Brain Waves Blog

The 2019 Online Conversation Benchmarks for Higher Education: A Campus Sonar Social Listening Study opens with “[t]he internet is real life,” and continues with a discussion of how institutions of higher education can use the internet to connect with their communities. It goes on to say, “...the reality is that their online presence is a combination of what they say about themselves and what others say about them.” As soon as I read that, I realized the importance of this study. The combination of what institutions say about themselves and what their community says, if we remove the online part, is also known as educational or campus ethos, which is the story, narrative, or mission institutions build around themselves but don't directly control.