February 2014 – Andrew Careaga

What’s the frequency, Twitter?

I guess by now we’re all aware that with Twitter, the more frequently we post, the greater the opportunity that our posts will be seen and acted upon.

But how much is too much?

This is something I’ve thought about since Guy Kawasaki brought it to my attention back in 2009. (See my post, To drive traffic, tweet and repeat, about Kawasaki’s test of tweet frequency.)

I’ve also worried about this idea of frequent and repeat tweeting. Like every other blogger with a PR or marketing background, I want to drive traffic to this blog. One way I do this is by sharing links to my blog posts on Twitter. I usually repeat the post a couple or three times, and generally I tweak the wording a bit in an effort to appear somewhat less lazy than a guy who automates tweets to churn them out at regular intervals. I don’t think I tweet too much. But I can’t help but wonder whether others see my approach to repeat tweets as obnoxious or spammy. I wonder whether followers ever notice those repeat tweets, and whether they think I’m posting too much about my own content.

When Kawasaki ran his experiment in 2009, he put eight hours of time between each repeat tweet. (He scheduled four identical tweets over 24 hours, then reported his results.) But a new experiment by Jade Furubayashi of SimplyMeasured makes Kawasaki’s test appear to be a model of restraint.

Furubayashi tweeted for one week in 15-minute increments, and another week in 30-minute increments. Her results showed that the more frequent the tweets, the greater the traffic from Twitter to her website.

So, frequent tweeting seems to drive web traffic.

But one item not addressed in Furubayashi’s experiment (and an issue raised in the comments to her post) has to do with the content of the tweet. Which also has to do with the headline or description used. (More about that in a previous post.)

What do you think? What’s the sweet spot for tweet frequency?

Image: Twittering Tweets Mural by cobalt123 on Flickr.

A thumb’s up for ‘Generation Like’

I just finished watching the PBS Frontline documentary Generation Like. Here’s the trailer:

Generation Like is the latest project by author and mediasphere commentator Douglas Rushkoff, and if you have an hour to spare I think you’ll find it worth watching. Anyone who’s interested in a better understanding of how today’s adolescents — tomorrow’s college students — are coming of age in such a rich digital-media environment ought to watch at least some of this video.

The premise of this documentary, in Rushkoff’s own words (around the 5:48 mark), is that “likes, follows, friends, retweets — they’re the social currency of this generation.” And that social currency can translate into actual currency for many corporations. Generation Like, says Rushkoff on his website, “explores how the perennial teen quest for identity and connection has migrated to social media — and exposes the game of cat-and-mouse that corporations are playing with these young consumers.”

I’m still trying to process what Rushkoff’s documentary all means for higher education — from a branding and marketing standpoint as well as from the perspective of our educational missions — so I don’t have much commentary to add at the moment. I will say that some of the concerns expressed in the film will probably turn out to be overblown. That’s typically the case with documentaries that try to critique or analyze a cultural shift as the shift is happening. It’s like trying to analyze the damage of an earthquake while the ground is still shaking. But this seemingly insatiable hunger for likes and recognition in the digital sphere does have major implications for how adolescents are marketed to — and how they can become brand ambassadors for those entities they “like” in the social sphere.

I think this program offers some valuable perspectives for those of who are responsible for communicating with future college students. They, like us, are affected by the culture around them, and their quest for identity is being affected by the digital world. And as one corporate marketer interviewed by Rushkoff says, “To stand on the sidelines is not an option.”

(Hat tip to Kevin Wood for pointing me to Mitch Joel’s post about Generation Like.)

Friday Five: Social media and student recruitment, according to #SocAdm14

This week’s Friday Five comes to you thanks to Mallory Wood of mStoner, who recently shared (via mStoner’s “Intelligence” e-newsletter) some key points from the 2014 Social Admissions Report from Chegg, Zinch and Uversity. In her email, Mallory shares five great data points from the research, all of which support her assertion that admissions marketers should “put your visitors (prospective students) in direct contact with current students, other admitted students, and admission counselors” through your social media channels, rather than trying to mediate the relationship through more traditional PR and marketing approaches like “second-hand stories and student testimonials.”

From the #SocAdm14 report: How often prospective students report using various social media platforms. Instagram and Twitter come out on top. LinkedIn and Snapchat are practically irrelevant. — From the #SocAdm14 report: How often prospective students report using various social media platforms. Use of Instagram exploded between 2012 and 2013.

But it would be too easy to merely repost mStoner’s five points. So I dug into the data to bring you five other interesting takeaways from that report. As for mStoner’s five takeaways, they’re embedded in this post by Michael Stoner, who got a sneak peek at the data prior to release. (He has connections.) But you should also sign up for mStoner’s Intelligence newsletter so you don’t miss out next time. That’s the intelligent thing to do.

Key takeaways: 2014 Social Admissions Report

Prospective students are connecting to your institution on social media. The percentage of students who follow official social media accounts grew by nearly 47 percent between 2012 and 2013 (from 49 percent to 72 percent). That would suggest that your official social media presence is important for student recruitment.
They’re checking you out on mobile, too. Ninety-seven percent of the prospective students surveyed for this report say they’ve looked at a college or university’s website on a smartphone or tablet. (OK, I did re-use one of Mallory’s bullet points. But it was worth repeating.) As the report says, “Mobile is not the future. Mobile is now.”
McKayla Maroney makes a cameo appearance in the report.

But they are not impressed. According to this research, nearly two-thirds of those students who viewed our websites on mobile devices said the experience was “OK” at best or “challenging.”
Ditch the mobile app. Three-quarters of the students said they wouldn’t download an app for a school they were researching. So don’t bother.
They’d rather talk to students and counselors. Nearly three-quarters of students (74 percent) surveyed said it was either important or very important for them to talk to currently enrolled students in social media. Sixty-nine percent said the same about admissions counselors. They don’t care that much about talking to faculty, alumni or administrators.

Want to talk about this research on Twitter? Or see what others are saying about it? Use the hashtag #SocAdm14.

Coming soon: CASE marketing and branding conference #CASEACMB

The CASE Annual Conference on Marketing and Branding is coming to Baltimore, Md., April 30-May 2, 2014.

Keep your eyes peeled for a postcard (like the one pictured) from CASE announcing this year’s CASE Annual Conference on Marketing and Branding. If you’re involved in marketing or branding for your institution, you won’t want to miss this conference.

Led by the illustrious Rachel Reuben (@RachelReuben), associate VP for marketing communications at Ithaca College, this conference promises to be a terrific opportunity for anyone wanting to learn from some great higher ed marketing and branding pros.

I’m fortunate to be a part of the faculty for this conference, which is scheduled for April 30-May 2 in Baltimore, Maryland. Joining Rachel and me are three more exceptional marketing and branding pros:

Charlie Melichar, senior consultant in strategic communications at Marts & Lundy and formerly with Vanderbilt University and Colgate University. I’ve worked with this great presenter in the past, and look forward to working with him again.
Jason Simon, who recently joined SimpsonScarborough as a VP and partner after serving as executive director of marketing communications for the University of California System. He previously held a similar position at North Carolina State University.
Heather Swain, the VP for communication and brand strategy at Michigan State University. A member of Michigan State’s staff since 2006, she previously work in communications at Ball State University.

Check out the program. We’ll be covering a broad range of relevant topics — from launching a new brand identity, measuring success and using storytelling in your marketing to advertising strategies and keeping your brand vibrant beyond the launch, and more. So sign up for this great opportunity. I hope to see you there.

You probably think this blog is about you

I was flipping through radio stations the other day when Carly Simon’s early 1970s hit “You’re So Vain” came on. It’s the song that propelled her to superstardom. And it’s a song I’ve heard millions of times, but not for a long time, and on this day, for some reason — maybe because I was by myself and driving a familiar route, so my mind was reasonably undistracted — I paid more attention to it than I normally would.

It amused me to listen to it. Carly Simon’s vocals are so heartfelt, but her delivery and the lyrics come across as somehow more mean-spirited today than I remembered it. Her words and delivery are vitriolic and essentially spewed out in a controlled seethe, directed at this unnamed perpetrator of vanity, who we all know by now was probably Warren Beatty, or possibly Mick Jagger, David Bowie or Cat Stevens, but definitely not James Taylor, who was her husband at the time. She’s clearly angry about this Lear jet-flying, apricot-tie-wearing offender.

Later on, as I reflected on my reaction to “You’re So Vain,” I thought about a track from the latest album by the Avett Brothers (The Magpie and the Dandelion) that deals with the same subject: vanity. In fact, that’s the name of the song: “Vanity.”

Despite the common connection of theme, these two tunes are as different from each other as the era in which they were born.

Carly Simon’s song came out in 1972, an era when obsession with celebrity and fame was still more or less mediated by the entertainment media of that time and The National Enquirer. And she sat in judgment of another person’s vanity.

The Avetts wrote their song in the era of the selfie. The vanity they write about is their own, not another person’s.

I’ve got something to say

But it’s all vanity, it’s all vanity

I found a tune I could play

But it’s all vanity, it’s all vanity

The Avetts aren’t directing any anger outwardly. They’re reflecting on their world and singing introspectively, while echoing the ancient opening words of the Book of Ecclesiastes.

The vanity they sing about is that of the Internet age. It is theirs, and ours, and maybe even Carly Simon’s. We’re all so vain. Especially those of us who post and blog day in and day out. Look what I wrote! Look what I’m sharing! Check out this video I found!

But at least we’re not angry about it.

You probably think this blog is about you. But, really, it’s all about me.