SOC7: Together Everyone Achieves More: A Team Approach to Student Support in Twitter

[Intro Music]

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

Holly: So welcome everybody. As she mentioned, we're going to be talking about in particular Twitter as a student support channel and really happy to be here today. It's our first time at HEWeb and in the eternal words of the classic film Wayne's World which does have a segment about Milwaukee, we are not worthy, okay, but we're really glad to be here today.

We are from New Mexico State University. We work in the Office of the Vice President of Student Success. We're very fortunate in that we are supported in exploring sort of innovative approaches to online support for students at New Mexico State which is a land grant and open enrolment university. Our main campus has about 16,000 students and with our community colleges, our system is around 40,000 students. So with that and the fact that we are a Hispanic serving institution, we have a lot of special things that we are looking at to support students.

Retention is a very important thing and many of our students are actually first generation college students so that sort of is in line with the approach that we have here. You can access our resources at success.nmsu.edu/heweb09. We'll keep that address up at different points so that you can refer to it.

We will be talking about our team approach. As you know, there are different approaches to an institutional Twitter presence. Maybe some of you are involved in some kind of Twitter on behalf of your institution and maybe there are people that you work with. Maybe you have some kind of team approach, even people that you consult with that help you to do this or maybe you're thinking about starting a Twitter account and from whatever perspective that you look at it, we're going to share our experiences and maybe that will be relevant to you in some way.

To give you a little bit of an overview of our presentation today, we're going to use this image to kind of take you through our presentation and it is of course in the middle of the @ symbol that users on Twitter use to show who they are mentioning or speaking to. We have sort of evolved this into a timeline if you will, so we'd like to tell you the story of our Twitter team and some of our learning that's occurred by sort of taking you through this journey.

So we chose not only to represent the timeline like this for purposes of showing the @ symbol but also because our philosophical approaches may be a little bit different than other folks in how they look at Twitter. None of us come from a business background or a marketing background and so our perspective is sort of framed a certain way and we just want you to know that so you know where we're coming from.

Our backgrounds are in education and technology and also communications and so we sort of think of our process with Twitter as a spiral. It's almost like what is referred to as the action research spiral. We go in and out of phases of kind of learning about what we're doing. It's a process of inquiry we're looking at okay, what are we trying to do? Let's try something, let's see what happens and then let's take some feedback and try and improve. So that just gives you a little bit of a framework to our presentation today.

The first stage of our Twitter team development is what we call the search for persona. In other words, just getting started. It was actually about a year ago that we created the NMSU Twitter account at NMSU. This is from a website called MyTweet16 that takes you back to your first 16 tweets so if you ever want to feel a little nostalgic for your first days on Twitter, it's kind of fun.

This is NMSU's bottom of the page so just read backwards. At the very bottom was the first tweet. You can see there are a few tweets there or maybe you can't, but the first few tweets that we posted were activities, things that were happening on campus. To be perfectly honest, although there were some different people that we were talking about Twitter and as a matter of fact we were using Twitter for a year or so before this project. It wasn't really a concerted effort yet. It was basically me saying, sure, I'll start us a Twitter account and we'll see what happens.

Within a few days started looking, searching for people, we had watched mentions of NMSU or people who might be talking about NMSU as just interested members of the community but we sort of took a different perspective when we were looking at it to find our students. So some of the individuals that were mentioned NMSU either attributed in their bio that they were a student from NMSU or maybe they were talking about a program that they were involved in.

So in a way that we felt that was appropriate, we followed those students and replied to them. You can see the top tweets is wondering what online support can do to help Aggie succeed. She says wondering what online support can help Aggie succeed and your thoughts are welcome. So we started to really think this should be a support channel.

Certainly having been on Twitter in maybe the 2007 to 2008 period, we were influenced by customer support models that already existed on Twitter. We were looking at Comcast with the Comcast cares account. Actually there are a number of Comcast accounts now. They've sort of scaled that out but that's what these individuals do all day; answer questions, search for mentions of Comcast, reply to those people, offer to help them and do the best they can to help them.

We're also influenced by Zappos which is a company that promotes the use of Twitter with most of their employees. I understand that they have close to 500 employees that are using Twitter and they're really looking at it as creating a network, a comprehensive network where their customers can receive that support and engagement and interaction.

So those ideas were important to us and we felt maybe we could achieve this on Twitter. So it wasn't long after we had gone out and followed some students and we're searching the NMSU mentions and we come across something along the line of this so NMSU is following me, isn't that a little creepy. And then there's a moment in time and I must say we have this sort of work environment where we work in teams a lot and we collaborate a lot so we're frequently just pulling folks in and out of what we're talking about.

So at this moment on sort of going down the hall and finding some people so we just got this tweet that's saying it's kind of creepy that we followed them, and that moment was sort of the beginnings of our team that idea that were going to come together and talk about this and that time, we actually kind of debated and how should we handle this and what should come out of this? That was how we started formally meeting, Twitter meetings.

So our response to that was a blog post on our internal blogging community, everybody's business, and we just tried to get some basic information out there that we felt that we could link to if students asked, who is this and what are you guys doing? What's happening here? So we provided information about who was participating in the account and we talked about some of our other considerations. We'll go a little bit more into that later.

It was the first time that we identified what we considered to be our following norms. This just basically means we decided that following students ought to be something that they opted into, that students should follow us first because if we had gone out and continued to follow and maybe made some students feel a little creepy like they're being watched from above and we're trying to kind of monitor them or whatever. But really just establishing we're here if you need help. This is really only about answering your questions and finding new support.

We sort of imagined it like a back channel through the bureaucracy, a concierge service where students could come. We were connected to the right people on campus. We felt we could help them get what they needed. So that was an early example of that.

We really realized through that process of coming together and talking about it that there was an immense value to having those perspectives. Even though we all were using Twitter, we really had different perspectives and it led to some great conversations about how we should proceed in this situation.

Along those lines, what we might recommend, if you are thinking about adding folks on to your Twitter team or composing a Twitter team, experience is important and certainly Twitter experience is one of those things. You might think about the depth of adoption or where people are going and how they're connecting with Twitter itself because someone who's following five people and has posted 20 updates is going to give you very different feedback about what the Twitter account should do compared to someone who's following several hundred and has been using it for maybe a year or something like that. So your experience of the people that you work with does play a role and certainly all those perspectives are valuable.

The next stage of our development kind of shows how the stakes increased with the student support channel because at first it seemed pretty simple. It's like okay, yes, we've got a team, how hard can this be?

I'm going to put myself out here. I'm going to explain to you how this is how simple I thought it was. This is a Google spreadsheet. I'm the one that created it. It's a Twitter sitting schedule. I thought hey, we've got seven people, we can each take a day. This is going to be so easy. There were comments made by the team, hey, after a while, we can just have our students take over a day and they can help us out with this and this is going to be great.

So although there were some specific conversations, for example, Melody works, she's Twitter sitting on Friday so we have to at some point decide what point on Friday she's off and then I'm going to pick up for her or whatever. So we had some conversations about it but in our minds, it was just like a methodology, a way of kind of organizing things but it sure was that great. We'll explain why. Our keynote speaker at lunch yesterday mentioned how methodology can hinder us sometimes, something that we think we need that structure. But we certainly started out that way.

It did have a benefit of increasing our presence because each person who was involved was tweeting a number of times more than just one person who would've been watching it and responds to all their other job opportunities. So that was kind of cool because we started to get a little bit more interaction.

It was challenging though to kind of mitigate some of those differences in perspective between all of these folks. What we really weren't prepared for, even though this seemed simple was the amount of time we were going to spend debating how we should be using Twitter as a team.

So what you see here is our follower survey and this is something that developed out of hours of debate and conversation. Well, if we're going to survey our followers, what should the methodology be? When should the post be made? Should it be a tweet poll or a survey monkey or how are we going to do this? Who's going to respond? Do we do it at 11:00 in the morning or 11:00 at night? Which way will be more valid? If we ask it too many times, are people going to stop caring? All this was really good for meetings but it definitely brought up the challenge of having that number of people, basically seven people getting together weekly and trying to decide how to manage this. So that represents that challenge.

This is part of our landing page now. This is kind of like the finished part. There may be four more questions I think and we do keep it as a valuable resource and it's part of the resources that we have on our web link if you're interested in checking that out. I did mention that when we set up that Twitter sitting schedule, it led to more student interaction. I'm now actually going to turn it over to my colleague Philip and he's going to give some examples of these interactions for you.

Philip: As Holly mentioned, we're informed by this customer service approach and what we say right on our Twitter bio is if you have questions about NMSU, ask us. We're going to connect you to resources. We're going to get you answers to your questions.

So kind of right off the bat pretty early on into the process, students start asking us questions and this was really the first time a student directly asked us for help on something. And they're asking us, how do I set up my iPod Touch to use NMSU email? Really, this was a great sort of first jump into these waters for us.

As a team, this knowledge is not documented anywhere on the NMSU message boards or website or anywhere how to actually do this. But in our little team amongst our seven people, we had this sort of institutional knowledge in our heads. We knew exactly what to tell the students. We were able to quickly get them up and running using their email on their iPod Touch. They were happy, we were happy, it was a nice sort of moment for us where we realized that hey, people are going to engage with us and we can actually answer their questions quickly, send them on their way, everyone's happy.

Here's another example. Here's a little later in the semester. The questions are starting to get a little more complicated we're seeing. Here's a student asking us, what happens when I drop a class, do I have to repay? So Holly mentioned the Twitter sitting schedule so there was somebody when this tweet came through. There was somebody whose day it was to respond to that and the way they responded was kind of maybe not as measured as we would have liked in retrospect. Their response was sure, drop the class, you won't have a problem.

So immediately, there are these different elements of the team and conversations start happening in cubicles and hallways about this tweet. We're starting to see some things emerging. It's like wow, did we just advise a student? We're not academic advisers? Did we really tell them that? We're the division of student success and we said yes, sure, drop a class. We didn't say hey, well, what's the problem with the class? Do you need some advising? Do you need some tutoring? Do you need some time management workshops? It's like why are you looking to drop that class?

So what we kind of learned from this particular moment here were a couple of things. One is sort of a 'gotcha' that you really sort of have to as somebody who's working with an institution, you have to really understand or know what you don't know about the institution and be prepared to sort of go outside, tap into your own sort of personal social network amongst your colleagues on campus and find out that information for your students.

The other thing that we sort of formalized here was this idea that we're not the experts. We can connect students to experts but we are not financial aid experts, we are not advising experts. We are simply facilitators to get the questions that they ask in this online space to the people who can answer them well and meaningfully.

So again, here's a third example of some of the sort of questions that are coming through. Again, the stakes are kind of going up with this question. A student is asking us, how does one student take disciplinary action against another student for harassment? Those earlier experiences where we had to think how we responded really helped shape the response to this tweet. I think we had a good measured response here. Again, the team kind of comes into play and there's a bunch of ideas get bounced around and we realized, okay, there's not a lot of information here but maybe the first immediate thing we need to tell the student is if you're in danger, if you know someone who's in danger, call 911, get off Twitter, Twitter is not your emergency 911.

So that's kind of the first thing that has to go out and then we have a conversation. It's like all right, well, who's the resource on campus that we need to connect the student with? It turns out the best place for them to go is student judicial services through the office of the dean of students. We make a phone call, kind of give them a heads up. We have this issue with a student on Twitter. Somebody in that office is saying, tell them to come to me, here's my phone number. And we were able to make sure that the student got the information that they needed on this kind of high stakes personal safety issue for them.

Yes?

Audience: We have this dialogue that gives a direct message.

Philip: It did. We immediately took this to a direct message because it gets into issues of privacy and all kinds of things.

Audience: It's best to have discussions about that.

Philip: Yes. There was a back and forth. Laura was actually -

Laura: Yes. I was going to mention it. Because they asked this publicly and we want to give them an answer so we answered publicly with a very standard answer and privately we said, here do this so take these steps. So yes, it was a combination.

Philip: All right. So for ourselves, for our team, at this point, we had some sort of takeaways, some sort of aha's for ourselves. Again, speaking for us, for our team, the single perspective is not enough. This can be too complicated for one person to handle most of the time.

Being somebody who's really sort of good on Twitter personally is good. Engaging interactive doesn't necessarily translate to somebody who does it well institutionally. This was also the point where we sort of put the final nail in the coffin of the idea that we would be able to at some point sort of model this and then let students run with it. We realized that there are some complicated questions here and you sort of need some staff accountability in place and again, sort of that knowing what you don't know idea kind of falls in here.

So if we were offering some advice to somebody else who was looking to set up a team or have a Twitter team at this point, we would say define the roles of your team. In our case, we have kind of moved through that Twitter sitting schedule or kind of an offshoot of that now at this point.

We have three major roles in place for the team. We have students who will do things like post events that are coming up, deadlines and that sort of thing. And we have the responders which are the three of us. We're the ones who feel the questions that come through on Twitter and connect students to people on campus who could answer their questions. Then we also have what we call contributors. �They're the people who offer things like Twitpics, maybe interesting links that come through our Twitter account, just to sort of round out the voice that we're trying to give to this persona.

So I'm going to take us through this next phase, part of the development. The buzz - get the phones away from the computer.

Okay. So we're at this phase where we have a model in place. �We have a team dynamic working, and what we're seeing now at this point is we're starting to connect to a large community and in some ways, we're doing this outside of Twitter. So here's kind of one of the first artifacts of that idea. This is our Twitter landing page. This is derived from that blog post that Holly showed you earlier.

This is a link right off our bio on our Twitter account now, and the idea here is transparency. We want anybody who is interested in what we're doing to know a couple of things. One, what unit of campus this is coming from. Who are the people behind it? We took up the convention of marking all our tweets with our initials so if somebody wants to know who is the person who just told me that there's an activity happening tonight or answered my question, they can come here and they can link. They can see who we are. They can link actually to our own personal Twitters or personal/professional Twitter accounts. So again, this idea of transparency.

Then, this is where we solidified some of the norms that Holly was talking about that we're an opt-in network and also that we don't follow people for disciplinary reasons or anything like that. We're here to answer your questions and that's pretty much the framework that we've set up for ourselves as an institutional Twitter.

So we got the team in place, we've got the landing page going and people are starting to take interest. Our colleagues across campus are starting to take interest in what we're doing asking us questions. One of the first times that we as a team here kind of took our show on the road, so to speak, was through a speaker series event that was set up through our office.

What happened there, the theme of the day was kind of social media so we had us as the Twitter folks; we had some people on campus who were doing really cool stuff in MySpace. We had some professors who were doing really cool things with social media, web 2.0 and online spaces. It was kind of a general conversation about what was happening in social media at NMSU. What you're seeing on the screen are just some of the PowerPoint slides that we presented that day.

I should say we did the speaker series and we immediately kind of saw that there was some interest, specifically in Twitter and that led to what we called our Twitter camps which were basically events that we've put on a number of times now where we'll bring in our colleagues and we'll just have kind of an informal workshop. We'll talk about what we're doing in Twitter. We'll talk about how they can maybe benefit from being on Twitter personally, how they might want to use Twitter for their own units, just kind of a conversation that we have specifically about Twitter.

So one nice piece of fallout from both those, the speaker series and the Twitter camps, is that we're starting to see other personas starting to emulate what we're doing. So here's a tweet from AggieTC which is our Aggie tech connection. This is essentially the technology component of our bookstore on campus. It's kind of similar maybe makeup in some ways as our team. We've got professional staff paired with students and they're all about technology, Apple computers, Dell computers.

What we're seeing them do is not just try to sell computers through Twitter but actually engage with an audience, be of value in the network. This kind of ties back to that very first tweet where somebody asked us about how do I set up my iPod Touch. Now, we've got a resource way better equipped to answer those sort of questions. We're starting to see that technology questions will come to us or come at NMSU and sort of general at NMSU how do I X? We're actually seeing this persona kind of jump in and say, hey, here's how you do that and if you're having trouble, come see us at the bookstore, we'll show you how to get that iPod working or figure out why your wireless connection isn't working and those sort of things. So it has really helped to sort of extend the network in some ways.

At this point, we're also starting to see some interest in what we were doing in student media, so here's a little bit of an article that was published in the journalism department's online magazine. It's called Emerge. Student reporters had seen what we were doing. They kind of tracked us down, figured out who we were and asked if they could interview us. They wrote a nice article about what we were doing in Twitter and how it can work for students at our university.

Then, we're also kind of widening out as well. This is a bit from our weekly newspaper in our town. They're using what we're doing. This customer service idea in our Twitter account is sort of an entering wedge to a conversation with business people around town about how they can may be using Twitter as a customer service channel and here's an example of some people at the university who are actually doing it.

So the takeaway, the aha that we had here is people are going to be interested in what we're doing so we need to be prepared to share that information to a wider community who may or may not be on Twitter. If we were offering advice at this point, when people come and ask to interview you or you hold a Twitter camp and as they're walking out the door, they're telling you, hey, that was great, I really enjoyed it. The accolades are nice but the thing that we quickly realized is we need to invite critique. In some cases, we kind of have to seek it out. We really need to balance out that perspective.

Laura is going to talk to you more about some other things in addition to how we're sort of inviting that critique so I'm going to turn it over here to my colleague, Laura.

Laura: Thank you. Okay. So as we're going along here, as you guys can see, our network was kind of emerging. We're trying to figure ourselves out. We recognize like Philip said that outreach was important, so of course we did the speaker series and the Twitter camp he mentioned.

These are a couple of artifacts from Twitter camp. You can see there's a little wiki and then this happened as a result but it was kind of nice because we had our campus community come out and they were really interested in learning about it. It just gave us a good chance to get them used to it, using it on a personal level before their boss said, hey, don't you want to start a Twitter account for our unit? That's often happened. I mean we've heard of that happening and we really, really encourage people to have a personal account so they get the sense of how it works. Anyway, so that's Twitter camp.

We also had a think tank session, and what we did with these think tank sessions, this is a tweet from there and I said, got some strange looks and had a lot of fun during our think tank session. The what-ifs were my fave. So this is just to indicate that we had this think tank session. We invited people from the community that were a little more apprehensive or weren't really into Twitter and they had heard about it and they thought well, it's going to go away. It might go away, but they thought it was really temporary and that it had no value.

So anyway, this was a great way to get them involved in looking at what we were doing and looking at Twitter as a whole. Also, we wanted to get them to be resource people. It's always nice to let people know what you're doing just so you have them as a resource and you don�t have to explain to 15 people why you need to call them to get answers for something. So this was really a nice thing.

One of the pieces of insight that we got that was really valuable in one of the think tank sessions was from an administrator on campus that is really cynical about social media. She's a wonderful person but she's really cynical about it. She said you don�t have to reinvent the wheel, a student support system already exists. This was a really comforting statement from her because she's right. It's not like we had to go and create tutoring or online services or anything. We just had to create an access point so that was really nice that she said that. It was a really great moment for us because it made us realize that she kind of had a sense that we weren't trying to recreate anything like that so it was really a nice moment.

So I mentioned that we were building our network and Philip talked about that as well. We just made this diagram to show and it's kind of complicated but we have people within Twitter, outside of Twitter or think tank and university community and of course, these people here are really nice because we can re-tweet everything or a lot of the things they say. We serve as a gatekeeper for what information goes out to our users. This leadership team is ultra important because they're the decision-makers and they're the ones who really support us and offer guidance if some crisis situation happens so that's really important. That's proven to be really important.

The particular case with the young lady that had the soccer issue, I was able to call one of the people on the leadership team and they responded really quickly because they had been to these meetings and realized what we were doing. I didn't have to explain to him what the situation was.

So basically, we learned that our network is beyond social media. It's not just who is in Twitter. It's already there and you just have to tap into it.

Most importantly, if you all were to decide to do something like this, the best thing is to foster a network of support so hold events and get people together, have one on one meetings. If somebody looks perplexed in the Twitter camps, for example, we talk to them after the fact. If somebody called and just wanted to sit down and talk about it and whether they should start one with their own unit, we just went ahead and talked to them.

So at this point, we've got us worked out. We think we got the Twitter team worked out. We've got our network going. We're comfortable. We've got our workflow figured out and then we have new challenges of course, right? It couldn't be that easy.

So this one was complicated because well, it starts off good, so we have this thing where an institution that's unaffiliated with NMSU starts using the hashtag, NMSU hashtag. I don�t think they knew that they were doing that at the beginning. This person engaged and said, you should find a new hashtag, this is our hashtag. So it was kind of nice because it made us realize that people were willing to engage if they needed to, if they were willing to protect the turf. It was a really nice moment for us.

Another example of engagement is we had a scavenger hunt and the students were able to Twitpic pictures of student services that they found useful, and so it kind of gave the indication that they not only thought the student services were useful but that the persona was useful for them. So that was really nice because it was kind of a validation.

Now, I'm going to read this. Campus emergency alerts. See homepage for details and updates.

As you can see, usually we're just flowing with information and we're just willing to say anything that is relevant. But with this particular tweet, we ran into problems because we didn't have all the information. And being resourceful and having connections didn't give us enough information to be able to appropriately give students good information basically, so it was a difficult situation.

But anyway, what we took away from this is that engagement takes different forms; some are more challenging to facilitate than others as you saw with the emergency one that was kind of a hard one. And that a team approach to student support is a moving target. You can't prepare for the unexpected, right? So that was really difficult. So it made us really realize that we have to continue the conversation that our outreach isn't over. We have to still meet with people. We're hoping to meet with safety people here pretty soon if they'll meet with us and they'll validate what we're doing.

So anyway, dealing with all these expected, unexpected engagement and interactions, we've used all kinds of tools and Holly is going to talk about that.

Holly: Thanks Laura. Okay. So just a little bit tools because for listening like that's how we're going to monitor engagement, all these tweets that are coming through; the emergency drama, the NMSU hashtag sort of battle. Tools became really important and we don�t have a lot of time. This is kind of the plat du jour at the moment. I just want to say that we're just that culture in our office where we all try a little bit of everything and we're not really likely to just stick with one thing and we feel that's a beneficial approach for a team because you need to see Twitter through different lenses to make sure you're not really missing anything. So using different tools definitely helps us and you want to have more specific questions about how tools can help your team get with us on Twitter or connect with us by email and we can give you some more information about that for sure because it's a great conversation about tools.

We'd like to put it altogether now and bring into perspective what we feel this whole project has done to benefit us as a Twitter channel for student support. First of all, we feel like this is a sustainable way of doing things, like if one of us leaves our job, this persona is not just going to stop and just be frozen in time. I have seen that happen when people are working on an institutional persona and they leave, there's a gap there. So this is going to make it easier for us even if we're just going on vacation to have that support that we need.

Twitter really is a 24/7 seven days a week sort of thing, and we definitely spend time, nights, weekends watching and responding.

Those conversations of checks and balances for your decision-making definitely help. I feel that is wonderful. It's hard as a team to have some of those conversations and debate some of those things but it definitely makes you stronger as a team too.

We've gotten feedback from our followers that they like the diversity in voice. That there are different people updating the Twitter and they feel like they're getting that experience. �It eases the workload and it helps it not to be all on one person. Just our institutional knowledge is kind of exponentially grown as a resource. Finally, it's just a model that the rest of our NMSU presence can use if they like to or if they want to.

Having said all of that, as I said, we have links to Twitter camp, wiki and our follower survey and our think tank planning document and all that stuff at this web address. So you're encouraged to use that in whatever way it might help you. If you notice something that you feel like we can improve too, that would help us also because we are seeking that wider feedback we've talked to people at our but we'd like to know also what you guys have to say.

So with that, I'm going to turn it over to all of you for questions if we have time. Yes?

Audience: In talking about your methodologies, when it comes to how quickly respond. How do you decide in response and is there some kind of a limit you have in place where how soon you can get an answer?

Holly: Well, I think our perspective changed. Oh yes, thank you. I was thinking about that. So the question is do we have a strategy or a methodology for how long we wait before we respond to someone, how we decide who will compose a response to someone. That's a really good question.

We started off thinking we need to respond within two hours at the minimum and we always have to respond to everything that ever gets said. I think through our process of discussion and kind of learning, we realized that sometimes it's appropriate to respond and sometimes you need more information. So we definitely base it on the situation and we do our best. There's a sense of urgency like Philip has said with Twitter. It makes you feel like we've got to get out there and say something right away. That might not be the best thing when you're dealing with this kind of topics.

Laura: I was going to say. Usually, we try to respond within a half day. I mean sometimes it's within seconds somebody asks something and it's quick. I mean we're human beings so we kind of took on that human kind of thing. If somebody @ replies you or has a question for you on Twitter, sometimes it takes you a little longer so there's no die hard time thing that we have stuck to. But we haven't had any complaints or anything like that related to how long it took us.

Holly: I was going to say we're all famous for texting each other like 10:00 at night or whatever and going, so did you see that. So we stay connected to each other pretty much.

Laura: It's really important.

Holly: That's a really good question. Yes?

How much work is this? It's a tremendous amount of work and like all quality things, again, referring to our keynote speaker yesterday, it's a lot of frontloading and a lot of building things upfront. It sort of seems we go in and out of phases of oh, new stuff to figure out. Now, it's going to take more time but upfront initially, there's a process of group development. It's form, storm, norm, perform, and that takes time.

Laura: We've got to do that about four times now. I was going to mention that we do get six to eight hours of sleep every night, all three of us for the most part. So we're not doing it all hours of the night or anything.

Holly: Another question?

The question of if we have gone to the point of really sort of coding our interactions with students and trying to quantify how much interaction is happening here. I think we've thought a lot about that but we don�t have the time really in our workload however, I'll let Philip address that.

Philip: I have thought a lot about that. I'm working on a master's in rhetoric and professional communication. As a research project, I'm very interested in online identity performance and things that happen in online spaces, so I'm actually very interested in exactly what you talked about, sort of looking at the types of interactions that we're having on Twitter and sort of figuring out, doing a breakdown. Like you said, quantifying them. So it's in my head but it's not something that we've gotten to the point that we've actually done yet.

Yes, that's kind of where our thinking is leading us. We do want to have that out there as information and it's sort of me in my own sort of personal education, what I'm doing. That's something I do want to try to take on and it will have a nice benefit for us at work.

Laura: We've definitely kept records of everything. I mean we went back and printed every tweet for the last, you know, and all these interactions.

Holly: It's a PDF. But actually, we sort of have other data things that we collect that are helpful. For the first time this year, we surveyed our incoming freshmen on their social media use so we have roughly about 20% of the students that responded to the survey and said they had a Twitter account. So that's some kind of baseline of the people who we're not talking to. That's helpful and then, like the follower survey that we tried. So we're trying to get different things that we can triangulate some meaning, but we're very excited that Philip is going to take on a little more focused thing.

We might have time for one more.

Audience: Do you find that most of your students know about Twitter, use Twitter or are in Twitter. For example, you had a conversation of what you had for breakfast.

Holly: Well, I would just say that in our experience, it's just growing and there were definitely students there when we started the account and it continues to grow and there are some great discussions happening online about young people using Twitter, definitely. But we're seeing it increase and that we measured that by number of mentions, how many times NMSU gets mentioned and then our followers just steadily increasing. Knowing that we're not seeking them out, they're finding it.

Audience: I'm just wondering how most of us who are concerned about that and isn't network.

Laura: I think it's kind of going where the students are. We do that with recruitment. We go to the high schools. We don't wait for them to come to us. So I think it's just if they're there, we want to be there. We want to be there to help them. So I think that's how it fits in. It's just another access point. It's like the phone.

Yes, I think we're pretty much out of time but stick around. Thank you.