Speakers: Fritz McDonald and CJ Cunniff

What do you want social media to do for you?

  • expand admissions inquiry pool
  • bring alumni back home
  • expand potential donor pool - annual fund.  if you can get your alumni back, they’re going to have a strong affinity and therefore likelihood to donate. 
  • broadcast your brand through viral word of mouth
  • expand reach of institutional identity
  • help achieve your mission: building meaningful relationships - giving people the ability to communicate back with you instantly raises your level of believability. social networks celebrate the free and open exchange of ideas.

Establish Specific Goals

  • what are your audiences ready for? 
  • how should your audience relations change? more engaged; broadcast messages. when you start to use these tools, you change your audience’s expectations for how they expect to be communicated with.  if you ask your audience what they want, and they tell you and then you give them something else, you’re probably going to fail.
  • what are you ready for? 

Develop a Staff Plan

  • there’s going to be a change in job titles - “community creator” “community manager” “content manager” “conversation manager”

Establish Measurable Criteria

  • you need to do this right away
  • what will is cost for social media to reach and impact the market? 
  • how long will it take community members to increase in significant numbers? 
  • how long will it take community members to influence others in the social web? 
  • how will social media impact marketing, recruiting, and advancement efforts? 

Define Target Audiences

  • define specific audiences
  • assess social media readiness
  • understand levels of participation

Reasons to Participate

  • making and maintaining friends
  • expressing shared interests
  • creating something
  • watching others
  • helping others
  • validating yourself
  • joining something

Social Network Hierarchies: Participation Levels

  • creators: create more content than anyone else, highly motivated, produce blogs, upload videos, write online articles on your and other network sites.
  • critics: react to online content from creators through comments, ratings and reviews, wikis, etc… There are more critics than creators. 
  • collectors: organize and aggregate content by saving URLs and tags on social bookmarking service, voting for news stories on site like Digg.  They organize and spread content that creators nad critics develop
  • joiners: build profiles on typical social networking sites and never get beyond it.
  • spectators: passively taken in what everyone else puts out in the form of blogs.  this will always be the largest group.
  • inactives: members who don’t do much of anything, such as Facebook members who haven’t updated their profiles in years. these are typically people 50 and over.  

Develop a Listening Strategy

  • search tools: technorati, brandpulse, alexa
  • listening communities
  • survey web visitors
  • listening schedule
  • vendor versus in-house

Create Network Architecture

  • develop a way to attract creators and critics
  • develop opportunities for user-generated content to define and engage them - user-generated content is the entire reason a social network exists
  • develop a system for driving traffic to and from what they create by rewarding them. you don’t necessarily have to pay them - make them prominent community members and take them seriously.
  • identify ways to multiply their influence and power. 

How many people do you need to impact your network? 

  • 1-3% can have the biggest influence: mavens, ambassadors, movers and shakers

Commit to a Platform - don’t just bounce around from network to network without really doing anything.

  • join a social network(s)
  • build a social network(s)
  • develop a blog
  • deploy random social media: viral video, RSS feeds, etc…

What should you do? 

  • join a network: audience age, strong brand, talking about you - amplifying. 
  • building a network - resources, audience potential for community - spreading
  • blog: big commitment, content, more editorial, will you respond to comments? 

Develop Content Identity? 

  • you can’t compete with Facebook - you have to do something different.
  • can you build content on theme, idea, philosophy, common interest, etc…?
  • what value can you offer your audiences? 

Many Tools Working Together

  • social media tools more powerful in combination
  • netowrk should multiply automatically
  • create an environment for people to spread the word - linking tools

Develop Content Delivery Strategy

  • multiple pronged - deliver content regularly in several media in several ways
  • video, photos, text, and blogging/file sharing capabilities
  • work in tandem with a video you post on YouTube or elsewhere
  • video and social network content increase ways to draw traffic

Develop Institutional Participation Strategy

  • participation elsewhere drives traffic to your site
  • go to blog connections and participate
  • 5 active social network accounts: LinkedIn, Yahoo! Groups, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube
  • visit forums and start multiple threads in multiple accounts
  • share your videos - include discussion forum.  

Measure Results and Optimization

  • measure specific of interaction isntaed of conversion numbers

Social Media Optimization

  • Google likes it when you have lots of links going in and out of your site

Evaluate by Plan 

  • what worked, what didn’t? 
  • discard, keep and improve
  • grow, evolve

Listening to Your Community

  • treat members like advisors, especially your creators
  • encourage candor - you get free research and development.  you have to be open to addressing negative comments.