Category: social networking

CASE joins the social media blogosphere

The Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) has launched a new blog devoted to “exploring trends and best practices in the use of social media in educational advancement,” according to the blog’s inaugural post.

The CASE Social Media Blog is the outcome of a CASE task force led by two CASE commission members — Kim Manning, who chairs the CASE Commission on Communications and Marketing, and Andy Shaindlin (he of Alumni Futures fame), chair of the CASE Commission on Alumni Relations. Those two have handed off the task force work to Charlie Melichar of Vanderbilt University and Andrew Gossen of Cornell. Charlie and Andrew have already loaded up a few good posts on the nascent blog.

I’m not sure the world really needs yet another blog about social media in educational marketing (or, more broadly, institutional advancement), but I’m glad to see CASE getting into this realm. CASE is a well-established organization, and with this blog, combined with the social media task force’s other work (articles for CASE Currents magazine, white papers, etc.), the organization may be able to reach a different segment of the higher ed community than current higher ed blogs. I hope they devote to this initiative the resources and energy it will need to become a success.

Higher ed and social media: the survey says…

Last week, Michael Stoner and Cheryl Slover-Linett, the managing partner of Slover Linett Strategies, presented the high-level results of a study they conducted on the use of social media among higher ed marketing types. Michael shares some background on the study, and a PDF of the results, on his blog. InsideHigherEd.com also reported on some of the findings, which were shared last week at the CASE Annual Assembly in New York. About 1,000 CASE members completed the survey.

Among the findings:

  • Facebook is tops. This is probably no surprise to anyone. Ninety-four percent of respondents reported their their organizations have a presence on Facebook.
  • Multiple media. Most respondents reported using multiple forms of social media. After Facebook, the most popular tools are Twitter (67 percent), LinkedIn (61 percent) and YouTube (59 percent).
  • Engage and build the brand. The top reasons cited for using social media were to “Engage alumni,” “Create, sustain, and improve brand image” and “Increase awareness/advocacy/rankings.”
  • Social media success. Most respondents perceived their use of social media positively, gauging it as either “somewhat successful” (64 percent) or “very successful” (20 percent). Only 11 percent said their social media efforts were “not very successful” and 2 percent “not at all successful.”

There’s much more to come from this survey. Michael indicates that he plans to publish a white paper pulling from the results sometime this fall, and to present a webinar with InsideHigherEd.com. So stay tuned.