by Bill Ives
September 10, 2010 at 3:51 am · Filed under
Social Media
A new study, Social Media and College Admissions: Higher-Ed Beats Business in Adoption of New Tools for Third Year, by Nora Ganim Barnes and Eric Mattson shows that US colleges are studying the “rules of engagement” in the online world in order to maximize their effectiveness at recruiting prospective students. This is the third year of their data collecting on this topic.
The longitudinal analysis shows that colleges and universities continue to embrace social media as their adoption of blogging again outpaces both the Fortune 500 (22% have a corporate blog) and the fast-growing Inc. 500 (42% have a corporate blog). The latest research shows 51% of colleges and universities have an admissions blog for their school. It is not limited to blogging. My alma mater, Tufts, has prospective students send them YouTube videos.
There have been many reports of business looking through social media to screen out prospective employees. They should look to schools to learn of more positive ways to use social media for recruiting. Colleges are also looking at social media for screening purposes. There was an increase in social media use for screening in 2009 while a decrease in the use of search engines for the same purpose.
Social networking, the social media that was most familiar to college admissions officers in 2007 and 2008 is still the most familiar. Familiarity with social networking has jumped from 55% reporting they were very familiar with it in 2007, to 63% in 2008 and now to 83%. Fifty-five percent of admissions officers report they are very familiar with Twitter.
This familiarity extends to usage as 95% of college admissions offices used at least one form of social media in 2009. Social networking is the most common form with 87% of admissions departments using it. Fifty-nine percent have a school Twitter account and, as noted above, 51% have a blog. In addition, more admissions departments feel that social media is “very important” to their future strategy than Inc. 500 businesses (50% compared to 43%). Good for them.
The colleges are also looking at social media to see what is being said about them. Fifty-three percent in 2007 and 54% in 2008 report they monitored the Internet for buzz, posts, conversations and news about their institution. The latest research shows an increase of close to 20% with 73% of schools now monitoring their school name. I wonder how that compares with business.
Barnes and Matteson at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research have conducted a number of studies on social media. See for example, Social Media in the Inc. 500: 2007 – 2009. This one is another useful addition to their work.
by Bill Ives
September 6, 2010 at 3:26 am · Filed under
Social Media
There has been a lot of coverage on Hurricane Katrina during its fifth anniversary. Marc Meyer wrote a nice post on Social Media Today, Social Media and Hurricane Katrina: What If? He was there in the week after and experienced some of the sense of isolation as many traditional means of communication were down. Now he wonders what would have happen if services like Twitter and Facebook would have been available?
We have seen how social media and enterprise 2.0 platform shave helped in more recent disasters. See for example, Details on Enterprise 2.0 in Operation in Haiti Relief on how the TISC (Transnational Information Sharing Cooperation) was used by the US Military for better communication knowledge sharing, and coordination. The main components of the system were online forums, wikis, chat and blogs. The objective is to a create system that not only helps with particular disasters but also builds an archive of best practices, key people/organizations and useful information to better handle future needs, as well as a platform for efficient cooperation.
It turns out that there were some uses of social media to help with Katrina. In this case it was blogs and wikis in the absence of Facebook and Twitter. The Katrina PeopleFinder Project was quickly organized through the Web by some people at Harvard’s Berkman Center. After Katrina many families were separated and left with no clear way to find each other. Hundreds of Web sites gathered thousands, of entries about either missing people or people who want to let others know that they were okay. The problem was that the data on these sites had no particular form or structure. So it was almost impossible for people to search or match things up.
The Katrina PeopleFinder Project enlisted virtual volunteers to enter data about missing and found people from the various online sources. It was promoted through blogs and the interface for administering the effort was a wiki. If I remember correctly over 20,000 volunteers were enlisted in a few days through the blog alerts. I did some work on this. You could do it anytime you wanted for as much time as you had available from your own office or home using your own computer. You took data from one of many separate databases and added it into a new central one with a common searchable structure.
This work gave me a closer personal look at the displaced people from my home town of New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast. Some of the individual stories emerged. It is small thing to do but you saw the names of people directly impacted by Katrina and hopefully helped a few people find people or get notified of the status of these people close to them. The social media tools have gotten more sophisticated and efficient since Katrina but they were in play there thanks to a few individuals at the Berkman Center and the thousands of volunteers they enlisted.
by Joe McKendrick
September 1, 2010 at 4:43 pm · Filed under
FASTforward'09
Irina Slutsky of Advertising Age just posted an interesting article on how some companies have created “Chief Listening Officer” posts, intended to oversee the mining of company mentions across social media venues and provide trending analysis.
At Kodak, Beth LaPierre has that role, charged with sifting through 300,000 new mentions of Kodak a month.
Susan Beebe at Dell performs a job of “broad listening” to Dell customers and consumers, and “giving all the intel to her Dell colleagues internally.” Dell even created a position called “Listening Czar: a couple of years ago.
The article points to a very important trend, and that is companies assembling and having someone that makes sense out of social media data — this is now important information to guide companies in market awareness and product innovation. But it’s not clear why these companies feel they need to have a CLO function that’s separate from the chief marketing officer, or other managers for that matter. In this era when markets and workplaces are conversations, every manager should be a “chief listening officer.”
by Bill Ives
September 1, 2010 at 3:21 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Social Media, learning
I was very pleased to receive a review copy of The New Social Learning by Tony Bingham and Marcia Conner. Tony is President and Chief Executive Officer of the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD). Marcia is a Partner at Altimeter Group, founder of the Twitter chat #lrnchat, and she writes the Fast Company column “Learn at All Levels.”
Getting a chance to read this timely work was exciting for several reasons. I began my consulting career in the learning space in the 80s and have remained convinced of its importance for accelerating business performance. I presented at several ASTD sessions during this period. Marcia was also a colleague of mine at Pistachio Consulting where we did some projects together. I had a chance to review an earlier version of one of the chapters of this book. But most importantly, it is the first book I have seen to help organizations understand and harness the huge workplace learning potential of social media and enterprise 2.0.
The authors begin with an acknowledgement that social learning has been around for a long time. While social media tools bring new power to social learning, it is not about particular tools as they will come and go. The book is about new ways that social media can enhance social learning and thus the book title. Much of the talk about social media has focused on marketing and, while there is great potential there, the authors bring forth a powerful additional use case. They also point out that social learning is not a new form of e-learning. I would certainly agree and much of e-learning appeared to me to be disappointing watered down adoptions of technology–based learning from the 80s.
I remember studies in the 80s where people reported that 90% of what they learned that helped with their work came from informal conversations with fellow employees. Now social media can enable those conversations on a global basis across enterprises or in a secure manner within a select group in one enterprise. When I first saw social media in 2004 the possibilities for knowledge management re-energized my interest in KM. I have began to see the same potential for learning and this book helps to put it in perspective and offers some excellent cases examples.
The book draws on some of my academic heroes, John Dewey, Jean Piaget, Peter Berger, and Thomas Luckman to set the stage for how people most effectively learn through active participation and social interaction. They define learning as “the transformative process of taking in information that, when internalized and mixed with what we have experienced, changes what we know and builds on what we can do.’ I certainly agree and it aligns directly with how Piaget would define learning. Jocelyn Davis, head of R&D at the Forum Corporation, recently suggested that learning might be a major motivational driver on the level of David McClelland’s three main drives achievement, affiliation, and power. Social learning can draw on a number of these motivators.
The authors list some of the major concerns about using social media in a business context and then offer excellent ways to address these concerns. The book takes a very practical approach and is clearly written with concrete examples through out.
After setting the stage, the authors provide a chapter each covering online communities, the power of stories, micro-sharing, growing the collective intelligence, and immersive environments. Each chapter begins with a detailed case example. The book concludes with some useful tips for making the most of in-person events. I let you read the book to get the useful details.
I highly recommend this book if you want to make better use of social media and enterprise 2.0, if learning is a passion, or if you want to increase the productivity of your workforce. It is one of the better business books I have seen recently.
