Brain Waves Blog

Social listening is changing the way economists talk about sexism and gender bias in the profession, illustrating how insights from online conversations can have massive offline impacts. Similarly, understanding conversations from audiences that your institution serves (e.g., professionals working in the field you’re preparing students for, alumni, or prospective students) can transform your marketing, program development, recruitment, or fundraising strategy.

You can never be too prepared when it comes to social media.

Social media managers, how do you start each work day? Email? Seeing how yesterday’s posts performed? I like to jump right into issues management. What kind of fires do we have to put out today? From viral videos on Twitter of students canoodling in the library to faculty gone rogue to good old-fashioned trolling. You never know what’s in store when it comes to working in social media.

Hashtags are a symbol that for the longest time was really only found on a button on your phone (yes, there were these things called “landlines” with physical buttons). But now the omnipresent hashtag is something more—an organizer used to group social content that evolved in programming and has seeped its way into many social media sites. Not only does it organize content, it mobilizes movements. There’s a lot to discuss with these little guys—owning them, “owning” them, and why they matter in higher ed.

A key outcome of social listening is the ability to identify real-time opportunities to engage with your audience groups when they’re talking to your campus or about your campus.

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.

In higher ed, reputation is an institution’s number one priority. The problem is, it’s not totally in your hands. Public perception is reality and anyone who has an opinion can share it online for the world to see. There’s a trust problem in our country, especially in higher education.