I became a big fan of Guy Kawasaki when I heard him speak at last year's SXSW conference. I've followed him for quite a long time on Twitter quite simply because he tweets randomly interesting things! In my mantra for social media content of positioning yourself and your brands as 'interesting, relevant and useful' to your target audience, Guy Kawasaki mostly ticks the 'interesting' box as my own reason to follow him. Positioning himself that way meant that I had an existing good feeling towards the Guy Kawasaki brand, and therefore was enticed to attend his talk, where he then positioned himself as 'relevant' and 'useful', thus fulfilling all three of my must-haves for engagement, and meaning that as a consequence I will most definitely be investing in a copy of his new book when I return to the UK (and recommending it here too of course!)
Through his talk he outlined his ten top tips for how to be 'enchanting' in order to achieve the things that we want, or to 'change the world'. In this post I will summarise what he said and challenge you to think, as you read on, about how these might apply to you both personally, professionally, and as an organisation. The key point underpinning all of this is that becoming enchanting to people is all about achieving their trust.
1. Achieve likability
This isn't about faking likability, but showing genuine likability. For Kawasaki, this is the difference between someone who smiles just with their jaw and someone who smiles with their eyes. He recommends dressing appropriately for an audience (not trying to out-dress them which suggests you think you are better than them, or underdressing which suggests a degree of disdain for your audience) and mastering the perfect handshake. Map this to your organisation, I question how likable your front-facing staff can sometimes be. Do they smile with their eyes (or with their voice when they answer the phone), do they genuinely care?
2. Achieve trustworthiness
Trust others first. Amazon is a good example of company that places trust in their customers: you can return a kindle e-book up to 5 days after buying (a time frame in which most people could have already read the e-book). This means that their customers trust and feel loyal to them in return. In universities do we ever really trust our students? Kawasaki encourages us to think not in terms of how much we can take from a relationship but in terms of how much we can give. When we meet new people, make 'yes' your default position. I'm not sure that university structures allow us to do this, but perhaps they should. Let's think, for example, of how universities engage with businesses. If we listened to their needs and just said 'yes' instead of starting out by saying 'we can do this, this and this for you' (the 'take' mentality even though it sounds like giving), then we might discover more creative ways in which to do business and establish a relationship of trust and mutual respect.
3. Get ready
In a business context, Kawasaki urges us to have great products - those that are deep (something really great - given that his background is in working for Apple, Kawasaki knows all about having great products!), those that are intelligent ("wow, what a clever product"), those that are complete (this is about everything, not just the product - the packaging, the aftercare, the purchasing experience), and that are empowering (for example, a mac isn't just functional, it also makes you feel more creative) and elegant. And when it comes to marketing our products, make our communications short, sweet and swallowable (not something that the HE sector is particularly good at I'm afraid). He also encourages doing a 'pre-morterm' to pretend that your product has failed, brainstorm all the likely reasons why, and then eliminate them one by one.
4. Launch
Tell a story. Give it the human angle (see part 1 of today's blog posts from SXSW on this very subject). Remember that these days nobodies are the new somebodies. Anyone can be an influencer for your brand and the success of your project so you need to be engaging with all of them, not just the editors of the big newspapers (though they remain important). Talk about your product in ways that people can understand. Don't just focus on the score from the student satisfaction survey - put it into a story, make it real for them...
5. Overcome
Overcome resistance. Think about how you can provide social proof that your product is great and used by many (Kawasaki here used the example of the proliferation of white ear-buds when the iPod launched). Enchant all of the influencers along the way, not just the top bosses. For university decision making this therefore might not just be the student themselves and their parents, but it might also be grandparents or friends, or just someone they happen to listen to (and trust) online...
6. Endure
Don't use or rely on money in order to 'sell' your product. If you pay someone commission or an affiliate fee for selling a product, people are less likely to trust them in this transaction. And invoke reciprocity: when someone says thank you, don't say "you're welcome", say "I know you'd to the same for me". And let them pay you back for things that you do for them: it makes them feel good and keeps the relationship of reciprocity going...
7. Present
Great enchanters know how to present. Customise the introduction to your audience. Sell your dream ie Steve Jobs pitches iPhones as a lifestyle item, not a sum of parts.
8. Use technology
Use technology as an enabler, not a barrier. Remove all technology barriers. Technology should enhance the experience and provide added value to your audience. If you use your social media presence to provide information, insights or assistance, then you will make yourself enchanting. Engage with people. Engage fast, and engage with many people (not just the ones you think are important). Engage often - social media is not the thing to do whenever everything else is done, it should be embedded in your ongoing communications.
9. Enchant up
Always enchant the people that you work for: if your boss wants you to do something, then drop everything else to do it. And prototype fast: if your boss asks you to deliver a powerpoint presentation for them to present from in 3 days time, send them a rough outline within an hour.
And always deliver bad news early and with solutions.
10. Enchant down
Enchant those who work for you. Above all else never ask anyone to do anything that you're not prepared to do yourself. Enable them to master new skills, work autonomously, and give them a sense of purpose. Empower them.
I've barely done Guy Kawasaki's talk any justice at all in this blog post. It's very much a summary of the points he covered, and I'm sure nobody communicates these points better than he, so you might be better off buying the book.
Tuesday, 15 March 2011
Tracy in Texas day three (part 1): what can we learn from story telling for social media engagement?
Day three at SXSW offered a real mix of sessions for me, from the art of storytelling in transmedia, to the future of location-based services and geo-social networking and gaming, through to the incredible Guy Kawasaki's session on enchantment. So, because there's so much ground to cover, I'm breaking them down into different parts. In this first part I'm going to reflect briefly on what we might be able to learn from story telling and narratives for our social media engagement activities.
The story telling and creative narratives in transmedia session that I attended focused mostly on what makes a good story. It was one of those sessions that I went to thinking it sounded broadly interesting but not entirely thinking about what I'd take away from it but with a couple of days in between, I think the lesson that I have really taken away from this is what we can learn from story-telling and narratives in the way that we approach communications activities. It's all about character and depth of character, about how we learn about others and our selves through relationships with those characters and our own emotional responses to them, and through the way that stories engage through the fluctuation of high and low points, and through the increasing pressures that occur in those stories, and the twists and turns that they take. For me, the point is that stories engage - nothing complex in this. Why is it that we watch the TV show, but leave during the ad breaks? Because ads rarely tell stories, and brands rarely have characters representing them. If we can replicate the art of story telling in our communications, particularly in social media spaces, then perhaps we can be more successful in engaging people with our brands. We can even make them co-creators in the stories if we're really smart about it. This, then, boils down to who those great characters might be and the great narratives that we can build or share about, around, or with them. We have them in our organisations, so why not communicate about them? Or perhaps we can create them. Aleksandr Orlov has 767,000+ fans on Facebook - I bet a page specifically for comparethemarket.com wouldn't get even close to this. Their whole approach introduces a character and a story, and because of that, it is successful.
We spend so much time in organisations thinking about message and consistency of message. But in stories (albeit movies, books, TV programmes or real life), while there is often some consistency, there is by far more twists and turns, false starts, changes of pace, changes of character and personality. Is it the differences and the changes that we experience - the 'journey' that we take, and the extensive range of emotional responses that we experience along the way, that maintains our interest and keeps us engaged. Surely there has to be a way to achieve this in brand communications and engagement activities...
The story telling and creative narratives in transmedia session that I attended focused mostly on what makes a good story. It was one of those sessions that I went to thinking it sounded broadly interesting but not entirely thinking about what I'd take away from it but with a couple of days in between, I think the lesson that I have really taken away from this is what we can learn from story-telling and narratives in the way that we approach communications activities. It's all about character and depth of character, about how we learn about others and our selves through relationships with those characters and our own emotional responses to them, and through the way that stories engage through the fluctuation of high and low points, and through the increasing pressures that occur in those stories, and the twists and turns that they take. For me, the point is that stories engage - nothing complex in this. Why is it that we watch the TV show, but leave during the ad breaks? Because ads rarely tell stories, and brands rarely have characters representing them. If we can replicate the art of story telling in our communications, particularly in social media spaces, then perhaps we can be more successful in engaging people with our brands. We can even make them co-creators in the stories if we're really smart about it. This, then, boils down to who those great characters might be and the great narratives that we can build or share about, around, or with them. We have them in our organisations, so why not communicate about them? Or perhaps we can create them. Aleksandr Orlov has 767,000+ fans on Facebook - I bet a page specifically for comparethemarket.com wouldn't get even close to this. Their whole approach introduces a character and a story, and because of that, it is successful.
We spend so much time in organisations thinking about message and consistency of message. But in stories (albeit movies, books, TV programmes or real life), while there is often some consistency, there is by far more twists and turns, false starts, changes of pace, changes of character and personality. Is it the differences and the changes that we experience - the 'journey' that we take, and the extensive range of emotional responses that we experience along the way, that maintains our interest and keeps us engaged. Surely there has to be a way to achieve this in brand communications and engagement activities...
Monday, 14 March 2011
Tracy in Texas day two: connecting with audiences in real-time and converting crowds into communities
So, following my little trip to Texas A&M on day one of SXSW, day two meant that I was properly able to dive into the conference programme. In this blog post I’m going to share notes and reflect on the content from two of the sessions that I attended, particularly thinking about the relevance of those conversations to the education sector (particularly universities and colleges).
Rob Garner’s (iCrossing) session on “Marketing in the Moment” highlighted the importance of speed in today’s world of real-time communications. Websites that take years to design, build and implement, then months to review and measure, are rapidly becoming a thing of the past and brands that can be agile and respond in the moment to their customers and audiences will be the ones who ultimately win. Making mistakes along the way is ‘simply part of how this works’. This takes me back a little to yesterday’s post about how Texas A&M have embraced the real-time quality of social media and are, mostly, empowered to respond quickly in these spaces and, furthermore, respond to the wants and needs of their communities to influence the content that they create for such spaces. How well are universities really set up though to operate in this world when decisions are made by committees and communications staff often, in my experience of working with lots of them over the years, do not feel empowered to speak and respond quickly, or weighty internal structures and sense of 'that's not my job' mean that they feel they can't always respond to everything. My pet hate, which I regularly have a good whinge about, is when someone, say for example a prospective student, asks a question on a college's Facebook page and, instead of answering the question, the community manager responds with something along the lines of 'you need to email admissons@university.edu'. Doh! In doing this, everything is slowed down, the 'customer' is left dissatisfied and you're making them work in order to get the answer to their question, and you are showing yourselves to be a fragmented and disjointed organisation with the right hand not talking to the left, but instead making your customers do that job for you.
Rob also described how the customer buying process is no longer a linear process, but more like a ‘rabbit warren’ where individuals jump around a network of information spaces in order to make purchasing decisions influenced by a range of opinions and views (in my mind, though, that doesn't mean that it's acceptable for you as a brand to send them off on even more branches of that rabbit warren than is necessary or desired by the customer). The same is very much true when we come to think about student marketing: prospective students of a university will each take their own unique run around the rabbit warren gathering their information from a variety of sources and influencers along the way, not all of them ‘official’ university information sources, and certainly no two experiences the same. And while they are on this journey the audience themselves (the students in this case) can become ‘brand publishers’ in their own right as they comment on, discuss, and therefore shape and influence the reputation of the brand. And they do this in a language that is likely to be completely different to the language that the brand itself might use to talk about itself. Though this leads me to wonder whether there could be a potential shift here towards brands adopting more of the language that their customers use in order to align these overlapping discourses more closely.
And thinking about how different individuals talk about, influence and even represent brands online, brings me nicely on to thinking about Thomas Knoll’s session that asked the question “Are your customers are crowd or a community”? In this session, a number of distinctions were drawn between the definition of a crowd, and the definition of a community. I think these are particularly helpful from a ‘audit’ point of view for organisations to consider in light of their target audiences.
1. "Crowds have pride, communities have purpose"
This therefore begs the question as to whether we can turn crowds into communities by giving them purpose? Again, thinking back to yesterday’s blog post, Texas A&M’s social media scavenger hunt is a near-perfect example of this. The hunt literally gave a crowd a combined sense of purpose, and the impact of that was community building (online and offline). Ordinarily, Knoll suggested, it takes time for communities to discover their purpose and that this isn’t something that we can force on them through a single marketing message. And in order for them to agree their purpose (or purposes), they need to have the right spaces provided for them to have those conversations.
2. "Crowds are looking for benefits, but communities are looking to belong"
Having a great brand, or the best price is not enough. Relationships and experiences help to make people feel a sense of belonging. For the HE sector this is the difference, for example, between 'I study at the University of X' vs 'The University of X is my university'. Belonging is caused by trust, relationships, and experiences, so how can we ensure that we foster those relationships and experiences? I think this distinction is particularly interesting when thinking about the academic body of an organisation. A lack of common sense of purpose (see point 1) driven by very individual and specific areas of research expertise, means that academics/faculty often don’t behave like a community and seem to lack a sense of belonging to a particular organisation, but instead have a sense of belonging to their subject. In this respect, perhaps we could argue that they are a crowd within the university because they simply look for the benefits from that environment (office space, funding, facilities, etc), but they exist as communities in a way that transcends the campus walls. This is a big internal communications challenge for universities: how can we turn faculty from a crowd to a community when they true sense of ‘belonging’ exists within their subject area, not the bricks and mortar environment in which they work.
3. "Crowds are driven by connection, communities are driven by collaboration"
How many places do you have to connect with your customers?
How many places do you have to collaborate with your customers? Where are the spaces where your customers can connect with each other, tell their stories and influence each other and, ultimately, your brand. This is all about letting go and empowering your audience, perhaps your students, to have a voice. In return for empowering people to feel that they have influence, you can achieve loyalty and community. Again, this is something that we could see in Texas A&M’s approach to social media: within their spaces students have their own voice and they can ask for and influence the types of content that get posted there. For example, the students have been known to ask for more content on a particular sport’s team or activity, and that in turn influences the content that Diane and her colleagues create and share in those spaces.
4. "Crowds prefer to get, communities prefer to give"
Communities like to help and have influence, and they like to share and spread. They like to 'give back'. Communities want to inspire and influence each other and be part of the experience. For example, they want to be part of the process of entertaining each other rather than just being entertained. Considering this in an education context again, I think this is an interesting point from the perspective of alumni engagement. How many of our sites and spaces truly enable alumni to give and share amongst each other? I think we’re getting close to this through spaces such as LinkedIn groups, but while the content that we place in there as an organisation retains a ‘push message’ feel to it, and while the spaces are heavily branded as ‘belonging’ to the institution, are we simply nurturing the ‘crowd’ mentality. We push, they receive (they get), they never really therefore get the message that they can share and give in these spaces, therefore they don’t become a community. Again, how can we facilitate this shift amongt alumni communities?
5. "Crowds are sustained by service, communities are sustained by story"
This distinction nicely also relates to point 4. Your crowd will remain a crowd as long as you service them enough. However, if you allow them to tell stories, then they become a community. This is the distinction that I explored above in relation to the ways in which we engage with alumni. By providing content for them, we are servicing them and therefore not giving them the freedom or the clues to share their own stories or to create their own common story (think again back to the point about shared purpose).
6. "A crowd is powered by inspiration, a community is powered by influence."
Finally, this point again is a difference between top-down communications and bottom-up communications. It is the difference between being ‘talked at’ and ‘listened to’ in my opinion. Audiences will only feel that they have influence, and thus behave as a community, if they are given the spaces in which to do this. Social media lends itself perfectly for this purpose if used well. Brands often use social media as ‘channels’ through which to push their content on to target audiences rather than really fostering true engagement through them. If a crowd feel that they don’t have influence in your own social media spaces, then they are likely to establish or engage in spaces where they do feel they have influence, which in the world of the UK university, for example, might be in spaces such as The Student Room.
In tomorrow's blog post we'll reflect on Guy Kawasaki's excellent talk on 'enchantment' and how to be 'enchanting'... that talk was so good that's it overshadows everything else I heard that day, so it will get my fullest attention! See you tomorrow...
Rob Garner’s (iCrossing) session on “Marketing in the Moment” highlighted the importance of speed in today’s world of real-time communications. Websites that take years to design, build and implement, then months to review and measure, are rapidly becoming a thing of the past and brands that can be agile and respond in the moment to their customers and audiences will be the ones who ultimately win. Making mistakes along the way is ‘simply part of how this works’. This takes me back a little to yesterday’s post about how Texas A&M have embraced the real-time quality of social media and are, mostly, empowered to respond quickly in these spaces and, furthermore, respond to the wants and needs of their communities to influence the content that they create for such spaces. How well are universities really set up though to operate in this world when decisions are made by committees and communications staff often, in my experience of working with lots of them over the years, do not feel empowered to speak and respond quickly, or weighty internal structures and sense of 'that's not my job' mean that they feel they can't always respond to everything. My pet hate, which I regularly have a good whinge about, is when someone, say for example a prospective student, asks a question on a college's Facebook page and, instead of answering the question, the community manager responds with something along the lines of 'you need to email admissons@university.edu'. Doh! In doing this, everything is slowed down, the 'customer' is left dissatisfied and you're making them work in order to get the answer to their question, and you are showing yourselves to be a fragmented and disjointed organisation with the right hand not talking to the left, but instead making your customers do that job for you.
Rob also described how the customer buying process is no longer a linear process, but more like a ‘rabbit warren’ where individuals jump around a network of information spaces in order to make purchasing decisions influenced by a range of opinions and views (in my mind, though, that doesn't mean that it's acceptable for you as a brand to send them off on even more branches of that rabbit warren than is necessary or desired by the customer). The same is very much true when we come to think about student marketing: prospective students of a university will each take their own unique run around the rabbit warren gathering their information from a variety of sources and influencers along the way, not all of them ‘official’ university information sources, and certainly no two experiences the same. And while they are on this journey the audience themselves (the students in this case) can become ‘brand publishers’ in their own right as they comment on, discuss, and therefore shape and influence the reputation of the brand. And they do this in a language that is likely to be completely different to the language that the brand itself might use to talk about itself. Though this leads me to wonder whether there could be a potential shift here towards brands adopting more of the language that their customers use in order to align these overlapping discourses more closely.
And thinking about how different individuals talk about, influence and even represent brands online, brings me nicely on to thinking about Thomas Knoll’s session that asked the question “Are your customers are crowd or a community”? In this session, a number of distinctions were drawn between the definition of a crowd, and the definition of a community. I think these are particularly helpful from a ‘audit’ point of view for organisations to consider in light of their target audiences.
1. "Crowds have pride, communities have purpose"
This therefore begs the question as to whether we can turn crowds into communities by giving them purpose? Again, thinking back to yesterday’s blog post, Texas A&M’s social media scavenger hunt is a near-perfect example of this. The hunt literally gave a crowd a combined sense of purpose, and the impact of that was community building (online and offline). Ordinarily, Knoll suggested, it takes time for communities to discover their purpose and that this isn’t something that we can force on them through a single marketing message. And in order for them to agree their purpose (or purposes), they need to have the right spaces provided for them to have those conversations.
2. "Crowds are looking for benefits, but communities are looking to belong"
Having a great brand, or the best price is not enough. Relationships and experiences help to make people feel a sense of belonging. For the HE sector this is the difference, for example, between 'I study at the University of X' vs 'The University of X is my university'. Belonging is caused by trust, relationships, and experiences, so how can we ensure that we foster those relationships and experiences? I think this distinction is particularly interesting when thinking about the academic body of an organisation. A lack of common sense of purpose (see point 1) driven by very individual and specific areas of research expertise, means that academics/faculty often don’t behave like a community and seem to lack a sense of belonging to a particular organisation, but instead have a sense of belonging to their subject. In this respect, perhaps we could argue that they are a crowd within the university because they simply look for the benefits from that environment (office space, funding, facilities, etc), but they exist as communities in a way that transcends the campus walls. This is a big internal communications challenge for universities: how can we turn faculty from a crowd to a community when they true sense of ‘belonging’ exists within their subject area, not the bricks and mortar environment in which they work.
3. "Crowds are driven by connection, communities are driven by collaboration"
How many places do you have to connect with your customers?
How many places do you have to collaborate with your customers? Where are the spaces where your customers can connect with each other, tell their stories and influence each other and, ultimately, your brand. This is all about letting go and empowering your audience, perhaps your students, to have a voice. In return for empowering people to feel that they have influence, you can achieve loyalty and community. Again, this is something that we could see in Texas A&M’s approach to social media: within their spaces students have their own voice and they can ask for and influence the types of content that get posted there. For example, the students have been known to ask for more content on a particular sport’s team or activity, and that in turn influences the content that Diane and her colleagues create and share in those spaces.
4. "Crowds prefer to get, communities prefer to give"
Communities like to help and have influence, and they like to share and spread. They like to 'give back'. Communities want to inspire and influence each other and be part of the experience. For example, they want to be part of the process of entertaining each other rather than just being entertained. Considering this in an education context again, I think this is an interesting point from the perspective of alumni engagement. How many of our sites and spaces truly enable alumni to give and share amongst each other? I think we’re getting close to this through spaces such as LinkedIn groups, but while the content that we place in there as an organisation retains a ‘push message’ feel to it, and while the spaces are heavily branded as ‘belonging’ to the institution, are we simply nurturing the ‘crowd’ mentality. We push, they receive (they get), they never really therefore get the message that they can share and give in these spaces, therefore they don’t become a community. Again, how can we facilitate this shift amongt alumni communities?
5. "Crowds are sustained by service, communities are sustained by story"
This distinction nicely also relates to point 4. Your crowd will remain a crowd as long as you service them enough. However, if you allow them to tell stories, then they become a community. This is the distinction that I explored above in relation to the ways in which we engage with alumni. By providing content for them, we are servicing them and therefore not giving them the freedom or the clues to share their own stories or to create their own common story (think again back to the point about shared purpose).
6. "A crowd is powered by inspiration, a community is powered by influence."
Finally, this point again is a difference between top-down communications and bottom-up communications. It is the difference between being ‘talked at’ and ‘listened to’ in my opinion. Audiences will only feel that they have influence, and thus behave as a community, if they are given the spaces in which to do this. Social media lends itself perfectly for this purpose if used well. Brands often use social media as ‘channels’ through which to push their content on to target audiences rather than really fostering true engagement through them. If a crowd feel that they don’t have influence in your own social media spaces, then they are likely to establish or engage in spaces where they do feel they have influence, which in the world of the UK university, for example, might be in spaces such as The Student Room.
In tomorrow's blog post we'll reflect on Guy Kawasaki's excellent talk on 'enchantment' and how to be 'enchanting'... that talk was so good that's it overshadows everything else I heard that day, so it will get my fullest attention! See you tomorrow...
Saturday, 12 March 2011
Tracy in Texas day one: learning how Texas A&M University “do” social media
This is my first blog post in a special series that I’m doing from my trip to Texas this week. I’m out here attending the SXSW conference in Austin again. This is my week to refresh my own knowledge of where social and digital media is going, spot new trends and products, and network with others feeling their way in new ways of communicating.
However, I bailed out on day one of the conference to take a drive over to College Station, about an hour and a half out of Austin, to visit Texas A&M University. Why? Well, they’re a university that has constantly impressed me with their use of social media. Their Facebook page has over 260,000 fans, and they grabbed a lot of attention recently for a social media-enabled scavenger hunt that they organised around their campus. Furthermore, they have their very own Director of Social Media. So, I headed over there for a chat with Diane C. McDonald and her colleague John Chivvis to get to know a little more about their approach to social media.
The first thing to say is that when they say ‘social media’ they mean social. They explained that for them the key thing that social media enables them to do is communicate a sense of the University’s culture that cannot be communicated in any other way. I guess this is something about its people, and you can only communicate that by providing the spaces in which those people can make their voices heard. That’s what social media does. It provides that space and that connection to act as a bridge between the inside and the outside, allowing others to experience the University’s culture for themselves.
Empowerment, management buy-in and support also seem to be essential for enabling Diane, John and colleagues to progress their social media efforts. Their managers seem to get it and seem to have placed their trust in those colleagues working on it to just do it. That means no committees to sign off every single tweet. Empowerment and trust from senior managers is critical for any organisation to be successful in social media, and because the team involved in this have a strong sense of brand, corporate identity, and levels of what is ‘acceptable’, they are empowered to be able to generate the quick content and real-time responses that social media demands. This means, for example, that they know that they can be ‘fun’ in social media spaces, but not try to be ‘funny’ because that wouldn’t sit well with the University’s overall brand.
They then bring that knowledge together with working closely with the student body to ensure that the content that they produce for these spaces is the kind of content that the students actually want to consume. Diane and John have no illusions that they are of the same mind of their students, so they recognise the need to understand and respond to student wants and needs in order to create spaces that they will want to engage with, be part of and, ultimately, influence the future direction of. That audience-centred approach has to be a key reason for the success of their spaces. They know that traditional ‘push messaging’ approaches don’t work, and that simply posting press releases on these sites just wouldn’t resonate with the audience. It also seems that Diane understands the importance of being there the whole time. She speaks about when she has to leave her desk to head off somewhere, about how she hands over to John to make sure that he is on the Facebook page or whatever else it might be in her absence. More on the need for real-time marketing in tomorrow's blog post!
It strikes me that their social media efforts, and in particular the scavenger hunt, have helped them to turn a student ‘crowd’ into a student ‘community’ (more on the distinction between crowd and community in tomorrow’s post, following my attendance at Thomas Knoll’s session at SXSW). The scavenger hunt (which, incidentally, had complete buy-in from the University President who allowed them to use his on-campus house as a destination in the hunt and donated and presented one of his trademark bow-ties as a prize to the winners) was really designed to grow engagement amongst the student community with their social media sites. It was designed to boost the number of followers on Twitter and increase the use of Foursquare amongst the community (they estimate that out of a 40,000 student body, about 6,000 of them are currently actively engaging with the University’s Foursquare activities). A side effect, however (albeit an intended one), of the scavenger hunt was actual, genuine face-to-face community building, and interaction with community members from outside of the campus. It prompted students to meet other students, form new friendships, and it excited interested observers from off-campus. One prospective student commented online that she now couldn’t wait to join their University after following this activity, and alumni of the University pitched in and helped participants out, or commented on how hard or easy the clues were.
So, having had this fantastic insight into their approach to social media, I presented Diane and John with the killer question, the one that all of my colleagues and clients back home want to know: so, just how many people are actively leading social media for Texas A&M? I expected a big number. Instead, I was told “oh there’s only three of us, kind of, and John is also responsible for the University website too”. For quite some time now, I’ve been going along with my UK counterparts and nodding in agreement when they say that the reason that we can’t ‘do’ social media like the Americans is because they are so much better resourced than we in the UK are. I no longer believe that. In reality, Texas A&M have only one member of staff wholly dedicated to social media, and two that help to support that process (amongst others). The difference, it seems to me is not one of resource and budgets, but one of empowerment, internal culture, embracing the ‘letting go’ and accepting that mistakes will get made along the way but that they’ll learn from them. We are, after all, in the business of learning!
In tomorrow's post... the need for real-time marketing, and thinking about 'crowds' and 'communities'.
However, I bailed out on day one of the conference to take a drive over to College Station, about an hour and a half out of Austin, to visit Texas A&M University. Why? Well, they’re a university that has constantly impressed me with their use of social media. Their Facebook page has over 260,000 fans, and they grabbed a lot of attention recently for a social media-enabled scavenger hunt that they organised around their campus. Furthermore, they have their very own Director of Social Media. So, I headed over there for a chat with Diane C. McDonald and her colleague John Chivvis to get to know a little more about their approach to social media.
The first thing to say is that when they say ‘social media’ they mean social. They explained that for them the key thing that social media enables them to do is communicate a sense of the University’s culture that cannot be communicated in any other way. I guess this is something about its people, and you can only communicate that by providing the spaces in which those people can make their voices heard. That’s what social media does. It provides that space and that connection to act as a bridge between the inside and the outside, allowing others to experience the University’s culture for themselves.
Empowerment, management buy-in and support also seem to be essential for enabling Diane, John and colleagues to progress their social media efforts. Their managers seem to get it and seem to have placed their trust in those colleagues working on it to just do it. That means no committees to sign off every single tweet. Empowerment and trust from senior managers is critical for any organisation to be successful in social media, and because the team involved in this have a strong sense of brand, corporate identity, and levels of what is ‘acceptable’, they are empowered to be able to generate the quick content and real-time responses that social media demands. This means, for example, that they know that they can be ‘fun’ in social media spaces, but not try to be ‘funny’ because that wouldn’t sit well with the University’s overall brand.
They then bring that knowledge together with working closely with the student body to ensure that the content that they produce for these spaces is the kind of content that the students actually want to consume. Diane and John have no illusions that they are of the same mind of their students, so they recognise the need to understand and respond to student wants and needs in order to create spaces that they will want to engage with, be part of and, ultimately, influence the future direction of. That audience-centred approach has to be a key reason for the success of their spaces. They know that traditional ‘push messaging’ approaches don’t work, and that simply posting press releases on these sites just wouldn’t resonate with the audience. It also seems that Diane understands the importance of being there the whole time. She speaks about when she has to leave her desk to head off somewhere, about how she hands over to John to make sure that he is on the Facebook page or whatever else it might be in her absence. More on the need for real-time marketing in tomorrow's blog post!
It strikes me that their social media efforts, and in particular the scavenger hunt, have helped them to turn a student ‘crowd’ into a student ‘community’ (more on the distinction between crowd and community in tomorrow’s post, following my attendance at Thomas Knoll’s session at SXSW). The scavenger hunt (which, incidentally, had complete buy-in from the University President who allowed them to use his on-campus house as a destination in the hunt and donated and presented one of his trademark bow-ties as a prize to the winners) was really designed to grow engagement amongst the student community with their social media sites. It was designed to boost the number of followers on Twitter and increase the use of Foursquare amongst the community (they estimate that out of a 40,000 student body, about 6,000 of them are currently actively engaging with the University’s Foursquare activities). A side effect, however (albeit an intended one), of the scavenger hunt was actual, genuine face-to-face community building, and interaction with community members from outside of the campus. It prompted students to meet other students, form new friendships, and it excited interested observers from off-campus. One prospective student commented online that she now couldn’t wait to join their University after following this activity, and alumni of the University pitched in and helped participants out, or commented on how hard or easy the clues were.
So, having had this fantastic insight into their approach to social media, I presented Diane and John with the killer question, the one that all of my colleagues and clients back home want to know: so, just how many people are actively leading social media for Texas A&M? I expected a big number. Instead, I was told “oh there’s only three of us, kind of, and John is also responsible for the University website too”. For quite some time now, I’ve been going along with my UK counterparts and nodding in agreement when they say that the reason that we can’t ‘do’ social media like the Americans is because they are so much better resourced than we in the UK are. I no longer believe that. In reality, Texas A&M have only one member of staff wholly dedicated to social media, and two that help to support that process (amongst others). The difference, it seems to me is not one of resource and budgets, but one of empowerment, internal culture, embracing the ‘letting go’ and accepting that mistakes will get made along the way but that they’ll learn from them. We are, after all, in the business of learning!
In tomorrow's post... the need for real-time marketing, and thinking about 'crowds' and 'communities'.
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