andrewcareaga

Last spring, it was Education Dive’s list of the top university Twitter accounts, as determined by Klout score, number of followers and some kind of secret “subjective appraisal.” (I groused enough about that shoddy methodology last spring, so no need to rehash it here and now. The links are there if you want to revisit it.)

Now comes something via the Huffington Post called The Top 100 Best and Most Collaborative U.S. Colleges. And, just like Ed Dive’s approach with Twitter, this ranking’s methodology does not pass muster on many levels.

Once again, there’s a heavy reliance on an institution’s social media Klout score. As if that weren’t enough to raise skepticism, it relies on another ranking — one that is well-established but that comes under fire year in and year out: the U.S. News & World Report listing of the best colleges and universities.

HuffPo contributor Vala Afshar, who compiled the ranking, used this formula:
Pick the top 100 colleges and universities listed in the U.S. News & World Report ranking of national universities.
Look at their Klout and Kred scores.
Rerank the U.S. News & World Report top 100 by those social media influence scores.
Create an infographic that claims: “The very best schools are the most social schools.”

So. Where to begin the critique?

Let’s start with Klout and Kred. These tools are supposed to measure the influence of a social media user. And it may be true that individuals with high Klout and Kred scores may be more influential than those with lower scores, as this more or less balanced article suggests, I’m not too familiar with Kred, but I think Klout is designed for the individual, because it offers rewards from brands to those who attain certain scores and levels of activity. Chris Syme calls the Klout score an “ego metric” (see her comment on this post from a couple of years ago), and I agree. Aliza Sherman, in the article I cite earlier in this paragraph, says:

A high Klout score is like a Maserati or whatever the cool car of the day might be. It’s fun to flash around, but at the end of the day, it isn’t practical.

So I don’t think these vanity metric tools carry much clout or cred.

And what about the U.S. News & World Report rankings?

First of all, Afshar only looked at the top 100 national universities. U.S. News ranks many other types of schools — regional colleges, liberal arts schools, specialty schools, etc. So by limiting only to national universities — all Ph.D.-granting — Afshar excludes many from his list. For example, Williams College was ranked the top liberal arts institution by U.S. News, and it has a pretty impressive Klout score of 85. Meanwhile, one of U.S. News‘ top national universities, the Colorado School of Mines, was ranked No. 100 on Afshar’s “most social” list with a Klout score of 57.

So if you’re going to use Klout as a metric, don’t penalize ostensibly social media-savvy schools just because they’re not in the “national” category.

Finally, Afshar’s ranking suggests that an institution’s high rank in social media equates to high levels of collaboration. I don’t buy it — for the same reasons I didn’t buy Ed Dive’s list of the best higher ed Twitter accounts last spring. Look at several of the schools on either list, and you’ll see that much of the communication is one-way. That doesn’t sound very collaborative to me.

One commenter on the HuffPo site wrote, “[I]f you calculate the correlation between U.S. News ranking and your social rank, you get a coefficient of around .32, which indicates a weak to middling relationship. In other words, it is difficult to make the claim that ‘the very best schools are also the most collaborative.'”

Difficult, yes. But as we tend to see more often these days, not impossible.

Brand building is boring work. What works best is absolute consistency over an extended period of time.

Al Ries and Laura Ries, The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding

The Rieses are right. Building a brand can be tedious work.

And who likes tedious? Certainly not creative people like us, right? We want variety. We want new.

And certainly not academic schools, departments, research centers or programs that want to do their own thing — “make a big splash!” — rather than stick with the university brand.

Tim Nekritz wrote about this issue recently. He describes it as a personal branding issue. Which it certainly is. Personal branding applied to academic programs is a new twist, and one I hadn’t thought about before Tim wrote about it.

But this issue of everyone wanting his or her own brand — of every department, every program, every student group, every sports program — is even more deeply entrenched in our culture. Because it’s embedded in our human nature.

We humans are easily bored.

We get tired of the same old thing. We crave something new.

Think about it. What graphic designer would be content to merely enforce an institution’s graphic identity standards, day in and day out, without desiring a more creative outlet of some sort? That’s why they’re doing freelance work at 1 in the morning. (More about that in this infographic. But I digress.)

The most successful brands are those that find a distinctive niche in the marketplace and stick with it. Which means they must be consistent — in their messaging and identity. Even established brands, when they make changes, are most successful when those changes are not jarring to the customers. (Contrast Starbucks’ successful minor tweaking of its graphic identity in 2011 with the great Gap logo debacle of 2010.)

One of the key takeaways from the recent CASE Summit, which I wrote about in my previous post, was “routine matters.” People notice the regular, not the irregular. This applies to the world of branding as much as it applies to our behavior.

Safe sports cars?

Or consider an example from Al and Laura Ries in The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding.

“Volvo has been selling safety for thirty-five years,” write Al and Laura Ries. (My edition of this book was published in 2002, so tack on another 11 years to that figure.) And selling safety has worked for Volvo. Even when Consumer Reports ranks some other make and model as the safest brand, Volvo is usually perceived as the standard for safety.

But “every once in a while,” the Rieses write, “someone at a company like Volvo gets a bright idea. ‘Why should we limit ourselves to dull, boring, safe sedans? Why don’t we branch out into exciting sports cars?'”

A Volvo sports car? (Yes, there is such a thing. To Volvo’s credit, they stick with their brand messaging, pointing out that the C30 Sports Coupe provides “large car safety in a smaller package.” Still, I’m not sure the two ideas — safety and sports cars — go together so well. I agree with the Rieses here. Volvo has diluted its brand by expanding into the sports car line.)

The higher ed example

Let’s apply this principle to higher education. The president of a liberal arts college decides it should add engineering programs, because STEM is all the rage. I think we see some schools jumping on the MOOCs bandwagon because they’re either 1.) afraid they’ll miss out on a hot trend or 2.) wanting to be perceived as a leader in the brave new world of higher education. But does the question ever occur to them: Will this dilute our brand?

“You should limit your brand,” advise the Rieses. “Your brand has to stand for something both simple and narrow in the mind. This limitation is the essential part of the branding process.”

Maybe that’s why colleges and universities have such a tough time with branding. They don’t like the idea of limiting themselves. That’s just human nature.

But “Limitation combined with consistency (over decades, not years) is what builds a brand,” say the Rieses.

Decades, you say? That’s a long time to be doing boring brand work.

But if we stick with it, it will pay off.

Author: andrewcareaga

Boring old brand-building

Brand building is boring work. What works best is absolute consistency over an extended period of time.

Safe sports cars?

The higher ed example