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?
]]>A few months back I posed the question on this blog about how augmented reality (AR) might be able to enhance campus tours. I think the potential for this is huge. Today, however, having just been playing with the General Electric Company’s Smart Grid Augmented Reality programme I’m beginning to think that the potential for AR to really bridge that divide between the print prospectus and the online experience could be huge. What if you wave a department’s page from the print prospectus at your webcam, and it launches a range of videos from students in that department, welcoming you and sharing their experiences and telling you about the course? Or you wave the page telling you about student accommodation at your webcam and suddenly you’re launched into a virtual tour of the different student halls, and watching 360 degree animations of student rooms? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this and where you think this might go. Personally, I think it’s pretty exciting!
]]>It’s important that I keep aware of sites like this given that I work so closely with universities, and it’s always good to see if any of these have the potential to migrate to the UK. So, I clicked on the link to take a peek at the site and was greeted with a pop-up asking me for a username and password. Now, not only has this site had excellent coverage through Mashable, but according to some of the commments, it appears they have also appeared in the New York Times Magazine. So, why oh why would anyone get such great publicity and mess it up by having a site that doesn’t work just when thousands of people will attempt to visit it? I couldn’t resist but to express my opinions through the mashable blog post and my own blog.
There’s a key message here, and a real fundamental of good communications and PR practice, that if you are going to get some great publicity (and good on them for getting such great mentions) you really need to have everything else in place to back that up, such as a website that actually works otherwise all of that publicity will just go straight down the drain. Such a pity.
]]>I’ve been wondering over the past few months just how much consideration universities actually give to the international scene in social networking as opposed to thinking purely in terms of social networks that dominate in the UK or western world. For example in Asia Friendster is one of the most popular social networking sites, overshadowing both Facebook and MySpace quite considerably. QQ, Xianonei and 51.com are also dominant in the Asian market but barely heard of in the West. The language barriers make some of these sites inaccessible to the marketeers and communicators working in British universities, but if they are serious about continuing to engage with potential students in Asia, particularly China, then perhaps efforts should also be made to educate ourselves more in social networking spaces dominating other markets. Time is an issue, with many communications departments in British universities already stretched and undoubtedly struggling to keep up with the pace of technological change and online communications. I’d be delighted to lead some research into the potential for marcomms with non-English language social networks if there were a few universities out there that might be interested to get involved and back this.
This recent blog post on Venture Beat gives an insight into Friendster’s dominance in the Asia-Pacific region. This post from Read Write Web written in January 2008 might also provide useful background information to anyone looking to explore the social networking phenomenon in China and Asia.
]]>Let’s consider the application of this, for example, for a university. Say a prospective student tweets that they’re trying to find information on a particular course, or trying to find something out about your university. Perhaps that piece of information isn’t readily available online, or it is available but well hidden. That university could then respond by either quickly putting the relevant piece of information up on their site, and provide a link back to the person who tweeted in the first place, or by supplying the link to that person. Surely this is just basic social media monitoring that all universities and similar organisations should be doing, but perhaps don’t yet have the time and resources to manage.
]]>I have been involved in a number of conversations over the past couple of years with colleagues throughout the HE sector about hosting open days in Second Life. If truth be told, it’s a no-brainer and if the popularity of Second Life continues (and at this moment in time I’m not entirely sure where it is going) then all universities will begin to take this approach.
However, what worries me about the reports from LJMU is that the campus that they (or in this case some of their students) have created is not a true representation of the actual campus. Some of the buildings are virtual replicas, but others are reported to be fictional spaces that students would like to see built on their campus, such as halls of residence with their own swimming pools. Designed to be ‘talking points’ amongst the student amassadors and prospective students, I fear that with language barriers in place amongst even some of the best English-speaking prospective students from overseas, these fictional buildings could be mistaken by some as representations of real buildings and create a false reality.
If Second Life is to become a widely used tool for marketing universities to overseas students I think a few simple rules of best practice need to be observed by the creators of those virtual spaces: