Category: web 2.0

Guest post: Paul Redfern’s five principles for social media strategy

I’m pleased to kick off this week with the first guest post on this blog. It comes from Paul Redfern, director of web communications and electronic media at Gettysburg College. Thanks, Paul, for responding to my call for guest bloggers.

If you do a Google search for “social media and higher education” it returns over 23 million webpages. My copy of University Business magazine arrived today and there was an article on 10 Twitter Tips for Higher Education and Five Steps to Developing a Powerful Social Networking Strategy. Put in a conference presentation on social networking and it’s accepted (and you get a big crowd). If you keep your eyes open you can find a webinar almost once a month on the topic. Follow a few higher ed people on twitter and more often than not it’s the topic of conversation. Higher ed to our credit is trying to figure it out. Some have. Some have not. Some never will.

In the last year I have participated, commented, created, and tried to understand social media for my institution. I came up with the following five guiding principles for our strategy in the next year. Some of of our plans will create lots of engagement with our audiences. Some of them will flop miserably. If you are afraid to fail social media may not be for you.

Here are my five principles. What can you add?

  1. Each piece to the social media puzzle may be small but collectively they add up
  2. Social Media needs to be integrated into our traditional approach to communications and marketing
  3. Social Media is word of mouth marketing for prospective and current students as well as recent graduates
  4. We do not have control of the message and we can take advantage of that fact – we need to listen
  5. Social Media will play a critical role in the future of brand, marketing, and institutional visibility

Here’s your chance to tell the boss what you think…

…about social media, that is.

Michael Stoner and Liz Allen are working on a presentation about what your boss needs to know about social media, and they’re looking for your input. They’ll be speaking this July at the CASE Summit for Advancement Leaders, which means they’ll have the ear of many higher-ups. If you ever wanted to tell the boss what you think about social media, now’s your chance.

“Our assumption,” Michael writes in a recent blog post, “is that many institutional leaders think social media/social networking is important but don’t know what to do, who to listen to, or where to invest staff time and (perhaps) money. I hear this all the time from presidents and VPs at our client institutions.

“So we thought we’d ask people who know best what their bosses should know. You.”

Michael and Liz are looking for input on these three questions:

  1. What misconceptions do senior leaders at your institution have about social networking/social media?
  2. What should they know that would help them to help you to do your job more effectively?
  3. Can you offer us examples of successful instances in which social media or social networks (we’re most interested in Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter) have been used to meet specific, measured goals? We’d like to do case studies and need some really good examples.

Please share your input on Michael’s mStoner blog, or catch up with him and Liz on Twitter (@mStonerblog and @lizallen, respectively).