August 2011 – Andrew Careaga

Marketing stars and stalwarts

I read with interest this Harvard Business Review blog post about an overlooked but very important segment of any organization’s work force. (Hat tip: BoingBoing.) The author, Thomas J. DeLong, who is a professor of management practice and organizational behavior, calls these employees the “stalwarts” of the work force. Not a very sexy name — certainly not on the level of “rock star” — but typical stalwart traits like reliability, steadiness and loyalty are rarely seen as sexy.

Yet, without Stalwarts (DeLong capitalizes the term), organizations would not function so smoothly. These are the “good, solid citizens of the organization” who “largely go unnoticed.”

“They are like the proverbial wheel that never squeaks — and, consequently, gets no grease,” DeLong writes. They also tend to be tremendously loyal, responsible employees who “care deeply about the organization’s values.” They “are intrinsically motivated by the service they can render for the good of the organization. … They feel that they have accomplished something if the company is running like a well-oiled machine.”

You probably work with a few stalwarts. Maybe you are one. In the higher ed marketing field — probably in all of marketing — I suspect the stalwarts don’t get much respect from management.

We tend to do a lot of care and feeding of the so-called stars (this is even more true on the academic side). Not so with the stalwarts. Again, as DeLong puts it, they never get greased because they aren’t complaining. They aren’t the high-maintenance superstars. They aren’t out there in social media trying to develop their personal brand. They’re doing the unglamorous work that keeps the organization humming along.

They’re writing the press releases about local events or student awards — the stories that have no chance of attracting any national or even regional media attention.

They’re creating the code that keeps the university website humming.

They’re managing your calendars, screening your calls, keeping the vendors at bay.

They’re responding to tweets and Facebook posts on behalf of your campus, and in so doing keeping the very vital conversations alive with important segments of your constituents. (Fellow higher ed blogger Tim Nekritz posted some very good thoughts about this recently.)

They’re the stalwarts. And as Professor DeLong has reminded me with his post, I need to reexamine how I think about these folks and their contributions to our department, our university and my own success as a manager. More importantly, I need to do a better job of expressing appreciation for their work.

Remember, not every rock band is made up of rock stars. Sure, you’ve heard of Elvis Costello. But where would he be without the Attractions? And how many Attractions can you name?

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Image: Rock Star Parking, by Torley via Flickr.

Friday Five: What you read here and why

Decided to look at some data for this blog over the past year to find out which posts seem to be of most interest to you readers and, even more important, why.

Like most niche blogs, this one has a very specific target audience — the online community of people working in higher ed marketing, PR and web — so numbers alone won’t tell the story of why certain posts generate more interest than others. But the numbers are an indicator.

Below are the five posts that received the most pageviews between Aug. 24, 2010, and Aug. 24, 2011, and my thoughts about why these posts were the most popular:

1. Friday Five: A blatant appeal for help (off-topic), from Oct. 1, 2010. This post was an effort to help raise money for a co-worker who was struggling to make ends meet due to costs associated with her daughter’s cancer treatments. So many of you responded to this appeal with contributions to the cause. Thank you.

Why (I think) you read it: The post was a compelling story, aided by a photo of the cute little girl who was undergoing cancer treatment. (That’s her on the left. See? Cute.) Unlike many of the topics I write about on this blog, this one had a strong human element, and many of you could relate. I also actively promoted this post via Twitter, Facebook and email, and as I updated the post with new news about funds raised, I tweeted about it even more. And many of you retweeted the story. So, the heavy promotion obviously helped. That’s one lesson I learned from Dan Zarrella during last June’s Lawlor Group workshop, which I also blogged about: It’s OK to promote, as long as you don’t overdo it. I probably came close to overdoing it in this case, but because I was tweeting for a good cause and not just to promote my own stuff, you were very forgiving. And very generous.

2. Friday Five: Lessons from a crisis, from May 12, 2011. This post, a quick summary of lessons learned right after a shooter incident on campus last spring, resonated with many readers and was retweeted for weeks afterward.

Why (I think) you read it: A shooter on campus is big, scary news in the higher ed PR community. People want to know how a campus dealt with the crisis. Our successful use of social media during the crisis added a novel twist to this story. This content — a combination of case study and lessons learned — held natural appeal for a big segment of this blog’s audience. (Over the past several months, social media and crisis communication has been the subject of posts by other higher ed blogs, including .eduGuru, HigherEdLive and, most recently, meetcontent.)

3. Why researchers should blog, from Nov. 26, 2010. This piece was inspired by a post by Peter Janiszewski, a health sciences researcher at Queens University. His post, titled Why all scientists should blog: a case study, presents a compelling case for using blogging as a vehicle for getting research ideas out to the online world.

Why (I think) you read it: This post got a lot of help from Peter Janiszewski and the audience of his own blog, Science of Blogging. It also benefited from tweets and retweets by a whole slew of Canadians, who seemed to appreciate the fact that I reached across the border to talk about the work of one of their own. One of the beautiful things about the Internet is its ability to break down barriers of nations. Here’s one small case where that worked.

4. Infographic of the day: the social media triage, from April 15, 2010. This post, though over 16 months old, still managed to generate interest over the past year — perhaps because it presents a useful and handy flow chart for social media managers.

Why (I think) you read it: It was short and useful.

5. Friday Five: why colleges and universities should blog (part 1), from April 1, 2011. This, the first post in a three-part series, was one created with a lot of help from my friends in the higher ed blogosphere. For this series, I solicited input from many of you, and you responded with information that proved to be of interest to this blog’s readership.

Why (I think) you read it: Many of the bloggers who were quoted in this post also helped to promote it via Twitter. The cross-linking from my blog post to their sites also helped. Again, an instance where cross-promotion and collaboration paid off.

Incidentally, each of the top five posts were close to the average or above the average in terms of average time on site. (The average for the year was 3:14, and the average for the top five posts ranged from 3:06 to 4:42.)

Gaining traction with social media

At the university where I work, we’ve been involved in the social media channels of Facebook and Twitter since 2007. But it wasn’t until this past weekend, as freshmen were moving into their rooms and Greek housing, that the level of engagement with our audiences on social media started to reach a point that I would consider critical mass in the sociodynamic sense.

OK, that may be a bit hyperbolic. Maybe “critical mass” is the wrong term. But the levels and quality of social media activity between our university and our audiences seems to be increasing.

Maybe it’s just that normal activity has resumed on social networks following a summer lull. But when I look at the data, I see indicators of increased engagement.

Facebook interactions and activity has been on the rise in terms of daily, weekly and monthly active users, likes and interactions (comments).

Twitter activity has also been on the uptick, with significant growth over the past three months (see chart below) and more interaction with followers, including retweets.

MissouriSandT Twitter Counter

I’m not sure what this means — yet. It could be that students, alumni and other target audiences are becoming more comfortable with the main social media tools as a means for interacting with colleges and universities. This rise in acceptance and activity would be consistent with the findings of the Pew Internet and American Life Project and others. (See Pew’s findings on social networking sites and our lives.)

It could also mean that the steady, persistent use of social media by campuses is starting to pay off. This would lend credibility to the argument that social media is not a quick fix, and that colleges and universities should not expect instant results from their efforts. This also suggests that consistent and persistent engagement in social media by an organization — university, business, non-profit, individual — will yield dividends over the long haul.

Whatever it means, it’s an exciting time to be involved in social media marketing/communication in higher ed.

As a new school year begins, what are you seeing with your social media efforts?

Measuring what works in social media

A recent post by Karine Joly, titled Why #highered is NOT there yet with social media marketing, took a skeptical but realistic look at some reported results about the state of social media in higher ed.

Delving into the UMass Dartmouth study on social media adoption in higher education — which shows what most of us assumed anyway: practically every college and university everywhere is using social media in some form — Karine compares some of those findings with the results of a couple of other studies on social media in higher ed. Her analysis suggests that all may not be so hunky dory in our social media world.

Just because survey respondents report that their social media efforts are successful doesn’t necessarily make it so.

Yes, the UMass Dartmouth study reports, “respondents have consistently raved about their [social media] experience, especially Facebook (95% success) and YouTube (92%).” But as the original .eduGuru Kyle James points out in his summary of the study, measurement is sorely lacking. “The only surprising negative,” Kyle wrote, “was that only 68% are listening to what is being said about them online by monitoring the internet for news, conversations or buzz about their institutions.”

How can you declare victory in the social media sphere when you aren’t paying attention to what is being said about your institution there? That is a problem.

KPIs to the rescue

All of this data leads Karine to conclude that there is “a real need to go beyond the ‘social media checklist’ tactic and adopt a more strategic and measurable approach in higher education.” I agree. I suspect many of you do, too, judging from the comments on Karine’s blog post. I know Michelle Sargent does. She nails it with her response to Karine’s post: “The focus needs to be on how this compares with business analytics and KPIs. We need to always be exploring and investigating previous business performance to understand what it is we want to achieve through future strategies.”

KPIs, or “key performance indicators,” are sorely lacking in our business. But we could learn from other sectors and apply their social media KPIs to our efforts.

According to another recent study (there sure are a lot of people studying social media these days), marketers in the tech, media/entertainment, and utilities and banking sectors have their favorite KPIs, many of which would be easy to follow in higher ed. The include some relatively easy KPIs, such as impressions and reach, social media “likes,” and microblogging (Twitter) followers, as well as more challenging or expensive to measure indicators, such as customer satisfaction scores and brand sentiment. Here’s a chart of most used KPIs from those sectors.

These KPIs are not necessarily a panacea, but perhaps this could be a place to start.

P.S. – Thanks to @azurecollier for pointing me to the eMarketer study about KPIs.
What KPIs do you use to measure your social media measurement and engagement?

The faculty strike back?

Back in my undergrad days, when Ronald Reagan was president and MTV played music videos, I thought college campuses were for the faculty, of the faculty and by the faculty. Little did I know that I and my classmates were witnessing a paradigm shift in higher education.

Today, the administrators are firmly in charge and the faculty have little say-so in governance.

That’s the view, anyway, expressed by political science professor Benjamin Ginsberg in a fascinating essay in The Scientist.

Ginsberg has been in academia for nearly five decades, so he has had a long-term, front-row view of this shift from faculty-centric university to the administrative-run model we have today. Not surprisingly, he takes a dim view of the new order of things.

The “ongoing transfer of power” from the faculty to administrators — as evidenced by the tremendous growth in administrative ranks since the mid-1990s — is a “troubling reality,” Ginsberg writes.

“On the surface,” he writes, “faculty members and administrators seem to share a general understanding of the university and its place in society. If asked to characterize the ‘mission’ of the university, both groups usually agree with the idea that the university is an institution that produces and disseminates knowledge through its teaching, research, and public outreach efforts.”

Beneath the surface, Ginsberg sees the new structure as one that allows administrators to “reward themselves and expand their own ranks” rather than invest in their institutions’ academic mission.

(Incidentally, the professor’s essay is based on his new book, The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters (affiliate link). The Scientist also provides a true excerpt from the chapter about teaching and doing research at the “all-administrative university.”)

While I take issue with Ginsberg’s cynical view of administrators — hey, what else would you expect from a mid-level marketing administrator like me? — I concede that he is probably half-right on some counts. Yes, the growth of administrators and professional staff has probably added to the cost of education. But the need for these additional staff roles is also a response to the changing marketplace of higher education. (Ginsberg would describe much of that response as “placating” students and their helicopter parents.) On a macro level, the student body is much more diverse today than it was when Ginsberg began his academic career — more diverse, even, than when I was a college student.

I also concede that his perspective is shared by many in academia and might gain currency with a public that is concerned over the rising costs of a college degree. It’s easy to take pot shots at the bloated bureaucracies of just about any campus, especially as tuition costs continue to rise.

It might gain currency, that is, if it were not coming from a college professor.

Let’s face it. College professors like Ginsberg have been the subject of many unfair caricatures long before academia became as administratively burdened as Ginsberg portrays it today. Who among us has never heard someone from outside academia complain about “lazy” faculty members who teach one or two classes a week, write a scholarly article or two a year on some esoteric (read: meaningless) topic, and do nothing of societal significance?

Besides, the public doesn’t distinguish between an executive vice president of academic affairs and an adjunct instructor of English. I doubt the public will sympathize much with a professor complaining about the academic administration.

What I find most interesting about Ginsberg’s essay is how he employs economic terms to describe the difference between faculty and administrative worldviews.

Faculty, Ginsberg writes, hold a “supply-side” view of the academic enterprise. Professors are “more concerned” than their administrative counterparts “with teaching topics they consider important than with placating students and other campus constituencies.”

On the demand side are the administrators, who, Ginsberg writes, “believe that a college curriculum should be heavily influenced, if not completely governed, by the interests and preferences of potential customers — the students, parents, and others who pay the bills.”

My perspective on Ginsberg’s take (disclaimer: I haven’t yet read his book) is that the faculty he describes are more concerned with “teaching for teaching’s sake” while administrators are focused on responding to market forces. But I hesitate to paint with as broad a brush as Ginsberg, because I know many faculty members who are sensitive to market concerns and respond quite well to them, while also managing to balance the demands of scholarship, research and teaching.

In Ginsberg’s view, the academic enterprise must be run either by the faculty (for the better) or the administration (for the worse). But in the real world, the best faculty and administrators are trying to navigate the academic enterprise in a new market-driven world, one in which the enterprise must meet the needs of consumers (students). The alternative will not be pretty.

Maybe Ginsberg wants to incite a faculty uprising against the administration to return the academic enterprise to some former glory, real or imagined, of one in which the professors ran things. But wouldn’t it be better to encourage faculty and administration to band together to meet the new challenges? The survival of higher education may depend on it.

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Related reading:

The Fall of the Faculty — from InsideHigherEd.com