Encouraging Academic Faculty to Start Using Social Media

This blog was originally written for and published on the CASE social media blog.

When it comes to social media, we can’t depend on our marketing or communications teams to create all the content. Organizations are the collective culture of the body of individuals that work there. Nowhere is this truer than in a university or college where we’re home to experts in all kinds of wonderful disciplines! Given the busy schedules of teaching, research, admin, families and hobbies, how do you persuade academic faculty to add social media into the mix?

My key advice: focus on them as an individual and how it will benefit and add value to their lives, not necessarily the organization (though secretly you’ll know that your organization will benefit too). Here are a few more thoughts…

1. Understand their needs
When running workshops for universities, I sometimes find a narrow understanding of social media. This typically is limited to blogs (“can’t do that, takes too much time”), Facebook (“I don’t want to be friends with my students”), and Twitter (“why on earth would I want to tell the world what I’m having for breakfast?”).

Focus on their individual needs. Faculty with demanding teaching schedules might find social bookmarking a useful tool for their students, while a research-intensive social scientist might find blogging, or just commenting on blogs, a good way to raise their profile amongst policy makers. Tailor your argument to every individual: they’ll feel flattered that you’re paying attention to them as an individual and you’ll find a solution that works for them. University social media handbooks are helpful but they can homogenise something that is actually very individual and niche so supplement them with one-to-one conversations.

2. Explain what they can get out of it
It’s easy to think that because we have to do something to make social media work for us that it becomes all about what we put into it. However, social media is as much about what we get out of it. Show them, for example, that hours spent trawling through Google search results can be reduced by asking your Twitter community or folk on Quora a question and have them do the filtering for you, or how RSS readers can save them time. In a recent podcast I recorded for HE Comms with Dr. Matthew Ashton, a prolific blogger from Nottingham Trent University, Ashton explained how writing a 500 word blog post every morning eases him into ‘writing mode’ for the day and as a consequence his academic writing output has actually increased.

3. Select and suggest the right tools for the right people
This is similar to point one, but here you need to think about how they already use social media and how they are, for want of a better term, culturally disposed towards using it. Think of Forrester’s Social Technographics profile and suggest tools and approaches that gradually move them up the ladder. Trying to encourage someone to go from being a spectator to a creator in one step is probably not going to work so think about where they start from and what baby steps can ease them upwards.

4. Show them others
Bring out their competitive spirit, inspire them, or reduce their fear of being the first to do something ‘different’ or ‘wacky’ by showing them what their colleagues are already up to. Find out who within your academic community (or within their subject area from other universities) is already using social media and be armed with those examples. Twitter lists are great for this. And getting academic colleagues to persuade them on your behalf might be more powerful than the development or marketing offices asking them to do it.

5. Massage their ego
Everyone wants to be thought of as interesting. Make them feel that way by simply being interested. It’s very motivating! In social media where niche communities exist with very specific interests, there is going to be a space for even the most complex thinkers to find a voice and people who are interested in what they have to say. So dropping them a line with a link to a blog post or online discussion that you think they could make a valuable contribution to might be a good starting point here to ease them in and make them feel that you and others are actually interested in them.

Tracy in Texas day 4: branding entertainment and story-telling

It just goes to show, doesn’t it, that the luxury of being away from work for a week and having thinking space also provides the luxury of time to blog? Return to the UK, and all time disappears and the blog suffers. As much as I communicate to my clients and attendees at conferences I speak at that it is important to maintain a regular blog if you are going down that route, I too struggle to find the time sometimes to keep it going. And so, now, I am only just returning to the remaining blog posts from my trip to this year’s SXSW conference to reflect on some of the discussions I participated in and listened to there. I'd like to suggest that the gap was deliberate - allowing myself pondering time - but actually it's purely because I've been busy since I got back from the US. (You guys really keep me on my toes running workshops, speaking at conferences, writing strategies and the like!)

So, in this blog I’m going to reflect a little on how brands can be involved with the creation of entertaining content online. This is inspired by a panel discussion I attended called ‘Branded entertainment: do brands hurt good storytelling?’

What really makes people tick in social media spaces? What is the content that people keep returning to? I often reflect on this in workshops I run for clients. What we see when we look at the most popular videos on YouTube or successful social media campaigns are often strong stories, engaging personalities (think Old Spice campaign) or the element of ‘entertainment’ running through those campaigns. Think of the ‘Compare the Meerkat’ campaign, for example, where a whole world and story, with a cast of characters and a life of its own has been created in order to promote an insurance comparison site… When we think about it, it’s not really all that different to the Nescafe adverts of the 1980s and 90s.

So, how can education organisations engage in story telling and entertainment online? One of the views I often hear from universities I work with is the view that universities are ‘serious’ organisations, in the business of education and innovation, not entertainment. So, how can we create stories and ongoing entertainment online in a way that sits well with our brands?

For a long time now I have been suggesting to organisations that demands of the digital age mean that we must now show people what we do, instead of just telling them. For a university or college that means allowing people to really get inside your organisation: literally, virtually and, importantly, culturally. Story telling online might just enable us to do this. It might be the vice-chancellor’s video blog, through a student’s regular updates on audioboo, or an entire drama series or online ‘fly on the wall’ documentary (universities are interesting places, full of incredible characters and a world of stories – why shouldn’t we capture them in a way that television series like ‘Airport’ and ‘Lakesiders’ have done for other organisations and places?). I confess, I haven’t entirely thought this through but there are some thoughts and approaches emerging in my little grey cells about what this could mean and could ultimately become for a university.

The alternative, of course, is not to create our own stories but to work with content creators, many of whom need investment to keep their content going, to ‘sponsor’ in some way content that they are producing online that is already resonating with our target audiences. This model works on television, so why shouldn’t it work online too? The ‘Charlie is so cool like’ videos are viewed by millions of people (over 120,000,000 views on YouTube). I can’t help thinking that a lot of the audience for these videos might well be intelligent teenagers (like Charlie himself) – a key target audience group for universities. Would it be so wrong for a university to sponsor his content? Not control it, just sponsor it? It’s a kind of brand association, I guess…

As always, I don’t have all the answers but plenty of thoughts developing on this. I really welcome yours in the comments below…