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Leeds Social Media Panel July, 2009

I came across an online discussion about the threats and challenges to Alumni Relations in the new media world sparked by a post by social media pioneer Jeremiah Owyang and with corresponding excellent points by Alumni Relations professional and social media pioneer in higher education, Andy Shandlin.  The upshot: absent some strategic response by Alumni Relations programs, social media platforms could soon render these institutions obsolete. The concern is that alumni are being lured away by Social Media platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn where they can connect without having to rely on us.  When I launched the Leeds alumni relations effort seven years ago, necessity was the mother of invention. I had no money, no staff, and limited time; these factors amongst others led me to rely on email as a main form communication. Then as now, I also supplemented my communications with limited print pieces promoting large events such as Homecoming. However, recently I have come to the conclusion that:

• Print communications in alumni relations communications are circling the drain;
• Social media and strategic online communications platforms will rule the day.

Several years ago (in part because of Andy Shandlin), I recognized the landscape was changing for communicating with and engaging alumni, especially since the launch of Facebook. More recently, when we combined our alumni relations and communications offices, once again, limited time and financial resources convinced me to eliminate high-maintenance, low-impact print projects for the school as a whole. Concurrently, I was able to create a position dedicated to creating a robust online presence. Since that time, we have established a social media presence in Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and blogs (side note: get your institution's SM real estate before someone else does. We were fortunate that an alumnus had already established LinkedIn for Leeds, but was more than happy to hand over management to us when we reached out to them). Subsequently, we are seeing our numbers grow in each of these platforms and more importantly, in increase in the quality of engagement in these platforms.

Media Channel 
Since we combined our programs, we are now operating more like a media channel in that we create all of our content and distribute it across our various platforms. For example, we put a lot of time and effort into our alumni magazine (yes, I said print was dying, but we are currently transitioning our magazine from its historic online PDF to include more dynamic content). Our YouTube postings are a staple now as we have posted over 100 videos of faculty research, faculty and student awards, and students and alumni since we established the account several years ago. Our videos also aid our public relations efforts as we embed the them into the press releases we send to our media contacts. We are also pleased that our faculty now request videos related to their research and ask that they be posted prominently on our website homepage.  

Social Media Engagement
Rather than threatening our existence, we see SM as collapsing geography.True, we don't have to rely on annual membership dues for our funding, though a significant part of our mission is alumni engagement and cultivation with the hope that they will see fit to support the school financially. It's notable that recently the University of Colorado Alumni Association eliminated its dues-based membership and launched its Forever Buffs program. They charge incoming freshman a one time fee and offer an online community to engage students and alumni. For us, we use our social media platforms to extend our brand and reach to our current students and alumni. As I say to my colleagues, we have to meet them where they are and then create interesting, educational and relevant content to enforce our value proposition. How do we measure our reach in these areas? We do an annual brand and alumni communications survey and we also track our metrics in all SM platforms, website analytics and press release data as well. See my colleague's Metric Messiah post for more detail. Across the board, all of our metrics are increasing dramatically. But are we engaging? Recently, an alumna asked to blog for us; which we consider a new wave of engagement. Subsequently, we've had many more alumni asking to participate as well. I consider these developments as signs of much more online alumni engagement to come.

By Sarah G. Martens

I recently received an email from a successful young alumna who is now an MBA student (at the Thunderbird School of Management) and an entrepreneur who developed her eco-friendly business concept while working in the Peace Corps in Peru. She wrote to me:

"Would it be possible to write some sort of blog on the [Leeds School] website about my experience as an entrepreneur and how Leeds helped me to get where I am today? Blogging is my initial thought, but I'd be really excited to take advantage of any ideas you may have."

What a great idea! The only thing is - we didn't have an alumni blog. Yet. One of the wonderful things about working for this small-but-mighty shop that is the Office of Alumni Relations and Communications is that everyone embraces a good idea and these ideas can be implemented quickly and nimbly.

After an informal conversation with the Director and Assistant Director, the alumni blog concept was approved and ready for take-off. The Assistant Director, aka the Blog Guru, went to work and created the new alumni blog, currently titled Alumni Dispatches. The woman who originally emailed me with the idea, Kate Robertson, was our inaugural post and as of this moment we currently have a total of 3 posts submitted, with several more in the queue.

We are excited to see where this goes, as I expect it will be well-received. We are promoting it through our alumni e-newsletter (to 19,000+ people) tomorrow so I'm anxious to see what kind of response we'll get. It's a simple and easy way to engage alumni as well as learn where they are and what they have been up to. What could be better?!? We plan to promote the different posts through social media and I'm confident that some will generate great story ideas for the Portfolio alumni magazine.

So, thank you to Kate for her email and thanks to the team for recognizing and supporting a great suggestion and running with it. If you are an alumnus interested in blogging, please contact Dean.Pajevic@colorado. We'd love to hear from you!

You can check out the variety of Leeds School of Business blogs at www.cuboulderblogs.com

We have eight active blogs, and more on the way. Beyond just your regular blog-roll, which is coming soon, how do we help our readers find not only content on this blog but across all our blogs and social media outlets? Well, I was meeting with Leeds MBA student Josh Whitney and he turned me onto Lijit, a robust search aggregation and content find-ability service. Not only is this web app created right here in Boulder, but Lijit has hired Leeds student interns (Josh is one, Julie Penner another) so we were even more happy to partner with a company working with our community.

Why Use Lijit?

• The big reason is that Lijit search makes it easy for our readers to find all sorts of other Leeds content. We have great stories, but they exist in lots of different places. Lijit lets users search in one easy place, and find all Leeds postings in blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and our main Leeds site. It's like a "walled garden" of just your content. Go ahead and try it. Search box up to your right. (Go ahead, I'll wait...) Cool, huh? :)
  
• From an administrator perspective, it's drop-dead easy to configure, install, and customize. Their "Wijit" creator (makes the code for your Lijit search box) is a simple step-by-step process that adds tons of functionality to your Lijit search with a few mouse clicks. Also very easy to add "Wijits" to new blogs.
• Awesome support (Thanks Grace)! The Lijit crew have been super helpful answering our questions and helping us integrate the service. From our conversations, you can immediately tell that customer service is very important. This is a great thing!
  
• Engaging stats: See a dashboard of where your visitors are from, and top searches. Of course some of this is stuff you can get from Google analytics, but with Lijit it is right at your fingertips. No digging down through a bunch of links, just your searches in your blogs. Efficient and actionable: I use the search terms to help guide future blog content.
• We are pretty new to Lijit, so I'm sure other reasons will become apparent as we grow.
  

So, in a world where creating and managing multiple content streams is now the norm for PR pros and communications departments, having a way to effectively share all that content with your readers not only strengthens your brand, it makes it much more useful and engaging as well.

 

Greetings from the ARC lounge, nothing makes blogging cooler than saying you are doing it from a lounge setting.  So we are going to start this session of the lounge with a little Q and A...

Tyler, it is obvious you do quite an array of very valuable projects; what is your favorite?
The first week of every month I hitch up my pants, crack my knuckles, throw on some of R. Kelly's greatest hits ("Step in the Name of Love" is a classic), and begin compiling our department metrics for the month.  What has started as a simple two page spreadsheet taking about fifteen minutes has amassed eight pages and three hours of work; with numbers used across a spectrum of presentations and strategies within the school. 

Why should I capture metrics?
This blog is all about how to communicate with our audiences, specifically emphasizing how social media campaigns can extend awareness and reach to audiences.  But proving a ROI is key to these campaigns so pages and pages of metrics become necessary.
So without discerning all my metric secrets and calculations, I feel it proper to share some of the revelations I have come to while compiling the numbers month after month.   And most importantly remember that these are purely quantitative numbers and do not speak for the qualitative interactions with your audience (though several social media platforms try to).

Man you sold me, so what Metrics should we capture?
Ideally having some set of numbers for everywhere on the web you are present is the goal; and most platforms have some sort of way to capture numbers so why not do it?

The big boy.
Our beautifully and intricately designed website leeds.colorado.edu is just bursting with content and information and we love to see what people are looking at using Google analytics.

We capture unique views for:

• the top 10 pages visited
• the top 10 alumni pages visited
• clicks on homepage
• Avg. Time on pages
• Geographic areas for certain pages
• Navigation summaries for homepage spotlights (as well as what percent of views are coming from the homepage versus alternate routes)

E-mail marketing
We love Constant Contact and we always capture open rate, top 5 links, and unique click throughs per our monthly newsletter sent out.

Blogs 
We are incredibly proud of our blogs at cuboulderblogs.com, and using google analytics we capture which blog is getting the most traction as well as individual posts that are popular.  (Like this post will undoubtedly be). 

Press
We use a wonderful combo of Meltwater News and Vocus to analyze press hits per month versus target peer/aspirational schools.  As well as making some beautiful visual charts of our progress that are great for presentations.
Social Media

Twitter
Followers and number of tweets, as well as tweets per day via tweetstats.com
and if your exceedingly bored reading this, check out our twitter page.

Facebook
Eventually everyone will realize that facebook fanpages are so much more useful than groups because fanpages allow you to get "facebook insights", which means they give us/you some very valuable numbers unavailable to facebook groups. 

We capture fans, views, photos, posts, comments per month.

Becoming a fan of Leeds is the cool thing to do by the way.

LinkedIN
Members, discussions, job posts - don't you want to get in on this action?

YouTube
Videos, unique views, comments, which video is getting the most traction.

Zmags
Putting our publications in a sweet online format gives the ability to see some qualitative aspects of our publications; as well as the general quantitative numbers you would get with google analytics.

We capture views per publication, zoom and click throughs (inferring people actually reading), and avg. time on each publication.


This is a very raw display of what we capture, (we do capture a little more than presented above), but this is the basic set.  Then I use these numbers to compare these to previous months and years and find patterns, what is working, what isn't, and find the right numbers to report.  And then push out what is popular in every communication channel possible.  In the end, these numbers need to compliment your communications strategy; and finding what proves your strategy is working is the goal...so good luck, and feel free to click these links and add to our numbers.

Isn't all this metric madness hard Tyler?
Yes, I probably deserve a huge raise.

Posted by Tyler McAnelly

So the Leeds Communications team has done a pretty good job of educating and engaging our internal faculty and staff about Social Media and its possible relevance to their personal and professional lives. At least I think we have.We still get puzzled looks and raised eyebrows from some of our constituencies who don't see the ROI. But then many of them are not "in the trenches" as those of us trying to build communications, media and PR strategies in a rapidly changing communications landscape with, in our case, very limited resources.

Interestingly, the more we pursue a SM strategy, the more feedback and connections we are getting from others who are active in SM or just interested our efforts. It's been great too! One of my campus communications colleagues shared a blog post of another higher ed professional who is leveraging these new tools to benefit her faculty. Rather than relying on the traditional mainstream media model of pitching faculty stars for possible coverage, she is using SM to do it herself. It was gratifying to see her rational as we are pursuing similar strategies for our faculty and programs as well. To pave the way, we held several SM presentations including "What is SM?" "SM Basics" and "Social Media and Pedagogy" ( I had to throw the "pedagogy" word in--it's big in academia) Actually, we didn't host that one, a school colleague did, but it was definitely in conjunction with our efforts. We've gotten positive feedback and folks seem grateful to have a better understanding of blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. And just in recent months we have been getting great response to our online efforts in these areas. Not bad for "free"?

The team was chatting about the fact that Leeds, founded in 1906, is one of the oldest business schools in the country. That's over 100 years old, which in this digital age might as well be a million. I'm sure back then the only tweets heard were birds up in the trees, and poking your neighbor, unlike today's activity on Facebook, might get you a swift kick in the shin. But "back then" people still communicated, and while slower and more localized, it had many of the same functions/purposes as our technology today. I can imagine that:

• They made announcements at large public meetings or on street corners (like blogging and twitter in that you send it out to whomever to read/hear, and other people "re-tweeted" in the same way)
• They had conversations one on one (email)
• They stood on the street with sandwich board signs around their necks (blast email)
• And, they always looked for new ways to do all these things which leads us to today and all the things we do.

My point? With all the wonderful innovation, the twittery, bloggery, shiny technology, don't lose sight of the basic human and institutional needs: Tell compelling stories, engage your constituents and make them nod in agreement, comment on a blog post, write an email, or call the school to get more involved.

What do you think, was communication really so different today than it was 100 years ago?

Great blog post from Martin Weller, a professor of Educational Technology at the Open University in the UK on the usefulness of blogging in higher ed:

A few key points:

• The economics of reputation - increasingly one's reputation online is seen as a valuable commodity. This is partly because a good reputation is difficult to establish and also because in an environment where content is free and widely available then quality becomes a differentiating factor.
  
  
• Engagement with your subject area - in many subject areas the blogosphere is where much of the informed and detailed debate is occurring. If this is the case in your subject area then not to be part of it limits your expertise in the same manner as not publishing journal articles (perhaps even more so). If your subject area is not one widely engaged with blogging then this represents a good opportunity to establish yourself as one of the lead experts.
  
  
• Increased reflection - keeping a regular blog seems to encourage a degree of reflection and critical analysis as you comment on conferences, workshops, research, etc.

Read the full post.

We have asked and yea have replied. Look at all our blogs! It's exciting not just because we have seven blogs (small pat on collective back), but because each of these groups has a unique voice, a unique story to share. And they will each grow to create engaging and useful conversations with their readers.  

So to our teams, thank you! We are here to blog our ways into the hearts and minds of the larger Leeds community. I hope our fresh start, like a young sapling, will grow into a mighty tree of sharing and community.

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The numbers in this video tell the story: We ARE in a social media revolution. The question then is how do we "revolve" and "evolve" into it? And not just get crushed on the rolling wheels? Or even worse, left behind?

"Take right action!" I say. And so do many others such as market guru Seth Godin on Social Networking and How to Do it Right, and Why Blog.

Check out the video(s) and get inspired.

Starting the school blogging would be a process, but what I didn't realize was that blog building and content population were just the beginning. The bloggers within the school have great stories to tell. And they have begun to tell them in the same way we all know, a story that goes out to the world. This is great! But who does it go to, and why will they be interested? When I ask them this last question, they look at me for an answer.

At first I thought, "well, you are the content creator, you know your own story". But then I realized what they didn't know was the context, the new blog-cific process to position it in the world. I would have to help them with that. I would have to be their coach (see above).

Mitchell Ashley made this point very clearly to me recently when I went through a similar discussion with him, but with me in the noobie seat. "Bizzzz" went my fizzling CFL-light bulb brain. Ohhh. I have to get one-on-one, mano-a-mano with our bloggers and share tips, tricks, best practices, and maybe even some inspiration. I need to up my blogging experience from theoretical dabbler, to "full contact" participant. I need to blog, day-in, day-out to grow from the One Who Knows, to the One That Shows. So, personal blog, here I come.

Do you have a personal blog? If so, please share!