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Amongst the crowd

Over the past year, I’ve learned a lot more teaching social web strategy and discussing web tools with people whose lives aren’t consumed with it than I ever did working in the field directly. Sometimes, you have to engage with your consumers and your audience and I’ve found this extremely helpful.

One of the things I remember talking about a lot last year from teaching my class to consulting to helping the SocialWyo folks plan their conference was the fact that you can have 50,000 foot discussions about this nebulous social media creature and go nowhere. Ordinary people with lives and work and jobs might use Facebook and maybe they’ve created a Twitter account. But no one in their everyday lives has made any of these tools really relevant to them in a manner that they can understand the real origins of web utility; as opposed to a telephone or radio or something like that.

I’ve enjoy conversations that force me to tone down the jargon, avoid the cliches and spend more time talking about the meat and potatoes of the topic without powerpoint slides or a backchannel. I think I’ve thrived as a strategist over the years precisely because so much of my circle was comprised of savvy people who are digital outsiders; coupled with a professional circle through the web of smart people who have their thumbs on what’s going on and keep me on top of things.

Broadcast rights, social media and the soul of college athletics

As recent as last fall, the Southeastern Conference announced it would ban social media from it’s stadiums. The conference reversed course after a backlash, but the thought process remains aimed at viewing social media as an adversary rather than a benefit to their bottom line.

The reason is simple. College sports leagues are making massive amounts of money selling broadcasting rights. The NCAA’s decision to expand the Division I Men’s Basketball tournament to 68 teams was driven solely by the potential of television dollars. So is all of this talk about expansion in the Big Ten and PAC-10 Conferences.

So why have college sports been so slow to adopt social media in a big way? Look no further than the web site of your favorite college or universities. Legions of institutions funnel millions into competing on the sports field, but when it comes to developing a web presence, schools largely outsource their sites to third-party vendors who provide easy cookie cutter solutions.

College web sites are not produced by third parties, so why should their athletic presence be any different? It’s a confusing situation that owes largely to a lack of coordination between institutional marketing efforts and how they diverge from athletic marketing. Better collaboration and understanding between the two audiences would be a good starting point, but it’s only the beginning.

Institutions will employ people to sell tickets and provide marketing support, but much of that marketing support still lacks a connection to follow trends on the web. Pro sports teams and leagues are figuring it out quickly. The Detroit Red Wings of the National Hockey League employ a social media coordinator, even the fledgling Women’s Pro Soccer League (WPS) have embraced the medium by creating a social media guide for it’s teams and streams games via iPhone. Going abroad, the Indian Premier League, the world’s largest cricket league broadcasts all of its games on YouTube, while still raking in major dollars on television revenues.

Major League Baseball is considered a fuddy duddy when it comes to sports innovation, as the league has taken ages to adapt in ways other leagues have. But when it came to social media, MLB was the first one to truly leverage the digital space in a way that generate massive revenues for its member clubs through MLB Advanced Media. As of 2007, this editorially independent arm of the league’s 30 clubs was generating over $400 million in revenues. While a drop in the bucket relative to the other revenue streams the teams generate, it proves it’s worth in ways beyond just the intangibles.

The only way college teams and their leagues will truly begin to appreciate the power of social media will be when they discover the money to be made. While smaller leagues and institutions might feel their strategies are confined only to their markets, broader thinking might compel them to start pooling their resources to create revenue opportunities where they don’t currently exist.

Very little is stopping smaller, regional and non-scholarship institutions from broadcasting their games online. Some conferences already do. The problem? Production quality is usually poor, it can be difficult to find someone experienced enough to shoot these games and the quality of competition indicates that only the most die-hard fans and parents are going to be interested in the content. So while there might not be a market for say, Division 3 regular season basketball games; the possibility exists to partner with an existing resource to reach the fans who’ve already assembled and create a repository for highlights and other content that might be of interest rather than being burdened with the task of creating and maintaining the content and then finding an audience for it.

Where the future takes us will be driven by something more than just good ideas or technology. It’s going to come down to money and the opportunities to generate it.

Twitter, What Is It Good For?

I ran across a Twitter policy page today that made me begin to think about my own use of the site and precisely what I use it for.

If you’ve been reading for a while (thanks!) you know that I have a complicated history with Twitter. I went from a Twitter skeptic to a person who recognized it’s value, though the latter post was mostly tongue-in-cheek because of the older one.

Lately, I’ve found it’s still useful but not in the same ways it once was. I never enjoyed Twitter solely as a means for communication, because it comes attached with a lot of the things that plague instant messenger (IM) conversations for me. Namely that the start can often be abrupt and the ending may be worse. I tend to like starts and finishes. I don’t really need definition, but I do like context. With both Twitter and IM, it can be short and pithy. Which works to some degree, but only sometimes.

Social networks have their place, but I eventually get fatigued of them and have to take a break. For all of the talk of the Zuckerberg internet hegemon in recent months, Facebook is the only one that handles this well. You need a break, you can deactivate and come back with everything intact. It’s handy for people who just decide to step away. When I finally canned my LinkedIn profile a few years back, they do send you an email saying that they have to delete your profile if you’re over a certain number of contacts; but in the email they don’t ask if you’re sure you want to delete. They just let you know when it’s deleted. I came back once more and then ditched it again, though I didn’t have that many connections and I’m back again now though I’m not actively adding people. If I get requests, I add them and if not, I don’t.

Anyway, on this Twitter thing. These days, I’m just not using it as much. If I had to summarize what I’ve viewed Twitter as from the start, it’d go something like this:

Interacting with interesting professional people who I don’t have a lot of contact with in my everyday life.
Staying connected to news on a different frequency.
Maintaining a presence as proxy for communicate with people who might share my interests, but who I may never meet in person.

The overwhelming majority of my friends don’t use it, I’ve taken to mandating each student in the community college class I teach create an account (but don’t ask them to use their real names if they don’t to) because I want to demystify what seems to be one of the most misunderstood social web tools; despite the fever pitch Twitter still seems to have lots of people in stitches about how best to use it.

Personally, I find I’ve used Twitter a lot less now than I did when I worked full-time in higher ed. I feel like I have less to say and what I do have to say, might not be as relevant to the majority of my followers, but this owes to the fact that the majority of my followers are higher ed folks and I haven’t gone out of my way to diversify my follower base beyond that.

Twitter has proven to be the most useful social network for me in my professional life and those who follow trends understand it’s value extends well beyond just the professional and the personal. It’s noisier than it once was and I find it’s ubiquity a bit frustrating, but it’s value seems longer lasting. I’ll continue to use it and suspect my usage will adapt further based on what I choose to do and where I choose to do it.

What about you?

The human factor

What’s the one unifying theme behind why we do most of what we do? Other people. The past year has been an interesting one, because I’ve spent a lot more time dealing with ordinary people who don’t deal with marketing as a regular part of their lives, rather than the previous five or so that I spent dealing with matters of marketing, web strategy and so forth to the schools, business or whoever else was paying for it.

The thing I’ve picked up more and more from people is how disconnected they are from everything that’s going on. They might use Facebook and a few are even tweeting. But many of them don’t understand what the purpose is. They might be searching for meaning in the midst of doing it, a few will adopt blogs and spew whatever sort of content that comes to mind. Yet, it all seems not to make any sense.

My first impulse is to blame the legions of social media experts spreading their knowledge to the masses, for failing to reach the critical masses in any real way. More and more, it just seems like a lot of this stuff is just people preaching to the converted and leaving everyone else to sink or swim (or pay a hefty fee) to discover what’s really going on and how it applies to their everyday lives.

I have a friend who’s traveled the world and has taken amazing pictures. We have this conversation a lot about how her diverse interests would be great on some sort of public forum like Flickr where other people could see them, rather than just Facebook where her friends can only gawk and comment. I explain that by doing this, she has no idea who she’ll meet as a result and what sorts of opportunities it’ll yield and if nothing else, it would feel good to expose more people to work you’re happy to expose anyway.

Among other things, her reply was to recall a conversation with an older professional who confided that he knew he needed to do “all of this social media stuff” but didn’t understand why necessarily and “there’s no real evidence that any of it works.” I bristled until she repeated it, but chose not to cite case studies galore or even riff off a few books I knew off-hand that would change that perspective.

Why? I realized the failure to communicate was within the medium that I operate in, not in other people’s inability to understand it’s usefulness. Web professionals seem to bask in the glory of the details and make money from being the smartest people in the room. The vestiges of the IT legacy where this all started haven’t fallen too far from the tree in that way. Some people do amazing work to convert the masses, but their advice doesn’t quite work.

I teach a college class of people who in many cases are returning to school after fifteen or twenty years away. Many of them have been laid off from jobs they held for a decade and return to a marketplace they barely resemble because it’s so different than the one they started in. Telling these people to merely create a Twitter account, a blog or a LinkedIn account and wait to reap the benefits ignores the complexities of what their lives have evolved into over the years. It’s just not realistic and is tone deaf to what they’re dealing with.

So while exposure to social media is important — and it’s a major component of what I communicate — it’s not the entire story. Many people do great work and create great tools like Tumblr or Wordpress and others. It’s easier today to break through than it was at other times, yet it’s more difficult at the same time.

All of this stuff is about people. These conversations, these debates and all of the tactics and strategy we spend time cultivating is about finding ways to reach people. I think this gets lost in all of the data collecting, creation of personas and ways we seek to encapsulate populations into neat packets that we can digest better. It doesn’t always work that way.

Sometimes, you have to turn off the screen and reach out the real people. Not just the folks in the office across the hall or even people in your own family. But folks a world away from where you exist, whose lives may be dramatically different and who consider issues that not be on your radar. They’re using the same tools we are to get ahead in the same place inhabit, but their issues and concerns are often lost.

It’s about time we fixed that.

Social media & The independent school

Independent schools have a bit of a different thing to consider when deciding on ways to leverage social media. While they’re not colleges, many of them are very different than traditional parochial or private schools in local communities due to their recruiting and alumni considerations.

It’s for all of these reasons that social media is just one more tool in a wide arsenal of communications mediums aimed at reaching audiences, expanding brand possibilities and so much more.

The question that prompted this post is basically a question of why. Why would an independent school use social media and what are the benefits?

Brand awareness and exposure are about more than brochures and advertising in traditional media. Social media is an invitation to discovering what an institution is about. There’s no better way to create a low-key introduction to your school than using social media tools.

For instance, using YouTube as a venue for videos about your school; whether it’s events held there, a look into a classroom experience or just life on campus, it can be a way to provide insight. It’s also a great way to demonstrate your values without writing a lot of words. It’s visual and appeals to both parents and prospective students.

The goal is to increase awareness and this is just one way to do that.

On social networking in schools

Schools banning social networking sites is counterproductive. The reason you still hear so many stories about people getting in trouble about something they’ve done online, is no one has been educated. The teachers don’t often know how to use social web tools, many parents are afraid of the technology and the students therefore just do what kids often do — learn from friends or on their own through trial and error.

Some companies think there an opportunity to sell schools educationally “relevant” social tools at a premium. These sorts of redundant tools frustrate me. It’s one thing to protect and encase localized information within an ecosystem that keeps it there. But it’s another thing to adopt costly half-measures that are endemic only to that system and leave the end users no smarter than they began.

It makes far more sense to teach educators from administration down to the classroom about the power of social media and how it can be leveraged effectively. I don’t expect everyone to use it and if they did, I’m not sure it’d be that useful. But for some enterprising teachers, there are a myriad of creative ways to employ the bevy of tools out there. I’m sure some of it is already happening in a forest where few can hear it.

It’d also be great for students to understand the power of the web. Sure, it means they’ll sometimes use what they learn and experiment. Sometimes, those experiments won’t please people in charge. None of this is new, though. With the mainstream having made a full embrace of the social web, it’s time to teach our children how to be smart online.