Useful resources for thinking about international social and digital media engagement

This week I'm running a workshop in Rome for CASE Europe's International Schools Summit. Because there is a focus during this workshop on engaging with international audiences, I thought I'd use this opportunity to share some useful resources for global social media usage:

• On 10/10/10 TNS launched their Digital Life report. Their survey interviewed almost 50,000 people in 46 countries to gain insight into usage of digital media in different countries. Their micro-site dedicated to this report (discoverdigitallife.com) is insightful and very useful.


• Social media consultancy Fresh Networks are developing a series of blog posts on developing a European social media strategy. You can view all of their posts here (I'm expecting they will add more as this is a fairly new series).


• In July 2010 OgilvyOne published a report on the use of social media in China. Their report can be viewed online here.


• Nielsen provide lots of useful stats and reports on social media. This blog post from January 2010 looks at global growth in the use of social media.


• Published in November 2009, Global Web Index's social web involvement infographic is worth a look.


• Forrester's social technographics profile tool continues to be a useful way of segmenting different age groups, genders and (some) nationalities according to how they engage with social and digital media in different ways.

This list is of course by no means exhaustive, but it's a start...! Hope it's useful. Please feel free to suggest more in the comments.

Some examples of best practice in use of social media by universities

The title of this blog post is, I must confess, a tiny bit misleading. When I say 'best practice' I perhaps should actually just say 'examples that I like'. ROI doesn't really seem to have woven it's way into the mix as yet for social media engagement practices in the higher education sector. However, I suspect that many of the examples I'm about to share here are earning their worth for the organisations behind them. Anyway, this post is primarily being put together as part of a workshop I'm involved in this week at Neil Stewart Associates' Marketing in HE conference (London, 13 October). With no presentation facilities in the workshop room, I have no way of sharing these examples with participants so instead I'm directing them to this blog post so they can check them out at their leisure. This list is by no means exhaustive, and I have many more favorites to share, but here are just five of my favorite uses of social media for marketing and communications by higher education institutions.

• Imperial College London: Interact
  I love this section of Imperial College's site for prospective students. It nicely brings together various interactive elements of their student recruitment activities in a central space. Importantly it opens up a way for prospective students to gain an insight into life at Imperial (student blogs, for example) and a way for them to communicate with the College in their own comfort zone (Facebook).


• The Hartwick Experience
  The Hartwick Experience is a micro-site for Hartwick College in New York State, USA. For me this is how social media should be done for student recruitment and marketing. It's a space where the real voices and experiences of current students can be viewed by prospective students. The space has very little in the way of a marketing voice, but instead acts as a facilitator to introduce current to prospective students. Its simplicity also makes it highly visually appealing.


• University of Strathclyde on Twitter
  There are increasingly more and more good examples of universities using Twitter to communicate with target audiences, but the vast majority out there still use it as a 'channel' to push out press releases or other push-marketing messages. The University of Strathclyde uses it for exactly what it was intended: conversation and engagement, helping to make it useful and helpful to the audiences on Twitter with whom they want and need to communicate.
  
• MIT Admissions Blog
  MIT's admissions team, along with selected 'associates' (alumni and other guest authors) run a large admissions blog providing useful information and timely updates to prospective and incoming students. The medium allows them to be quick to update information, and by enabling comments on each blog post they can save themselves time by responding once to a question rather than several times (if that question were, alternatively, directed to them by private email or telephone call). The only downside is that it's not particularly well set up just to see a list of all blog posts...
  
• IMD Interact

One from a management school this time. The International Institute for Management Development (IMD) in Switzerland has an interactive section of its website for showcasing business knowledge and expertise of its faculty and extended community (partners, alumni, etc). Through the interact section visitors can read short 'coffee break' interviews with business leaders or join in (through the site or social media sites) in the 'Great Debate' questions, featuring topical business and management themes.

I have plenty more examples that I often share with organisations in conference presentations and workshops, but these are just a few of my current favorites.

What does a VC or President need to know about social media?

I've just this minute spotted a tweet from Danny Yoder of Eastern Mennonite University (EMU) in the US, urgently asking the Twitter community what a university President ought to know about social media. This is a question that I get asked a lot and to some extent advise on a fair bit in the strategy and training work I do on social media for universities. So, in the hope that I help Danny in time for his 2 hour deadline, and perhaps one or two others out there that are grappling with this question, here's my top five, very much off the top of my head, thoughts on this...

1) VCs and Presidents need to know that social media if here to stay and not just a passing 'fad'. It's very easy for them to get caught up in the notion that only small percentages of people might have a twitter or a social bookmarking account, and that Facebook may well die a death in two years time as something like Friends Reunited has (perhaps even MySpace). It is not, however, the sites themselves that are important in this trend, but the overall changes that this makes to the way in which we communicate and collectively work together to prompt change (see Clay Shirkey's work in this area). Social media is here to stay. Social media revolution video is always a good starting point for making this point and drumming home the sheer scale of this (even if VC/President doesn't use social media themselves).

2) Social media does not just provide another channel through which we, as universities, can 'push' out our usual corporate messages. Many marketing and PR people, and their managers/leaders, have jumped on the social media bandwagon as a means of 'free advertising'. Those who do this will only serve to upset individuals. Social media is about engagement and conversation, not about push messaging. See my blog post about the need to be useful, interesting and relevant to your audiences.

3) Social media 'buzz' should reach the top table. Comments about your brand on social media sites are typically authentic and from the heart, often spontaneous, and here to stay. Listening to this is a great way to learn about flaws and improvements that could be made to your organisation (customer service, culture, products - ie courses, etc) that you might not otherwise get through traditional means such as feedback surveys. Monitoring social media should therefore be a number one priority and recurring comments should be fed back up to senior managers. Online comments are not so easy to brush under the table.

4) Even those who don't actively engage in social media sites (think 'inactives' in the Forrester Social Technographics Profile), can still be influenced by what is posted there. Think wikipedia. If you do a search for Eastern Mennonite University (Danny - this one's for your sake, but very much true of other universities too) on google.co.uk, then the wikipedia page for your university comes up at number three on the search results. Numbers one and two are from your own website. This pattern is true of most universities. This means that anyone, anytime, anywhere can update that page and say things about your brand and anyone using the internet to search for information on you will be easily directed to that page.

5) Social media requires a strategic approach, time and resource to make it work properly. It is a common mistake to think that if we set up a facebook page then they will come. Everything you do in social media takes time and this cannot be done easily as a bolt-on to already-busy university administrator time. It requires a content strategy, ongoing commitment and the right voices to front it (better to be individuals rather than a faceless corporate 'brand' posting comments/updates). Furthermore, the last person that people really want to hear from in social media spaces is the marketing or PR representative of an organisation. If you're thinking about student recruitment, then prospective students want to talk to current or past students. If you're talking about journalists, to give another example, then they want to talk to the academic responsible for the research, or the leader of an organisation, not the press officer. The marketing and communications folk can develop the strategic thinking around how to use social media (and the e-learning team too, of course), but the whole organisation - as a body of individuals - needs to be engaged to make it really work well.

There's so much more I could add here, but wanted to keep it short and sweet in the aim of helping Danny out for his meeting in less than two hours time!