Brain Waves Blog

For marketing and communications professionals, each semester can bring anywhere from several hundred to a hundred thousand plus public online mentions about their respective campus. And yet, most marketers only report on the social and news content they produce. That’s not the case for Angela Polec, La Salle University’s Vice President of Enrollment, Marketing, and Communications. 

Batman and Robin. The Avengers. Link and Epona. The Fellowship of the Ring. X-Men. Harry, Ron, and Hermione. Aang, Katara, Toph, Sokka, and Appa.

Community colleges in the United States have long been underfunded and understaffed. That hasn’t stopped them from serving as a vital resource to their local communities while educating a student body more diverse than many four-year campuses can claim. 

How would your marketing team shift its content strategy if you intimately understood the differences in how prospective, admitted, and current students talked about your campus? That’s the question Tony Dobies, Senior Director of Marketing at West Virginia University (WVU), found himself asking in the fall of 2020.

We see you. Yeah you, on campus. You've been following Campus Sonar since our founding in 2017. Maybe you saw Liz speak at a conference; maybe you listened to a podcast episode that featured a Sonarian. Or maybe a friend or colleague of yours told you to check out this new agency called Campus Sonar. 

Social listening may seem simple, especially if you’re getting a pitch from a software company. Just enter your search terms, and ta-da—social data. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. Each software product collects data differently, and the data that’s returned may come with nuances that aren’t obvious to the casual user. Since social listening is all that we do, I’m sharing what we’ve learned working with millions of social mentions from about over a hundred institutions. Hopefully it will help you make an informed decision about how to approach social listening for your campus.