August 2009 Archives

Like kids playing sandlot baseball, the Leeds school has exploded onto the social media landscape over the last year. Whether we created blog posts, tweets, videos, photo albums, status updates, etc., we have heard from our alumni and business community and the response has been energetic! .

Planning-wise, we had targeted the groups we wanted to reach, and had an idea of how to leverage these in concert with each other and traditional media. But now that we made it to what we figured was "first base," we realized that home plate was still far away and to reach it, i.e. to succeed in this new game, we needed some serious coaching.

Enter social media superstar coaching team of Kathryn Marshall and Patrick Ward of 104 West Partners and their newly formed consulting group made up of Twitter shut-out pitcher Elaine Schoch, and big-hitter blogger extraordinaire, Mitchell Ashley. (Kathryn is also a Leeds alum and present Board member.)

Our first meeting with them was a freewheeling brain-dump and near-therapy session around all our present SM initiatives. From the over four hours of discussions, our consultants brought a new level of rigor and professional experience to our SM communications process that is already helping us refine our messages and create more value around our internal teams of content creators. Since they are fine-tuning their consulting process with us, our barrage of questions (like how do we track the various ROIs!) helped them come up with creative ways of answering our questions while keeping us on track.  :)

I look forward to the next meeting with their team and hopefully you'll continue to see our social media offerings grow.  

I recently attended a Media Day hosted by the central communications office where I work. This annual event was launched 3 years ago to reach out to local and regional media organizations to help solidify our working relationships. At the time, they didn't foresee the tsunami that has overtaken the 20th century news media sadly demonstrated during this event. At the event, it was clear our staff greatly outnumbered the media. Also, it was announced that the lone TV camera there represented the three Denver-based TV stations--a new pooled resources effort. When I shared my observations with one of my colleagues, he remarked he never liked the way these journalist covered us anyway. Granted, our institution has had a rough go of it with the media over the last several years but that being said, I see the situation a bit differently. Certainly we chafed when the news coverage wasn't the most positive, but you can be sure we loved it when we were portrayed positively. 

So what are the implications of the news media attrition for those of us in higher ed communications? 

The model that I am implementing casts my team members as  content creators and content aggregators and has us leveraging our many communication platforms (both traditional and social media) to amplify our messages.  Implementing this model also raises more questions.:

• What is the right mix between traditional and social media (some don't even think we should be in social media)?
• Will this approach successfully and credibly deliver our messages too our target audiences?
• Is it sustainable from a resource standpoint especially when trying to determine the appropriate mix between different mediums, i.e. electronic versus print?
• Can you measure ROI?

Some have said that I am taking big risks especially when it comes to envisioning and implementing new models. I think the greater risk is choosing not to adapt to a changing communications landscape.

Earlier this month, we hosted an event for Leeds alumni in the Chicago area. In my two years here at Leeds, we hadn't hosted an event in Chicago so our visit was overdue and the alumni were excited we were coming. 

As anyone who plans events knows, event planning involves a lot of nitty, gritty details and planning for both the foreseen and the unforeseen. So far on event day, everything was great. The weather was perfect; our boxes of supplies had arrived from Colorado unharmed; the Union League Club of Chicago was beautiful and the staff was attentive; we had a large number of expected attendees; we were all set up and ready to roll on time with no major glitches. Sounds like the making for a smooth event, right? 

Well, shortly before the first guests were expected to arrive, an 8-person brass band began their once-a-month concert for the listening enjoyment of the private club's members and guests. This robust group of musicians was playing in the lobby of the first floor and our event registration table was just one (open-staircase) floor above them.  Lovely.

 

It's not that I have anything against French horn players and big band music, however, they were SO LOUD that as our guests arrived, we literally needed to yell in order to greet them and help them find their nametags. The good news is, my director and I are roll-with-the-punches kind of people and we just made the best of it. We teased our guests that the band was the official welcoming party and that we were happy they had made it. The music wasn't nearly as loud within the event room and it stopped long before our faculty member Steve Lawrence's presentation on RETooling for a Renewable Energy Future. Phew!

But that's just the thing about event planning. Past experience is oh-so-important and diligent planning can never be overlooked, but you've always got to be able to adapt and adjust at a moments notice. It had never occurred to me to ask the onsite contact ahead of time, "Will there be a brass band playing in your Club at any point throughout our event?" 

I guess we need to add that one to check-list for next time. 
 

We moved our offices and in the course of the transition, I was invited to take possession of a fax machine in my new office. My predecessor had used the machine to fax out flurries of press releases to what I now call the 20th century news media. My colleague relayed to me that for the entire previous year he had resided in said office, he had never used the machine. So, there it was, an relic of an era soon to pass into tech history. We joked about recreating the scene from Office Space where Samir uses a baseball bat to take out his wrath on the defunct fax for its endless "paper jam" error messages.

But in some ways, that seemed cruel because, to my knowledge, this fax in question had never let anyone down. Sad too, that I ascribe anthropomorphic attributes to Mr. Fax. But maybe its also that we as a culture now grapple with a pace of change that does not allow much time for sentimentality for "the way things used to be." Consider the aforementioned 20th century news media as another example...we barely noticed when an almost 150 year old newspaper went belly up. Oh sure, a few of us shed some tears, but then soon moved onto our IPhone, Blackberries and social media channels. 

But back to the fax. In the end, I didn't need it services anymore...there's just no justification to continue the relationship. So we cut the phone service, pulled the land phone line (another relic) and laid Mr. Fax to rest in that big technology surplus room in the sky.       

In May 2009, the Leeds School of Business joined the millions of visitors on Twitter. We created our own account on May 1 (follow us @LeedsCUBoulder ~ do it, you know you want to). We knew we wanted to be there; our first few followers, some Leeds School alumni, were happy to see us on Twitter and tweeted as much. Hey! We're doing *something right*...

But on May 4, I was stumped. Already? Albeit briefly, I was stumped nonetheless. One of our incoming MBA students tweeted us @LeedsCUBoulder that he admired our profile picture, a graphic logo representation of the Koelbel's Building iconic dome. (The Leeds School of Business is housed within the Koelbel Building on the CU-Boulder campus). He wanted to know if we had a desktop image based on the logo. I didn't know so I asked Sarah B. She in turn asked our wonderful freelance graphic designer Kristin to create a slew of desktop images. I in turn kept the student in the loop. Within a month's time, the desktop images were up on the Leeds School web site and the page became one of the top five most popular for the Leeds School alumni pages (with a total of 139 unique visits in the two months since they debuted).

Aren't they gorgeous?

We spread the word via Twitter, Facebook, our monthly internal school e-newsletter and our monthly alumni e-newsletter, and we will do so once the fall semester starts in a few weeks. I told a friend who works at a college in the Colorado high country about the experience, and she told her boss and her boss loved the idea so much that they are creating their own free desktop images.  The student, Aviraj, parlayed this communication into a conversation about his desire to blog for the MBA program; he starts this week. When I asked his thoughts on the whole situation regarding his original desktops request, he said he felt special that his new school, inspired by his question, would run with the idea and create products which he and other Leeds School supporters could use to "get in the zone and show school pride."

 

I remain amazed that it took mere days to see the potential of Twitter in the higher ed realm as a listening tool and not just an avenue to push information out. And look what the opportunity reaped for the players involved (a need met by alumni relations department, freelance work, a gig blogging, inspiring others in higher ed as a leader in social media). Since then, I've responded to a few more questions via tweet, which I was able to either address directly or seek out someone else who could in a timely fashion.

Our alumni and students want us in these online spaces, they want us to share information with them, to listen to them and to acknowledge them. It's all a conversation, whether we're in person or online. And one can carry us into the other. And that's a good thing.