Brain Waves Blog

At Campus Sonar, our humans set us apart. Our experience researching and analyzing the nuances of online conversation means we understand how to measure the effectiveness of your content. We know how to analyze who sees your content and understand how that’s impacted by each platform. When you develop social media strategy and create corresponding campaigns, this is ultimately what you need to measure to show success, right? The effectiveness of your campaign. If it worked.

A few short months after beginning my MBA at Drexel University, I landed the role of social media strategist in Drexel’s Office of University Communications. With no professional marketing experience under my belt, I was suddenly responsible for being the digital voice of a prestigious institution with a combined social media audience of over 260,000 followers.

I’ve never met a marketer who would tell you their department is fully funded and adequately staffed. Marketing is just one of those wishy-washy, nebulous concepts that can be extremely difficult to grasp unless you’re involved in the day-to-day work these professionals tackle. In higher education in particular, it’s easy for marketers and communicators to feel slighted, like our work is often overlooked and first on the chopping block when the time comes for difficult budgetary decisions. It’s common to celebrate admissions and development staff during times of high revenue—but institutions tend to forget about the communications pros who plan, create, and deliver key messages for those offices. And that’s a mistake. 

As companies across higher ed, and the country, are moving their operations online, including the Sonarians, we thought we’d gather and share some of our best tips for remote working. Typically, one third of our team works remotely. Some of them have spent years doing it and others jumped into it more recently for the first time. 

If I asked you to define authenticity, could you do it? When I tried this myself a few weeks back, I ended up settling on a definition that was something like, “content that is authentic.” Realizing that the word authentic is also subjective, I tried defining that, only to rely on the word original. But what is original? With each attempted definition, I found myself going deeper and deeper down a rabbit hole until eventually my wife jolted me back to reality and commented that I’d been holding the same piece of chicken on my fork for an unnatural amount of time. Note to self: save the work thoughts for a place other than the dinner table. 

Social listening is one of the most important parts of a social media manager’s job. It’s crucial to protecting and furthering the brand, as well as knowing the sentiments of your audiences. When your brand is a college or university, it’s also a great way to learn about trends and, if you keep track, to identify (and hopefully respond to) unusual issues and valuable insights. Another way to look at it is: social listening can be step one in what my fellow guest blogger Erika Boltz calls “issues management.”