Tell Us What Your Boss Needs to Know About Social Media & Social Networking

What do institutional leaders need to hear about social media & social networking?

Liz Allen from Caltech and I are doing a preconference workshop at the CASE Summit this summer about social media and social networking and we need your help. The Summit is CASE’s annual meeting for senior leadership—attended primarily by presidents, heads, CEOs and/or vice presidents for advancement, development, alumni relations, marketing, communications, PR.

Our assumption is that many institutional leaders think social media/social networking is important but don’t know what to do, who to listen to, or where to invest staff time and (perhaps) money. I hear this all the time from presidents and VPs at our client institutions.

So we thought we’d ask people who know best what their bosses should know. You.

Please advise us about they need to hear. I gave a presentation at the CASE Assembly in 1996 about using the web for various advancement purposes and queried the listservs (CUE‑L, PUBS‑L, and others) about what people needed to know. I got lots of great responses. Let’s see what happens in 2009, in the era of social media.

Here are three questions on which we’d like your input:

What misconceptions do senior leaders at your institution have about social networking/social media?
What should they know that would help them to help you to do your job more effectively?
Can you offer us examples of successful instances in which social media or social networks (we’re most interested in Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter) have been used to meet specific, measured goals? We’d like to do case studies and need some really good examples.

Please add your thoughts in comments, below, or share them by email to us: Liz Allen or Michael Stoner.

Points we’ll make

We’re going to try to avoid a lot of the cliches in presentations like this one-like how social media/networking trumps all other communication known to humankind or how fast Twitter is growing-and get right to our key messages. Here are some of the points we think are important for us to make in the session:

• Everything is connected to everything else: social media/social networking can’t exist in a vaccuum. You should think about extending your existing (and, we’d hope) well-developed brand across the web.
• Social media is not an option but a necessity in 2009.
• Social media isn’t “free.” You need to be prepared to participate; the biggest challenge is staffing.
• Social media isn’t fast: it’s about relationships and building relationships takes time.
• Social media isn’t hard; it’s complicated.
• You should participate yourself so you understand what social media/social networking is all about.

Here’s where we’ll go into some case studies. We’re looking for examples of effective, successful use of social media. Can you help us? Post below, or contact either Liz Allen or me (Michael Stoner) directly by email.

What we sent to CASE about the workshop

Here’s the description for the session that we sent to CASE:

Maybe it’s because you heard that the Obama Campaign used 16 social network sites during last year’s campaign. Maybe your daughter has (finally!) convinced you that your institution should be on Facebook. Regardless, it’s clear that your institution needs a social media strategy. And now you find that some people are a‑Twitter, others swear by LinkedIn, your office geek likes Mashable. And now you’re more confused than ever.

Because you’re not alone, we’ve designed this session to provide insights into the hundreds of social media options by focusing on key strategic questions for advancement. We’ll talk about what you should consider in developing a social media presence, how much time it will take to manage it, and how you should think about measuring results. We’ll provide examples and mini case studies of how institutions are leveraging social media options. And, most importantly, we’ll provide plenty of time for questions and discussion.

Thanks to Jason Baer for this post, which inspired some of my thinking about key points to hit in the presentation.

And again: Please add your thoughts in comments, below, or share them by email to us: Liz Allen or Michael Stoner.