Consistent Branding: Connecting Your Social Media Sites

In school marketing, or corporate marketing, we understand the importance of consistent branding. Brochures, ads and other publications should all look the same, pushing our tagline and our current marketing goals. How many of us are doing this with our social media sites?

Here’s a challenge: look at your institution’s Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and any other social media sites, one right after the other. Do they all look similar? If a prospective or current parent stopped by any of them, could he or she quickly identify that as a site from your school? Where’s the common thread between them all?

Consistent branding isn’t hard to do, especially the baby steps. Consider:

1. Using your logo and your school colors. Twitter and YouTube allow you to change the background. Use your school colors for the background then the school logo for the profile picture for these sites and for Facebook. Simple.
2. Mimic your viewbook or ad campaign online. Hillel Community Day School uses a landing page to individualize its Facebook presence. Sewickley Academy’s Twitter and Facebook as well as Harker School’s Twitter and Facebook pages all feel consistent and highly customized to those schools.

While there are a few third party applications like http://www.involver.com that will help you build Facebook landing pages for example, these are often site-specific. I foresee apps being built that will help, for a fee, integrate your look and feel for you across ALL the major social media sites with minimal time/resources on your end. Why wait or why spend the money however, when simple fixes now can yield the image your school deserves?

How are you branding across social media sites?

–Lorrie J

Show Me The Data: ROI for Social Media

We all want it but have little idea where to find it: data on the success of our social media marketing efforts. Return on investment (ROI) helps tremendously as we share what we’re doing with supervisors and as we evaluate our own time and manpower. After all, social media is one more thing on our plates; it had better be worth something.

Social media marketing, like most marketing, falls into three categories:

• Recruiting students (admissions)

• Retaining students (school spirit)

• Raising money (development)

Let’s look at possible data points for each categories.

When recruiting students…

1. Look at your school Web site’s referring sites.
   That means, “What sites did users visit before coming your school’s Web site?” Many schools use Google Analytics but you may have another tool you use. What you’re looking for are social media sites. Do you see Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc. as what Google calls referring sites (under Traffic Sources)? If so, take a further look to see how many visits, how long people stayed on your site (1 second and it’s no good but 5 minutes and that’s admission-worthy) and, most importantly, how many are new visits.
2. Ask prospective parents and students.
   Go ahead. Ask them if they have visited your Facebook or other social media sites and if so, what they thought of them. Keep in mind that memories can be faulty (I’ve had folks tell me they loved our TV ads when we only had radio ads!) but the data might be telling if they visited but felt the page or tweets just weren’t for them. This will help ensure you’re meeting the prospective students’ and parents’ needs in your marketing mix.

When retaining students…

1. Look at Page Insights.
   This is Facebooks’ own data for any business Page (not group). Lots of robust data here including: total visits; users by gender, age group, country, and city; languages the page was viewed in; and page interactions (the number of times posts were commented on, liked or shared). Exportable into Excel, you can track major events (good or bad) by spikes in usage or interactions.
2. Consider total membership.
   For Twitter, YouTube or Facebook Groups, look at membership (total followers, subscribers or group members). Keep in mind, however, that this is very rough as folks may have joined in the past and never once visited that site again.
3. Encourage participation.
   Invent ways to get people to interact in some way to show you’re they’re alive and kicking on your social media presences.
   • Create a hashtag for your most popular sports team (#goABCLionsFootball) and ask folks to retweet wins and other messages during the season.
   • Create a cool Facebook profile picture with the auction logo and ask folks to donate their profile picture for a given week/month to the auction to help promote it.
   • Ask a direct question on Facebook such as, “Name a favorite teacher past or present and how he or she made a difference in your life”

When raising money…

1. Promote on Facebook, track in your database.
   Schools are saying that they’re getting new donors, young alumni who have never given, through fund-raising promotions on Facebook. Use Facebook to really publicize your Annual Fund, Capital Campaign, and link folks back to online donation forms on your school’s Web site (or to more traditional ways of giving such as by phone or mail). Then, occasionally, look at your recent alumni donors in your database, look for new donors and compare against your Facebook Fans or Members.
2. Make giving online unique.
   Create unique e-mail addresses (annualfund@abcacademy.org) to track giving from online sources. Use URLs on Facebook, Linkedin, etc. that are unique to these sites: www.abcacademy.org/annualfund. Then track giving rates to these e-mails or URLs and compare to giving rates elsewhere.

How are you tracking your ROI for marketing with social media?

–Lorrie Jackson

Sell the Unique with Social Media

What makes your school unique? An unparalleled community service program from K through 12? The standing-room only annual auction? A world-championship chess team? Whatever it is, are you talking about it on social media?

Many schools have dipped their toes into Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube, etc. but usually for general school spirit, alumni relations and admissions. Very admirable to be sure. But part of serving your constituencies and part of representing your school authentically is highlighting what is truly unique and glorious about your school. What sets you apart.

Consider that ultimately, any school marketing effort should help you retain students, recruit students or raise money. Ostensibly, that unique program, building, team, whatever has a cult following that, when they say you care enough to highlight them in social media-land, will return the favor by greater engagement (which leads ultimately to retention) and hopefully increased giving. Plus, the next superstar for your program/team/etc. may be surfing the web and looking for mentions of his or her beloved interest when looking for a school.

Want examples? How about:

Facebook:

• American School of Bombay’s ASB Unplugged Conference
• Avon Old Farms Hockey
• McQuaid Jesuit Wrestling
• LaJolla Country Day Library

Twitter:

• Summit School’s Head of School Michael Ebeling
• Lausanne Collegiate School’s Basketball Program (Varsity Boys and Girls)

YouTube/Vimeo:

• Yokohama International School’s IT department

What’s so interesting about your school and how are you going to spotlight like it in social media?

–Lorrie Jackson

Email and Social Media: Playing to Their Strengths

What is your preferred communications tool?

• 96% Facebook
• 93% text messaging
• 91% email

Are you using email the same way you did 5, 10 years ago? Are you keeping up with friends and family via email or has Facebook taken over that role? What about your favorite nonprofit or place of worship? Would you rather get an email or see a status update on Facebook or a tweet on Twitter from them, or all of the above? How do you want to communicate, and be communicated to, in today’s world?

An October 2009 article in the Wall Street Journal points out that for many users, email no longer is the center of their online communications. Slower than text messaging, less responsive than instant messaging and less inclusive than status updates, email is a far cry from how we communicate naturally and how social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin allow us to do.

Yet, as Om Malik notes in his blog post “The Social Web Prays at Email’s Altar,” email continues to play a powerful role for Internet users. Malik calls it “the hub of our Internet experience” where ultimately all other communications media interact with us in some way. If Facebook wants to tell us something about our account, it emails us. So does Twitter and the rest of the social media squad.

How does this impact how we market to our audiences? Are we still to email newsletters or are these a thing of the past? Recently ExactTarget, an email marketing firm, bought CoTweet, a twitter third party vendor. In an interview with the two company’s CEOs, the New York Times asked how business owners could best tap into the power of email and the main social media sites. In summary, here are their responses:

• Facebook – “offers a richness for a consumer brand because it’s a destination where you can have lots of different types of interactions and media. It’s a good place to focus on building a community outside of your own site.”

• Twitter –  “the place where you engage in real-time conversation and that’s the place you announce everything you do. It’s brings traffic and attention to what you do elsewhere…. It’s more about short, pithy conversations…. Twitter is very bi-directional; you have to listen to what’s being said and jump in. It’s also an interesting convergence of marketing and customer service.”

• Flickr and YouTube – “content repositories that have communities around them.”

• email – “an opportunity to present images and content that can drive customers back to the web site.”

Each therefore has its strengths and each still plays a role. At your school or organization, how are you finding the roles of email and social media evolving?

–Lorrie Jackson

Pages vs. Groups: Facebook Might Not Be Right…

Groups and Pages serve different purposes on Facebook. Groups are meant to foster group discussion around a particular topic area while Pages allow entities such as public figures and organizations to broadcast information to their fans. Only the authorized representative of the entity can run a Page.

–Facebook

With all due respect, Facebook, it’s not quite that simple. Sometimes, officially, you want a group and that’s okay.

First, you didn’t give schools and organizations both the page and group options early on, just groups, so now many official entities may have active groups that they are loathe to give up to move over to a page and risk losing traffic.

Second, groups are on occasion a better option for a school or organization. Here’s why…

Groups

Cons

• Admins cannot track activity (how often members visit the group, interact with content, etc.).

• Admins cannot add most third party applications.

• Wall posts do not automatically feed to members’ personal Walls.

Pros

• A closed group can be by invitation only.

• Admins are listed and visible.

Pages

Cons

• Anyone can be a fan (no control of who’s fanning your page).

• Admins are not listed and visible.

Pros

• A page is public (even a non-Facebook user like great-grandma can view a page).

• Hundreds of third-party applications are possible.

• Traffic can be tracked with page insights.

• Wall content flows into page fans’ personal Wall feeds (unless they choose to hide these posts).

• Pages can link to other pages (an alumni page can favorite a school’s general page).

So, when to use pages vs. groups? For most schools, yes, a page is the way to go. It’s public, you can see the return on your investment and you can add lots of bells and whistles.

For schools looking for safety and a large degree of control, groups are still a viable option. They’re also great for internal subsets of people such as parent groups by grades.

So, Facebook, we appreciate your thoughts on the matter, but like most things in social media, we users are defining the tools to fit our needs. Thanks anyway.

–Lorrie Jackson

This isn’t High School. Fans, Followers and Social Media Success

1,000 fans on Facebook?

500 followers on Twitter?

Think your school or organization is hot stuff because you’ve got the numbers to prove it. Think again.

What do those numbers tell you? Quite simply: at some point this person signed up to be a fan or follower. That’s it. That may have been the one time they visited your Twitter profile or Facebook page. Never again. Still excited?

This particularly annoyed me back when Facebook first rolled out the Page usernames. First you had to have 500 fans then the minimum dropped to 100. While this was probably a way to slow down the demand for usernames and prevent Facebook resources from being overwhelmed, it devalued the tiny but tough pages. What if you’re a small school in a small town doing amazing things with your Facebook page.  You deserved a distinct username too. (blogger’s note: yes, usernames are now available to all. Click http://www.facebook.com/username/ to claim yours if you have not yet done so.)

So, relax on the numbers. This isn’t high school. The biggest party doesn’t win. The best party does. So invite the right people, be happy with the crowd that shows up and rock on:

• Upload engaging content

• Ask questions that matter

• Invite folks to post stuff that means something to them

And when they do post, if appropriate, thank them privately or publicly

And, if you do love numbers, focus instead on Page Insights in Facebook. There’s a wealth of information here that can validate your efforts and make it clear when you’re doing a good job with social media.

Make it meaningful and stop worrying about the numbers. If you share and listen appropriately, the crowd, your unique crowd, will come to you.

–Lorrie J

Are You In the Way?

“The French orchestra leader Pierre Monteux critiqued a concert conducted by a young Andre Previn, asking the new conductor whether he thought the orchestra had played well.

‘I thought they played very well,’ Previn said.

‘So did I,’ Monteux agreed. ‘Next time, don’t interfere with them.’”

– Bob Fenster, Twisted, Tales from the Wacky Side of Life

It’s so tempting. We want to manage our organization’s Facebook page like we manage corporate print and electronic publications. We want to be in control from the plan to the content to the rollout. That works in one-way communications. Trouble is…social media is a two-way street. Are you letting traffic through?

What do you do when…

• You’re in the middle of a well-crafted message on Facebook and some well-meaning fan starts posting on a different topic?

• You’re trying to focus on next week’s very important event and all fans seem to want to share about is an event from months ago?

• You’re tweeting carefully about the arts per your marketing plan and your coaching staff begin a Twitter account for the athletic program in response?

Clearly, they’re off-message and off-the-plan. But most of the time, it’s worth it to let the orchestra lead. After all, they are the insiders and your organization the outsider in a world where the insiders are favored.

You’re truly an interloper in the land of Facebook and YouTube; if your school or organization plays heavy-handed with messages and doesn’t let users have some freedom in posting content you’ll lose them. They have plenty of other pages, groups, friends, followers, etc. to share with if you aren’t willing to listen.

This even applies for posts, tweets, comments that are slightly negative or, ahem, just plain odd. If everything is squeaky clean in your social media sphere, it’s a little too boring and spun. Posts that show a real side, particularly when they’re followed by subsequent posts by other fans who defend your school or organization, are worth their weight in gold.

Is your orchestra playing well on its own? If so, is it time to get out of the way?

–Lorrie J

Do Your Own Thing. Honest.

To lead an orchestra, you have to turn your back on the crowd.

–unknown

It may seem counter-intuitive.  Media, social media experts, even this blog. Voices everywhere call on schools and nonprofits to follow the hordes who are now using social media to market to and engage their diverse audiences.

And personally, I think that’s true. Internet users today – which are our parents, students, alumni, grandparents, donors – expect to be part of the conversation, to contribute to a community. We need to jump in and take advantage of the social media wave.

What that doesn’t mean, however, is to follow others in our industry blindly. Just because school x or company y is doing this or that doesn’t mean it’s right for our school. Examples are great, lessons learned are better. But in the end, we have to listen to and serve our own communities.

Missions matter. Your school or company occupies a unique niche and operates under a specific mission and philosophy. Tailor your social media usage to who you are, not who others are. Following the Joneses is a waste of resources.

That means it’s really okay to do your own thing like:

• Using Vimeo not YouTube if parents are skittish about the “anything goes” nature of the latter.
• Focusing on alumni or parents, not current students if you’re a K-8 and want to create a Facebook page but worried about student safety.
• Using your school website’s 2.0 tools like blogs, forums, etc. instead of mainstream social media sites if your school’s mission or philosophy is in conflict with the openness and riskiness that social media can represent.

Listen and lead your orchestra. Ignore the crowd.

–Lorrie Jackson

Content Counts in Social Media

What you say on social media says a lot about you. Think about it. From a personal standpoint, the posts you write, the friends you have, the pages you fan all paint a picture of the person you are.

Similarly, as a school or company what you post – text, video, photos, etc. – says worlds about what your organization believes in and values.  Take a minute to review what you’ve posted in the last few months. You may be surprised to find out you’re favoring one area, interest, age group, even gender over another.

Years ago, I was an English teacher at a high school and we were trained to solicit answers from everyone in the class. It seemed that subconsciously we as teachers would always go for the smiling and attentive student or off-task student and ignore the invisible ones. Our filter was skewed; without being intentional we didn’t have a complete picture of our class’s understanding.

Without really listening to the whole school, not just the smiling, perfectly dressed students in the front row, we are not able to paint the whole picture. Now, there’s a balance between authenticity and still marketing your school’s best side, but there’s room for the fun and chaos and mess of daily school life if we simply are ready to listen.

A school in particular is a balance of competing interests. We’re artistic and academic and athletic and other activity-ic. We’re young and old. We’re studious and social, serious and smiling. We’re mission-driven and spontaneous and boisterous.

Who are you and does your Facebook page and Twitter account really reflect it? Or, are you just posting athletic scores and wondering why no prospective arts parents are coming to your admission office? Content is king. Let the king represent his country.

Lorrie Jackson

Tweet Your Tagline

Can You Tweet Your Tagline?

Quick. What’s your mission? What’s your philosophy? Most importantly, what’s your current advertising tagline? And, can you tweet it?

In a recent blog post, Beth Kanter talks about Twitter for back channel , the conversation that’s happening while you present. You know, the folks that are tweeting your main points, comments/reflections on your points and counterpoints to your points WHILE you’re still talking in a presentation.  One of her suggestions? Start presenting in tweet-able bites.

Translate this to school or corporate marketing. We’re used to sound bites for media. Now it’s time to look at tweet-able bites that help spread our tagline and message quickly. That’s true whether you’re preparing a presentation or just creating tweets to send out on a typical day.

For some schools, this is a shift. Many of us are great at tweeting campus events, news, awards, etc. That’s the trees. Time for the forest. Share the 20,000 ft. view of your school every now and then. What do you stand for? What sets you apart? If you only have 140 characters to describe your school’s uniqueness, what are you going to say? Perhaps this even becomes a great marketing exercise for internal use, clarifying your identity and vision.

So, I ask again, can you tweet your tagline?

Lorrie J