulfill all of their roles. By working together, community managers across campus can form an effective, collaborative team ready to engage audiences on a variety of topics.

Managers and executives higher up in your organization need fewer details. Knowing how social tools fit in with their overall mission and goals (e.g. increasing event attendance, receiving more applications for admissions, etc) is vital. They don’t need to know how many times you tweet in a week, but they do need to know the impact and outcomes of those tweets.

Embed social media staff throughout your organization, and encourage them to collaborate across departments. Community managers are in place to build relationships and engage your constituents. Collaboration and communication are significant aspects of their skill sets. Use them!

This post is also featured on the CASE Social Media blog.

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Sharing Your Success Part Five: Bringing it All Together

January 20, 2011 2 Comments

This is the fifth in a series of posts exploring some of the ways you can gather data about your social media presences, make sense of it all, and report your findings. Read all five parts; the most recent post is at the top of the page.

You’ve done the gathering, analyzing, crunching, and assessing – now you need to create your report and summary. You’ll want it to be clear, concise, and easy to digest. Make sure you know who it is intended for, and what level they are within your organization. Managers, directors, trustees, volunteer leaders? What types of information do those different groups need, and what questions will they have?

The key is to break down your report into categories. You can plug and unplug each category for the audience you are addressing. I’ve created a template to guide your efforts. Download it here (45K PDF). Copy and paste the general outline of the template into a new document and fill it in with your own organization’s information.

Here are a few tips for working with the template:

  • Start with an executive summary. This will give people like trustees and VPs a high level overview of your progress, goals, and the status of your efforts.
  • Assess your audiences and stakeholders. This is critical for making strategic decisions about engaging those groups. The more you know about your audience(s), the better. Show off what you know.
  • Describe your efforts in all of your social media tools separately (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and so on). Show qualitative and quantitative data. Draw conclusions and make assessments.
  • Highlight new tools and trends. Describe technologies that are new to the social media space that might solve a problem or fill a need within your organization. Explain why these tools are on your radar screen, why they may be effective, and if/when you plan on using them in an official capacity.
  • Restate your communications strategy. It is important to remind your reader that everything you do is governed by big picture, long term thinking.
  • Briefly summarize your report and write a conclusion.

These tips will help you provide the information your reader needs without bogging them down in unnecessary detail. Over time, your reports will help you assess long term growth and change in your social media efforts.

Filed under ROI Series Tagged with , ,

Sharing Your Success Part Four: Blog ROI

January 5, 2011 Leave a comment

This is the fourth in a series of posts exploring some of the ways you can gather data about your social media presences, make sense of it all, and report your findings. Read parts one through three here; the most recent post is at the top of the page.

So you have a blog…does anyone care? Is anyone reading it? Let’s find out.

Many blogging platforms have built-in metrics dashboards. These will give you basic stats, like how many hits the blog received (lifetime, in the past month, or even a particular day) and the most viewed posts. All of this is valuable quantitative information that will give you a few pieces of the metrics puzzle.

Having numbers is great, but counting the number of times that someone landed on your site doesn’t tell you much about your audience. How did they get there? Did they like what they were reading? How did they interact with the content?

Gathering data from multiple sources will give you a clearer picture of the impact of your blog.

Don’t underestimate the comments. Just like Twitter and Facebook, the things people say about your content can be incredibly valuable. Copy, paste, and save comments and feedback. Take a critical look at the comments and use them to guide your future efforts. What did people like? Not like? What generated the most interaction?

How long did they stay? By using a tool like Google Analytics, you can find out the amount of time people spent on your site. This is a particularly useful stat for blogs. If on average, users spent more than 20-30 seconds on a blog page, they were probably reading. Remember the lurkers: readers who don’t leave comments or otherwise interact. This is a good way to get information about those enigmatic readers.

How did they get there? You can learn a lot about your traffic by taking a look at your other social presences. I call this “data layering.” For example, look at the shortened urls you used to promote blog posts via Twitter. How many people followed those links? How many people RTed those links? And how many people mentioned that post in a tweet?

Search Terms: What search terms brought people to your blog? What did they search for once they reached your site? Frequent search terms can provide valuable insight into your audience’s needs and interests. Make note of them.

Next time…bringing it all together: tips on generating reports.

Filed under General Posts, ROI Series Tagged with , , ,

Sharing Your Success Part Three: Twitter ROI

December 17, 2010 Leave a comment

This is the third in a series of posts exploring some of the ways you can gather data about your social media presences, make sense of it all, and report your findings. Read all three parts here; the most recent post is at the top of the page.

Measuring your Twitter presence turns out to be a little more complicated than Facebook. Instead of just one, there are several tools you can to use to get a good picture of your progress to date. Below, I list some of the tools I use (and each name is a link to that service), and summarize the service(s) they provide.

The Tools

Hootsuite: Dashboard for managing your Twitter presence. It can also be used to manage other social media tools (LinkedIn, Facebook) but I find that it is most effective for Twitter. Hootsuite includes a built-in URL shortener. Provides user stats such as language and home country. Lists your most popular tweets, and greatest advocates (users who retweet your content). Hootsuite, a previously free service, recently converted to a paid model. I find their new service and pricing menu a little overly complicated, but it still provides the useful services I’ve come to value.

Twitter Counter: Graphs the number of new followers of your Twitter account over time (see example below). Creating a graph for a time period of up to three months is free; six months or more requires you to send a tweet from your account lauding their services.

HashTweeps: Lists the number of times a particular hashtag was tweeted, the user(s) who tweeted it, and how many times that person tweeted it. Use this for measuring your institution’s hashtags.

WhoUnfollowedMe: Notifies you when users stop following you, which may help you better assess how your tweets are coming across to your followers.

Don’t forget to capture tweets that you want to highlight in your report – good conversation threads, positive feedback, etc. Copy and paste the text and the user who said it into a spreadsheet or database for future use. This is a similar tactic to the one I described in my earlier post about Facebook.

Analysis

Much of what I mentioned last week about analyzing your findings in Facebook applies to Twitter as well. Here’s what I said with a few updates for this week (changes in italics):

Take a good hard look at what the numbers and the comments are telling you. Ask questions such as:

  • Which tweets were more popular? Which ones weren’t as popular? Why do you think that is?
  • Which days of the week and time of day had more response than others?
  • Who retweets you most frequently?
  • What kinds of tweets cause people to unfollow you?

Asking good questions about what you’ve found will help you draw smart conclusions on your findings. Use those findings to set new goals. What new things will you try? What will you continue to do the same? What will you abandon entirely?

Next time, we’ll talk blogs – how many people read yours, and are they really reading it?

Note: Thanks to Andy Shaindlin of Alumni Futures for first telling me about HashTweeps.

Filed under General Posts, ROI Series Tagged with , , ,

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