My recent work developing social media strategies and running workshops for primary and secondary schools reveals that there is particular nervousness about the use of Facebook, and rightly so, for those who work with children. Typically representatives from the schools that I have spoken with are advising teachers to either not be on Facebook at all (!) or at least to not accept friend requests from their students (Missouri in the US even went so far as to attempt to make it illegal for friends and students to become friends on Facebook, though this is currently being questioned as to whether this law can pass, and the decision held until february 2012). However, the danger of this is a ‘bury our heads in the sand’ mentality, unable to see and understand how young (and old!) people communicate with each other via social media, and unable to see what people in spaces such as Facebook are saying about your school or perhaps even you as an individual.

Some schools have been fighting social media in its entirety: banning it in the classroom, banning it on the school network, ignoring it, and advising teachers not to use it. But some, as this recent article in the New York Times reveals, have realised that this is a battle that they cannot win. Schools are better off to be in there where it is happening, rather than at the edges not understanding the platforms that their children use every day and that influences their lives so much. Whatever children spend a lot of their time doing and interested in should be of paramount interest to teachers since it can tell us so much about how to engage young people and how they want to receive information (which may well extend to teaching materials). I believe that schools also have a fundamental role to play in educating young people in using social media (and any forms of communication) appropriately, and they cannot do this if they do not understand the tools and concepts themselves. Therefore we should be encouraging teachers to be in these spaces and learning about them not closing them down.

Now, however, Facebook has introduced the new ‘subscribe’ feature for individual profiles. This provides a way for users to see select updates from other users in their news feed, without actually becoming fully-fledged ‘friends’ on the social network. This is clearly Facebook’s response to the audience segmentation that Google+ has introduced to the world of social media through their ‘circles’ functionality.

The ability to control who sees which messages and updates that you post is a powerful game-changer in social media terms. Until recently, our answer to presenting our different personas depended on us having to manage multiple accounts and profiles: Facebook for friends and family, LinkedIn for professional networking, etc. In short we would have multiple personas developed and communicated through multiple sites. Now through a single platform we can communicate with friends, family, co-workers, clients, whoever it might be, in different ways without having to switch to a different site for each group. We have multiple personas, but through a single site. The rapid early growth of Google+ has meant that Facebook has had to respond fast, and so it has.

The subscribe feature will now enable anyone to be able to share updates with each other, but to select which updates they see by choosing to either make them public, ‘friends’ only, or private. This is achieved simply by people becoming a ‘subscriber’ of individual updates, not a friend (i.e. they can’t see your full profile if it is fairly well protected). This has particular benefits to teachers, as Mashable highlight in their article on this new feature.

So, as teachers and lecturers may now decide to start those kind of connections on Facebook, one thing needs to be considered: we need to be careful and cautious every time we publish a status update to check the privacy settings of each update. Make sure that you check how it is being posted so you don’t accidentally post a status update designed to be ‘private’ or for your friends only to your ‘public’ feed. However, common sense and best practice dictates that if you’re going to publish an update that you don’t want others to see in any form, then you probably shouldn’t be posting it online anyway, no matter how ‘private’ your Facebook account is.

Whatever happens, we’re fully expecting this to be something that we’re asked to talk more about and demonstrate in our workshops and strategies for schools and universities, and we think this is a positive step for Facebook and for schools.

Pinterest is a space where you can collect and categorise things that you see that you like, and share those things with others. In my mind, it’s a little like a beautifully designed, easy to use, and highly visual social bookmarking site. But most of the stuff that people ‘pin’ (read ‘bookmark’) are actual objects and things (or things to do/make, etc) rather than ideas (though you can pin those too if you wish, but it needs an image to go with it). And, quite frankly, it’s a space in which I come across stuff pinned by others that are truly cool, creative and inspiring. It’s nightmare for the bank balance though as it triggers the ‘I want’ reaction. Here are my pins.

So, how does this translate to marketing and communications? If you look at very targeted, highly personal campaign approaches like KLM Surprises (thanks Chris Gibbons for alerting me of this), then it provides a great way for companies to get a personal insight into the things their individual customers or stakeholders like and to surprise them with a gift or something they have pinned. Likewise, you’ll also want customers and potential customers to ‘pin’ your products since this is social sharing, and others might make purchases off the back of what they see on Pinterest. And for universities or independent schools, if someone is paying several thousand pounds to attend your institution or send their child there, a few quid spent on something that they truly like and want to say ‘thank you’ could be money well spent in terms of forming a lasting relationship with them. So, check out if they’re ‘pinning’ anything perhaps?

Happy pinning folks!

Okay, I should expand on that a little I guess. Here’s the thing… for months now I’ve been noticing a growing trend of some university and college ‘corporate’ Twitter accounts (ugh!) retweeting positive comments that people say about them. This can be anything from someone enjoying an open day to a student excited to have been offered a place at your organisation, to someone celebrating their graduation. In the past ten days I’ve been asked by at least three universities whether this is something that they should be doing, so I thought it merited a blog response.

First, the positive. The fact that they are doing this demonstrates that universities are now spending more time monitoring and listening to what people say about them online. Great! Well done. This is very much a step in the right direction.

Now, the reason why I don’t think we should be retweeting all of those lovely comments: it looks needy and desperate. This is personal opinion and I am sure many people will disagree with me, but the need to shout out and spread every single good thing said about us online to me almost suggests that we don’t hear many good things said about us. People follow people and organisations on Twitter who provide them with some kind of added-value to their lives, not those who simply pat themselves on the back. Your RTs of someone saying something nice adds no value to the user experience.

I am not for a second, however, suggesting that you shouldn’t do something with all of those lovely tweets. Too bloody right you should. They’re great! We revel in them and we want to see more. So, here are a few thoughts for what you might do with them instead of simply retweeting them.

1. Say thank you
Simply thank the person for saying something lovely about you. Other people will see you thanking someone for their kind comment and will therefore know that people are saying good things. But you won’t be shoving it down their necks in a desperate ‘look! look! someone said something nice’ way.

2. Have a conversation
Beyond just thanking them, have a conversation with them. Find something out about them, engage with them, find out what prompted them to say such a lovely thing… what did they like most about their visit to your campus, etc? Use this as an opportunity to develop a deeper connection with that person and to gather crucial feedback. You might even prompt them to say even more lovely things in the process.

3. Favorite it
Many people use the ‘favorites’ functionality on Twitter as a bookmarking tool. Turn it instead into a recommendations/endorsements tool. It’s more subtle than retweeting those comments, but it gives you a place that you can direct other people to (link from your website) to share the great things that people are saying about you. I do this for myself and my work, but this could easily be done by organisations too.

4. Build lists
Create a list (can be private if you wish) of all of those lovely people who say nice things about you. This can be your ‘ambassadors’ list and will provide you with a way of keeping in touch, and maintaining engagement, with those people. They’re your fans, and they’ll continue to be if you keep them involved and engaged. You never know when you might need to call on them for something further down the line. Alternatively, the comment that they make might reveal who they are in relation to your organisation, so you might add them to a list of ‘prospective students’, ‘alumni’, ‘current students’, for example. These lists could become very valuable to you as part of understanding your target audiences, what makes them tick and how they use social media platforms like Twitter to help you finesse your engagement plans and activities for them, as well as just keeping in touch with those individuals.

There should be a number five here I think. It will feel tidier. But, I’ll leave that open to you. What else do you think you can be doing with positive tweets that people make about you or your organisation?

Through his talk he outlined his ten top tips for how to be ‘enchanting’ in order to achieve the things that we want, or to ‘change the world’. In this post I will summarise what he said and challenge you to think, as you read on, about how these might apply to you both personally, professionally, and as an organisation. The key point underpinning all of this is that becoming enchanting to people is all about achieving their trust.

1. Achieve likability
This isn’t about faking likability, but showing genuine likability. For Kawasaki, this is the difference between someone who smiles just with their jaw and someone who smiles with their eyes. He recommends dressing appropriately for an audience (not trying to out-dress them which suggests you think you are better than them, or underdressing which suggests a degree of disdain for your audience) and mastering the perfect handshake. Map this to your organisation, I question how likable your front-facing staff can sometimes be. Do they smile with their eyes (or with their voice when they answer the phone), do they genuinely care?

2. Achieve trustworthiness
Trust others first. Amazon is a good example of company that places trust in their customers: you can return a kindle e-book up to 5 days after buying (a time frame in which most people could have already read the e-book). This means that their customers trust and feel loyal to them in return. In universities do we ever really trust our students? Kawasaki encourages us to think not in terms of how much we can take from a relationship but in terms of how much we can give. When we meet new people, make ‘yes’ your default position. I’m not sure that university structures allow us to do this, but perhaps they should. Let’s think, for example, of how universities engage with businesses. If we listened to their needs and just said ‘yes’ instead of starting out by saying ‘we can do this, this and this for you’ (the ‘take’ mentality even though it sounds like giving), then we might discover more creative ways in which to do business and establish a relationship of trust and mutual respect.

3. Get ready
In a business context, Kawasaki urges us to have great products – those that are deep (something really great – given that his background is in working for Apple, Kawasaki knows all about having great products!), those that are intelligent (“wow, what a clever product”), those that are complete (this is about everything, not just the product – the packaging, the aftercare, the purchasing experience), and that are empowering (for example, a mac isn’t just functional, it also makes you feel more creative) and elegant. And when it comes to marketing our products, make our communications short, sweet and swallowable (not something that the HE sector is particularly good at I’m afraid). He also encourages doing a ‘pre-morterm’ to pretend that your product has failed, brainstorm all the likely reasons why, and then eliminate them one by one.

4. Launch
Tell a story. Give it the human angle (see part 1 of today’s blog posts from SXSW on this very subject). Remember that these days nobodies are the new somebodies. Anyone can be an influencer for your brand and the success of your project so you need to be engaging with all of them, not just the editors of the big newspapers (though they remain important). Talk about your product in ways that people can understand. Don’t just focus on the score from the student satisfaction survey – put it into a story, make it real for them…

5. Overcome
Overcome resistance. Think about how you can provide social proof that your product is great and used by many (Kawasaki here used the example of the proliferation of white ear-buds when the iPod launched). Enchant all of the influencers along the way, not just the top bosses. For university decision making this therefore might not just be the student themselves and their parents, but it might also be grandparents or friends, or just someone they happen to listen to (and trust) online…

6. Endure
Don’t use or rely on money in order to ‘sell’ your product. If you pay someone commission or an affiliate fee for selling a product, people are less likely to trust them in this transaction. And invoke reciprocity: when someone says thank you, don’t say “you’re welcome”, say “I know you’d to the same for me”. And let them pay you back for things that you do for them: it makes them feel good and keeps the relationship of reciprocity going…

7. Present
Great enchanters know how to present. Customise the introduction to your audience. Sell your dream ie Steve Jobs pitches iPhones as a lifestyle item, not a sum of parts.

8. Use technology
Use technology as an enabler, not a barrier. Remove all technology barriers. Technology should enhance the experience and provide added value to your audience. If you use your social media presence to provide information, insights or assistance, then you will make yourself enchanting. Engage with people. Engage fast, and engage with many people (not just the ones you think are important). Engage often – social media is not the thing to do whenever everything else is done, it should be embedded in your ongoing communications.

9. Enchant up
Always enchant the people that you work for: if your boss wants you to do something, then drop everything else to do it. And prototype fast: if your boss asks you to deliver a powerpoint presentation for them to present from in 3 days time, send them a rough outline within an hour.
And always deliver bad news early and with solutions.

10. Enchant down
Enchant those who work for you. Above all else never ask anyone to do anything that you’re not prepared to do yourself. Enable them to master new skills, work autonomously, and give them a sense of purpose. Empower them.

I’ve barely done Guy Kawasaki’s talk any justice at all in this blog post. It’s very much a summary of the points he covered, and I’m sure nobody communicates these points better than he, so you might be better off buying the book.

A question that I increasingly come up against now as I go out and run workshops for HEIs on social media strategy and implementation is how to monitor your online reputation. There are a number of free tools available to do this now, all with their limitations, and increasingly more and more subscription services that offer sophisticated solutions but again come with limitations. This morning I spotted a note on the CIM HE Marketing Group on LinkedIn informing members of a new service developed by ESISS that is specifically designed to monitor online reputation of HEIs. The service costs £3000 per year and they’re offering a two-week free trial.

The pricing is fairly competitive, I believe, with other paid-for services but at first glance of their description of the service I too would say it comes with its limitations. Firstly, their list of sites monitored sounds limited (Google Searches, Twitter, Facebook, Bebo, Blogosphere, News Sites, Wikipedia, TheStudentRoom, WhatUni, RateMyProfessor, IRC/IRQ, Graduate
Jobs Forum and eBay). It may be the case, however, that they just don’t list everything on their marketing materials but if this is the complete list, it is fairly restricted. I also worry that the weekly summary reports will result in customers just relying on those for their updates and not making the effort to check updates more regularly. A lot of damage can be done online in the short space of 7 days, so monitoring really needs to be done daily. Finally, they also claim that the service ‘categorises the reputational risk automatically on behalf of the organisation’. This sounds to be to an attempt at automatic sentiment analysis, but as this Fresh Networks review of paid-for social media monitoring tools revealed, automatic sentiment analysis is not particularly reliable, and a human-approach is very much required too. There could be a danger of relying on such services that you’ll miss an emerging crisis, or an excellent opportunity because an automatic system has categorised it incorrectly.

Now, of course, I’m saying all of this without actually trialling the tool so I’m very interested to hear from anyone who is trialling it. The plus points for the tool are that it monitors some networks that are very specific to HE (thestudentroom, for example) that other monitoring sites may miss, it enables translations of mentions of your brand in foreign languages, and it does allow for some benchmarking too. I’m very much looking forward to hearing of others experiences of using this tool or others on the market.