Succeeding with Social Media 2012: third annual CASE/mStoner/Slover-Linett report #casesmc
This is a live-blogged post during the 2012 CASE Social Media conference.
Background
- Third year of the survey
- Sponsors: Case, mStoner, Slover Linett Strategies
- Method: survey mailed to 18,000 representative CASE members; blogged on mStonerblog; tweeted by Michael and other mStoner team members
General Findings
- Facebook: still the dominant channel
- 82% of departments handle their own social media (but they have input from others)
- Top goals are still focused on engaging alumni and enhancing brand image
- Only 25% of respondents say they're "very successful" in their social media efforts
- Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube grew in importance
- Fewer institutions are using vendor solutions like Harris Connect and iModules. More are likely building their own.
- There is growing acceptance of social as an effective communication tool
Social helps .edu engage. Most respondents said social media has been most successful around increasing engagement with target audiences.
More people are working on social now than a year ago. At the instituiton level 67% have at least 1 FTE and 32% have at least 1 FT dedicated staff person on social media. This means we are looking internally and externally for training. "Best practices in social media" and "Internal social media and branding policies" appear to be the most important to respondents.
Comments
- People are measuring social efforts in a more sophisticated way, it isn't just about fans and followers and retweets. What are the outcomes and actions people are taking?
- People are thinking about goals before tools. They are conducting research to discover where their audience already is before launching a new channel.
- Don't forget we do not own social channels and we can't control if they change or go away.
- Buy-in is essential for success... maybe. It depends on your institutional culture. Some people wait for buy-in and others live by the "ask for forgiveness not permission" approach.
- There are a number of "teaching moments" for your student workers that you can capitilize on.
- The more channels (online and offline) you are using to market your social activites, the better off you are.
Examples
- Webster University: Summer Ticket Giveaway. There were a number of ways you could earn tickets by posting to social channels. Results? Traffic and activity to social sites/blogs increased. Page views increased from 747 in 2010 to 4600 in 2011.
- The College of William & Mary's Ampersandbox. In print a box of cards with word pairings was sent to prospective students. A site was created to support the print cards and received more than 9500 unique visitors to the site in the first 3 months.
- Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University created a flash mob. It was the most watched South African video on YouTube. There was a PR campaign around the video and it received a lot of attention from bloggers. Applications to the university increased 27%.
- Elizabethtown Battle of the Blue challenge. Develop an athletic and instituitonal rivalry to motivate young alumni to donate. A site was created, videos were released on YouTube, a hashtag (#goetownblue) was used, and their giving increased roughly 2% among young alumni.
- Oregon State University's Powered by Orange campaign. This started as outreach to Portland using the "Powered by Orange" tagline based on alumni-research. It took so well in Portland that they expanded the campaign and it eventually became a branding campaign for the university. For more information read the mStonerblog posts about this campaign, here and here.
- The College of William & Mary's Mascot Search. Here is a blog post about this campaign.
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