Brain Waves Blog

 

If news about politics, the virus, or messages from angry family members about Thanksgiving plans has caused you to avoid your phone, you may have missed our big announcement. After months of secrecy (no one caved, though Liz came close), we were finally able to announce STREAM, by Campus Sonar. Steve, Master of the STREAM Team, shares more about how we accidentally started another business at Campus Sonar with the main goal of making you smarter.

At the University of Central Florida (UCF), we’ve used influencer marketing with student social media ambassadors to create, collaborate, and distribute content on behalf of the university since 2018. We started the program by finding students who had a decent following on social media and grew it with students who showed eagerness and passion for UCF. The strength of the program and our contributing ambassadors allows us to reach a greater, more influential market of like-minded individuals and create authentic advocacy for our campus.

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.