Social Media Plan for CityU of Seattle

Blogs, Twitter, and Social Networking

Social Media and CityU of Seattle

May 2009

April 10, 2023 Dan Morrill

What is Social Media?

Social Media is a collection of systems that allow users to interact with content creators

All social media systems allow complex interaction between people across many different types of platforms and conversational styles

Few create, some participate, many simply read passively, but this is changing – people want to talk and be heard


Social Media is Globalization 3.0 in action

People to People conversations become more important than the official communication from the company

The company, group, organization no longer controls the message, the people within and outside the organization control and produce the message, the company can only monitor what is being said about their brand and engage when appropriate or desired

The barriers to entry are nonexistent, anyone can join in or leave at any time


Social Media is a collection of systems

High Order Systems – Aggregation and Collation

Friend Feed (http://friendfeed.com/cityuofseattle)

Social Median

Stumbleupon/Digg/Reddit and Bookmarking sites

Mid Level Systems – Notification and Conversation Systems

Twitter (http://twitter.com/cityu)

RSS Readers (Really Simple Syndication)


Social Media is a Collection of Systems

Low Level Systems – Where original content can be posted

Blogs (proposed http://blogs.cityu.edu)

Web Sites (http://cityu.edu)

Blip.TV/YouTube (Video) (http://cityuwebcast.blip.tv/)

Podcasting Servers (http://technology.cityu.edu/loudblog/)

Some mid and high level systems can also be used for original content in the form of comments

FriendFeed, Social Median, and Twitter are examples of this process


Why Social?• All the Social Networking systems currently in use rely

on person to person interaction with each other. No People No Conversation

• All the Social Networking systems start with an idea posted anywhere on the internet, then shared, reshared, commented, and eventually a consensus is achieved, or the issue is dropped

• All the Social Networking Systems rely on reaching a “catalyst state” in that there are enough people for discourse (not necessarily intelligent)


Why would we want to use Social Media?

Get to know our audience better, start a conversation with them, find out what they want then deliver it

Better brand name recognition raise our brand awareness and exposure on an international stage

Reach our customers and constituents where they are (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, et. al.) and how they choose to consume data/information

Demonstrate quality – what we provide is a quality product, more people should talk about it, if we don’t start who else will?


There are some real benefits to doing this


What are the Rules?

Measure everything

Make a commitment to success

Allow people not to participate

Allow for failure

Learn from the comments

Adopt and promote change within and outside the organization

Communicate, participate, engage


What do we need to do?

Build out the rest of the support systems

blogs.cityu.edu

Figure out who will blog

Program Directors? Department Heads? Alumni Affairs? SIFE? Teachers?

Start writing content

First one to 100 posts wins a prize, will Dan win?

Tie them into higher level systems

Twitter, FriendFeed, Social Median, and others


Measure Everything

Who is coming?

Where are they coming from?

How long are they staying?

Are they starting a conversation or passive readers?

Where are they engaging at, on the site, on another system?

Where are we talking to them?

What does our content look like, is it quality or forced?

Where else are folks talking about us?


Make a commitment to success

Presidential Staff

Deans

Program Directors

Senior Staff

Special Groups

All need to be participating in the program

All need to be behind what we are doing


Allow people not to participate

It is OK not to want to blog

It is OK not to want to twitter

It is OK not to want to be on Facebook

It is OK not to want to be on LinkedIn

The people who do participate are the ones who want to be there

We only want willing participants


Allow for failure

At some point, there is going to be a major failure somewhere:

Personal

Informational

Scorched Earth approach to quitting

Trolls and other forms of life

How we handle the controversy is more important than how we handle the day to day

Plan on failure – know what you are going to do before there is a firestorm on the network


Learn from the commentsPeople are going to tell you things:

Things you want to hear

Things you do not want to hear

Opinions on what works and what does not work

Love and Hate Mail

No matter what they say

No matter how they say it

Does it provide value to what we are doing? If yes, use it.


Adopt and promote change within and outside the organization

Social Networking is not easy

Change is not easy

Social Networking can be downright scary

Promote change – but do not force it on people who do not want it.

Social Networking can be fun, we just have to show that it can be fun


Communicate, participate, engage

Communicate – use the systems we connect to, to get the word out

Participate – continually make great content and comment on others content

Engage – Engage across the spectrum of social systems we participate in


Similar systems with big differences

Twitter is a “micro blogging” site, you have 140 characters or less to express yourself

FriendFeed is an aggregation point with conversation, people can use it just like twitter and feed other data into it


Aggregation and Collection Systems

Aggregation and Collection systems collect original content either automatically or based on user submissions, people then vote and comment on the entry

Yes even Google does this with Google news and other content


Blogs and Content Systems

There are many kinds of content creation and delivery systems

The one you choose to use are the ones you will be the most familiar with and could end up a permanent decision


Facebook

Facebook is a person aggregation site, people hang out there to meet up with old friends and make new ones, share information, start conversations, take quizzes, look at bad advertising, and otherwise interact with people who are geographically dispersed around the world

There are some 200 million people on Facebook


But there are other social networking sites

There are a lot of social networking sites

You need to find time to participate in them, and finding the time is not easy in our hyper connected ADD world

There are hundreds that are not on this slide


Information Overload

As people build trusted communities, information overload becomes meaningless, we self filter

How much you are trusted is your social capital

Spend it wisely, it is all you have online


Theories on why we do what we do

Much like Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, social networking has a similar break down in how we address those things we need, as we need them, when we need them.

This chart works across many social systems


But it all boils down to people


So why do we want to do this?

Start the conversation – if we don’t start it, no one else will

Participate in the greater educational communities – bring more visibility by participating in and sharing data with some of the other educational blogging systems out there, as well as other social systems

Set the tone – how we engage, when we engage, how we participate shows how cool CityU of Seattle can be


Social Media Plan for CityU of Seattle

Business

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