TechWag

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Bandleader or community manager, call it what you will, but I will become a social community manager for a group of people who want to take education to the next level and go to where the students are. That means we will be working on and working with social media, this could be very cool for everyone. What will make this interesting is that we are starting from scratch, and I have some of the best people in the world who have written about social networking best practices.

The problem with this is that this will be a big job to do, with a lot of uncertainty when it comes to what the expected outputs are to be. The first step in this is to come up with a plan. The next is to make sure everyone agrees with the plan, then like any new technology, find and cultivate the internal early adopters, make policies, and then support those early adopters through the entire process.

This is not going to be easy either. One of the biggest misconceptions for this is that social networking is easy. They see groups like Coke, Mazda, Comcast, Jet Blue and others that have been successful with social networking, what they fail to see is that there is a long record of accomplishment with these companies. They have invested heavily into their own brands using traditional media, and have leveraged that brand recognition into the online world.

We are not so lucky, while we have some brand recognition, it is not where it needs to be, so there will have to be a dual effort with traditional and online marketing to get the word out. There is no sense in doing social networking if we do not let people know we are out there, and that there is a value to coming to the school. We also have to offer things free, and using the MIT and Berkeley open campus model we can provide hours of content free, while the degree will cost the student something. We show quality in the programs, and use that quality to drive conversation that we also engage in, which in turn drives enrollments.

The best mix is going to be word of mouth, traditional marketing, social networking, free content, and the ability to reach out the program directors for questions and answers. This would break some of the educational modes, where the higher in the organizational hierarchy you are the harder you are to reach. The process has to flatten the organization, where people are engaged with the decision makers largely to be enrolled and get guidance. This does not meant that the traditional advising or counseling staff do not have a role to play, but you smooth the path before the student gets to that point. You want them enthused about the program, but they also have to learn the system. If the students know that senior management is engaged with them, they are more likely to jump through the admissions hoops than if they were doing this cold.

This is the best approach that I can see at this early stage in the development and design process. These are the steps:

1. Get executive sponsor and let them know the truth, this will take time, energy and there is no immediate payoffs. You will want to stick with this and examine the payoff in year one and year two to ensure that it is meeting the goals of higher enrollment.

2. Work out a tracking system, who comes in via social media and who does not. This gives us a way to measure the effectiveness of the new/old campaign models.

3. Find the early adopters who will stick with this, not the folks who will go “ooh shiny” and get distracted ten minutes later, but the folks who really want to do this, and are willing to put in the hours to make the content, do the movies, write the blog entries, and answer student questions. Find folks willing to install tweet deck (or equivalent software) and hang around FriendFeed to see what is happening.

4. Continue to use ordinary marketing to help build brand recognition. Use the ordinary marketing to push the social networking, let folks know we are online and the cool stuff we are doing.

5. Have good policies, keep them fresh and updated, ensuring that everyone knows what is expected of them for this program.

6. Monitor and adjust as needed as often as needed, run statistics at least monthly and be open about them with the people participating in the program. This will build a little friendly competition between the early adopters, and get them engaged.

7. Show this system or process off internally, build desire, “Wouldn’t you want to do this?” or “Look how successful this program has been because of this”. The other key to this is do not get pushy, if someone does not want to do it, leave it be. When they want to do this they will come to you for help, if they never come to you, they probably would never have stayed with this in the first place.
8. Rinse, wash, and repeat as necessary

This is the basic plan I am going to lay out for the program and see what happens. I will want to track statistics early on in the process, and see what ends up happening with it. I will also need to be very flexible; people will do this at their own pace and in their own way. Being respectful of that is also going to be important as my role as the community manager. I also need to start working on finding a replacement as soon as possible because it will be impossible for me to keep this up for the year, more likely two that it will take to become an effective web presence. I will happily remain as an advisor to the program, but they will need to hire an effective community manager in about six months. I’ll post the opening on FriendFeed when it comes out.