Developing and Maintaining a Social Brand
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to give a presentation on “social branding” to a local chamber of commerce. I’ve embedded the slides below. I discussed developing a “social persona,” branding, Facebook, Twitter, and how to optimize content to reach your target audiences, among other topics.
P.S. What are the best apps for networking? I game my opinion to U.S. News. Which are your favorite?
What Makes Great Content?
For those in higher education PR/Marketing, Georgy Cohen is a certifiable rockstar. She is a writer, speaker and founder of Crosstown Digital Communications who in a previous life, led the development of Tufts Now, for my buck, the best higher ed online newsroom in existence. When it comes to content, she is Queen.
Today on her website, Meet Content, she published a feature focusing on developing content for recruiting prospective students to online programs. I was fortunate enough to share my thoughts for the piece.
Below is an excerpt, but make sure to read the entire column, which includes contributions from Higher Ed Live’s Seth Odell.
Lesczinski: This past January, our School of Liberal Arts hosted a campus panel on career options for criminal justice graduates. We brought in practitioners from a number of criminal justice fields including a police officer, criminologist, lawyer, researcher, etc. The one panelist that couldn’t make the actual event in person, actually called in from his squad car. The students definitely got a kick out of that.
We crowd-sourced panel questions to our students, registrants, and members of online criminal justice communities leading up to the event to generate interest and then provided ample opportunity for attendee to interact with our panelists. The feedback from this event made us realize the importance of trying to personalize our events. We don’t need to attract thousands of students or registrants for these types of events to be successful. In fact, we can better foster that sense of community by focusing on smaller, more intimate events tailored to specific target audiences that will allow for more personal interaction.
Featured in U.S. News
I had the opportunity this week to chat with Menachem Wecker of U.S. News on the newly released “#SocialMedia and Advancement: Insights from Three Years of Data” study conducted by mStoner and Slover Linett Strategies, in partnership with CASE. Some of the findings are intriguing, including the low number of colleges using social media as part of their crisis management strategy.
Wecker’s piece, Colleges May Neglect Social Media in Times of Crisis, Study Says, was published this morning.
Here’s what I had to say:
Although he was also surprised by the survey findings on crisis management, Lesczinski has a hunch that a large percentage of institutions are either developing or planning to increase their crisis communications on social media for the future.
“Because students tend to tune out single streams of information, it is vital that institutions use a variety of channels such as E-mail, social [media], and text [messages],” he says. “Institutions have to ensure they are participating in the conversation both to correct inaccuracies and because students are more prone to seeking out trustworthy sources.”
Read the full article.
HigherEd Social Media ROI
As you can tell, I’ve taken the summer off from blogging. It’s been fantastic. Of course, it doesn’t mean I’ve quit my day job or stopped reading what others are writing.
This one was too good not to share. Michael Stoner takes the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research to task for its recent report “Higher Ed Documents Social Media ROI: New Communications Tools Are a Game Changer.”
Read Michael’s whole post but here’s my favorite part:
- Don’t believe everything you read! In this specific case, I venture that it’s not that teens love social and hate print. It’s that admission officers think they do just because they’re teens. In my experience, adults usually always over-estimate the appetite of young people for technology; they’re much smarter about it using it than we give them credit for.
- Don’t dismiss traditional channels quite yet (and I include email and websites here). We’re in a time of change, so those channels still work and are often critical sources of information. Isn’t that what the Noel-Levitz data tells us? It’s not that teens don’t like print (they told Noel-Levitz they do), they’re discriminating: they don’t like print that sucks, just like they want web content that is informative and relevant, delivered in a way that helps them find information quickly.
The Social Network
Welcome to HigherEdPR.com
I’ve had a few emails asking why the blog has gone silent over the past six months. Well, teaching a college class and taking over as president of the local Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) chapter will do that.