The two-word guide to social media – be sociable
It is called social media because that’s what it is; the tools are blogs and discussion groups. It should be like having an Open Day every day.
You are inviting people to get to know you; it is a person-to-person relationship. For some, this means contact with the person at the top; the ultimate champion for this level of openness and connectiveness.
Everyone counts, not that everyone wants muck in. Still, if you think of Social Media as being sociable, then all it requires are enough people to put their ear to the ground, catch conversations and, where appropriate, to join in. This might be a group discussion on LinkedIn or Xing, or a short, guiding, and encouraging comment on a student blog. The appeal of social media is that you choose to listen, to join in or start conversations; it shouldn’t be a message that is shoved at you, but one that is ‘opt in’. This self-selection is vital; it means that your audience, just as you do, has decided that this is a party, conversation, or community where the things you are interested in are being discussed. Lurking is an unjustly negative term for browsing, or simply reading what others are putting up. Starting on the periphery like this is reasonable, indeed a good way to start. From the periphery you listen and look. At some stage you may feel the desire to comment or join in. You may be noticed and drawn into a discussion anyway. If you are reading a blog, then you may feel you want to comment. And in time, you may feel comfortable enough with your own blog to write your own.
Think of Social Media as a place where conversations start and may be picked up by others. It can be and should be networking.
To be effective and build your presence (and that of the Faculty), you should be spending 30% of your time reading blogs, 30% of your time leaving comments on other people’s blogs, 30% of your time writing your own blog, with 10% left over to tag, link and title your content and study the analytics. Some basic information on how you are doing is valuable, entertaining and informative. It is interesting to know which topics attract attention and bring people back; equally valuable is knowing whether links to and from the OUFBL pages are being followed. Tags, titles, and links help your content get noticed in the storm of information.
I’m always struck by how by the expectations of the first time blogger is that as soon as you post something you will immediately be linked to your intellectual soul mate, or embraced by hundreds of readers who are eager to hear your remarkable words; you forget that anyone who wants to be online is tied up somewhere else, you’ll have to call them over, earn their respect and post consistently.
An introduction to social media.
Social media has been likened to a marketplace or bazaar; if you are selling rather than influencing, this is the case. In Higher Education I liken it to putting up a stall in Liverpool Station – we’re trying to put ourselves into a stream of prospective clients (our three audiences, which can be segmented further as interested in business or law as a student or interested in business as an HR or L&D Director).
Any measure of success must be assessed both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Firstly, using web analytics, anything we do generates figures over time of how many are visiting, what they are looking at, how they pass through the site and where they exit- patterns form, and we can learn something from this.
Secondly, when students sign up, they must be asked what brought them to this decision and how, so that we can develop what works.
The longer-term measure of success has to be put in context; there are multiple personal reasons why a person chooses one course over another.
Social Media: Where we are now
Traditional marketing and events, as well as awareness through the BBC, have a role to play, as does, of course, Government decisions about Higher Education and the state of the economy. We must also bear in mind the increasing competition from traditional universities and new interlopers, who can offer something similar, though, for now, on a far smaller scale than the Open University.
If this sounds as if I am saying Social Media is but a part of the mix, I am, but where Social Media goes much further than this is in its potential to engage those closest to the Faculty of Business and Law in the social media process.
I recently received an email asking me to vote for someone or something, as this would raise awareness of such-and-such a person or event – this, although somewhat unethical in my view, then boosts this person or event up the rankings in the blogosphere. What it shows is that engagement, however tiny, can involve just about everyone. Whilst such a vote may not seem like social media, it is, in effect, a one-character Tweet.
There are times when just clicking on something, going there, approving, liking, voting, is the most non-committal and easiest form of engagement.
You have left your mark.
You have been picked up on someone’s radar.
The next step is to comment to a friend on what is going on in an email, or to discuss it online somewhere; better still, to blog about it, even say something to camera and put that up.
I think of these as inclinations of social media, a few jangling bells in the wind, rather than the real McCoy.
These grass roots are important though and the engagement of most, rather than very few in projecting ourselves online should be the goal. If you’re asking why, then the simple answer is because everyone else is doing it.
Only a generation ago we believed in the sad isolation of people in modern society, this inevitable physical separation in a world so packed with people in our cubicles and boxes that the social media is able to overcome, not through the bombardment of messages not through the overwhelming flood of stuff, but through the ability to discover, if you are prepared to look, like minds.
Birds of a feather flock together.
This is the title of an influential study on the use of social media in higher education, where the research showed unequivocally that in this case, students, gathered by discipline to share ideas. On my own, to continue the bird analogy, I’m like the sole woodpecker tapping away at a telegraph pole. It doesn’t take much to visualise swallows gathering together on a telegraph wire, geese grazing or swallows spinning through the air. You chose to join such a flock of one or very many.
For social media to be effective we need a real bird or two, a few decoys may even work to draw in our own people, let alone outsiders, the key though, is to create an attractive environment that through its participations becomes a self-sustaining hub of insights, news, support and discussion.
A key part of any social media strategy must begin with those who will make our hub, our X Lake (Peter Scott) a place worth visiting, perhaps a place worth linking to regularly, even a permanent home. Once established it doesn’t need a Social Media Tsar (or should that be swan), the number (in part), also the variety, but especially the specific ‘breeds’ as it were become the appealing thing.
I come from a background in advertising with its above the line and below the line promotions, with narrow casting and broadcasting. We’re all familiar with advertising media, the content of papers, magazines, TV and radio designed to attract certain segments. Stuff is shoved out to these groups; however much research and planning that is undertaken it is a push and shove activity. Some would say we have it shoved down our throats.
Online at first naturally building on what we knew, space was sold online to fund new ventures, and irritating popup boxes broke our conversations or contented reading. It continued to be a case of the publisher or producer (now online) pushing and pedalling what they thought was best for us. The communication was largely one way and came through a pipe, virtual and actual.
But then, slowly, just plain folk, as John Seely Brown likes to call the non-specialist citizens found they could self-publish.
At first it was just a case of tinkering at the edges of a website, making it more than a brochure, but a room, a landscape, or as some academics want to describe it as ecology where things develop organically. The crucial, radical shift is the developed ease with which we communicate anything we like to anyone and everyone we like and expect and get a response whether it’s a simple thumbs up like, or a comment, even a person’s contact details and if we care to read it because they’ve dutifully completed the profiling forms, we have a good idea of what they are about.
John Seely Brown teaches about learning. I particularly like the way he describes vicarious learning on the periphery, a king of opt-in apprenticeship whereby you join a group by sitting on the periphery. You pick things up, you observe and listen, you may adjust to fit in. Eventually something crops up and you make a contribution, either the conversation touched on something where you had an opinion, or the numbers attending were low so you got your chance that way. Gradually you may work your way or simply be drawn into the centre of things as your knowledge and worth increases.
This is how social media works, both for the new practitioner and for the new audiences.
You allow yourself to be drawn in, you engage. And in turn, at whatever stage you might be at on one of these concentric rings you may find yourself making friends and doing the journey together. Think how convinced a person will be by the time they decide to study an MBA, or law degree, indeed any course, if they have come to a decision while sharing their concerns, hopes and desires with like-minds, those in a similar situation to them, who are on the same journey, or have been on it already. Think also, once we can play this with extreme tact, how through a close network of the most senior and influential Learning and Development Directors we can, having won them over to our practices and achievements, have them commit to sponsoring many of their staff through an MBA or other Business School module.
Some of us blog; if you have the time you can have our life story.
This scares many people; if it didn’t the blogger would be a mass-participation sport it isn’t. There may be 133 million blogs today, compared to the 60,000 in 1999 when I started, but I know that that active blogs, say content once a week, let alone once a month or three months means that the ‘active’ blog is more rare than we are made to believe. If 1% of those who go online blog, I doubt half of these can be called active, and even less the commentators and influencers who, like the daily paper, or radio show, have a regular audience or readership. A figure that is somewhat larger undergraduate student populations with recent research putting the figure at 34% having blogged at all in the last year while 11% are at it regularly.
The value of sharing who we are and what we do developed out of trials and experiments in around 1998 when a now director of Linkedin was featured in the Washington Post for keeping a blog not about their personal lives, journal like, but about their business life, and in particular the meetings she was having. It is from this exercise that Ellen Levy saw the value of developing, nurturing and sharing connections, of keeping like minds, and influencers together, as if in one place. What has occurred in the last decade, and over the last few years in particular, is that the number of people doing this globally has hit a critical mass – it works and it works fast so long as most people are willing to play the game, to state what they are about.
Social Media is about nurturing.
I liken to the job of social media manager to that of a host who has a multitude of presences in virtual gatherings others of like mind he hopes to influence will gather. In our case this means having places online that will attract and retain folk represented by the segments that matter most to us guided by the marketing research: prospective MBA students from Germany and Ireland, current and prospective corporate clients in the form of HR and L&D Directors from global multinationals … people interested in becoming lawyers, using law in their job or because they are interested in it.
And others.
Perhaps I should continue with the analogy of birds flocking together, on the other hand, sensitive to how any metaphor can bias what is after all only a subjective impression of my understanding of what is going on, how about, as we’ve done for over a decade in web-media, use a gardening analogy, of nurturing different gardens, and walling some off.
An prospective MBA student in Germany doesn’t give a hoot for the breadth of what the OUFBL is doing, this person is ONLY interested in their personal learning journey, one that begins with learning what it is they want to study, and why, and them with whom, and why … and so on. Apt to be talking about Germany, but it was the new eCommerce Director while at Mercedes, who introduced to that organisation the concept of ‘My Mercedes.’ Short of self-direction through our website this personalisation of content is feasible when and if this person links up with someone from inside the OUFBL, or an Alumnus, or current student, who can identify what matters to them. The gardening analogy is to create from current and fresh content a patch designed to appeal to these prospective students from Germany. Imagine having to do this for every niche, the Republic of Ireland the next one, the three different segments who find the School of Law appealing … or two quite diverse groups likely to be linked to the same content: undergraduates in business or law, compared to the Human Resources or L&D director. As we cannot please the individual, the next analogy, returning to this gardening theme, is to see the website as a garden centre where the plants that are of interest to you can be readily selected, picked out, and planted for further development and nurturing elsewhere.
This requires the simplest of step changes with the current website.
1) Give the pages ears, tongues and teeth, so that they can listen and talk. Every page, tweaked, requires and deserves, indeed necessitates opportunities to be shared, by email, fed into Linkedin or Facebook (or a myriad of others), the url saved in one service, the content profiled in a person’s blog.
2) Refresh the content, not only to keep it alive, but to make it current and shareable. It should be readily dropped into forum discussions.
3) Ensure that the content is more than informative, our influential thinkers ought to have their say, to be controversial with conviction and authority.
Somehow, especially in the highly competitive market for business education, we need to turn heads back in our direction.
Creativity works. An inspired, short, memorable, pointed message shot as a piece of video that might last less than three minutes will turn heads. Executed on brief, with aplomb, it will get attention. It has to be on YouTube, and it has to have every optimising tool craftily in place.
The reputation and position of the Open University in the world is shifting.
It can no longer afford to be bashful; this old dame of distance learning must rejuvenate, even reproduce and multiply in fresh, invigorated, competitive and international forms. The OUFBL has a reputation of going first, being the early adopter, today however, it faces competition, e-learning is not such an exclusive expertise (the OU teach the Masters in Open and Distance Education after all, and in my tutor group we have a senior learning designer from BPP no less. E-Learning courses are common place, with a vibrant commercial business sector creating content too).
We should not be complacent
At Learning Technologies 2011 I attended a seminar in which RBS described how they had created a bespoke business school offering for managers globally in all their business with Harvard Business School; a director of MMMC described how a viral video put onto YouTube filled an online marketing course within two weeks of going live which was within the two weeks when registrations would close. The video was aired; I understand its brilliant appeal. A compelling narrative set to a rock ballad, simply executed, made you laugh and had you agreeing. The other example they gave was to target, through Facebook, a group they felt were untapped for the online marketing courses they were offering … woman in Arab countries. Advertising through social media works in that audiences have already self-selected in relation to what interests them and so the messages they are likely to respond to. It is not expensive to advertise in Facebook and on Linkedin, for Germany the promotion should be in Xing.
Competitors will be as agile, and will cherry pick the low lying and moist valuable fruit.
Nor does it have to be e-learning, blended learning has its attractions, indeed are not all OUFBL modules ‘blended’ compared to ‘distance’.
This debate will rage. We must call a spade a spade. Internet audiences/participants, commentators, bloggers and the lurker/readers require best efforts at the truth, which is more reliably supplied by fellow students, current and past, than from the fingertips of a pinioned internal copywriter.
‘Nearness learning’ is a message worth promoting; this sense of proximity includes the relationship with people at the OUFBL. This can only occur if, still at arms-length, more blog. Even if comment options are turned off, at least you are then saying something.
Corporate social media touches on external and internal communications, while educational social media is engagement through institutional web conferencing tools, forums and blogs. It is impossible to exclude one from the other, each floats in the digital ocean, currents that flow between student social media feed to external communities because these students work for pharmaceutical companies, and banks, the NHS or DoH, they are serving in the Army, Navy or Air Force, they are on oil platforms, in other educational institutions (tertiary, secondary and primary), and some even work for the direct competition of the OU – how else do they learn to do what the OU does?
Early and in some respects continuing concerns regarding the internet, always picked up by the press and stigmatised, and often a concern of the social media novice, is the revelation of more than basic information. It is basic information, it is stuff that enables the internet and social media in particular to work on your behalf. It is extraordinary easy, and not as impolite as it would be at a party, to cold shoulder anyone whose conversation irrates or bores you, or to eliminate, literally, the messages they might be pointing your way if you don’t like them. Just as spam had to be eradicated before it stymied the future of the internet, social media communities are sensitive and increasingly robust at delivering what you want, the exclusion of the pests. You can only develop trust for the medium by dipping your toes in the water, then stretching out and taking a swim. These audiences are not universal, they won’t reach everyone, but they are an increasingly vital, vibrant, IT comms savvy bunch.
You get well educated people to offer up their profiles to the world and if shared through. The right channels they can be ambassadors externally, champions internally and even educators, answering student questions, or at least pointing them in the right direction if they stumble into you in one environment or another. This is from the perspective of the individual, why social media enables very simply though, is the socialising of everyone, not as a crowd, but as an army of individuals, and apt term if we are thinking about a ‘fight back.’ It is apt, though the wider community must never perceive it as such, cynicism is easily spread.
Rather it should come over as a genuine desire to engage. To harness social media, as our competitors will be doing and possibly with greater agility, and desperation, or fuelled by another panic growth fuelled by Venture Capitalists desperate to invest in anything with an e in front of it, a number of things have to occur.
Those able and willing to do so, tricky with those academics who crave solitude, is to make yourself better known and available to your various audiences. Even those and perhaps especially those who don’t wt to teach, contact with future, let alone current and past students is vital. The numbers game used to be how much you spent on advertising, or how often your ads went out. The OU, perhaps like Oxbridge, feels as if it is just there, it needs no introduction or explaining, this might be the case in a domestic market, but OUBS is competing globally where we are a literally a virtual unknown or at best misunderstood.
The numbers game has for a period been about pay per click, this, rather like the popup ads of the past, is being reviewed, it is unsustainable on the one hand, but also perceived as a form or buying social influence in a world where authentic social influence counts for more.
Just because you spend the most money doesn’t make you the best.
Just because you pages get the most views does not mean that these pages offer the best service or quality, the best experience or outcomes. Increasingly and understandably people want to hear it as it is, has not this always been the case if the opportunity arose?
Now through social media you can ask, you will get the experiences of many through the right forums and from the right blogs. Nor is it just the case of reading or viewing a testimonial. They say that old news keeps like fish, it does, and like the fish and chips it used to be wrapped in quickly found its way into the bin.
Old news online does not need to go off like fish; it can be refreshed, served in different ways. And where the task is gargantuan, you enroll your readers to bring the social media party alive, it is their ideas for discussions, their comments, views and a suggests that get it going and keep it buzzing for the benefit of all, especially for the newcomers, those on the periphery, the potential OUBS student who chances upon who has actively sought out a group where conversations are being had about a current or past course, its strengths and weaknesses.
SMART
Specific Measurable Attainable Realistic Timeline
The possibilities of the website to play a social media role needs to be realized. It may offer a number of key landing pages, information people require to make informed decisions, with some news and forthcoming events too but it needs to become a hub, and like our own Hub, a place where people regularly gather. The operative word is ‘people.’
To become this vibrant hub where those interested in studying business or law at various levels the OU way meet, there needs to be an opportunity to converse, to exchange ideas, to recommend and a guide.
The initial, and tentative step, is to include everywhere an item of information is isolated, a share button, so that with a quick click, as is the social media savvy person inclined to do, that gobbet of information can be shared. It means that there must be lots of remarkable information of course, nuggets that people feel compelled to share. We let our visitors do the promoting for it, enable, encourage and feed this inclination to share immediately.
We need ample opportunity to communicate too, not simply getting in touch, but to communicate through commenting on the thing that has got their attention. This keeps any initial dialogue to the point. There needs to be good reason to hang around, an MBA student may take three years to decide before committing; during this time there is ample opportunity for them to be drawn somewhere else because it is a huge undertaking, in time, cost and the intellectual challenge.
At the point when they get their debit card out will have other schools in mind? It is at this point where we re most vulnerable, where, just as the shoppers hand may pick one product off the shelf rather than the other, that we need to have formed such a depth of opinion that they won’t be hijacked. Whilst the OU has depth in distance learning, expertise and ample examples of success it is palpable that this depth, let alone the scope and scale are not coming over.
The FT started a blog roll of current MBA students a few months ago. This is read globally and is indicative of two things, the new found reputation and value to the old publishing world of the citizen blogger, but also that the OUBS was not seen to be part of the initial line up. Most disparaging of all from the FT the idea that distance learning students often dropped out, wouldn’t stick to their blog and would probably drop out of their course. We now have Lieutenant Colonel Sean Brady, a new to the OU MBA student, begging for himself and reading between the lines for his seniors, company and career.
Where else are we being left out of the conversation? It will be one thing to Who to blog for us
There are three parts to the social media task, a task that I will say shortly, needs to be shared with a variety of others. When it comes to social media too many cooks make the broth, indeed, once and if we get some more cooks invovled, we need the waiting staff, and the punters to be weighing in too.
These three parts are:
Listening
Commenting
Communicating (blog,webinar,forum)
It ought to be continuous. If limited to theUKperhaps evenings and weekends and Friday lunchtime are the moments to be around to join in what may be an asynchronous conversation, but nonetheless has to be synchronous and responsive in nature. To satisfy, as we must, a global audience, we need to be active all the time.
This is a fire that once lit we should never allow to go out.
This is far easier than it sounds:
By blogifyinge a website that happens to be built with blogging software we permit a greater variety of messages … It isn’t for us to decide if our reader cares for something heavy or trivial at that moment, this is their choice not ours.
Choice is also key
This does not need to be an online brochure, where the choices have been made for our readers.OxfordUniversityhas a Wall of Faces – you can pick any number of ways into theOxfordstory. We too need many video testimonials where the kinds of people, their decisions and choices are revealed by their stories. The right story becomes the starting point for their journey.
Blogs can be anything
They are as versatile as anything we have ever written down on paper, whether it’s a list, core assignment, diary or minutes of meetings.
They can be micro in length like Twitter, or draft chapters for a forthcoming book, they can be a gallery of pictures with no written words, all words but delivered as audio, or video. What matters is that the person publishing the content has an authentic voice and from amongst the voices we have the full gamut of experiences, largely current students saying how they’re getting on, but helpful where academics are sharing their thinking on latest developments, their own interests, and of course on subjects that might impact on what their students are doing.
I’m not looking for a million page views a month that you might get from the one man blog like Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish or the team efforts of the Huffington Post, but the OUBS website and its affiliate blogs should be coming from students, academics and others and ideally working as a collaborative and interrelated community.
Two problems or lost opportunities result where bloggers operate separately either independently or even through platforms managed elsewhere in the campus – the reputation that belongs for now at least as much to the OUBS as it does to us, gets lost. Indeed, the expert blogger may be doing more to develop and publicize their own reputation rather than that of the faculty … The lost is twofold, enough of what they are doing online isn’t sticking to us and there’s a greater risk that they will be headhunted, taking bath their academic and abilities to promote online with them.
Not one blogger but a dozen, not one for social media but six
Garry Slapper leaves and takes with him the only person at OULS who is blowing the Alpenhorn on their behalf. The silence from the SL will be palpable. He’s already cut back. In another faculty Grainne Conole also on the transfer list has gone from noisy blogger to silence.
Anyone and everyone can blog. Getting over many misconstrued reactions will only occur once you ,ale a start and if you give it enough time, like anything, golf, knitting, growing a garden, you have to invent time, thought and effort before you see result that are never overnight.
I’d like to feature blogs of people thinking about an MBA, doing one and alumni. As well as blogs from those representing any or all of the courses.
These blogs must be independent and genuine, nut this is no reason why they can’t link to our content, links and promotion that is then announced further via Twitter. Support and advice is readily available on how to help your blog on its way, to be picked up and talked about. We need to know how best to tap into OU Platform and Open Learn, are these drawing people in or bouncing them out? Where are they a distraction, where adding value and purpose?
Are we a hub or just one in a series of roundabouts? What’s your metaphor for blogging?
There are so many variants that he term blog has stretched beyond a reasonable definition, you end up qualifying everything. They have some things in common though, they cease to be a blog if they are inert, and that’s a book, logbook or diary.
The subject, writing style, design choices and all the other attributes that a person, might add to these webpages of theirs are personal. For the sake of argument a micro blog, like Twitter, could just as well be a response to a forum thread and runs to 140 characters, perhaps a forum thread should be up to 250 words, but ,ay stretch to 500.A blog ,might be any length and be collection of anything.
Presence in forum threads, your own and other people’s is all about building a reputation. In time and by default your mug and profile are associated back to the institution you jail from, or the discipline you follow. All you have to do is to drop in, perhaps as often as you might get a coffee or visit the bathroom. Every other day might be a minimum; it really depends on the level of activity. We have far too many segments to follow on the one hand while on the other it helps that someone with a reputation goes in. [1] Diaryland, wordpress, OU Student Blog, Share this:
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