Brain Waves Blog

It’s a common illusion that a campus social media presence doesn’t cost anything. I’m here to tell you not to fall prey to that illusion, and explain what’s involved in building and staffing a higher ed social media team (including costs) so you know what you need to get started or get leadership support your need for additional resources. This post, along with two additional posts publishing in April and May, are excerpts from Fundamentals of Social Media Strategy.

I'm well aware that this post is being published as campuses consider furloughs and layoffs. Please don't dismiss it as something to think about "when things get back to normal." Staffing your social media team is more important now than ever.

I've given many presentations on Reddit over the last few years and after many of them, an attendee will privately come up after and ask a question I’ve become used to fielding. It usually goes something like this.

Alumni are one of the most influential voices in building your brand. And, if you’re in advancement, it’s your job to nurture these voices by engaging your alumni and building relationships, creating a stronger connection to their alma mater. To do this well, it helps to understand their pride and pain points so you can better speak to and with them, celebrate their wins, and ease their grievances. 

When you create any piece of content, a critical component is understanding your audience. Who will read your content? What are the demographics of the channel you’re publishing on? These are important questions to make sure your content resonates. 

Crises happen. The ripples are felt in-person and online. While talking to every person affected would be helpful, it is not realistic. Social listening, however, gives campuses instant access to online conversations about a particular crisis as they emerge on social sites, in forums, on blogs, in the news, and on other websites. Furthermore, social listening allows for unique views into trends within those conversations as the crisis unfolds in real time. All in all, social listening puts campuses in a better position to plan or adjust crisis communication strategies in the moment based on emerging insights. But this is only effective with human analysts teaming up with technology to write the perfect query and easily visualize the data. 

TL;DR

If we asked you to define authenticity, could you do it? When we tried this ourselves, we ended up settling on a definition that was something like, “content that is authentic.” Realizing that the word authentic is also subjective, we tried defining that, only to rely on the word original. But what is original? With each attempted definition, we went  deeper and deeper down a rabbit hole.