SOC3: Talking to Your Boss About Twitter ...

[Intro Music]

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

Lori Packer: So, the idea that I had for this presentation or the reason I had the idea for this presentation is in the last year of my job at the University of Rochester, I work in the communications office as the Web editor there, I'd been asked to give presentations to several different groups on campus about this social media thing. "Could you talk to our department? Could you talk to our faculty? Could you talk to et cetera about Twitter? You manage the university's Facebook page. Come and talk to us about it."

So, I've been given presentations to our board of trustees, our president's cabinet, the college deans, basically trying to give an overview about what all this stuff is for those audiences. And in the process of doing that, I landed on a few, I hope helpful strategies to help you talk to that group of people about these tools.

Like I said, I work in the communications office. Does anyone else here work in a communications or a PR or a marketing shop? Anyone else from IT, Web services organizations? About admissions or alumni or advancement? Well, as we come from different places, but unless there are some chancellors or chairmen of the board of trustees in the room, I think one thing we all have in common is that we all have a boss. We all have a director or a VP or a chair that we need to at least convince or persuade when we have an idea to do something that that idea is worth their time and our time. And in social media, there are a few immediate obstacles that you have to overcome before you can even begin to have that conversation.

I'm going to pick on Twitter a little bit. But I'm really talking about social media in general. When I put this presentation together, I tried another little experiment because I'm not experimental enough, I guess, and I just wrote all my presentations as tweets. So, it is supposed to look like that.

So, for Twitter specifically, the first obstacle you need to overcome is your audience of your boss, your director or your chair. Twitter is pretty easy to mock. It's called "Twitter", number one. It has all kinds of nomenclature that comes along for the ride. You have to talk seriously in meetings about tweets and retweets and mentions and DMs and twibbons and twallows and twipples and tweckling and hashtags.

So, yeah, the nomenclature just explodes. And it's very easy to find that kind of stuff ridiculous. If you Twitter, does that make you a Twit or a Twitter? All of the quotes in this presentation are direct quotes from people that I work with, said to be funny. "Are you a Twit or a Twitter?" I get this in every meeting from one particular colleague, who shall remain nameless. "So, Laurie, tell us what's going on in 'MyFace' and 'Spacebook' and 'Twitter'? Hahaha..."

[Laughter]

The second obstacle you need to overcome before you can even really begin this conversation is that they know that these things exist but they don't know, which is dangerous because they think they know. They've heard about it, I mean, a sort of a tipping point with Twitter specifically about maybe six, seven or eight months ago, when CNN is talking about Republicans using Twitter on the House floor doing Barack Obama's speech, when they're writing about it in the real time. These people are smart people and they work in higher ed. So, they've heard of Twitter, not to overgeneralize but for the most part, they're not using it. So, they don't really know. They think they know but they don't know.

And the first two obstacles go hand in hand, right? Because we mock what we don't understand. We sort of inoculate ourselves against embarrassment by immediately making fun of something. That quote about the "Spacebook" and the "Twitter", the guy who said that actually honestly slipped up one day and said "Spacebook" in a meeting. And it was kind of funny and everyone "Hahaha..." So, now at the beginning of every meeting, when it gets to my turn to sort of report on my activities, he says, "So, Laurie, what's up in 'Spacebook' and 'MyFace'?"

So, he's inoculating himself against the fact that he doesn't know what these things are. And he's an associate VP and it's not comfortable to admit that you're not sure what someone on your staff is doing for a living. So, for these folks, trying to get them to understand how the things actually work beyond just simply knowing about it and reading it is another key challenge.

Twitter is a little bit to blame for this because when Twitter first launched, they had this nice friendly sign that said, "What are you doing?" So, I get this all the time from my boss, like "I'm brushing my teeth," "I'm eating my pizza," "Who cares? Why would I even bother with this stuff?" Trying to then convince them that that's not what it's about is job #1.

On Twitter you're not simply sending out voluminous blahs, although sometimes it feels like a blah especially today or these last few days about your day-to-day mundane activities. It's not really, what are you doing? It's what are you doing? What are you thinking? What are you reacting to? What are you responding to? What are you finding? What are you knowing? What are you learning right now? And sharing all that with those of us who care to listen. So, you're right. I don't care that you're eating your pizza. But that's not what it's about.

Obstacle #3 to justify your existence or to justify your activities, you're often asked to quantify. And this is a bummer, actually, because I don't like quantifying things. I'm one of those folks that, "It's about the conversation. How do you measure the value of a relationship?" And what has been great about this conversation is I've gone to a couple of different sessions. I have actually talked about analytics and metrics. So, now I've learned more about how to answer these questions by attending other people's sessions.

But it is challenging to put especially a monetary value, and these folks often think in terms of monetary values and budget, on what you're doing. For example, at this conference we've all, I think, witnessed the value of the back-channel and that it's, well, maybe not all of us, maybe I think people wish they didn't experience the value of the back channel.

And it makes the conference a completely different experience. It's a different level on which to experience the event that we're all physically at. And it adds I think a huge value to the experience at the conference. I have no idea how to quantify that. I don't know how much that's worth. All of us are the ones that are contributing to it. So, it's in a sense it's free. It's not really but it feels free. So, how do you put a dollar sign on that? I don't know that you can. And you have to talk to folks who are used to having dollar signs on everything in a way that doesn't put a financial value on things necessarily right upfront. So, that's a challenge.

And the last challenge, shouldn't you be working? They've heard about Facebook specifically from students. And it's a place where you go and goof around and socialize. And now you're telling your boss that you're going to sit in your office and be on Facebook and it's work. It's not chatting with your friends.

The flip side of that, though, is you also have to convince them or explain to them that there's a fun factor, there's a play factor in places like Facebook and Twitter that can't be discounted. And just because something is fun doesn't mean it's not real and useful and valuable as a tool. So, when I'm on Facebook, yeah, sometimes I'm checking out my friends' movie picks and bands and stuff. But I'm not just doing that. I'm actually not even mostly doing that. It's a tool for fun but it has got a fun element to it that you can't just dismiss. You can't dismiss the fact that these things are fun. That's kind of a point. If you're not having fun with them, you're not helping build the community. So, when you're sitting in your office trying to use these things, use them to make sure that your boss understands that this isn't fun and games; it's fun and work.

So, to overcome all of these obstacles, you need I think a few strategies. You need to sort of figure out what can I do to break down those doors. The first thing you really have to do with these folks, I think, is convince them that this stuff is real. It's not a fad. It's not a trend. This isn't Santa Claus. I didn't make this up. This is real. This exists. And for audience, statistics can sometimes be a useful tool.

These are folks who again are smart people. They'll probably remember the dotcom boom and bust of the '90s. They'd be forgiven for thinking that something called Twitter is just the next pets.com and is going to be consigned to the sock puppet dustbin of history and it's easily ignored. But it's your job to convince these folks that this is real and this isn't going away. And to do that, statistics can be useful door openers with this group. This is a group that likes to see things, like I said, quantified and quantifiable. Statistics aren't the "end all and be all", but they at least help you get that this isn't a fad conversation starter.

So, this is a slide that I've used in a couple of presentations I was talking to you about earlier to try to help explain the reality of a site, in this case, Facebook. This was done back in March. And at the time, Facebook had just turned 5 years old. It had 175 million active users. Ninety-nine percent of incoming freshmen have a Facebook profile. That's according to a study from the College of Amherst. There were 300,000 users being added every day. And our University of Rochester Facebook fan page there had 4300 fans. Now, if I were to give this presentation today, I'd have to update that slide in a professional manner, of course.

Six or seven months later, Facebook is now 5-1/2 years old with 300 million active users. Ninety-nine percent I'm assuming hasn't changed. I haven't seen any updates on that about college freshmen. Six hundred thousand new users added every day, and our page has now up to 5600. When I gave this presentation to the board at their retreat in Niagara Falls, it was very nice, I got to go to Niagara Falls. This 175-million-active-user figure, if Facebook were a country, they would be the sixth most populated country on earth, more than Russia, more than Japan, more than Pakistan, more than Bangladesh. And folks around the room were like, "Really?" And today with 300 million, if Facebook were a country, it would be the third most populous country on earth, behind only United States and China. So, it's not an insignificant, ephemeral thing that's going away. It has actually got this critical mass of folks using it.

So, once you've convinced them or at least help explain to them that these things are real and around and aren't a fad, the next thing I think you need to do, because again for the most part these folks aren't using these tools although they've heard of them, is show them the conversation. it's much easier to show than it is to tell. Let them see the conversation happen. We don't think about conversations as visual, but in this case, they are. You want to let them see the conversation for themselves.

So, again, this is another slide from a presentation I've done for, in this case, the board of trustees. So, when I opened with this slide, this is me on Facebook, I haven't had a Simpson's avatar in a really long time. And I haven't had that hair in a really long time or that office for that matter. I've moved around. So, it always gets a little bit of a chuckle.

And then, the next thing I do right from here is log in live to Facebook in the boardroom with all the trustees and people sitting around and saying, "Well, just log in as me and see what's going on." And again, they could joke about "I hope my friends aren't up to anything naughty. Hahaha..." and silently actually really hope that my friends aren't up to anything really naughty. [Laughter] And log in and let them see this is a light-bulb moment for them as you start to explain. And it's very basic stuff, but you start to explain in simple non-Facebook-specific or Twitter-specific language what's going on here.

So, I log in as me and the first thing I see is my friend in San Francisco, who has a film opening this week, is going to a film festival. My sister has posted pictures of our cousin's wedding from last weekend. The band that I'm following has a new album out or a new concert. The university library, for example, has posted something.

So, you see all of these status updates. And the first question they asked is, "So, when one of your friends put something on there, you just see it?" "Yes, see? They're all there." "So, if you wrote something right now, all your friends would see it?" "Yes, they will." So, it's at that level and you can't talk to them. And I'm being cynical and sarcastic because I'm with you all and we're all like each other. But for that group you really have to have a sort of an educational tone to your voice, I think, and not act like you're simplifying things. But it's very basic and it's exciting to see folks who maybe have an experience as to start see the value. But it's fun. Their little light bulbs go often. It's a cool thing to experience.

The other thing I do once we log in and sort of see everything or log in to my profile, and if you haven't done this yourself, you should, and if you haven't done this with your boss, you should, start doing a search for your university on these different tools. Trying to convince them that the university needs to be a player in Facebook and Twitter and YouTube, for example, will be a lot easier if you sort of show them that the conversation is happening anyway. It's happening without us if we're not part of it. And we want to be part of it. We want to be able to contribute.

On Facebook, for example, our institutional Facebook page is just one really small aspect of our university's presence on Facebook. We have groups out the wazoo. We got dozens of groups for University of Rochester. If you nailed two things together that have never been nailed together before, someone will make a Facebook group out of it. We have groups for specific floors and specific dorm rooms, history majors, senior history majors, each a cappella group, all the athletics group, just people who hate the women who works in the dining services area, I'm not naming any names.

And our University of Rochester is often confused with Rochester Institute of Technology. So, we have several Facebook groups that say, "Rochester is not RIT," "Rochester is better than RIT," "RIT is better than Rochester." We've got RIT colleagues in the house?

[Laughter]

On YouTube, thank goodness, we have several a cappella groups that have really good YouTube channels because if you do a search for University of Rochester on YouTube, the first 25 things you see are their videos, not education offices' videos because their videos get viewed a whole lot more than ours do and they're great. In this case, when I did a search for the University of Rochester with the group, the board, there is a student that posted a video of him playing the Harry Potter theme on our university carillon. He was awesome. Everyone was laughing like "That's one of our students." "Yeah, that is." "And he posted on YouTube." "Yes, he did. That's great."

And the same thing on Twitter. You can use Twitter search tools to see, I mean, we've been doing it probably quite a bit on this conference, what are people saying about the University of Rochester. Create sort of a search panel with the use of a product called TweetDeck, for example. You can track all your searches and sort of see moment to moment what people are saying about you on Twitter. So, it's that sort of listening second step beyond just sending things out. And once they get to see that all these stuff is going on anyway and you don't have anything to do with it at the moment, they may feel a little bit differently about how they want to participate.

And this is the point at which your boss may start to get shared, when you start to show him or her that all these things are happening. You may have to talk them back from the edge at this point and convince them that it's not about control; it's about authenticity. For this group, that's probably an obvious message we've talked about a lot in this conference. But for this group of people, it's not their comfort zone. If especially if you're talking about people in PR, communications and marketing, these are the folks who are used to driving the message and creating the message and crafting the message and distributing the message. To explain to them the fact that they have no control over what's going on is a good thing, is a difficult thing to do.

So, the next thing I think you need to do with these folks. You've talked to them about why this is real. You've given them some statistics and background. You've shown them a little demo, logging in, for example. Let them go for a test drive. Let them steer for a while. If they're not on Facebook, maybe help them create a Facebook page or a Twitter page. And let them see the stuff for themselves and the power of it for themselves because it doesn't really come home, it doesn't really hit home until you actually start to experience it.

So, for example, this is our engineering school dean. And he created a Twitter page for himself over the summer. He's a new dean. In our office, we have writers and publicists who cover different beats in the university. And we have a new engineering publicist who's a younger guy, and we have a new dean. And they talk and he said, "Yeah, you should really try this out. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. But you should try it out."

So, Dean Clark is on Twitter. And this is one of the first things he tweeted from his account. "The first student who call our office will receive a University of Rochester banner and the detail." This cracked me up because the thing he asked someone to do was to call a phone number. He didn't say hello or retweet this. He didn't say, "Call me."So, that was Dean Clark's reaction. And I don't know who called. I don't know if it was a staff member or a student or a faculty member. I mean, he had been on Twitter for like a week. People were already following him obviously because they saw that message and replied in less than a minute.

So, this is going to be a little challenging, I apologize. I'm going to try to do a little demo of my own. How do you Mac people do this? This is something you may have seen. If you're on Twitter a lot, you may have seen people where they're doing a demo for some new person, someone who's new to Twitter. Yeah, what's everyone up to today?

So, if you have someone who has never seen Twitter in action before and you're trying to explain to them how this can work, one aspect of it, you can do a quick demo of Twitter for them. And I'm going to do a demo of how to do a demo of Twitter for your boss right now...

So, I'm going to let that steep for a while and come back. Let's see. Hey, Coach Eric Extraordinaire. Steve in the back of the room.

Audience 1: That definitely was him.

Lori Packer: I know.

[Laughter]

Lori Packer: Wouldn't that work for you?

Audience 2: That will work for me.

Lori Packer: He's all that guy, of course. I hope to do this again and then people will just be like, "Hello already. Go away." But this is a very simple but powerful way, I think, to show someone who has never used Twitter themselves how to start conversations and how people respond back and forth on an individual level on a more specific tactile level. And then, from there they might be able to start to imagine something like a university as an institution.

I get asked sometimes about who can have a Facebook page, who can have a Twitter page. In my opinion, any unit of the university that can sustain it and manage it and things that's useful and has an idea about how to do it should do it. If the English department wants a Twitter page, go for it. If one class in the English department wants a Twitter page so that they can talk to each other during the semester, why not? If it works, if it's something that they think they can sustain and find value from, why not? So, this is the way to show those groups in real time how Twitter might actually be applied to what they're doing. Let's see if I've got any more people on it. I got a lot more yesterday but it's OK. Everybody's sleepy.

So, this gets to what I was just saying about who should have a Facebook page or a Twitter page. The question of do we need to have a strategy of how we're going to do this, of what we're going to try to get out of it and why we're doing it or should we just do it, it's a tricky question to answer. And in my experience, they're not mutually exclusive. First, you just do it. Then, you have a strategy. I think you can't get bogged down or try to think about all the eventualities or permutations of what a Twitter page might do for you or a Facebook page might do for you without just doing it first.

The university's institutional Twitter or the university's Facebook page that I and some other folks of the university manage, for lack of a better word, I created that on the day that pages were announced as a feature with no clue about what I was going to do with it. The main reason I created it was because I wanted to make sure that someone who works for someone, admissions or communications or some office, had control of the University of Rochester name before somebody else grabbed it. I didn't have a plan about what I was going to do with it. I was just squatting on it at that point. Similar thing with YouTube or Twitter, where we just wanted to have the UofR name before we really knew what we were going to do with it.

But then, from there you can start trying to plan as you sort of go through trial and error the things that work and the things that don't work and do some experimentation. So, for example, after this conference last year, I'm really seeing the beginnings of the power of what Twitter can do with the group that has the sort of geographic proximity that we all have now. We're all geographically proximate. We're all here at an event together face to face. And we're all meeting people. We're all doing the same thing in the same place.

That's a great place to start to see Twitter interact. I mean, that's where it was first created. It was at a conference I saw myself last where everyone was together in one place. You can start to see that when people had geographic proximity, they want to keep in touch virtually as well. They want to know what's going on over here, what's going on over there, where are you, what are you doing.

If you do that with a group at an event at your own campus just as an experiment, just call a pilot program if that helps make it more palatable just to see what happens, like a commencement or a reunion weekend. Like last year, this conference coincided with our, we call it "Meliora Weekend", that's our big reunion, family-parent day. And I decided this would be so much fun at Meliora Weekend. The demographics is probably right. We got a lot of the young alumni, maybe a lot of young professionals. I think we got a lot out of it.

So, this year Meliora Weekend is this weekend coming up. So, we have a bunch of people in our young alumni office and our advancement office, communications office, who created a separate Meliora Weekend Twitter page. We have the university's institutional Twitter page. The individuals are tweeting as themselves. Using a hashtag on Meliora, we put the hashtag on the registration materials when you sign up for the weekend. I don't know if they were smart enough to put on name badges or not but that would have been cool; I'm not sure. But we try to promote this idea of the hashtag.

We don't know what's going to happen. I mean, obviously, you never know what's going to happen. But it could be great. I'm sure there will be positive elements of it and negative elements of it. But as the university, we'll be providing another channel, another layer, another form of experience of that event that wouldn't exist without it. It might be great. It might do nothing. But it's something to try. It's something to experiment with.

And then lastly, again if you're trying to convince your boss that this thing called Twitter is a good thing to do, maybe instead of taking it at the institutional level and saying, "We need a university Twitter page or Facebook page," think about how you and your colleagues can use it on the sort of personal and professional level. What about your own social media presence, not just your institution's?

So, if you work in a PR office, for example, are the individual people who work in that office on Twitter? And are they using it for professional purposes? In PR, there are a couple of resources. Muck Rack is a good one for finding journalists on Twitter. Just finding reporters who are on Twitter, there's a service called "Help a Reporter Out," which started off as an email, I believe, and is now on Twitter. If a reporter needs a source to talk about, the coming crisis in university admissions at small or large colleges. I need a source to talk to me by 4:00 p.m. for my deadline. If you have a legitimate person at your campus, I can speak to that. You can get in touch with that person over Twitter and get your PR or media relations job done through Twitter.

So, it's thinking about your personal space as also your professional space. Personal is professional. If you can figure out or if you can get your institution or your boss around that idea of doing it individually, it might be a little easier. Once they see it in action in their own office, it might be a little easier to get them up to that institutional level.

I say every day, and this definitely gets back to that shouldn't-you-be-working obstacle. I tell my boss last time that I learn something new on Twitter every day that helps me do my job. I also learn that someone's going bowling and someone has been out until 3 o'clock in the morning and eating pancakes. But that's the fun element. Just because something's fun doesn't mean it's also not useful.

As far as professional development tool, for me it has been amazing. I follow all you guys and I hear what you're doing and I see what you're doing, and I hopefully contribute something every now and then. And it's a give and take. And you learn while you're sitting at your desk basically. I've heard so many things first by hearing them on Twitter.

And this slide just says what I just said. I should've skipped ahead. Experiment with ways to use Twitter in your own profession. If you're working in PR, are you following the local reporters and the local media in your area on Twitter? They're all out there. Every local television market has an institutional Twitter page. And most of the reporters have their own pages.

We had a suspicious package alert on campus that actually turned out to be one of our faculty members shipping a riding crop back from Africa. And it had wires sticking out of it. It had some sort of weird wires coming out of it. And it got stopped in our campus mail services office because, "There's a box with wires sticking out of it." And the people closed down traffic. They called the bomb squad out. And we had two reporters on Twitter saying, "What's going on at UofR? There's something happening with the security. I'm going to go check it out."

And in the old days of last year, the first contact you'd probably have with a reporter about something like that would be them calling you and saying, "There must be something up at UofR. Can you talk about it yet?" And then, your university spokesperson meets with her boss and has a message and "What are we going to tell them and when?" You can't do that anymore. You can't wait. They're going to be talking about it themselves, anyway. It's just like if they called you; just now, their first contact is on Twitter. So, if you can sort of show those professional uses of Twitter on a personal level for you, for your job, I think that can help make the case for we need to be doing this at an institutional level that makes sense for us.

And this is my last slide and we'll open up for some discussion. This is a slide that I've ended a couple of presentations with for these folks. It's sort of to try to help them understand what the point is of all of these and why we're doing this. So, I had to talk about the line. We need to participate, not dominate. For example, our friend who played the Harry Potter theme on carillon. He had thousands of hits, very cool, a 45-second video. So, the reaction is sort of , "Hey, this is amazing, spontaneous. This is sort of a stupendous thing that has happened. Let's do it again. Let's make a viral video."

I don't know how you make viral video. You make a video and it becomes viral because good things happen to it. And maybe I'm not just sophisticated enough to think about how you would manipulate things and make them go viral. But you can't bottle lightning and have it happen again. You have to just sort of let these things happen.

And again, for folks, especially in PR, whose jobs it is to push things out and get things to happen because they want them to, this concept can be a little tricky. But the value of it is the fact that it is authentic, that it has its own origin and you didn't push it. And if you start to, it gets obvious really quickly, that you're kind of, "The PR office is pushing out all of these viral stuff. And aren't we great?" You need to step back a little bit. The reason that video is so cool is because our office had nothing to do with it. If our office did have something to do with it, it wouldn't have looked at all like it looked like. And it wouldn't have nearly as compelling anyway.

Institutions need to find their feet in this virtual world and learn to contribute, not control. I think that's the role of people like us, the institutional side of things. Like in our Facebook page to a party, we're throwing a party. And as the host of the party, we want the individuals who'll attend the party to have a great time and to talk to each other. That's why they're there; to talk to each other. We're providing the cocktails and the snacks. We're providing them with stuff that they can't get anywhere else. That's the last point. Above all, be useful. Give them something that they can use, do or have fun with, something they can't get from anyone else and then get out of the way.

So, we do produce great stuff. We produce videos. We pop news. We have bands. We have stuff that we know about because we work in the communications office. We can provide that information that's fodder to people and they probably can't get that information from a better source. But our job after that is to just get out of the way.

And we've had some cases where, and only twice, it has only been twice on our institution's Facebook page history that I've deleted anything. And both times they were spam. That was just someone posted an ad for something that had absolutely nothing to do with Rochester or the University of Rochester. So, I just zapped it.

But we get all kinds of comments to things that we post, people liking and commenting on things. We had a couple of examples where this gets back to that your boss might get a little scared. We had a couple of cases where the boss did get a little bit scared and said, "What should we do? What should we do?" One was we were mentioned in an article, what are these rankings? That wasn't really a real ranking, but it was just like the top 10 blah. We were the top 10 best schools, best prizes, good schools, good prizes.

So, someone in the admissions office posted that to our Facebook page. "The University of Rochester is a good school. The University of Rochester is a great school." I don't know anyone who wouldn't say it has a good prize or is cheap, anyway. So, they posted that to the Facebook page. And immediately we had four, five, and then by the end of the day, 15 or 16 comments saying exactly that. "This is a great place and everything, but I don't know where they're getting these good prizes thing because you guys are pretty expensive."

And that kind of comment trail started rolling on. And in our office, the first reaction from the guy who said the "Spacebook" and "MyFace" was, "Well, you can delete that, right? You can just leave the post there and delete the comments. Or could you just delete some of the comments or delete the whole thing?" I was like, "No, it's out there. And they're not saying anything incorrect. And they're all coming from a place you love. They're all fans of the university. They wouldn't be fans of the university's page if they weren't fans of the university. And they're making legitimate points. I mean, why would we axe that?"

So, instead our director of admissions who is on Facebook wrote a little, like one-sentence response about, "I get their point. We don't know how to put these together, either. Some high percentage of our students get financial aid. And that's probably why we ranked highly. You should check out our financial aid pages for more details." Just a sort of a friendly simple tone. And nothing else happened after that.

The second one was a little funnier. We had our students won the "College Bowl". That old TV quiz, the "College Bowl"? We had the "College Bowl" champions on our campus. And they became the phone-a-friend folks for "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" So, they were on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" And they had this video that they were running on all the networks for a week.

So, we posted that video to our Facebook page. And you know how it picks out a little icon and just slaps it on there. And you have a limited control over what icon gets put. The little icon that got put up was just sort of blue box that didn't really look like anything. It was a logo for the show, I guess. And the feedback immediately, the first person who commented said, "Why does that remind me of a Tampax box?" And then, we had eight comments about Tampax boxes.

Nothing bad, just being goofy, just being funny. And the guy who posted it was like, "This is fantastic. This was such a fantastic opportunity." And we wasted it because these stupid people are talking about Tampax boxes. Let's delete it and do it again. Let's delete it and repost it. I was like, "No, they're just having a conversation with themselves. It's not something bad about the university. It didn't work out as well as we wanted to. But you have to take the rap with this move. You have to take the good with the bad."

So, the line here is all about authenticity and what are your people really saying. Learning when to contribute to the conversation like our dean of admissions did and when to step back. It's all about contributing, not controlling. That can be a hard point with these folks. But it's an important point to make before we try to do anything real.

I think I'm done. I think I left more time for questions this time. Yes?

Audience 3: So, how did you manage for me on Facebook, all my co-workers want to be on my Facebook. And I'm like, "Well no, this is sort of a personal thing, my Facebook." I'm a fan of RIG. But, I just have all these co-workers that want to know everything about me. But Facebook is my personal space.

Lori Packer: Yeah. If that's how you want to use it, that's absolutely how you should use it. And then, if they try to friend you, just ignore them and they'll get the message. I do have professional folks on Facebook and I think of my Facebook page as more a combination of fun and professional. There are things I wouldn't put there. For instance, I actually did have a little bit of a struggle when the Spacebook-MyFace guy befriended me. I was like, "No, he's an associate VP and he wants to be my friend. OK." But then, I accepted it because I thought, "OK, he's trying. This is really hard for him. This is a guy who doesn't get this at all." And I don't post anything that I wouldn't want him to see, anyway, so sure. I'll be his friend.

Actually this guy isn't my boss; he's like my half-boss. He's one of these weird relationships. But my actual real boss hasn't befriended me. And I have an employee and I haven't befriended her because I think when the power relationships are unequal, then it gets weird. We're at the same level in the organization. So, I just thought, "OK, he's trying. And I need to encourage that."

But if you want to use it for personal reasons, the views you're putting it to, then you should do that. Yes?

Audience 4: One thing about that is I simply... personally I feel the need what I get is a lot of time. So, I have to check my voicemail, my email, my Twitter account, my Facebook - not that I check all these things all the time and actually get any work done at the same time. So how am I going to respond to a tweet in five minutes when I'm in the middle of checking my email.

Lori Packer: The answer to that is you don't have to respond to a tweet in five minutes. All of these things are voluntary. They're not mandatory. There are tools that can help you use it more efficiently, like TweetDeck. I wouldn't show your boss TweetDeck. For those of you who haven't used it or seen it, it's sort of a panel view of Twitter. It's sort of a sensory overload the first time you see it. You see all the different panels sort of moving in space in real time. I have it open on my desk all day. I have my own Twitter account. I have the university's Twitter account. During the conference, I have the conference Twitter account. So, I tweet way too much.

But you're not under any obligation to do any of these things. I think it's interesting and useful to try. And if it doesn't work out for you and you feel like it's a time stop, just stop doing it. Yes?

Audience 5: You mentioned the problems and the questions you get about comments like something. Do you get questions about more serious in there and how do you respond to it?

Lori Packer: We haven't had that question. We haven't had that experience yet. At that board of trustees meeting in Niagara Falls, the dean of the school of nursing, when I was sort of showing how you write things and they appear on other people's pages and people write back and forth and some of the things that people were saying that were funny, she said, "I'm sorry, but is all this legal? Are we allowed to just be sharing all this stuff? Is it OK if we're sharing this stuff?" And our university general council, the lawyer in the room, which was fantastic, said, "I don't understand any of these. I'm not going to use any of these. I'm not going to do any of these."

But from an institutional standpoint, the only thing that I would say that we need to worry about is of someone's making an ad hominem attack on an individual person. And if someone did that, we as an institution need to take care of our people and we need to get that off there. It has never happened in our experience yet. I'm sure others had experiences where that may have happened but not with us.

I think I've only got time for one more question. Jay?

Audience 6: A quick one of the actions of Bamboo when going to use Twitter. Is it like iPhoto or iTunes? Also as you break it up to vocal groups. It gives you a little bit of what they say when something new is in the category so they prioritize searches.

Lori Packer: Yes. Bamboo?

Audience 6: The other thing is uploading voicemail, automatically turns those into email and I find that it does have some quality. The transcriptions aren't always right , but it's nice having everything in one box. And the other question I have is what have you found that's been successful to convince people who were trained and hired to be broadcasters to be one with it, to begin the process of changing the way they think about interaction to being more of an engagement with the user. Have you been able to pace rationally? It seems there's a cultural contest in there?

Lori Packer: Yeah. I think the second part, the listening half of the equation of all this social stuff is the hardest to get. We all know how to write things on the wall and send things out on Twitter. But the flip side of the conversation that involves listening is the one that doesn't come as intuitively. I think the biggest thing that I do all the time, I don't know if it works but it helps, is just simply showing them the conversations that's happening anyway.

It's often an eye opener, that there are already people talking about us. They'll write things like, "I'm visiting the University of Rochester with my kids today." We're not going to jump in and reply or retweet or do anything to like every mention of the University of Rochester.

But there have been occasions when you can answer a question someone is having. And then, they freak out. They're so excited that you actually responded to them, that someone from the institution said, "Well, actually the campus visits don't start until March. Go to this URL to sign up." They just are beside themselves with gratitude and joy. So, if you can show a couple of instances of that happening, it's a hard thing to click over to. But I just start to see it. I think that's the most useful thing to try.

I think I'm out of time. So, thanks, everybody.

[Applause]