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...
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