By Olivia Poisson, Communications Officer, University of Basel and Jun Sarbach, PR Consultant, ETH Zurich.
How to really engage your community
On the second day of our study we were invited to Stanford University where we met experienced social media managers of three different units. They openly shared their strategies, provided us with insights and gave us good advice. This is what we take home from Stanford:
Nathalie White, Marketing & Communications GSB, Stanford University
Try this at home
Do live tweeting and prepare them well
Maintain faculty twitter list and check daily for retweeting
Aim for one viral tweet a week
Check out these tools
Chute for content aggregation
uberVU for metrics
Twtrland for hashtag analysis
Nathalie White from the Stanford Graduate School of Business
Brent Izutsu, Director of Digital Media (Online Learning)
Try this at home
Use online courses to provide unique and novel experiences for students
Get faculty more interested in teaching and pedagogy with online courses
Use data generated by MOOCs to help to improve teaching
Check out these tools
edX
Coursera
Udacity for publishing online courses
John Stafford, Director of Digital Media, Stanford University Communications
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Incorporate a call to action in your posts
Help the community to tell their own story
Use social media to reinforce and protect your brand
Check out these tools
Crowdflower for sentiment analysis
Radian6 for monitoring
Adam Miller, Stanford Alumni Association
Try this at home
Think twice before sharing university rankings
Create twitter lists to engage with alumni
Identify the different types of your alumni and their needs. Engage them all!
Check out these tools
medium.com for micro blogging
Salesforce for alumni data base