With a Little Help From Your Fans

Last year, at least one institution scuttled its rebranding effort when students, faculty, and staff took to Facebook and soundly panned the identity before the planned launch. Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ, is hoping to avert this outcome by asking its constituents—at least, those who are Facebook fans—to vote on a new logo. Stevens will roll out this logo in celebration of its 140th anniversary.

The poll is the latest step in a process that began last summer. The resulting logo and institutional rebranding is linked to plans for Stevens’ anniversary celebration. Michael Schinelli, the Institute’s associate vice president for graduate marketing and communications, notes that their design partner, Spiral Design, had developed identity materials. “We were going through the normal approval process until earlier this year when we talked about getting the community to give input on the designs. I suggested that we create a Facebook campaign that would allow stakeholders to vote—and also grow our social media fan base.”

Spiral developed four concepts. Schinelli reports, “The designs went through a series of revisions and we settled on four that we thought were both divergent enough to offer a choice and strong enough to be a winner. The poll also has info on the design elements, such as the authentic characteristics, history and aspirations that would identify Stevens better than our current logo. These include our gatehouse, the river (we’re perched above the river, overlooking New York City), Alexander Calder’s artwork (he was an alum), the University motto “Per Aspera, Ad Astra” (Through adversity to the stars), and the S for Stevens.”

Stakeholders can cast their vote via a Facebook poll to be launched today. The poll will be open through 9 a.m. Friday.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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Hometown Newsmaker Shares News That People Care About

We’ve all read about how the news business is changing. About the death of newspapers. It’s pretty grim.

At least it’s grim for big metro dailies and national newspapers like the New York Times. I live in a small town in Vermont and here, our local (weekly) newspaper is thriving. And in the suburbs, the local newspaper is valued. People may have other sources for national and international news. But whether we read a newspaper every week, or use a local newspaper’s website, there is often no other way for people in small towns and suburbs to get local news.

And what are we looking for? In a community like mine, people want to know what their friends and neighbors are doing: we want to celebrate their accomplishments and join them in mourning their losses. And help them through the rough spots when we can. So news about local people is an extremely valuable commodity, one that people will read and share with their family and friends.

Don’t believe me? Consider these findings from research conducted for the Suburban Newspapers of America last year. They found that suburban newspapers, even free ones, were valued and trusted sources for local news:

• #1 Source for All Things Local – Suburban newspapers surpass metro newspapers, television, radio and the internet as the top source for community and neighborhood news, local youth and high school sports, local business news, local shopping and advertising, and local entertainment news


• Valued – Nearly 8 of 10 adults rate editorial quality as ‘good to excellent’


• Informative – More than 8 of 10 adults say their suburban newspaper ‘informs them’

This is one reason that I find readMEDIA’s Hometown Newsmaker so intriguing. This service distributes news that people care about—information about the accomplishments of students, such as academic honors and athletic accomplishments—directly to newspapers, which can easily repurpose that news on their websites and in print newspapers. Turns out news that can be borrowed from authoritative sources can be a valuable commodity.

Listening to their clients
I asked Colin Mathews, president of readMEDIA, how his company dreamed up Newsmaker:

The idea came from the colleges themselves. We had launched Newsmaker (a product that is aimed at combining traditional “local” press release distribution with high-end web/social media posting in an easy package), and some schools started asking if we could handle hometown news. I had no idea what they were talking about, so I went on a road trip and interviewed almost three dozen college media relations departments to find out if hometowners were important (yes!), if they were easy to do (no way!), and what they would do if they could wave a wand and make it appear.

Then, all I did was sort and sift those interviews down into some product requirements and then our very smart team build a beta version to try out. The things that didn’t work in the beta were my ideas—where I had added to what I had heard in the interviews. So we took that stuff out for the launch version and focused on making everything as easy as possible. Since then, every new feature comes from customer feedback.

There are a number of elements of his comment that I find compelling. One is that readMEDIA responded to a real need. Indeed, hometown releases like these were the bread-and-butter of college news offices when I was a young professional—and always difficult to produce and mail in those pre-computer, pre-Internet days. Second, their customers are driving product development.

A typical client, the Albany TimesUnion, runs Newsmaker content on its local news pages [here’s one for Schenectady] next to local news and sports events.

Content that people value—and so do institutions

Let me reiterate, for our local paper—and many others—this kind of borrowed content is extremely valuable. When it’s posted on a website, it offers possibilities that make it extremely valuable for students, parents, families and friends: the ability for it be shared on social networks.

It’s also valuable to colleges. St. Michael’s College in Burlington, VT, has used Hometown Newsmaker for about a year and a half. Buff Lindau, the long-time media relations person on campus and now its director of marketing and communications, emphasizes the value of these humble news stories to her college:

Although most small colleges claim it, Saint Michael’s has surveys of students, parents and alumni that show this college to be a remarkable community wherein faculty help students in and out of the classroom and care about their futures. Students make lifelong friends, and the rest of us feel a part of that vibe as well. Because of the strong sense of community, we are keen on reinforcing parents’ good feelings by finding ways to showcase their students’ accomplishments. Getting students recognized in print on online in hometown media outlets is just another way of enhancing these connections with the college and making parents proud and happy.

SUNY Oswego is beginning its second year with Hometown Newsmaker. Tim Nekritz, associate director of public affairs at Oswego, agrees, saying,

The main value is twofold. Most obviously, it’s great for the students and their families to have their accomplishments recognized in the local media. I have students tell me how excited they were to see their name in the local paper, which is cool. But it’s also great to get the Oswego name and message out there. And who knows—maybe someone will see someone in their neighborhood is studying, say, software engineering, at SUNY Oswego, not realize we offered a major they’re looking at and start considering us.

Lindau doesn’t confine her use of Hometown Newsmaker to the obligatory stories about academic honors and graduation. “In addition to dean’s list and graduation hometowns, I do stories on students who appear in a play or serve as writing center tutors, or go on a chorale tour, or serve as RA’s. I’ve gotten adept enough at the process that I use it frequently without spending too much time with it.” she writes. She’s careful to limit the time she spends on this activitiy, but notes that “I still think the time investment, which I carefully limit, is worth it.”

Nekritz, himself a former reporter who is now active in social networking, noted, “The media landscape is increasingly fractured, but people will never tire of seeing themselves or people they know recognized. Just when you think no one reads papers any more, you run into a student excited because their parents emailed them an article about them being on the Deans’ List. Or they end up posted on a Facebook wall, or tweeted as a link. No matter the delivery method, good news will never go out of style.”

One of Hometown Newsmaker’s clients that is showing how powerful this is is the New York National Guard. Mathews said, “They use Hometown Newsmaker to announce deployments, promotions, training exercises and the like and their Facebook traffic is terrific: each hometowner is getting ~5 additional page views via Facebook when a solider (or family member) pushes the story into their news feed.” And he told me, “We now get more referral traffic to hometowners from Facebook and Twitter than from Google News, which tells me that people are actively incorporating school-sponsored news about their kids into their social graph.”

Newspapers also benefit from this kind of traffic. Mathews said that TimesUnion staff has told him that they’ve has seen their page views double since pulling in hometowners. readMEDIA sees clickthrough rates between 5 percent and 10 percent on these stories—huge engagement rates, at zero editorial time and cost.

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Job Posting: Associate VP Marketing & Communications, Cal State U Northridge

California State University, Northridge (CSUN), seeks a strategic and analytical Associate Vice President of Marketing and Communications who is committed to the University’s goal of educating a diverse group of students and preparing them to be productive and learned citizens.  The Associate Vice President assumes responsibility for the planning, coordination, and management of the University’s public relations and strategic communications program; to communicate effectively the University’s mission to its varied constituencies and ensure overall continuity of institutional brand consistency and image; to recruit, manage and mentor a marketing and communications team ; and to collaborate with the Vice President of University Advancement in setting the overall strategic direction of the department.

The ideal candidate will have at least ten years of progressively responsible experience in public relations, press, communications, publications; and strong supervisory and personnel management skills.  This is a unique opportunity to partner with an esteemed leader in the field of higher education and serve as an architect and builder of a marketing and communications program at one of the nation’s leading public universities.  Together with the Vice President, the Associate Vice President will engage the University’s various constituencies at an increasingly deep and meaningful level and will direct a complex public relations program including the development of strategic marketing plans for promoting the image of the university; secure cooperation from representatives of the communications media; communicate clearly ideas and recommendations; manage and supervise the operation of a fast-paced and visible department; and maintain cooperative working relationships with students, staff, faculty, public agencies, private agencies, the community, and the media.

Download a job description in PDF format.

More detailed information on the application and hiring process.

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Me and My iPad

Let me be clear: as far as the iPad is concerned, I want one. Preferably now.

I’ve been following the screeds about this device with a lot of amusement and enjoy reading as many of the pros and cons as I can. I get a lot of the “here’s why the iPad is awesome” posts through RSS. One of the people I follow on Twitter (you know who you are, @williamgarrity!) has been helpfully forwarding along many of the “here’s why the iPad sucks” sources.

Who knew there were so many things to love? Who knew there were so many things to hate? Especially because this is a device that only a few hundred people have actually seen and held. Whatever happened to “wait and see?”

I’m especially amused by the folks who already despise the iPad because it’s not all-inclusive—it doesn’t play Flash; it doesn’t have a huge array of connectors (USB! HDMI! Firewire!)—or because it’s not a netbook of some kind or because you can’t mod an iPad or because .

Katie Hafner gets it: she wrote an intriguing piece for the Times on Sunday. The article, When Phones Are Just Too Smart, appeared in the Fashion Section of the paper edition—so it’s amazing that I saw it. But the point Hafner makes is that while a lot of people own a lot of iPhone apps, they tend to use 5-10 apps regularly.

There was another article in the Times onn Sunday that made a related point. In Steve Jobs and the Economics of Elitism, Steve Lohr writes,

From computers to smartphones, Apple products are known for being stylish, powerful and pleasing to use. They are edited products that cut through complexity, by consciously leaving things out — not cramming every feature that came into an engineer’s head, an affliction known as “featuritis” that burdens so many technology products.

KISS, we were reminded just yesterday by @bluefuego.

Indeed. I don’t want really complex stuff on websites I visit. And I certainly don’t have the time or patience to deal with highly complex products. I have a lot to do, every day, and I don’t enjoy having to figure out how to use a highly complex tool with largely inscrutable instructions.

So am I that strange? I don’t think so. I think many people yearn for simplicity and respond to a product that provides a very high level of functionality, even as it eschews needless complexity. Some of my friends like to tinker with stuff and figure out how it works. I admire them, I really do. But I’m someone who’ll pick up a santoku rather than start up a food processor to julienne a carrot or chop some garlic.

Why is the iPod so successful? Not because, feature-for-feature, it’s the best MP3 player, but because Apple made smart choices in creating a device that many people could use, easily. [It doesn’t hurt that the iPod looks great and that iTunes makes it easy to buy content and download it to an iPod.]

So back to that iPad. I’m expecting a small, light, multi-purpose device that can replace my laptop in some situations like when I travel, especially when I travel for pleasure. I’ll be able to read on it, watch movies on it, check websites, do light email. It’ll be great in that situtation. Will it be perfect? Nope, you can bet it won’t be.

But I expect it to be most of these things because it’s an Apple product.

Can I have one, now, please? Naysayers be damned.

And who knows? It might even be good for the web. I, for one, won’t be sorry to see fewer stupid deployments of Flash.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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Recipes for Success: Independent schools break the mold when it comes to social media

My article “Recipes for Success: Independent schools break the mold when it comes to social media,” appears in the print edition of January’s CASE Currents and on CASE’s website [though a login is required to read it].

Here are some key takeaways:

• Because of their small scale and relative lack of bureaucracy, it’s often easier for schools to experiment with social media.


• Aside from embrace of social media—with some encouraging results at places like Baylor School and Beaver Country Day School—there’s some really innovative work going on. Northfield Mount Hermon has merged social media feeds into its website and Worcester Academy’s mashup brings the voices of many members of the school to WAMash.

CASE has generously given us permission to distribute a reprint of ”Recipes for Success.” [Thank you, Currents staff!]

And I wrote up interview notes from some of the people I talked to as a series of case studies:

• Baylor School, Small Staff, Smart Choices Yield Social Media Success So Far for Baylor School


• Beaver Country Day School, Social Media in Action at Beaver Country Day School


• Northfield Mount Hermon School, Northfield Mount Hermon: Social Media Done Right


• Proctor Academy, Innovator: Chuck Will, The Longest-Running Blogger in Education?


• Worcester Academy, Living Institutional Life Online at Worcester Academy

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Learning from Teens About Social Media

Not surprisingly, teens are pretty smart about the way they use social media. Tim Nekritz wrote about this in a smart blog post on 22 October:what 15 freshmen taught me about social media. Here’s one of the most telling lines of Tim’s post:

I asked if they would feel different joining a group started by an institution vs. one started by a student. The enlightening response: We don’t even look for that or care. We just want to meet other students. Some even said they would prefer the groups be created by the college because they would trust the information more.

For these teens, it’s pretty clear: Facebook is a social experience. Tim’s small sample confirms what lots of other researchers, including danah boyd have to say. Karlyn Morrisette made a similar point:

Teenagers have always made a really clear distinction between things they use for their social lives and things they use for “business”. Friends are for social media. Colleges are “business.”

Disentangling professional and personal

So I’ve decided that I need to emulate those teens and straighten out my social networks. Maybe it’s because I’m trying to avoid engagement fatigue, or just organize my online life more effectively. Or maybe because my inner introvert nature is asserting itself.

But, whatever. Here are some of the changes I’ll be making.

Facebook: I resisted Facebook for a long time. Now that I’m using it regularly, I’ve become aware that its value is for me to communicate with friends and family. I really like the fact that a lot of people from my local, physical community are on Facebook. It’s a reality of my life that I can’t be as involved as I’d like to be with some of my neighbors in FTF relationships and Facebook offers a way for us to keep in touch: it’s better for me than the telephone. Same with family and more far-flung friends.

Some of my Facebook friends are people I’ve met professionally—folks with whom I have a relationship that goes well beyond what LinkedIn can offer. I’ve learned about their spouses and kids and it’s nice to have the glimpse of their lives that Facebook affords.

But the truth is that I’ve also friended a lot of folks I barely know, for the vaguest of reasons. So in the next week or so, I’m going to unfriend a slew of people and resign from a mess of fan pages. No offense to anyone: but I need to keep Facebook as a place where I stay in touch with people that I know fairly well.

LinkedIn: Yeah, I agree: LinkedIn has some deficiencies, but it’s the best we’ve got right now for professional networking. And it’s what I’m going to rely on for business relationships. If you are primarily a business friend/acquaintance, I’d welcome the opportunity to connect with you LinkedIn if we aren’t already connected. But not on Facebook.

Twitter: If you follow me on Twitter, you’ve probably guessed that I’ve grown to like it. [Thank you once again for the incentive to join, @KarineJoly!] It’s amazing to see how much you can communicate in 140 characters. I work alone some of the time, so Twitter provides a bit of a watercooler experience for me. And I really like the fact that Twitter provides the opportunity to segment one’s identity.

I have three Twitter IDs; most people reading this blog post will be interested in following either mStonerblog, which I use for business-related tweeting, or, for the next few months, CASE5sm. We set this up to communicate around the pre-conference workshop on social media at CASE V. I’m going to do some selective pruning of the people I follow on @mStonerblog: nothing drastic, but shedding some people whose insights are less valuable to me than others.

Making choices
I’m focused on these three tools because I’ve already found them personally valuable and, for now, they’re where I want to focus my activity. I am well aware that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other communities in which I can participate if I choose to do so. I’m not much of a photographer, for example, so I’m really not into Flickr, and though I watch videos on YouTube like any netizen, I don’t spend a whole lot of time commenting on them. So Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter offer the best possible options for connecting with the other people I value in my personal and professional life.

Others are making similar choices. For example, I was interested to see last week that even Mr. .Edu Social Networking himself, Brad J. Ward, pruned his Twitter account. The blog post explaining the how and why makes fascinating reading.

One of my continuing realizations is that I just don’t have enough time to have a healthy marriage, do my work, stay connected with my mStoner colleagues, our clients, and the people I value in my personal life, and try every new tool or social networking trend that surfaces.

And, you know what? As social networking mania fades, people will make the same kinds of choices I’m making. Our audiences, members, supporters, alumni, donors, prospective students, etc.: they will also experience their own “a ha” moment, if they haven’t already, and start to think a lot more carefully about how they manage their online social life.

Can they really follow every fan page for every group they’ve had a tangential association with? How many updates from people they barely know are they willing to read when they open their Facebook page? How many Facebook games can they play? How many tweets from how many sporting events can they stomach on a Sunday morning when they log into TweetDeck or Nambu?

It all comes down to relevance. How relevant the content we’re consuming—in the form of tweets, blog posts, YouTube videos, Flickr images—is to our personal needs and interests. Time and attention are my most precious resources and I want to use them as wisely as possible.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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Timing is Everything

If you’re considering changes to your website, chances are that one of the first questions you’ll hear from your campus community is: “How long will it take?”

Unfortunately, that’s not an easy question to answer.

First, you’ll need to decide whether the project is a simple redesign—adding some new graphic elements, content, or features—or involves totally rebuilding the site. (We’d call this a “redevelopment project.”)

A site redesign can take a few months. But, with or without help from an outside consultant, a website redevelopment process is time-consuming. We estimate that it takes from seven months to one year to perform a complete site redevelopment project that includes a content management system implementation. A more limited project can be accomplished in less time, of course. But remember the old adage: “Fast, good, or cheap: pick two.”

Managing a web redevelopment project takes a lot of time, so if you’re the project manager on campus, you can expect to be very busy during the project. Nancy Prater, who managed the redevelopment of Ball State University’s website (BSU.edu), estimated that she spent 25-50 percent of her time on the website relaunch project while it was underway; during the final six weeks before launch, it was 100 percent. (Nancy shared some of her insights about her experience in this post).

Susan T. Evans led the redesign of William & Mary’s website. Here are some estimates of the time she spent on this project from May 2006 to July 2008 (totals include her time only, not that of the other members of her team):

• Preplanning/assessment/needs analysis (prior to hiring a consultant): 125 hours


• Kickoff/RFP: 280 hours


• Redesign (working with mStoner): 2,700 hours or 30 hrs/week for 104 weeks

Of course, William & Mary is a fairly large, complex university with undergraduate programs and graduate and professional schools. If you work at a smaller professional or independent school, you won’t spend as much time as Susan did on the project-but it will still take a lot of time.

How about the amount of time it will take to accomplish different phases of the project? Here are estimates of how long it takes our team of experienced writers, designers, and developers to complete various phases of a web project:

• Write 50 pages of web content: from start to finish, including research, writing, and editing: six weeks


• Develop three creative concepts: from creative brief to presentation: three weeks


• Develop six templates from a finished home page concept: two weeks


• Poduce HTML files from completed designs and test them in preparation for CMS templating: three weeks


• Implement a set of nine templates in Drupal (an open source content management system): four weeks


• Beta test a new, 500-page website: four weeks

Note: This is an excerpt from our new white paper, “Redeveloping Your Website: Asking the Right Questions, Finding the Right Partner.” You can download your own copy and share your comments about it.

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Small Staff, Smart Choices Yield Social Media Success So Far for Baylor School

Immersing yourself in social media isn’t easy when you manage communications and marketing for an education institution, even a small one. There’s already a lot on your plate: events to produce and publicize, magazines to put out, a website to update. That’s certainly true at the Baylor School, a boarding and day school in Chattanooga, TN, where Barbara Kennedy, associate vice president for external affairs, manages communications.

Kennedy’s team is responsible for marketing, media relations, publicity, PR, publications, a magazine, BaylorSchool.org, and programming and promoting the school’s summer programs. It’s a small staff: just Kennedy with a director for summer programs, a webmaster, a designer, and a freelance editor who helps with the school’s magazine.

Despite the existing workload, Kennedy knew that it was important to learn about social media and to incorporate these tools into her work. “I knew that I had to be responsive. I’m a 25-year PR veteran and I knew I had to adjust to these changes myself. And I know our audiences expect us to communicate in this way.”

So in spring, 2009, she and Bernard Fertal, Baylor’s webmaster, began exploring social media. “We wanted to be in the lead, but we didn’t want to proceed without really thinking through the advantages and disadvantages,” Kennedy said. “I think some people thought social media was just a fad that would soon fade away—and still others chose to ignore it. But we looked at it as a revolution in how we do our jobs.”

After some experience, she added, “Bottom line: we look at social media as a powerful way to leverage traditional marketing and communication tools that we already have in place.”

Pilot project focused on a class trip

After doing some exploration and research, Kennedy developed a pilot project to launch over the summer, when she had time to focus on it: a travel blog about a student trip to Washington D.C. with photos posted on Flickr. “This was only read by the students who were on the trip and their parents and there wasn’t much interaction, but it gave me a reality check on the time commitment. Then we started tweeting. And I had already been immersed personally with Facebook, so the Baylor School fan page was the next logical step once classes began in August.”

These continue to be her focus. “I’m amazed at how quickly the Facebook page took off: it has grown virally, as has @BaylorSchool [1216 fans and 103 followers as of 28 October 2009]. We plan to do a radio promotion directing people to follow us on Facebook and Twitter, so we’ll see how those numbers grow.”

Kennedy’s main focus is The Baylor Blog, which feeds the fan page. She said, “Since I am generating all of the news items on our website and much of the information that we share with parents and students on a regular basis, I do the updates on Facebook and the blog.”

Tweets are drawn from the school’s daily announcements and other web content and lead back to news stories on BaylorSchool.org. Fertal manages @baylorschool and handles most of the tweets.

As a communicator, Kennedy appreciates the flexibility social media gives her in telling a story—and allows her to watch how her stories spread. “As someone in communications, the feedback and data I get on posts is invaluable.” As an example, she talked about some photos she posted of Korean students celebrating a Korean holiday. “I’m interested to see how many of those kids will interact, showing me if it’s viable to reach students in Asia this way. I may not get much interaction, but I’m watching what happens.”

Kennedy also appreciates how much she can learn about her audience. “Our total fan base is predominantly ages 13-24, almost evenly split male/female. As a boarding school, it is also of great value to see that 1,002 of our Facebook fans are from outside of the state, and 39 of those fans represent 19 different countries. Having the data also informs my choices on what to post, and will no doubt shape our communication strategies in the coming months. For example, 100% of the interaction has been from females (ages 35-44, 40 percent), (ages 45-54, 40 percent), (ages 13-17, 13 percent), and (ages 55+, 7 percent).”

She continued, “This week, we have pulled in 17 percent participation from males and our younger fans are becoming more active. So I’m thinking harder about posts that I feel will keep connecting with them. Our next step is to leverage this information with admission and fund-raising.”

And this data helps her to gain support from Baylor’s board. “I felt that some of my colleagues were just being polite when I talked about social media, but when I shared some of this data with the board, they really responded. They got that it was a whole new way of communicating.”

Challenges? What challenges?

When asked about challenges in putting social networking into practice, Kennedy said, “It has been ridiculously easy, but it was personally scary for me to let go of some of the control. I was blocked for awhile on creating the fan page because I wasn’t sure anyone would respond to it. Silly, huh?”

Kennedy and Baylor have not encountered any discipline problems or issues with their own ventures in social networking, but that doesn’t mean that Kennedy hasn’t had “an aha moment” around potential abuses of social networking. “A couple of years ago, a reporter ‘friended’ some students on Facebook to get a quote regarding a controversial issue on campus. He ran the story with a student’s quote and I was just blown away. Because I also handle media relations, it was a teachable moment for me, the student, and others in our school community. That was my first experience with Facebook—and, when you think about it, it’s a miracle that I grew to love it!”

Although being an active blogger and Facebooker take more time in her day, it hasn’t been a big burden for Kennedy. “Honestly, it takes me just a few more minutes a day. I would be developing news content for the website anyway, so copying and pasting into the fan page and tweeting about it—is really just a few extra minutes.”

Even the interaction is manageable, Kennedy has found. “I don’t follow up much, though I do spend time reading comments and think about how they might inform what I post. For Twitter, I’m looking at what people are reading, RTing, and I’m thinking about they say. This takes 10-20 minutes a day. I could spend more time on it, but I don’t. I have to set some boundaries.”

The effort she’s put into social media—and its payback—have resulted in some plans for the near future:

• Silverpoint, Baylor School’s web partner, is designing a mashup page that pulls together the school’s various feeds; it should go live this fall.


• Kennedy is also exploring how she can incorporate a Flip video camera and iMovie into her communications retinue, and her immersion in social media is causing her to rethink how she will present Baylor’s magazine when it moves online. The current print magazine is mailed twice a year to 10,000 people. Kennedy isn’t sure what an online version of the magazine will look like, but she is sure that her effort won’t involve slapping a PDF on BaylorSchool.org. “I’m thinking about how we can tell stories through video and audio,” she said.


• Finally, there’s a need for other voices to join the conversation online. She’d like to include more student voices, but that hasn’t happened much yet. One of her concerns is the amount of time they could spend: “I don’t have a lot of confidence in their level of commitment to it—they have a whole lot of things going on,” she said. And she’d like to see other departments involved in contributing to and sustaining Baylor’s social media activities. “We need other voices to join the conversation and in doing so contribute to the effort,” she said.

Note: This post is the result of research and interviews for an article on innovations in social media by independent schools. It will appear in the January 2010 issue of CASE Currents. There are four related posts:

• An interview with Chuck Will, from Proctor Academy, Innovator: Chuck Will, The Longest-Running Blogger in Education?;


• A case study on how Northfield Mount Hermon School’s new website will incorporate social media;
• 
  
• A post about online life at Worcester Academy.


• A case study of social media in action at Beaver Country Day School
.

Update: The mashup page went live the week of 2 December:

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Social Media in Action at Beaver Country Day School

At Beaver Country Day School, an independent school in Brookline, MA, social media plays an increasingly important role in marketing and communications and in the classroom. Jan Devereux, BCDS director of communications, said that the school’s laptop initiative and significant investment in information technology and professional development has accelerated the momentum for these (and other) online communications.

In contrast to the social media activity at Worcester Academy, most of what an outsider sees of BCDS’s social media is targeted toward prospective families, alumni, and other external constituencies and is produced and managed by school staff. Behind the scenes, though, there’s much more going on. Devereux said, “In our classrooms, teachers are using all sorts of Web 2.0 applications as learning and teaching tools—blogs, Ning groups, wikis, YouTube. etc. This effort was piloted in 2008-09 and is now active in every class.”

Devereux said that she began exploring how BCDS could use social media more effectively in its marketing and communications activities when planning began for a relaunch of BCDSchool.org in 2008. “A goal of that redesign was to make the site more interactive,” she said.

She’s encountered no obstacles to rolling out an array of social media initiatives. The school’s administration was very supportive: “We are lucky that our administration has been very supportive and trusting of our experimenting in the social media arena without a drawn out trial and approval process.”

She added, “At Beaver, it’s in our DNA to ‘try new things.’ Peter Hutton, our head of school, says, “We’re going to make mistakes but we’re going to make excellent mistakes.”

Devereux is clear about what BCDS is trying to accomplish with social media, at least for now. “Its purpose is two-fold: to promote connections with and among members of the community (hopefully resulting increased financial support and school spirit) and to enhance our brand image (hopefully boosting admissions),” she said.

Social media in action at BCDS

BCDS social media initiatives include the following:

Facebook: Devereux said, “We have a fan page where we post photos, videos, and brief news items designed to keep in touch with our 413 (and growing) fans and to promote school events. We also have a private alumni group (currently with 146 members), which we use primarily as a platform for alumni to (re-)connect with each other. Here, we post alumni events, but not news.” She added, “There are also a couple of class-specific group pages started independently by alumni.”

BCDS is a WhippleHill customer and uses the company’s Facebook Connect feature, which allows visitors to BCDSchool.org to share news to their Facebook, Twitter and other social media accounts.

Twitter: BCDS has a main Twitter account @BCDSchool and a second, @BCDSweb, which used by the communications staff. Devereux explained, “We post to the main account a couple of times a week—sports scores, news of guest speakers, a photo now and then. We try to keep it lighthearted and upbeat, and are somewhat wary of bombarding our followers with every little thing.” @BCDSweb is used primarily to network and share info with other school communicators and education marketing/media folks.

@BCDSchool feeds directly into the school’s portal, making the tweets accessible to non-followers.

LinkedIn: As far as LinkedIn is concerned, Devereux noted, “We created a Beaver group on Linkedin where current and former faculty and staff can connect with each other and alumni. We have not used it to post job openings at the school.”

Classroom activity: Various social networking tools and applications are used in all BCDS classrooms as a part of school’s 1:1 laptop program which began this year. Some of these sites are linked to BCDS’s mashup.

Devereux and her communications colleague Matt Clobridge manage the Twitter Facebook accounts. BCDS’s alumni relations director, Shira Lewin, also works with them to update Facebook. Lewin has reserved @BCDSalumni but hasn’t started tweeting from that account yet. Deveruex said, “We’re not sure there’s a separate audience for alumni-specific tweets.”

Finally, A new page pulls various social media and social network feeds into BCDS’s website giving current and prospective families a window on how social media are being used as teaching tools.

The biggest challenge? Finding the time!

So far, the biggest challenge in putting social networking into practice, Devereux said, is time. “Managing social media could be a full-time job,” she remarked. “In general, the online side of our jobs is taking a huge amount of time—and it’s getting bigger. In five years, the balance has shifted to doing just about everything online.”

She observed that social media has become an organic process. “We do it as it happens—we don’t ‘plan,’ but respond to opportunities because there’s always something going on on campus.” But it’s not as if it’s random. “We keep in mind what we want people to know about us: today, we had four kids who were recognized by National Merit Scholarship. We want people to know about this so, we posted it. The next tweet might something about sports or a guest speaker.”

The immediacy of social media appeals to Clobridge. “Yesterday, a singer-songwriter came to an English class, so we took a Flip video camera and covered it as a web news story.”

Clobridge came to BCDS from a public elementary school and appreciates the fact that his current environment provides many more opportunities for him to take action without overthinking them or seeking approval.

Although Devereux joked about the risk of making mistakes on their social media activities, she said, “There haven’t been any major gaffes.” And there haven’t even been snide wall posts or negative blog comments. Clobridge said, “People have been respectful and haven’t done it.”

At BCDS, Devereux noted, “There’s a culture of respect and tolerance that carries through everything Beaver does. Teachers talk to students about how their online identities are a reflection of who they are and the importance of being respectful in a public forum.”

Note: This post is the result of research and interviews for an article on innovations in social media by independent schools. It will appear in the January 2010 issue of CASE Currents. There are four related posts:

• An interview with Chuck Will, from Proctor Academy, Innovator: Chuck Will, The Longest-Running Blogger in Education?;


• A case study on how Northfield Mount Hermon School’s new website will incorporate social media;
• 
  
• A post about online life at Worcester Academy.


• A post about how the small staff at Baylor School handles social networking.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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Categories: Admissions and recruiting / Alumni / Strategy

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Living Institutional Life Online at Worcester Academy

A most innovative experiment in bringing the life of an institution online began as a project in a creative writing class taught by Antonio Viva, associate head of school at Worcester Academy in Worcester, MA.

Viva had always taught this class, offered to juniors and seniors, using a traditional approach to writing. But he’d been reading Here Comes Everybody and wanted to think differently about creative writing. So, he said, “I gave the class a homework assignment and invited them to write about what they wanted to communicate—and then suggest the best ways to communicate it.”

The result was a class blog—but with a difference. Viva said, “Instead of creating a typical blog—where I was posting assignments or thoughts and having students comment—we started a blog where the students could post their work. What better way to engage young writers than to say, “Write for the world”—and then give them an audience for their blogging, video, and image content.”

It soon became apparent that the site had a following well beyond the confines of the Worcester Academy campus. “Once we launched the class blog, it became popular. We were tracking it using Google Analytics and started seeing more than 2,000 visits a month, from all around the world. The students got really engaged with the idea that their writing was being read and commented on by so many people from so many different places.”

Viva, his colleagues, and the Worcester students sensed an opportunity. Within a few weeks, the class blog became WAMash, Worcester’s mashup site, which integrates a raft of student student-produced content, including blog entries, YouTube videos, Flicker images—and aggregate tweets tagged with #WAMash. Over the summer of 2009, the academy opened up WAMash to the entire community: four administrators and the middle school will be posting to it. And there are plans to expand it further.

In Viva’s view, WAMash exists to engage Worcester’s extended community—students, staff and others on campus; the parents of current students and alumni; alumni themselves; and members of the community from Worcester and around the world—with the pulse of life at the academy. “We encourage students who write for WAMash to write about what’s on their minds. We have teens writing about all kinds of topics that are important to them and haven’t shied away from controversial topics such as same-sex marriage.”

Visibility creates incentive for students
Posting this work—and making it public—has significant consequences, Viva believes. Because students have an audience for their work, they have real incentives to write, take pictures, or create video. They can see the impact their work has as members of the Worcester community—or, indeed, the public—read it, rank it, tweet it, or comment on it.

Andrew Pogorzelski, a member of the class of 2010 who writes for WAMash, said, “I think it is a great chance for students to take advantage of having a site on campus that is read by people around the world. I aspire to be a journalist, so having my articles and opinions posted for people to see is great. I just hope people enjoy my pieces as much as I like them, even though my writing may be challenging their opinions or confirming them.”

Viva noted, “We’ve already seen that sharing student work this way helps alumni reconnect with Worcester. We’ve gotten great feedback from them. For example, I got a comment from an alum from the Class of 92 who said he loved the stories we wrote and he was going to share them with his classmates. And he remarked that there was no better way for alumni to connect with Worcester than through something that a current student wrote.” Not to mention provide parents of current or future parents a glimpse of student work “I’ve had parents say they are amazed that their student is so funny and articulate.”

WAMash now features more than student content, though student work still plays a central role on the site. Viva sees WAMash as a cornerstone of a reshaped communications program for the school, though it’s not clear yet exactly what that program looks like. “WAMash has forced us to start from scratch and rethink our communications. We began formulating a long-term strategy this summer and want to connect our online and off-line communications.”

For Viva and his colleagues, WAMash has demonstrated the power of using different channels to tell a story. They’re planning to use the lessons they’ve already learned in reshaping Worcester’s communications. “I think we understand our communications channels pretty well. But how do all these channels fit together, what are messages we need to communicate, and how can we develop a consistent theme? How does WAMash fit into our website? How do different areas of our website fit together?”

Good questions all, ones that Worcester is in the process of exploring, with the thought that they will create a new communications plan this fall. “We want to see how everything fits together, what Worcester’s communications ecosystem looks like.”

To Viva, it’s clear that WAMash encapsulates the life of Worcester Academy and will continue to do so. One of the questions the school needs to answer is how its communications director and other staff use WAMash. “Do they post stories to the site? And what about the student newspaper—does it have a separate site?”

Viva even has Worcester’s Board of Visitors contibuting to WAMash: members blogged about what they learned on their recent visit to campus.

A need for standards when everyone’s a communicator
In addition to thinking through how it uses different communications channels, Worcester plans to explore how communications are produced. “We’re sitting down with offices across the school to see how we could redistribute responsibilities and move to a much different approach to communications. We’re looking at staffing and job responsibilities across the board.”

Viva is unfazed by what may be a controversial proposition on many campuses, including some universities: having such a large quantity of student content-produced featured so prominently on Worcester Academy’s website.

“Right now, our policy is that submissions are reviewed and edited. We use a peer review/peer edit process where students share their work and other students review it. This gives them access to each other’s writing, allows them to see different angles. Then I give them an initial set of edits and they work on it—when it’s done they tell me when they want to publish.”

He continued, “But we’ve been talking about this: the nature of blogging is less formal than the kind of work we’ve normally asked students to do. How do you change a 20th-century instruction and assessment process? It’s different now. The work isn’t always perfect. I say to students: ‘Put your best writing in front of the world and if it’s not perfect, you’ll be called on it.’”

He’s also not threatened by what others may perceive as negative comments to posts, videos, or images.

Contributions from so many different people have led to an unanticipated problem: standards. “We’re discovering that we have to establish a set of style guidelines for WAMash, which we never thought we’d have to do. Things like how to cite photo sources, how to tag, what hashtags to use.”

And what about issues around privacy—when and how to identify students online, how much information they can reveal, etc.? These sorts of issues are certainly a concern for Worcester, as they are for other schools. Viva said, “Worcester Academy is no different than other schools in dealing with policies, privacy issues, other things that are in a gray area.” But, he notes, there’s a key difference: at Worcester, the community is involved in providing feedback about what happens online in WAMash and elsewhere.

“We’re different in that we’re modeling appropriate online behavior. I’d rather we embrace technology, understanding that it’s not perfect and that we have to learn how to live with it. I’m willing to give up control so that students are not just consumers of content, but producers. This is the democratization of the web and it’s a whole new realm.”

For Viva, that means engaging with students, and acknowledging that there will be teachable moments—and that’s part of why Worcester has taken this step. “Part of my job as a teacher is to open things up, have a conversation with the kids. If schools are brave enough to take that first step, students will meet your expectations.”

Note: This post is the result of research and interviews for an article on innovations in social media by independent schools. It will appear in the January 2010 issue of CASE Currents. There are four related posts:

• An interview with Chuck Will, from Proctor Academy, Innovator: Chuck Will, The Longest-Running Blogger in Education?;


• A case study on how Northfield Mount Hermon School’s new website will incorporate social media;
• 
  
• A post about social media at Beaver Country Day School.


• A post about how the small staff at Baylor School handles social networking.

Posted by Michael Stoner
Additional Posts (275)
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