Brain Waves Blog

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.

I’m teaching a new class dedicated to social listening this semester in the Department of Advertising, Public Relations, and Media Design at the University of Colorado Boulder. Recently I was asked, "Why so narrow of a focus?”

Earlier this year, Campus Sonar analyzed conversation about the 2017 HighEdWeb conference. Now that the 2018 conference is over, we set out to compare the conversations.

You wrote your query and segmented out athletics, but do you have accurate and relevant data and is it categorized correctly? Even the most carefully written queries and rules may let irrelevant mentions seep in, so validating the integrity of (i.e., clean) the data is crucial to your social listening strategy. That's where expert human analysts come in.

No social listening software provider focuses on the education industry. This is what stuck with me after I read the latest Now Tech social media platforms report from Forrester. No wonder campus-based professionals have such a hard time finding software that meets their needs.

We’ve all overheard conversations in hallways and cafeterias. Some of us, perhaps more than others, are well acquainted with the thrill of overhearing conversations that aren’t quite meant for our ears—even if they are public. We can learn exciting and occasionally meaningful tidbits about people’s lives we would otherwise never know.