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'.
Tracy:
ReplyDeleteThanks so much for sharing this. You just reinforced what I already knew but have had difficulty getting others around me to acknowledge. That trust issue is huge. I would like to know what kind of things they did to earn that trust and how long it took. You definitely encouraged me to stay on this path and keep digging deeper. Can't wait to read your other posts. Wish I was at SXSW too! Some year, maybe.
Hi Jay. Many thanks for the comment. I can't answer the question for Diane with regard to how long it took to build up that trust. My sense is that they are fortunate to have managers who really empower them to do their job, and the rest is, I guess, an ongoing process for them. I'll just reflect a little on your predicament, as it's one I encounter all the time in my work with universities (and other organisations - universities very much aren't unique in this respect). Firstly, I often use the innovation adoption curve to illustrate to university managers how what we do as universities (ie the business of being a university) is all about innovation, pushing the boundaries and learning. That is to say that the business of a university to some extent places us at the more 'innovator' end of the innovation adoption curve. However, our business practices and our marketing-communications activities often sit right of centre on the curve and are therefore not aligned with the core purpose of the organisation. Making mistakes is a crucial part of the learning process, and making mistakes is a reality not just in real-time social media engagement (see day two post on this), but in any learning activity (and particularly for innovation). Therefore as learning institutions, shouldn't we accept and perhaps even embrace the fact that some mistakes may happen along the way, but empowering staff to do their job right will ultimately make them more aligned to the brand and 'on message' with a common sense of purpose (see also day two post on community, and I'll reflect on this in day three's post too thanks to Guy Kawasaki's excellent talk...)? Furthermore, there's nothing quite like having examples and case studies in your weaponry to argue this case too. I suggest you might like to read Groundswell (Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, 2007) and I'm also reading Charlene Li's latest book on Open Leadership at the moment which might also help your thinking and your case. Failing that, there is sometimes (although a risky strategy) a case for just doing it under the radar without the bosses necessarily knowing. I did some work once for an organisation in-house where I was employed as their communications 'expert'. I knew that Twitter was an excellent way to be reaching out to one of our key target audiences, and that that particular audience were very busy in Twitter. The nature of the organisaton meant that we actually looked foolish not to be in there with them (it was a technology organisation), so while the senior managers discussed and pondered whether we should be doing it and what the organisational policy on this would be, I just cracked on with doing it, then later went to them with the results, which they of course thought were great and thus supported my ongoing efforts in this activity. I don't think they ever fully 'got it', but what they did realise was that nobody died because I hadn't gone through a peer review process for each and every tweet I was posting, instead it just supported our relationship building and helped us, in turn, do some other things more efficiently because we had those ongoing relationships with the right people via Twitter. Social media ultimately is just a conversation, and your bosses can't control the conversations you and your colleagues have about the brand in the pub with your friends... In fact, if they empower you, you are more likely to say all the right things! Best of luck with this Jay and let me know if you make progress. And give me a yell if you ever need any more help with this...
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