SOC2: Nurturing Communities with Social Networking

[Intro Music]

Announcer: You’re listening to one in a series of podcasts from the 2009 HighEdWeb Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Kristofer Layon: All right. Well, thanks a lot for everyone who's come to this session. It looks like it's close to standing room only. I hope I can deliver something that keeps everyone happy for this time.

I work in the central administration of our university and so my experience and my presentation is derived of some things that I've just put into practice over time and have learned over time and I've experienced both the highs and the lows of social media. I allude to both frustrations and challenges with social media in my presentation. So I try not to sugar-coat it too much but I do show some good applications and ways of measuring success as well.

So with that, I'd like to begin with the basic premise that I've experienced myself that social networking can nurture and create community. I think that's really one of the strengths of this medium. Hopefully some of you have experienced this already and if you haven't, hopefully you can allow yourself to consider just how this might work for you beyond just the basic updating your status on Facebook or things like that. But before I go any further, I'd like to do what any good academic presenter does and review some definitions. Don't worry I'm not going to get really super technical with this but it's really just to get you thinking about what community means. That's one of the keywords that I chose for my presentation.

So here's one definition. I'll just allow you to read it.

As I'm talking, try to keep these ideas of community in mind. Try to keep in mind that when you're engaging in social media, it's a lot more about just updating things about yourself but keep these ideas of what community really means in mind. For example, the word "common," being a root of the word community actually.

Another definition of community. So again, now we're getting into common attitudes, common interests, common goals. So the first few definitions really focus a lot on sameness, I think. I think it is true that often, for example, the Ning network for this conference was brought about to unify people with a common mission of coming here and we have common backgrounds of working for universities. So granted there are some themes of sameness in community and we're hoping to have fellowship here, both during sessions and in the evening.

Here's another interesting definition. It actually emphasizes the differences of people really or at least in this case, organisms. I'm not sure if we have, is anyone of a different organism in this session? We have one, okay. But really just the idea here that actually community can bring together people who actually are quite different as well, so maybe it's just important to think about it. Again, we can't really address everyone's particular individual applications with social media but I'm just encouraging you to keep these things in mind as we go forward.

Keep in mind if you're using social media or about to, are you bringing people together who are very different or on the common cause? Are you bringing people together who are already very similar? Just think about those issues because I think they're important.

So again, I'm just highlighting some words in this definition; group, interdependence. We've covered organisms already. I supposed I should have asked about species but I don�t want to embarrass anyone if there's a non-homo sapiens in here.

Habitat. I can think we can all agree really that the online space is sort of its own habitat these days and so what does that mean? Well, I'm going to remain philosophical here for just another minute or two and what I want to emphasize is that the purpose of social networking is to create community and it can be used, again, to bring different people together around a common cause. We can also use it to share information that a group of similar people may find interesting. It can even enrich a common environment and allow people to thrive or perform at a higher level.

On the one hand, these can be fairly profound ideas and on the other hand, they're actually mostly just simple ideas and really basic to who we are as humans.

So I'd like to pause here and just introduce what I think are a few good principles of good social media persona is, what I'm really calling it, because I think if you're keeping these ideas of community in mind and respecting the notion of whether you're bringing people of different backgrounds together or not, what does mean when you're actually typing even something as short as 140 characters? I think one of the principles is to try to be factual and I'm going to admit, I don't know if I mentioned it already but a lot of what I'm talking about comes out of my personal use of Twitter. I'm kind of unabashedly Twitter focused. I have a bias towards it.

I say factual most of the time because I actually follow some people who are almost Twitter comedians. It's really amazing how much about persona they can develop online and some of them are outright blatant liars. I mean they write some of the tallest tales in really short segments. So there is a place for that. But I guess what I'm pointing to is that probably in a university setting, we're more inclined to be sharing factual information and things that are helpful and maybe not I mean quite as entertaining all the time.

I do think that another really important principle is to be sincere and polite. That might sound kind of common sense but really what I mean is sincerity also means again it kind of parlays into areas of consistency. What kind of personality do you want a social network to have? You don't really want to be one thing one day and a completely different thing another day because that can make the people to stop following you perhaps or to not really get a clear sense of what the central idea of your events or really the mission of your social network.

Despite the fabulous success of Obama using social media last year for politics and certainly there's a place for politics and social media but you may want to ask yourself if you're not entering into a social network, especially a custom one for overtly political reasons, you might want to be careful then about something that can be divisive among some people. It's a shame that politics is so divisive, can be so divisive that we actually have to be cautious about it but I think we kind of live in that era right now where if we're not trying to be political in what we're doing on our social network, you might ask yourself well, maybe the casual comment about something I read today that is political just really fit here. Am I going to alienate somebody who I'm actually trying to attract or recruit because of something from my social network?

Again, really just straying off topic in any way might not be super conducive to what you're trying to do. I kind of use for myself and I probably break the rule at the time but I kind of do a 90-10 division of what I do, sometimes even 80-20. Even in some of my more official social channels where it's around a particular thing, I have the vast majority of the tweets in my case be very targeted for the social network, for the intent. It's kind of hard to describe it in abstractions right now but I'll focus a bit more when I focus on the examples.

But there is a place for adding some filler because after all we are all human and we're having conversations with people, we're not staying on topic all the time in real time either. So see if you can ask yourself and just be aware of it. Again, I'm not giving you real cut and dried prescriptions on everything. We just need to be human about what we're doing but it is helpful to think about some of these things as you're entering in to the space.

So what I hear a lot about when people talk about Facebook especially, I hear the same story a lot, people say well, I use it to reconnect with people from high school. I sometimes wonder what does this mean actually? Is it really just people from high school all the time that people are reconnecting with? Is Facebook really high school? We could actually probably prove that that's true if we dwell on that for a long time which I'm not going to. But sometimes I think Facebook can be high school and actually it can be very conducive to reconnecting with people from your past. I just had a reunion this summer and so I really have experienced that and continue to experience it right now.

But I think what people really mean when they're about the strength of something like Facebook or really any network is that your bridging time is often asynchronous. You're putting up a status update that might yield something later so it's a different kind of communication. You're sharing common ideas and you're even sharing emotions. So I think one of the reasons why it's so obviously taken off like it has is it really mirrors the human experience and it's really not something that is quite as techie as it maybe started to be. Even something like Twitter I think has really turned into much more of a mass adopted channel.

I think the other reason why we're seeing such a wide adoption of social media and how it can apply to so many things that we do even in our work context is that it's creating this ecosystem where we can share and link and free each other of the things that are just part of our everyday lives, things like music, film, articles in the news. That's really one of the ways that I recommend using it and I'll be alluding to that a little bit more here as I go further.

But given where we're at, I'd like to show just a few university examples. I'm assuming that a lot of people again have their own social spaces but some of you may be wondering, well, what do these spaces look like if I'm at a university? Can they actually be particularly branded or customized?

I'm going to start with blogging because I still consider blogging to be social media. Actually it's one of the earliest forms of it. This is one of our blog centrally at our university. It concerns communications. You can see that on the right where you would typically have categories. In any blog, we have things about branding policy, our events calendar, how to do mass emails. We have sections where our central communications office can update people on some latest developments and then we also have of course the commenting and questioning aspect of blogging and it works really well for these kinds of things.

So I don�t think we should be dismissing blogging as something that is kind of a has-been or small-scale phenomenon. I don't know if any of you have seen this film this summer but for those of you who haven't, this is a film based on a true story that is really centered around a blog, of all things. It's written by a character named Julie who works her way through Julia Child's, The Art of French Cooking, a cookbook that was put out I think 40 years ago.

Actually, the blog is still online. One of the things that I thought of after the film was I wonder if this thing is still online. And it is. It's actually an early blog at salon.com. You can see it has kind of a vintage early 21st century look. You can go there. It's at blogs.salon.com and there are some numbers. If anyone is really curious, I can give those to you later.

Anyway, blogging can in fact lead to feature films I guess is my point. Your blog might actually lead to one starring Meryl Streep or Amy Adams as well. So don�t cut yourself short as far as where to go.

Other types of social networking at the University of Minnesota, we do have themed fan pages. Some of our schools and colleges have their own. This is a Ning site for one of our colleges. The next two screens show how closely you can tie in some of your visual identity between an actual website and a social place because here is actually a Drupal-driven site but it's basically a static type website for a science and technology program. Then we have the Ning site that links from that site and it has its own look. We didn't want it to look too much the same but we do have it, as you can see have a pretty clear graphical tie.

Of course, different social networks have different abilities to do the sorts of things that you can with branding, so if branding is important, one of my points is you might have to be careful even making a platform decision. Ning gives you a fairly wide scope to brand. Something like Twitter, you can brand Twitter of course but once you start thinking about all the ways that people use Twitter on a phone or on a desktop, app, you do lose a lot of that branding so you need to keep in mind what's critical for a particular social application you want to do.

Finally, photo and video sharing. That, I think it's still social media in my opinion. This is actually a branded YouTube view so you can have a YouTube channel branded through your university. Microblogging which again is kind of my favorite channel and the dominant platform right now is of course Twitter. Our university news service for example has been using Twitter I think since the beginning of the year, maybe even since last year.

This first screenshot just shows that at that time, I think I did this in May, we had about 919 followers. I'm actually not in this office but I'm just sharing some work with some colleagues here. Four months later, it has jumped up to 4,000 so you can see that one of the nice things about Twitter is you can measure your followers pretty nicely and it kind of gives you a sense of what's going on. That's a pretty astounding growth rate when you compare it to traditional media actually. I'm going to do some other comparisons about returns a little bit.

I'm going to take a pause for a drink of water here. If anyone has a question, I don�t mind taking a question or two. Yes? You just want to talk loud. Yes, I'll repeat it.

Audience: It looked like a university user. Do you recommend that a university has several Twitter accounts?

Kristofer Layon: The question was should a university have more than one Twitter account. I would say for a large university, I mean I come from the University of Minnesota where we're a big 10. We have about I think 60,000 students, four campuses and even if I just narrow it down to our main campus, it's a big place; something like 19 colleges.

So I would say when you have different colleges in a very big organization like that, you could easily justify a separate Twitter account for different colleges. Especially in our case, we have such a decentralized web communications environment that there's no one person making those decisions anyway so it's sort of a question that no matter what the answer is, there's kind of the idea of how you leverage the decision or control how many Twitter accounts you might have. It's kind of a free for all people can do what they want.

But on the other hand, a smaller organization I could still imagine departments having accounts. My next example is actually an event having an account.

So I think it really depends on the purpose of what you're trying to do. Really, you should fit whether you have a Twitter channel or a Facebook fan page or a Ning. I mean kind of answer those questions in the context of the rest of your communications questions because if they don't fit the rest of your communications strategy, you can really start with the strategy as a media agnostic situation too.

If you have a strategy that has goals in the social media, choice doesn't fit, support the strategy, that would probably be the main criterion I would use. But maybe some of the other examples here will help answer that question too.

So again, one of the things that I've done, I helped organized a web conference at our university actually and it's called MinneWebCon. And partly because a bunch of us are on Twitter anyway and when we started this conference almost three years ago, it was still pretty new. You felt pretty cool when you're even on Twitter. So with that, we have to have a Twitter channel, right? And there was kind of no question, but there was no real scientific decision-making behind it either but it gives me an example to talk about some integrated social media here.

So of course we have a website because any web conference is going to have to have a website. This is talking about the last version that we have this past April and our two keynote speakers. We do have a Facebook fan page and you can see that I made sure that when we were working on this that we have both our university branding and our conference event branding.

So to get back to your question, I think you can justify having separate channels as long as, again, it fits your communications plan and your branding efforts and things like that.

This is a screenshot from our Twitter feed. I guess it was last month. As you might imagine, this really kind of peaks with activity during the conference and leading up to the conference, it fades a bit after the conference. So again, there are challenges as to how you manage this over time. I'm not going to say that if you started following this, you'd get a whole lot of engaging updates because our conference isn't until April but again, I make a conscious decision and the other people on our planning committee do too that we're not trying to keep it busy just for the sake of keeping it busy either. If someone is following it, we're assuming that people aren't expecting news this time of year because it's several months away.

So don't feel compelled to keep something busy and at a high volume level just because you have it. If you're supporting an annual event, well, let the ebb and flow happen with the event and don't worry about it. That would be my suggestion.

This is where I think it gets a little interesting and it's based on real data that we're able to measure pretty precisely and yet it was only for one event so I don�t mean to suggest that this is a broad universal set of results that would be true for anyone. But I'm just saying that for our particular event, I consider it advertising in the sense that we were promoting our event on Twitter. We did some Facebook advertising with our second main channel. Our third main channel was doing some traditional web banner and advertising on a news site.

So we can compare the ROI or the return on investment for that. For people who normally don't deal with finance and things like that, I know I don�t. I didn't really know how to compute ROI at first but it's basically your income minus your cost divided by the cost. So what I did was we actually had 13 people last year find out about our conference for the first time. I was very specific with my follow-up survey question. I wasn't just interested in people who were following us on Twitter before but for this particular event, we had 13 new attendees who can attribute their attending the first time through Twitter which brought in $1,500. I had to arbitrarily just assign $100 cost to that because Twitter is free but we spent some time updating and whatever.

But at any rate, it gives us a 1,400-percent ROI which is pretty high especially when you compare it to the next few numbers. Facebook, we did get a few people as well; two, unfortunately only two. But we can run that calculation and we still gave 285% return on our investment for the amount of money that we put into our Facebook ad.

But at least in our situation, we feel that granted these aren't big numbers and our total attendance has been 250 just to scale what's going on here. So out of 250, we only had two people come last year apparently because of Facebook ads. But our banner ads brought in also just two people but you can see that the cost was pretty pricey, $540 for the advertising which means that we went in a hole for that channel of negative 54% return.

So again, a couple of things that I'm trying to emphasize with this: One, especially with things like Facebook advertising, I don't know if that's new to some of you but if you do it, you get a number of impressions reported back to you. There's a variety of ways you can set up how much you're willing to spend so they'll stop charging you at a certain point but it's pretty easy to track the success especially in the case of something like this where if you have an event and you surveyed people afterwards you can then kind of tie their responses to your investment early on and decide whether you're having success with your social media.

Paperedtogether is a business in Minneapolis where I'm from and she's a printer. She does a very old-fashioned kind of printing called letter press. She has about a 100-year-old press in her garage and does wedding invitations and she does business cards and stationery and things like that. She has a very beautiful website where she talks about her business. But in fact I would say her website is probably the smallest piece of her success with what she's doing.

One of the things she does is she sells on Etsy which if you haven't been there, Etsy is kind of an amazon.com for non-corporate stuff. It's for handmade goods, artist goods and things like that. The site itself is pretty fabulous. I actually went to a presentation once by the founder of this and he's an incredible designer but you really go there for the content like you would for any good site and in this case, Krista's content is pretty fabulous.

She's also pretty savvy of maintaining a portfolio on Flickr. Don't forget that Flickr is a social space. Twitter is a stream of text that you can fit in a box. Flickr is a stream of images that you can fit in boxes as this particular shot shows. So you're probably starting to imagine how this all fits together now because in her Twitter feed she often - and this is actually from she had just one consolidated feed where she put up a lot of random stuff and a lot of business related stuff.

So I will preface that if you went to her Twitter feed now, you would actually find paperedtogether having fewer followers because she's broken out her personal channel into a separate one. But her business one now is of course tweeting updates about when she updates her portfolio. She might talk about when she's giving a special on something. She'll often thank her clients. I've learned through her Twitter feed that she has clients; despite doing work in her garage in Minneapolis, she has clients in Hong Kong, Australia, South America, Europe, Asia, basically around the world.

That's the thing that is pretty stunning to me and that's why I'm showing this example. If an artist can leverage social media to get clients all over the world out of her garage, what can we do at world-class institutions that are colleges and universities with social media where we already have more channels to work with, more people to help us do things, larger audiences already. I think it's kind of inspirational thing to think about.

So when I conclude her example, I like to say that some people have garage sales but Krista has a $40,000 and growing garage business that she uses social media primarily to generate all of her income.

So I'm going to conclude here with just some personal thoughts about what I think social media success requires and I'm trying to keep it careful and on time because I'm sure there's a lot of expertise in the room and I want to have a fair amount of time for questions.

I happen to be a runner and I for years ran just short distances kind of regularly and even semi regularly, not very disciplined, and I grew up in Duluth, Minnesota though where Grandma's Marathon in June is one of the biggest events of the year and I always kind of had an aspiration it'd be cool to do that. What I learned is that running really goes to an entirely different level of commitment when you have to run outside in the cold like you do in Minnesota if you're surrounded by snow and you're sometimes doing it in the dark. But if you're going to finish a marathon, you can't just run whenever you want, you have to run when your plan dictates because there's a way to finish a marathon and it's not just by casually running whenever you want for short distances.

Similarly, if you're into dairy, you can't just take a cup of milk and a few minutes later have something like this, a fine blue cheese. You do need to start with this but you're getting the sense that there's a factor of time here.

Similarly, with any other good thing, wine being another good example, the wine comes later. There's a lot of front-end work upfront. And why I'm trying to stress this a bit is that social media always feel so immediate and you can sign up for an account and bam, you're just off to the races. But that's the easy part. The easy part is signing up for the account. You have to develop how you're going to be using it for the long term and you have to figure out how long you're willing to slug through maybe some slow times and some challenges for some longer term results.

Finally, just one last metaphor, all of us who design online using pixels know that just one pixel alone looks like this. When you have a few more, it starts taking that shape. The more you have, the more of a pattern emerges and it starts to have an entirely different meaning from just the one pixel. Then finally, when you have a whole screen of them, you get something that's very different from just one little dot on the white screen.

So what do these ideas have to do with social media? Well, I would argue that as with my experience with marathon running, what took me from just casually running to be able to finish a marathon was following a very strict plan. At the time, I took a plan that I read about in Runners' World Magazine. I tailored it a little bit based on my personal preferences and constraints in my schedule but I followed someone else's plan because they said if I followed this plan, it would work. I tell you it did work.

So I would say that with social media, you do need a plan and you shouldn't underestimate the value of the plan and you shouldn't just work on it for five minutes and then stick it in a drawer. You should actually revisit the plan a lot and if the plan isn't returning the kinds of results that you want, you should be tweaking your plan just as much as you might be tweaking which media you're using. You might want to stick with a medium for example and tweak your plan about how you're using it more.

Certainly, in the case of social media as well as running, cheese, wine making or anything that takes time, you really should take and exercise patience. I know a lot of people who start using something like Twitter and they find it a bit confusing, they find it frustrating, they don't really feel like they're getting much return from the experience but you can imagine that it takes quite a while to get people to follow you. It even takes quite a while to find the interesting people out there to follow and so you really do have to take a patient approach to developing the kind of channel you want for an event or an office or a college depending on your situation.

I think humility is important for a couple of reasons. I think people both love and not love or dislike experts. People do want expertise and yet I think people distrust people who act like they have all the answers. So just because I think that's true in regular social communications, I think we should keep in mind how important humility is in our online conversations and status updates as well. I've learned the hard way I'll admit that you can put something out there that's pretty brief and pretty assertive and you get your feedback pretty fast sometimes about wait a minute, that's not right, or you can start to debate that you didn't intend on starting. So just remember to be humble with whatever you're doing.

My final bit of advice is just be persistent. Persistence is important in social media and again, take a long view of persistence. Don't necessarily think that you have to update everyday or add something to a fan page every week or post a new video every month because in my opinion and it kind of gets back to Debra's question here earlier, there's not really a canned correct answer for how you do these things, how often, how many channels you have. Again, get back to your basic communications plan and if you're not a communications person yourself and you're much more technical, really work with your communications people in your office to get a sense of what their goals are because I can't really emphasize enough that I think social media is much less of a technical toy and it becomes really a very human and very communications and strategic tool when you use it plentifully and patiently.

So with that, those are my slides and I saved a little time here for questions. Thanks a lot.

So I would encourage if people are close and can use the microphone, maybe just run up and use the mic or I can repeat a question too. There's one in the back.

Female: You may want to repeat the question.

Kristofer Layon: Well, if I can hear you, I'll repeat it.

Audience: Your last research, you proceeded to use Facebook, Twitter and Ning. How do use this if you have a limited budget.

Kristofer Layon: The question in case everyone didn't hear talks about if you're working within limited budgets, how would you balance the use of Twitter, Facebook and Ning? I just have a few observations. I don't know that there are again clear answers for that. I mean context is everything, but some of the things I have observed and dealt with myself is that for example, the Ning platform, I really like some of the branding prowess that it has. I mean you can have a very bold header that is very much tied to your marketing and theming.

The downside to Ning if you go with the free version that is ad supported is you have all these ads on the side which really can compete with your content and really might look out of place in a university setting if you're trying to emphasize that channel as a university social space. So you have to balance the value of having ads or not. In some social options, that's a big decision.

For our implementation on that one that I showed you, we've kind of fortunate in that program is beyond our university as well as it's a consortium project. And so we kind of felt like we could afford having the ads show up because well, for one thing, it was a group decision and everyone felt like that was fine but it wasn't trying to brand our university as much and so we kind of monitored the ads were coming in and what was coming in and we felt that they didn't interfere much and we didn�t have enough budget to support that going to the premium level.

Twitter of course currently at least is free, and you've probably already sensed I have a bit of bias towards that so I would recommend that as a free option and as an effective option. But again, I know that that's not going to be everyone's answer.

You saw my example with Facebook. I mean Facebook itself is free, Facebook advertising is not. I do think Facebook advertising is very brilliant in how you can target to geography or to different uses. You'd have to kind of get in and see and I don�t want to take too much time in answering that in detail. But Facebook advertising is a very targeted advertising mechanism and so you can control how much you spend and experiment with it without committing too much. So that's something to keep in mind.

Question there?

Audience: With your example for ROI, obviously Twitter looked much better than using banner ads or Facebook ads. But I can make a Twitter site, no one is going to know about it until I market it and advertise it to the public. So how do you start doing that? Do you have campaigns to promote the new Twitter site or how does that all start out?

Kristofer Layon: That's a good question. In our case, our conference is so low budget and it's at a public university so it's all nonprofit. I mean we hardly had any advertising budget. In the two years that we've done it, we only thought of printing posters for the second time. The only printed thing we did before that was a printed program and printed nametags literally. So we did no advertising in the first year for our Twitter feed and I think really that speaks to Twitter as being a word of mouth phenomenon. I think almost any large Twitter success happens because of the strength of community, the strength of people referring and then following each other.

So in our case, we had a core group of probably a couple of dozen people who when we opened our Twitter account, we all commented about that from our own personal ones. And because we all had followers, it's sort of like a pyramid scheme. Once you have the right people, it's an honest pyramid scheme in this case, one that doesn't defraud people like Madoff. But it really is that structure where it's exponential in its growth.

But I will admit when you start, it doesn�t feel that way and that's really where the time element comes into play. But I would say that Twitter advertises itself much better than you could ever advertise outside of Twitter about your Twitter. I mean that's my opinion.

Yes?

Audience: You answered a question earlier about Twitter accounts. I don't know if you will answer this or not, but you have multiple Twitter accounts and multiple other accounts. I don't know if it's important enough to maintain consistency with that.

Kristofer Layon: I guess we're timed so I can just answer that one question. Certainly, as much consistency as possible would make sense. I mean that just seems like more of a common sense answer. For example, I use Kaylan for myself for a variety of things and so for me, it's personally consistent for people who follow me and more than one place, it's probably consistent as well.

For our university conference, we use MinneWebCon, we chose the name. At the time actually, we did have a discussion about - I mean before we named the conference, we decided what would be a good name and we did use Twitter name length and just kind of keyword length as one determining factor for why we went with that name.

I would say that even with the graphics and logos, graphic design these days, you can really think the same thing. Can a logo fit into a square box and be shrunk down small so that it can be used in a Twitter design or can it be used as an avatar and show up clearly on something tiny like an iPhone?

So there are actually a lot of good branding decisions that tie into not just naming but your graphical identity too. So I hope that's helpful.

All right. Well, this is done. Thanks a lot.