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Representin’ (Your Brand) on Social Media: Part 2…or What I Learned from the Great Snowman Challenge of 2014

I have been known, on occasion, to take things a little too far. Evidence of this can be found in my frequent use of movie quotes–lately, I’ve been asking my young son “Who throws a shoe, honestly?” whenever he tosses his footwear–and how I really get into character whenever my children and I play Project Runway (let’s just say I’ve sported a boa, sensible hat, and a fashionable, albeit snug, women’s jacket all in the name of fashion).

Therefore, when my wife, sister-in-law, and I decided to make marshmallow snowmen over the Christmas holiday it seemed only natural to suggest we have a contest. The concept was simple. We would each make our snowman–or “snowperson” if I was being politically correct–and then ask our friends, family, and colleagues to vote for their favorite via Facebook and Twitter. The snowman who received the most votes would be the winner and the person who crafted the winning selection–my wife, sister-in-law, or me–would have their “angel” placed atop the family Christmas Tree.*

My contribution was “Jim” and going into the contest I believed my prospects of winning were good.

Boy, was I wrong.

The final tally was “Earmuff” 30 votes, “Brunchie” 20 votes, and “Jim”….6 votes. Curious as to why people voted the way they did, I asked my colleagues on Twitter to share their thoughts.

Here’s what they had to say, um, tweet.

Still, I was perplexed as to why my offering fared so poorly. Looking beyond the craftsmanship or lack thereof of “Jim”–after all, Ann Handley may have been spot on that my snowman was “sad”–I soon realized that I made some tactical errors. My individual lapses, coincidentally, are some of sames ones social media managers make when it comes to brand representation and in this post I’ll share some of my missteps and how they can be avoided.

What’s in a Name?

I’m not sure how it began. It may have started with the character “Jim” from The Office or the original captain of the Enterprise, James Tiberius “Jim” Kirk. Either way, at some point I started substituting this one syllable name into casual conversation. For example, when my daughter and I would talk about getting a dog I’d say, “You know what would be a good name?” and my daughter would reply, “I know…Jim.” So, when I was thinking about names for my snowman, I thought “Jim” would be perfect and that voters would feel the same.

Nothing could have been further from the truth.

I had made a critical error, one that many social media managers make when representing their brands.

I didn’t take my audience–in this case, the voters–into account.

This is something I never would have done in my role as social media manager for the Harvard Business School’s (HBS) alumni office. My social media approach, particularly on Twitter and Facebook, is completely audience driven. Each day, I try to bring together alumni with common interests and share web content with classmates of specific graduates. The goal is always the same: to provoke some kind of response, whether it be a clickthrough to an article or a reply to a tweet.

Below are a few recent examples of this approach in action.

A)

B)

Granted, it took some time to come to this social media strategy of direct, high touch engagement and understanding what our alumni on social media were most likely to respond to.

This is an approach I didn’t take with the snowman contest. If I had taken a step back and thought about my audience–which was a cross section of family, friends, and business colleagues–I may have gone with a different name, one more appropriate to the situation (i.e., the holiday season). Looking back, it would have been interesting to see what would have happened if I had gone with “Snowball” or “Jingle” instead of “Jim.”

(The takeaway for brand managers are: 1) Just because you think something is cool doesn’t mean anyone else will and 2) ALWAYS take your audience into account–and what they may be interested in–when pushing out social media content.)

Mind Your Competition

Another critical mistake I made was ignoring my competition (i.e., my wife and sister-in-law). Along with disregarding what they were naming their snowmen–which may have put me at a competitive disadvantage–I also didn’t look at my snowman looked compared to theirs. As you can see, my submission lacks–especially around the midsection–many of the features of Brunchie and Earmuff. For example, my wife and sister-in-law included colorful buttons on their snowmen. I just dabbed on some frosting in the same area.

Disregarding your competition is another common error. While I don’t check in on our competition every day, I do try to “take a peek” on what they are doing on a fairly regular basis since HBS is competing with ALL the other brands–especially other higher education institutions–that our alumni are following on Twitter and Facebook. If our competitors are doing something different and gaining traction with our shared audience, we need to know about it so we can adapt and modify our approach if necessary.

And in the end, I’ve found that ignoring your competition–like naming a snowman “Jim”–is NEVER a good idea.

Was this post helpful? Is there anything I missed? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

Robert Bochnak manages social media for the Harvard Business School’s alumni office. He’s also the former writer and editor of GradMatters: The Blog for Tufts GSAS.

Follow Robert on Twitter at https://twitter.com/RobertBoc.

*As children, my wife and sister-in-laws made Christmas angels as part of a class assignment. The angels are decades old and each year one is placed on top of the tree. For our first annual snowman contest, I “played” for my sister-in-law, Pia, who was unable to join us since she was performing in The Lion King on Broadway in New York.

Read my post, “Representin’ (Your Brand) on Social Media: Part 1” at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140801134139-38520837-representin-your-brand-on-social-media?trk=mp-reader-card

 

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What The LEGO Movie Can Teach Us About Social Media

As the father of two children under eight years old, I have seen The LEGO Movie A LOT. But I can’t really complain, especially since the other films I watch on a regular basis feature a pair of sisters with a seriously dysfunctional relationship (C’mon, Anna and Elsa from Frozen communicate exclusively through a door for, what, fifteen years, and we expect them NOT to have any issues?), a tow truck, named “Mater,” in serious need of a dentist, and a “castle steward,” voiced by Tim Gunn,* who serves a princess who ascended to her lofty post “overnight.”

After spending many hours with Emmet and the gang–and since I see almost everything through the prism of social media–I thought it was an ideal time to write about The LEGO Movie, social media, and what we can learn from one of the highest grossing films of 2014.

Lesson #1: REALLY Listen to Your Audience

One of my favorite scenes from the film happens within the first half hour. After Emmet (voiced by Chris Pratt) and Wyldstyle (voiced by Elizabeth Banks) narrowly escape Liam Neeson’s Bad Cop, Emmet reveals that he is not, in fact, “The Special.” Once Wyldstyle gets over her initial anger, she gives Emmet a detailed explanation of the prophecy and the nefarious plans of Lord Business. Emmet responds by saying. “Great. I think I got it. But just in case… tell me the whole thing again, I wasn’t listening.”

While Emmet’s failure to really listen doesn’t do any irreparable damage–Wyldstyle does end up repeating herself–the same can’t be said when it comes to social media, especially Twitter. Dismissing, or flat out ignoring your target audience, can alienate the very people you wish to engage and can lead to negative brand perception. But when you actively listen to your audience AND act on what they are saying–or tweeting–a number of engagement opportunities can arise. Below are a few examples of how, as social media manager for the Harvard Business School (HBS), I have embraced this approach to varying degrees of success.

On Tuesday of this week, alum Alejandro Goyen posted the following tweet.

Recognizing an ideal engagement opportunity (after “listening” to this alumnus), I responded as follows.

While Alejandro did favorite my tweet, we didn’t see any other engagement.

Things were much different when we interacted with fellow alumnus Tom Leung, as evident below.

Like with the previous example, we reacted to what Tom tweeted, but in this case we received a more substantive response.

And once his offer was on the “table,” we had much more to work with social media wise.

These two examples happened within hours of each other and serve as proof that listening is integral to effective social media engagement.

Lesson #2: Ignore the “Haters”

There are detractors (people who question your decisions and motives) and then there are the haters, individuals who seem to relish in despising you. Emmet has the latter in spades. Everyone from Batman to Abraham Lincoln seem to have it in for our hero, uttering such gems as “You are so disappointing on so many levels.” and “A house divided against itself would be better than this,” respectively.

Granted, Emmet doesn’t help his own cause, especially when he delivers one of the worst motivational speeches of all time. But even in the face of mounting criticism–coming mostly from the Dark Knight himself–Emmet remains undeterred and succeeds, first by saving Batman and company with his double decker couch and later by convincing Lord Business to lay down his arms, um, Legos.

We can learn a lot from how Emmet dealt with the “haters.” As a field/discipline, social media is still fairly new and because of this it’s not uncommon for social media managers to have their work questioned or criticized. This is completely understandable, especially since much of the work we do is both unpredictable AND experimental. While I can predict some things (e.g., alumni responses to a question I pose on Twitter), I’m often surprised by which content resonates with my audience and which does not; case in point, I posted the link to an article penned by an alumna yesterday, with no idea how it would perform. Based on past posts, I expected 25-30 clickthroughs and maybe 10-11 “likes.” The post generated 600 clickthroughs (and counting) and 24 “likes.” I have absolutely no idea why.

So, how should you “deal” with the “haters?” I can sum it up in three words.

Data, Data, and Data.

Okay, that was four words, but you get the point.

Regardless of the social media platforms, or platforms, you’re focusing on, it’s imperative that you have a way of measuring your success. Here at HBS, I gather data on both global (clickthroughs, “likes”) and granular (individual alumni engagement) levels; for more on my data collection and reporting read, “Making the Case: Explaining the Return on Investment (ROI) of Your Social Media Efforts.” While choosing what you want to gather data on–I for, one, spend most of my time analyzing individual alumni interactions on Twitter–is difficult, it’s crucial that you have this information at your disposal. Because once you have this information in your arsenal, you’ll be able to respond to some (and hopefully all) queries regarding your approach.

Lesson #3: Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, matters

Near the end of the LEGO Movie, Emmet delivers a MUCH better speech than he did earlier in the film. With Bricksburg, Emmet’s home, on the brink of destruction, our hero appeals to the compassionate side of Lord Business , encouraging him to “take his hand” and join the “good guys.”

During the speech, Emmet also shares how everyone–Lord Business included–can be “The Special.” That, essentially, every person is important and has value.

This philosophy–one I’ve tried to embrace even while driving here in Massachusetts–is a key feature of my social media work. Each morning and throughout the day, I review my alumni lists (for more on list management, see “Rules of Twitter Engagement”) to see how I can connect with alumni. Sometimes these connections happen on an individual bases (see below) and sometimes they involve multiple alumni. But, ultimately, the important thing is making each individual alumnus/a we interact with feel valued.

Granted, this individual engagement approach may be a tough sell to your supervisor. But here’s one way to look at it from a numbers perspective. If you have ten of these types of engagements a week (note: we typically have four to five times this number), this will translate into 40 individual engagements and month and 480 a year. These types of interactions, which may not have happened otherwise, can lead to alumni feeling more brand affinity (i.e., a feeling that the alumnus/a is being listened to) and can help open the door to other engagement opportunities through events, student mentoring programs, etc.

For me, this approach is a no-brainer…just like the double decker couch.**

 *While I may have take issue with the program “Sophia the First,” Tim Gunn can do no wrong in my book.

**I’m a huge fan of the double decker couch as well and would have built one myself–and probably gotten injured in the process–if I had thought of it while in college.

Was this post helpful? Is there anything I missed? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

Robert Bochnak manages social media for the Harvard Business School’s alumni office. He’s also the former writer and editor of GradMatters: The Blog for Tufts GSAS.

Follow Robert on Twitter at https://twitter.com/RobertBoc.

 

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Two Wicked Awesome Social Media Ideas…That I Had Nothing To Do With Whatsoever

It really is all about me.

By “it” I mean the blog that you are reading.

Please let me explain.

When I first started writing this blog in August 2013, I did so for mostly selfish reasons. A few months earlier, I had started a new job at the Harvard Business School (HBS), one which focused entirely on social media. This meant, unfortunately, that I wouldn’t be able to write on a regular basis (contrast this with my previous position at the Tufts University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences where I penned a blog, an e-newsletter, and was a contributing writer to an alumni magazine), so I decided to start blogging about the one thing I knew something about…

The boy band, “One Direction.”

Just kidding.

The answer is social media, of course (though, I must admit I know way too much about Harry, Niall, and the rest of the lads from 1D).

Over the next year and a half, I wrote posts on everything from event coverage to my favorite social media mistake (actually, I wrote three separate posts on this topic, so maybe I don’t know as much as I think), with the majority of blog entries focusing on a social media strategy I conceived and what I learned from it.

Again, it was all about me.

But in this post I want to do something different. I want to write about a pair of social media ideas that my colleagues came up with and that I was charged with implementing. Because in social media, as in life, nobody can reach their full potential alone…or as T.V.’s favorite zombie-killing sheriff Rick Grimes would say, “We survive this by pulling together, not apart.”

Idea #1: Social Media Ambassadors

During my tenure at HBS, we’ve developed close ties–well, as much as one can on Twitter–with a number of alumni on social media. The relationships have been forged through our direct engagement with graduates based on their personal and professional interests (for more, see my post titled, “Rules of Twitter Engagement”). Our approach, which has resulted in over 15,000 unique interactions–retweets, favorites, and replies–with more than 1,300 alumni since January 2013, is about more than alumni engagement, though. We have also used social media, especially Twitter, to drive traffic to our alumni website. We have done this by connecting alumni with content involving their section mates or classmates (see below).

A few months ago, my supervisor devised another way we could increase web views.

He asked me to identify our most active alumni on Twitter–who had also graduated within the last five years–and see if they’d be willing to help amplify our content.

Once I completed my research, I sent the following email to my alumni prospects; these people would later become our first class of “Social Media Ambassadors.”

All told, I sent 30 emails and 25 of the alumni I targeted agreed to participate in the project. The next logical step was to provide the ambassadors with content they could share with their alumni networks. Below is an example of this first “official” email, as well as one article I pointed alumni to.

As expected, our ambassadors shared the content with their networks–via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and email–and we have, at this early stage, seen an increase in web traffic. While the long-term success of this strategy is unknown (since we are most definitely in the pilot stage), I feel confident that this approach will lead to more web hits, especially when we roll it out to alumni from multiple classes.

Idea #2: Alumni Directory Twitter Handle Integration

My Twitter work, as I shared in previous posts, begins and ends with the alumni lists I have assembled. These lists, five in all, are critical to the work I do on a day-to-day basis. Each morning, I review these lists (an example of which is below) and look for opportunities to engage with alumni.

When we do have an alumni interaction–that is, when an alumnus/a favorites, retweets, or replies to one of our Tweets–I add the individual’s name, Twitter handle, year of graduation, and other details to a tracking spreadsheet.

The spreadsheet provides the raw data I use to connect alumni with each other based on everything from geographic region to year of graduation. The list currently stands at 1,300 alumni, which is nice but…

We have more than 5,000 alumni on our Twitter lists.

This means there’s a large cohort of alumni we haven’t interacted with. These alumni may find our content engaging, but this is mere speculation since we haven’t had a confirmed interaction with them. This has troubled me for some time, but I couldn’t think of a solution to this problem.

Until, a colleague in our web communications group suggested a rather ambitious research project.

The project, which I estimated would take 3-4 months to complete, involved taking all the alumni we have tracked and adding their Twitter handles to our alumni directory. This would be a painstaking process, requiring one of our staff members to go through each individual name on our lists, copy his or her handle, and then add this information to the corresponding alumni record in the directory.

But once this project is completed, we’ll be able to extract these Twitter handles, as well as a wealth of other alumni information, onto a separate spreadsheet. So, if we pen a profile on a 2010 graduate from section A, I will be able to send this content to ALL alumni we have tracked from this section. Currently, I can only send this content to those who have made it onto my tracking spreadsheet based on previous Twitter-related interactions.

And once we have a larger pool of alumni data to draw from, I feel confident we’ll see a significant increase in alumni engagement on Twitter.

Was this post helpful? Is there anything I missed? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

Robert Bochnak manages social media for the Harvard Business School’s alumni office. He’s also the former writer and editor ofGradMatters: The Blog for Tufts GSAS.

Follow Robert on Twitter at https://twitter.com/RobertBoc.

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Engaging Students on Social Media

Spring in New England is pretty sweet. After “suffering” through frigid temperatures, epic snowbanks, and awful driving conditions, the warm winds of spring are a welcome respite from winter. Spring is also graduation season, when college and university students from Maine to Connecticut don caps and gowns and pose for family photos. This is also the time-May 29, 2015 of this year to be exact–when I can officially engage with the newest alumni of the Harvard Business School via Twitter and Facebook. Up to this point things are, well, complicated. While I’m not prohibited from reaching out to current students during their two-year stint at HBS, students are not considered to be part of my social media “beat.” But, over the past few months, students have started interacting with us on a more regular basis and I’ve felt emboldened to engage with them; and in this post, I’ll share some strategies I’ve used.

Scaling the Conversation

Each day, a number of alumni follow us on Twitter. The same is true for students. Whenever we get a follow notification from an alumnus/a, we tweet the handles of his or her section mates to them. When a student follows us, we take a slightly different tact. The first thing we do is confirm what year a student is in. If the student is a first year, we’ll ask him about his first impressions of HBS or what he’s looking forward to most in his inaugural year. If the student is in her second year, we’ll try to find out what she hopes to do post-HBS.

Below is a glimpse at how one of these recent interactions played out.

Once Cherian responded to my tweet and shared what he had on tap for the future, I was able to attempt to “scale” the conversation; which involved extending an offer to the student.

I’m able to make this offer–and follow-through on it if necessary–due to the way we track alumni on Twitter (click here for more on my alumni tracking approach) and how we use LinkedIn (read my post, “Tipping the (Social Media) Scales” for more information). It didn’t take long for Cherian to accept my offer and once he did, I went to LinkedIn, accessed our alumni group, and typed “Shanghai” into the “Advanced” feature field. Once I found a trio of alumni in Shanghai who were also on Twitter, I sent the following tweet.

Capture (and Share) Campus Life

Cherian’s case was an example of reactive social media, an approach predicated on waiting for a student to engage with us in some way. But there are times when I’m more proactive. This typically occurs when I’m able to capture an aspect of student life, something which occurred last week.

Since my building is only a half-mile away from the HBS campus, I usually walk to meetings. During my travels, I noticed several flag football games being played on a nearby field. I approached some players on the sideline and was informed that the games involved current HBS students. Before long, I was snapping photos of each contest on my smartphone and then posted the following on Facebook.

Soon after adding the collage, I reached out to individuals on my Twitter student tracking list and sent the Facebook link to them.

While I wasn’t happy with the amount of “likes” the post received (six is REALLY low for us), I believe it’s an approach that could–if done correctly–engender significant student engagement.

Another strategy I’ve employed is connecting students with topical alumni-generated content. Last month, we asked alumni on Twitter to finish the following statement, “My Welcome to #HBS Moment was…” Once we completed our chat–which, at last count, involved 30 individual alumni–we tweeted the ensuing Storify to new students on our Twitter list during their first two weeks of classes. My rational, like with the section football collage, was to share a specific type of content with students, one that would appeal to as many of them as possible; and sometime next month, I plan to send the same query to first- and second-year students so I can add new, fresh perspectives to the Storify.

Was this post helpful? Is there anything I missed? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

Robert Bochnak manages social media for the Harvard Business School’s alumni office. He’s also the former writer and editor ofGradMatters: The Blog for Tufts GSAS.

Follow Robert on Twitter at https://twitter.com/RobertBoc.

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Making the Case: Explaining the Return on Investment (ROI) of Your Social Media Efforts: Part 2

“Just when I thought I was out… they pull me back in!” –Michael Corleone, “The Godfather: Part III” (1990)

I know how Michael Corleone feels…sort of.

Like the Godfather star, I, too, understand what it’s like to try (and fail) to distance myself from something. But, unlike the Corleone family scion, what “pulls me back in” is social media ROI. Once I find a way to quantitatively measure my Twitter activity, I stumble upon yet another form of analysis. This poses a problem because the more measurement layers I add, the more time it takes me to “run my numbers.” At this point, my analysis takes anywhere from forty-five minutes to an hour each day; time I could be using to tweet, post, or engage in other social media activity. But, in my experience, embracing multiple ways of gauging social media ROI is essential when it comes to sharing why your work matters. The more data you have in your arsenal, the better, and in this post I’ll share a new form of analysis I stumbled upon recently.

(Read Making the Case: Explaining the Return on Investment (ROI) of Your Social Media Efforts: Part 1)

Making Connections

While I work in higher ed and do not, technically, sell anything, I’ve always taking a customer service approach to my social media work. A key part of this customer-centric philosophy is connecting alumni with each other based on professional and/or personal interests. An example of this philosophy in action is below.

When I first started working at the Harvard Business School (HBS), I looked at interactions like these on a granular level. I would count each tweet as a “touch” (see “What Do You Want to Measure”) and add them to my tracking sheet for future tabulation (see “Collecting and Interpreting the Data”). While it was (and still is) important to measure individual engagement, I was missing something important; namely, the connections that were taking place. These connections are not only an essential part of what I do, especially on Twitter, but are a valuable tool when it comes to sharing the importance of social media. So, a few months ago, I started tracking these connection using the format below.

Before I started tracking this information, though, my supervisor and I had to determine what constituted a “connection.” We discussed this topic at length and decided that a “connection” needs to fit the following criteria.

1) It must be a tweet in response to an action we took. The example below illustrates this “rule” most clearly.

Earlier this month, we tweeted an article link to several HBS alumni, including Andrew Rosenthal (aka, @rosenthal)

Andrew not only read the article, but shared it broadly with fellow alumni. This, under our tracking matrix, constituted a connection.

2) The tweet from the alumnus/a must include the handles of fellow alumni. It cannot be a tweet directed solely at @HBSAlumni.

3) It cannot be a retweet

With these “rules” in mind, we now have another valuable data point in our presentations. Defining what constitutes a connection has also helped me be more deliberate in seeking out these opportunities on a more regular basis.

Was this post helpful? Is there anything I missed? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

Robert Bochnak manages social media for the Harvard Business School’s alumni office. He’s also the former writer and editor of GradMatters: The Blog for Tufts GSAS. 

Follow Robert on Twitter at https://twitter.com/RobertBoc.

 

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Rules of (Twitter) Engagement: Part 2

After managing social media for both the Tufts University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Harvard Business School’s (HBS) alumni office, I’ve learned a few things…

1. Nothing beats a well-timed Say Anything-inspired tweet.

When it comes to social media, you can never go wrong with a little Lloyd Dobler.

2. There are some things you should DEFINITELY NOT tweet about.

3. Engaging with your audience is (and really should be) a full-time job.

When it comes to point #3, I don’t think you should be on your smartphone tweeting 24/7–though, I have been known to tweet at 3am–rather, it’s important to always be thinking of new ways to connect with your target audience. If you’ve read any of my previous posts, specifically my inaugural “Rules of (Twitter) Engagement,” piece you’re familiar with many of my strategies. While these approaches have resulted in 11,177 unique interactions with HBS alumni since January 2013, I recently added a new strategy to my outreach arsenal. The reason I did can be summed up in one word: scale.

Scale, in business terms, is defined as “a system that will be able to maintain or even increase its level of performance or efficiency when tested by larger operational demands.” My social media work at HBS is predicated on, to a large degree, my ability to increase (or scale up) the number of alumni we have substantive engagements with.

At HBS, we’ve experienced some success with social media engagement, evident in the 935 individual alumni we have communicated with (these are alumni who have retweeted, favorited, or replied to one of our tweets on one or more occasions) since February 2013. While this number is nice, it isn’t that impressive given that there are more than 60,000 HBS alumni. Therefore, it’s important to bring many more alumni into our social media orbit. To expand our reach, I’ve pursued a number of different strategies. Using my alumni social media tracking sheet, I…

1) Share career or personal highlights with specific alumni groups.

2) Pose questions based on the interests of alumni (see the discussion on Blackberry I curated at  https://storify.com/hbsalumni/where-did-blackberry-go-wrong) and aggregate responses into Storifys.

3) Connect alumni with each other.

A fourth, new strategy I’ve implemented is to reach out to “shared” followers; these “shared” followers are individuals that we (@HBSalumni) and alumni we have never engaged with before both follow. We assumed that an alumnus/a–in this case Avni Patel Thomspon (@APatelThompson)–would serve as a bridge between us and these “new” alumni.

After coming across Avni’s blog post, which announced the imminent launch of her start-up, we tweeted the news to her section mates (i.e., people, we assume, that she has close relationships with dating back to her time as a student) and then reviewed the followers we (@HBSAlumni) and Avni had in common. This list consisted of 36 alumni, many of whom we had never connected with or attempted to before. One of the names on this list was alumnus Joseph Thompson.

 

For our next round of tweets, we targeted alumni like Joseph. We hoped that he and his fellow alumni would retweet, favorite, or reply to our tweet and then we’d have an excuse to extend the conversation.

 

Fortunately, Joseph did retweet us, but we were unable to move the conversation forward after thanking him for the RT and posing a follow-up question. But we were able to add Joseph to our tracking sheet (for more on Twitter tracking lists see my post at https://robertbochnak.wordpress.com/2013/08/06/to-do-lists-staffing-and-a-whole-lot-of-strategery/) which may provide future engagement opportunities.

We had better luck with HBS alumnus Glenn Thrope. Following the approach illustrated above. I tweeted the photo below to Glenn and other alumni.

 

Glenn not only responded to our original tweet, but we had the following exchange with him and feel confident that the stage has been set for future two-way contact.

This engagement approach, coupled with our other strategies, has led to a significant increase in the amount of alumni we’ve interacted with each month. As the chart below illustrates, we interacted with 1,332 individual alumni from January to April 2014 (January-335; February-250; March-353; and April-394) and with the exception February, we increased our engagement number by an average of 24% each month.

 

 

 

Was this post helpful? Is there anything I missed? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

Robert Bochnak manages social media for the Harvard Business School’s alumni office. He’s also the former writer and editor of GradMatters: The Blog for Tufts GSAS. 

Follow Robert on Twitter at https://twitter.com/RobertBoc.

 

 

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The Importance of Being Observant

There’s A LOT my wife doesn’t “get” about me.

She can’t understand how, if given the choice, I’d eat the same thing every day (i.e., burger and fries) or why I wear my torn and weathered jeans when I have several pristine pairs sitting in my closet. My spouse is also mystified by my obsession with superheroes–which is understandable since I’ll be 40 in May–and how I manage to splash water everywhere while doing the dishes.

But there’s one thing that perplexes my wife more than anything else.

It’s the regularity in which I bump into walls, chairs, bed frames, and other inanimate objects in our house.

Her sentiment makes complete sense; we have, after all, lived at the same address for 7 years so I should be able to find my way around. But, unfortunately, this isn’t the case and my wife believes my “bumps” in the night, morning, and afternoon are because I’m not observant.

(She’s probably right. After all, I have been known to ask, while driving, “Hey, when did that Pizzeria Uno open?” Only to hear, “Um, it opened 6 months ago, honey.”)

Now contrast this with my social media work for the Harvard Business School (HBS). If anything, I can be too observant, but I believe this as an asset as opposed to a deficit and in this post I’ll share why.

Making Your Time Count

My office is located a half mile away for the HBS campus. Because of this, I spend very little time on the main campus. When I do go there, it’s usually for a meeting or to hit the gym, which I do  3-4 times a week. The gym is a five-minute walk from the school’s parking lot, so the amount of time I’m actually on campus each week is about 40 minutes–20 minutes of walking to the gym, 20 minutes strolling back. These walks, while short, have been very helpful from a social media perspective. I have witnessed glimpses of campus life that I’ve been able to integrate into my Twitter and Facebook work to great effect. The screen shots below are glimpses of what I’ve seen.

While all these screen shots are different, they do have something in common.

None of them were planned.

In each case, I happened to notice something interesting, whipped out my Android, and took a few photos. I usually waited until I got back to the office to post the photos and then I waited to see what kind of response we’d get on Facebook. I also used Twitter to drive followers to the page.

The results for this type of unplanned social media activity were positive. The first three posts, which together, resulted in 66 likes, 5 comments, and 4 shares, outperformed, by a fairly significant margin, the content I’d usually post on Facebook. The fourth post of the child “riding in style” was different. With 97 likes, it remains one of the highest performing items I’ve posted.

There is, of course, a lesson to be learned here beyond the importance of “awareness.” The lesson is that opportunities for social media engagement can happen anywhere and at any time. You just need to pay attention to the right “signs” and have the proper tools to act accordingly.

Below are the “signs” I look for and the tools I typically have at my disposal.

1) Audience Benefit

Whether I’m sitting at my desk or strolling to the gym, I’m usually thinking about my audience. My audience, for example, is interested in connecting with HBS and they feel a genuine sense of nostalgia for the school. Since the alumni are on the “older” side, many have families which is also a consideration. So, when I’m walking through campus and I see something of interest, I usually stop and think A) will this be of interest to a critical mass of alumni and B) how can I use it if I do take action? There have been many cases where I’ve seen something cool, but realized that it wasn’t a good fit and kept on walking. The “riding in style” opportunity was a perfect example of all the right elements coming together–the child’s riding through a building alumni are very familiar with, he’s a child (which appeals to the parent set), and, in a more general sense, he’s doing something unique; after all it’s pretty rare to see a three-wheeler racing across a tiled floor at Harvard.

2) Move Fast

Life, as the philosopher Ferris Bueller said, “moves pretty fast” so too must the social media manager. When capturing unplanned content, it helps to have a camera or phone at the ready. I would suggest having the latter since it’s very easy, with today’s smartphones, to take a photo and post it onto social media in minutes, if not seconds, after you take it. It only took a few minutes for the boy to ride by, so time was of the essence. Fortunately, I was ready.

Was this post helpful? Is there anything I missed? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

Robert Bochnak manages social media for the Harvard Business School’s alumni office. He’s also the former writer and editor of GradMatters: The Blog for Tufts GSAS. 

Follow Robert on Twitter at https://twitter.com/RobertBoc.

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Wet Willies, Kegs, and Social Media Causality

Things were much easier when I was younger.

If my younger brother was watching television and I didn’t agree with his program selection, all it would take was a “noogie” or a strategically-timed “wet willy” (and the threat of more to come) for him to cede control of the remote–until, of course, my parents found out what I did and I would be sent away to my room for the rest of the day or evening.

As a college student, things were even simpler. When I lived off campus, all we had to do was purchase a few kegs; make some phone calls (I was an undergraduate well before Facebook and texting arrived so we had to rely on much more rudimentary modes of communication); and, before long, our living room would be crammed with fellow students sipping (okay, chugging) red solo cups full of “Natty Light.”

Now that I’m a little older–okay, I’m more than a “little” as my fortieth birthday will be arriving this spring–I find that it’s much more difficult to “make things happen,” especially when it comes to my kids; I consider it a huge victory when they put away their dishes or hang up their coats. This challenge also extends to my social media work, and in this post I’ll share some strategies I use to influence (I hope) the actions of those I interact with and how I can “prove” the causality of my outreach.

Directing (and Measuring) Traffic

In my previous post titled, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Social Media,” I shared some best practices for “selling” the merits of social media to your supervisors and other leaders in your organization. Another way to make the social media argument is showing, in concrete terms, the results of your Twitter, Facebook, and other social media-related work. Granted, this isn’t always possible as I’ve found it very difficult to prove causality when it comes to Facebook and LinkedIn. By “causality,” I mean being able to say with clarity that my efforts contributed to an alumni contribution or event registration. I’ve spent A LOT of time thinking about measuring impact–if you’ve read any of my previous posts, especially “Explaining the ROI of Your Social Media Efforts” and “Social Media Event Coverage: An Integrated Approach (Part 3)” you understand this–but it’s always been a challenge (if near impossible) to claim that “yes, I helped play a part in making this–webinar registration, donation, etc. happen.”

But I do think I’m on to something, specifically a way to use social media to both influence and measure alumni action. Here’s the story…

A few months ago, I was approached by a colleague at the Harvard Business School about promoting a webinar. In the past, I would have gone right to TweetDeck–after getting approval from my supervisor to help my colleague–and start tweeting immediately to alumni who might be interested in the webinar. This time around, I took a different approach. First, I spoke with my colleague and found out when she planned to share the webinar information with alumni via email, since I wanted my tweets to be sent at least a week after her email was so I could determine, with some reliability, if my tweets had led to an increase in registrations.

Once I determined the optimal dates for sending out my scheduled tweets, I went to my Twitter tracking sheet (for more on social media tracking, see my post titled, “Rules of Twitter Engagement”) and, since the webinar focused on charitable giving and its positive impact, I pulled Twitter handles for all alumni who included “nonprofit,” “President,” or “CEO” in their bios.

Using these handles, I created four different Twitter “messages” and scheduled them, using TweetDeck, to be sent at one hour intervals over the course of seventy-two hours. Prior to scheduling these “direct” tweets—and by “direct’ tweets, I’m referring to those that include the handles of specific alumni followers—I sent a series of “broadcast” tweets (those that did not include handles of alumni), as well as posts on Facebook and LinkedIn

Once I completed my social media outreach, I conducted my analysis. Here’s what I came up with.

As you can see, the numbers above aren’t that impressive. Even though we have more than 8,000 followers, I didn’t see much in the way of clickthroughs, retweets, or comments. Also, I have no way of gauging if my broadcast tweets had any impact on webinar registration.

Here’s what happened when I sent out my direct tweets.

Obviously, I had a lot more activity with this direct approach, evident in the amount of clickthroughs (68), retweets (12), and comments (11). But more importantly I was able to draw a direct link between my direct tweets and event registration–five alumni registered for the webinar based on my tweets.

How did I figure this out? It’s simple, really. I contacted my colleague and asked her to send me a spreadsheet listing all alumni who registered for the webinar in the hours after I sent my first direct tweet. I then reviewed the list and located the names of alumni I tweeted the event information to.

Granted, five webinar registrants is nothing to brag about (I was actually very disappointed by the tepid registration response, but I was happy with the number of comments) but what I have now is a model that I can replicate–in fact, the day after Thanksgiving I have a series of direct tweets going out for another webinar. Moving forward, I will be able to make the argument that, at least when it comes to event registration, there is a casual relationship between my activity and alumni action. This is yet another way to sell–especially to “higher ups”–why social media matters.

Was this post helpful? Is there anything I missed? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

Robert Bochnak manages social media for the Harvard Business School’s alumni office. He’s also the former writer and editor of GradMatters: The Blog for Tufts GSAS. 

Follow Robert on Twitter at https://twitter.com/RobertBoc.

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Cracking the Facebook Engagement Code

What do Lady Gaga, the film Donnie Darko, The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, and Facebook all have in common?

They are all things I REALLY don’t understand.

While I know a bit about this foursome–with the possible exception of Mrs. “Poker Face,” seriously, what’s the deal with these get ups?–my knowledge is fairly limited. Naturally, this poses a problem when it comes to Facebook in particular, since a significant part of my social media work at the Harvard Business School (HBS) depends on a deep understanding of this outlet and how to maximize its potential.

But I do want something to be clear. I’m not saying I don’t understand how to use Facebook or to be successful (at times) with it. Rather, my work with Facebook is problematic because it’s difficult to predict whether or not my outreach will meet my engagement expectations. This isn’t the case with Twitter; I can usually predict how successful I will be (see my “Rules of (Twitter) Engagement” post for more on this topic) when posing a “Question of the Week” or otherwise reaching out to alumni.

But not all my Facebook outreach has been disappointing. There have been cases, whether by accident or not, where I have been successful and in this post I will share some of these instances as well as strategies I have used.

Photos…and Then Some

It comes as no surprise that photos and Facebook go together like, as Forrest Gump would say, “Peas and Carrots”  but there are some steps you can take to make it about more than the photos. By using both email and social media (e.g., Twitter), you can increase both the number of “likes” you receive and the comments to a given photo or photos. Here’s a recent example of this “blended” approach.

Earlier this month, we hosted an alumni event at a local restaurant in Boston. The event drew around 100 alumni and featured presentations by faculty members and alumni. As with most events, we had a photographer present. The day after the event, I posted several photos on our Facebook page. Once the photos were up, I went to work.

The first thing I did was pull up my Twitter tracking sheet (see my first Social Media Matters post for more on list management); sorted it by “city” and “state”; and then, using Tweetdeck, scheduled a series of tweets to Boston-based alumni. These tweets included a very brief synopsis of the event with a link to the photo gallery, which is included below.

So, did this targeted outreach make a difference? While it’s difficult to say how many “likes” and “comments” resulted from my tweets, I can say with confidence that I was able to, at the very least, get alumni to view the gallery. This is evident in the number of Twitter-based clickthroughs my gallery link received–33. It’s important to note that the more followers you can send direct tweets to–for example, in New York we have identified more than 100 alumni on Twitter–the better chance you have of “leading” followers to your photos or other content on Facebook.

But Twitter was just one piece of the engagement puzzle. Once the gallery was posted, a colleague emailed the link to all alumni who had pre-registered for the event. Together, social media and email helped the event photos generate 138 likes, 14 shares, and 23 comments. These numbers are significant, especially compared to those generated by a previous photo set that, without the help Twitter and email, generated only 11 likes, and no comments or shares.

Question Your Audience

When it comes to Twitter, it’s crucial to “know” your followers. This knowledge includes, but is not limited to, understanding what your followers like–from books to movies–to what they are doing career wise. Armed with this “data,” it’s possible to engage with them around their interests, as opposed to simply broadcasting information that may or may not resonate with your followers.

Facebook, on the other hand, presents a few problems. In my experience, it’s difficult to know what your Facebook “friends” are interested in without going to their individual profile pages. But, with patience and a little experimentation, it’s possible to have substantive discussions (i.e., engagement) with your Facebook audience. One approach I’ve taken is to pose questions focused on the HBS experience, but I only came to this approach after experiencing the following failures.

Obviously, these questions did not produce the engagement I was looking for. So, to use a business term I have picked up at HBS, I decided to “pivot” and try something different. This unproven approach was to ask questions which encouraged alumni to reflect on their student experience. My thesis was based on the assumption that alumni were interested in our Facebook page because the school resonated with them on an emotional level. So, if I could encourage alumni to reflect on their time at HBS, they might be inspired to “like” the question we asked or (even better!) respond to the query I posed. Below are a few examples of this approach in action.

Here’s another one.

As you can see, I was much more successful in my Facebook outreach in the second set of examples, as opposed to the first. I not only increased my number of “likes,” but also generated more comments/responses to the question I asked. These comments also provided pockets of engagement opportunity where I could ask follow-up questions using the Facebook “reply” option.

Another example.

So, what did I learn from this process? I learned that,,,

1) Your engagement approach should be based on what your Facebook friends are interested in, and not what you find interesting. How do you find this out? See #2

2) You should ALWAYS be willing to experiment and fail BIG when using Facebook to interact with alumni. If something fails, try something similar to see if there were any extenuating circumstances that caused your engagement to “miss the mark.” If the problem was with the content itself, try something different and continue to do so until you find a Facebook strategy that works.

3) You should have a way of tracking your work on Facebook. I use a spreadsheet which includes each post and link, as well as the day and time that the post was published. This data helps me determines if a specific day or time had any impact, whether positive or negative, on my social media outreach.

Was this post helpful? Is there anything I missed? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

Robert Bochnak manages social media for the Harvard Business School’s alumni office. He’s also the former writer and editor of GradMatters: The Blog for Tufts GSAS. 

Follow Robert on Twitter at https://twitter.com/RobertBoc.

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How to Find Your Social Media Peeps

There are a few things you need to know about me.

I’m a big fan of, in no particular order…

1) The music of ABBA (full disclosure: We listened to “ABBA: GOLD”  following almost every party we had in college. Yes, my friends and I were definitely not cool)

2) Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

3) Refrigerated Twizzlers (I know, I know, it’s kinda weird but they taste REALLY good)

4) Conducting research

While I would love to blog about the greatest musical foursome, snack, and movie (Khaaaaaaan!) of all time, this post will focus on my love of research instead, specifically as it relates to Twitter.

In the Beginning

When I first began tweeting, I came up with the following “formula” to help guide my work.

Identify>Engage>Leverage

This approach was (as it is today), pretty simple. If I could find the people I was interested in following, I could engage with them (e.g., retweet their posts, promote their blogs, share their professional achievements, etc.) and then “leverage” these connections; this would include followers responding to my “Questions of the Week,” retweeting my posts, and/or reaching out to me directly referencing my handle in their tweets.) The challenge, of course, is actually finding these “influencers” and in this post I’ll share some research approaches that have worked for me then and especially today.

Start With Twitter

Twitter itself is a useful resource, especially for social media professionals who work in higher ed. When searching for alumni, I include the handle of the school I’m interested in, as well as the word “alum” or “alumni” to sharpen my search. Below is an example of this approach– using my undergraduate institution, UMass-Amherst, as my search area.

A)

B)

First, I add “@UMass Alum” into my search area, hit return, and then view the results. As you can see, individuals with “UMass Alum” in their Twitter bio come up and then, after confirming these tweeters are actually alumni, I can follow them. Naturally, this is a time-consuming endeavor, but it has proven to be one of the more effective ways of finding Twitter followers.

Get LinkedIn

With more than 250 million users, LinkedIn is where many job seekers and employers visit when looking to find or fill a job. This is also one of the first places I go to when I want to find Twitter followers. Like with Twitter, I take advantage of the site’s search capability to find what I’m looking for. But my LinkedIn process also has some unique features.

On LinkedIn, the first thing I do is access “Advanced People Search” (see below).

Once there, I toggle down to “School” and add the necessary information–in this case, “University of Massachusetts-Amherst”–and once I hit “return,” a number of profiles appear.

The next thing I do is open each profile and access the “Contact Info” field.

The alumna above happens to have a Twitter account, so after I confirm that she’s is, indeed, an alum I can then follow her on Twitter.

One of the drawbacks of this approach is that you will need to search every person’s profile. Unfortunately, there’s no way to globally search for alumni who are also on Twitter. But one of the benefits of this LinkedIn research approach is that each person you search will get a notification that you “viewed their profile.” In my case, this resulted in a significant increase in the amount of people who wanted to “connect” with me.

So, there are definitely pros and cons to searching for Twitter followers on LinkedIn, but in my experience it’s well worth the time to use this medium to find (potential) “peeps.”

Was this post helpful? Is there anything I missed? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

Robert Bochnak manages social media for the Harvard Business School’s alumni office. He’s also the former writer and editor of GradMatters: The Blog for Tufts GSAS. 

Follow Robert on Twitter at https://twitter.com/RobertBoc.