Category: higher education

Big brand social media blunders and lessons for #highered

shocked business woman“The bigger they are, the harder they fall” is an adage that seems to hold true for big brands in social media these days. When big brands mishandle a situation in the social media sphere, the fallout can be significant for the companies.

But these failures hold valuable lessons for us in higher ed social media work. These situations, as they become magnified and amplified into full-blown crises by social media’s “Ever-Shifting Mob” (fellow higher ed blogger Dennis Miller‘s apt description), should serve as cautionary tales for all of us who deal with social media in the higher education.

Brandchannel recently dissected two recent big brand blunders:

  • The Applebee’s firestorm that occurred after the company fired a waitress for posting a photo of a receipt from a pastor who wrote on the bill, “”I give God 10% why do you get 18”; and
  • The out-of-control Twitter chatter that occurred in the UK when struggling music retailer HMV announced layoffs, which one of its social media managers live-tweeted.

(Hat tip to Kary Delaria, @KaryD, for sharing the Brandchannel post via Twitter.)

Social media and PR, integrated

Both situations contain important lessons about the importance of integrating social media and public relations functions during a crisis. But there are other issues at play here:

  • Respond quickly but thoughtfully. Speaking to Brandchannel, SHIFT Communications CEO Todd Defren advises to “respond immediately to show you’re listening, but that needn’t mean falling on the sword. Most reasonable folks just need to know you’re aware and pondering vs. reacting thoughtlessly. ‘We hear you and we’re thinking this through. We’ll get back to you’ is a placeholder for sanity.”
  • Manage your social media presence. A no-brainer, right? But the ultimate failure in both situations was a lack of organizational structure for handling a brewing social media crisis. “Crisis communications in social should be planning like a PR crisis: there should be both preparation and response,” Teresa Caro of Enguage told Brandchannel. “[B]rands must have an upfront plan that anticipates a reaction.”
  • Be transparent. It’s cliche, but true. “The essence of a strong relationship with customers is transparency,” said Frederick Felman, CMO of MarkMonitor. “In the case of a faux pas, do the right thing – acknowledge the issue and engage in sincere and honest dialog with the community.”

All great advice. But much of it boils down to 1.) integrating social and PR functions for any organization, 2.) planning and preparing for the inevitable social media dust-up, and 3.) management training and empowering the PR and social media team to respond in real time.

A year ago, I wrote about how the PR and social media functions in higher education should be integrated at all times — not just during a crisis situation. Maybe it’s time to revisit that topic for further discussion, and to see how far higher ed has come in a year.

P.S. – Another post worth reading on one of these crises is Dennis Miller’s A tip for Applebee’s. A higher ed PR veteran, Miller offers some good thoughts on how that corporation and its “sadly under-prepared management” might have handled the situation better.

Image courtesy of © Dead_morozzzka | Stock Free Images & Dreamstime Stock Photos

Constraints and creativity

Disturbed young manI recently read a Harvard Business Review article called “Why Innovators Love Constraints.” (Thanks to our university’s chancellor, Cheryl B. Schrader [@SandTChancellor], for tweeting the link.) The author, Whitney Johnson, summarizes the virtues of working within defined parameters — primarily, that constraints can drive, rather than inhibit, creativity and innovation.

Her suggestion may seem counterintuitive to those of us who believe free reign is required for creativity. But Johnson is right. The more constraints applied to a situation, the more creative we must become to find a solution. As Johnson puts it:

A tightly-lidded box can stifle and suffocate. It can motivate us to figure out how get outside the box. To make choices about how we will expend the resources we do have available to us, to find cheaper, more nimble ways of doing something as a person – and as a corporation. Our perceived limitations may give us direction on where we might play, or want to play. Indeed, if we will let them, constraints can (and will) drive us to disruption.

Constraints can drive creativity. When we think about creative geniuses — Picasso, for example, or e.e. cummings or Quentin Tarantino — we think about their breakthroughs or breakaways from conventional methods. But they still had constraints. Picasso still had the canvas, cummings the blank paper, Tarantino the camera. But they worked within those constraints to create a new approach.

Twitter is a great example of a medium that constrains us. Within the span of 140 characters, we must compose a thought, a comment, a reaction, a response.

As a result, we have people like Tim Siedell (@badbanana), who routinely serves up gems like this:

And this acerbic bit, after Budweiser’s baby Clydesdale Super Bowl commercial that had everyone sniffling:

I’m not suggesting that Siedell is the Picasso of Twitter. But he’s pretty damn clever, and just about every tweet of his that I read gets me chortling. He’s figured out how to work within the constraints of the medium, just as Picasso did with visual art.

“When it comes to writing, or building a business, we may chafe against constraints, imposed or otherwise,” Johnson writes. “But without any constraints, we are creating ex nihilo, and can easily lose our way. Paradoxically then, a constraint can become a tool of creation.”

Haiku (the 5/7/5 syllable constraint). Limericks. Music (only seven notes to work with). All are constrained. Yet when creative minds accept and work within those constraints, they can create beauty, or at least (with limericks) a laugh or a smile.

Based on this principle, it seems that higher education, which faces many constraints (budgetary, regulatory, infrastructure, and so on), should be ripe for innovation. The challenge, as I see it, is that higher education (in general terms) has been allowed to function with relatively few constraints over the years. When you’ve been given a lot of latitude and freedom for a long time, you may tend to have less incentive to innovate.

But as we know, times are a-changin’ in higher ed. It’s time for creativity and innovation to happen. And it can happen, if we recognize and accept those constraints for what they are and figure out how to innovate within those parameters.

For some ideas on what’s already happening in the realm of technology in higher ed — and no, this is not another MOOCs post — take a look at this top 10 list of the most innovative approaches to technology, as judged by CampusTechnology.com. (Hat tip to Mark Greenfield [@markgr] for sharing this.) Take note of the creative ways in which these campuses are dealing with technology and learning issues.

Image courtesy © Rookcreations | Stock Free Images &Dreamstime Stock Photos.