Brain Waves Blog

The definition of crisis is “a time when a difficult or important decision must be made.” To effectively monitor and manage a crisis and understand the decisions they need to make, organizations must be plugged into the online conversation. Strong, strategic social listening in a crisis ensures you know a crisis on campus is brewing before you get a call from your president, allows you to monitor the issue in real-time to inform your PR response, ensures campus safety, and mitigates brand impact.

With March Madness upon us, you might notice a higher prevalence of basketball mentions in your school’s online conversation, or just online in general. While athletics can bring helpful attention and money to your school, for staff members interested in other areas of the conversation, the focus on athletics can overshadow the academic conversation and targeted brand messages. Separating the athletics conversation from the rest of the conversation is possible and can be helpful in strengthening non-athletic conversations.

Social listening is a flexible and direct way to earn insight into understanding the mindset of your target audience. Audience research and conversation analysis allows you to identify a target population and analyze all (or a sample of) their conversations over a defined period of time. Campus Sonar recently worked with Spring Hill College (SHC) in Mobile, Alabama. Using conversation analysis, Campus Sonar helped SHC uncover their brand and define it so they could move forward, using brand research to build their strategy.   

Sometimes when people hear social listening, they think that online analysis is limited to social sites like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Reddit. Luckily—for both analysts like myself and for our clients—that’s not the case! As many colleges and universities earn reviews from prospective and current students, alumni, and parents on sites like College Confidential and Cappex, it’s important to understand the picture these reviews paint of higher education institutions. Campus Sonar uses social listening to gather reviews from these sites and analyze both positive and negative comments. We capture the thoughts about a higher education institution from across the internet, which could include: the typical student, why others recommend (or don’t recommend) it, opinions on academic programs and resources, or other trending topics from the cost of tuition to the food in the cafeteria.

Quality data and insights are valuable to higher education marketers. In Are You a Modern Marketer? we maintain that these insights help higher education professionals create data-informed strategies to drive recruitment, growth, and enrollment. But how do higher education professionals find data and leverage the insights accordingly?

When I saw the opportunity to lead a centralized social media effort in higher education, I jumped at the chance. Luckily, it was also at North Carolina State University—in one of America's fastest growing cities, Raleigh, NC.