Feb 26th 09 Posted by Fritz McDonald in Featured Articles, Strategic Creative

Common Misperceptions About Social Media

Recently, B.L. Ochman, a leading social media strategist and author of the What’s Next Blog, published a piece for Businessweek.com called “Debunking Six Social Media Myths.” It was good, insightful business journalism and in a true 2.0 spirit of collaboration, I’d like to build off her riff and focus this topic for higher education. Here are, then, the 10 most common misperceptions about social media that I hear on college campuses and at higher education conferences across the country:

1. It won’t cost you anything—strictly speaking, social media offers several tools that are either inexpensive or free. Ochman lists the usual suspects: YouTube, flickr, Facebook, etc. The truth is there’s a catch with some sites and services: Ning, for instance, offers several different options starting with free. The free option, however, offers limited branding and community-building opportunities and usually inspires people to move up to premium packages that offer more…and cost more. You’ll have to buy domain names and any hosting you can’t do on your own system. Ochman points out that while many social sites, services, and technologies don’t cost anything, weaving them into an effective social media campaign will impact your marketing budget. A serious commitment to building a strong campaign starts at $50,000 in the corporate world. At the very least, you’ll have to dedicate time and resources to it and neither come cheap.

2. You can do it all yourself—this is only true if A. You’re very well-versed in social media and have a strong personal presence or brand on the social web, and B. There were 48 hours in a day. Both becoming knowledgeable about social media and developing your own program take serious time—and just about everyone working for a college or university already has too much on their plate. A serious commitment to integrating social media into your marketing and recruiting requires knowledge, talent, and commitment—additional resources, in other words. You need to either hire staff or reliable student workers, or outsource the job to get it done right.

3. It’s easy to find a social media expert—Ochman did a Tweepsearch of Twitter users following noted web expert Robert Scoble and found more than 2,500 people calling themselves everything from social media strategists to gurus. These days, nearly anyone with a working knowledge of Digg calls themselves a social media expert and it’s easy to be taken in by these people. (It’s funny how the true experts in this field—people like Chris Brogan and Jeremiah Owyang—keep a very low, humble profile. I’d rather be seen as a student of social media, not an expert). Boomers believe that anyone under 30 is automatically an idiot savant in social media—if this were true, why does my 19-year-old nephew refuse to get involved? How can you judge whether you’re hiring or working with someone who knows his or her stuff? Determine how much they know about marketing, recruiting, and/or fundraising beyond social media. If they don’t understand the broader framework they won’t be able to apply social media to effectively meet your needs. Whoever you use has to be knowledgeable enough to build a campaign that gets results.

4. It will provide a quick fix to your recruiting problems—at the core, social media tools are relationship building tools and any relationship takes time. We’ve seen a few examples of relatively rapid success, such as Rachel Reuben’s yield work for SUNY New Paltz. She would probably be the first to tell you she worked night and day to make it happen—without someone this gifted and committed on your staff, it’s unlikely you’ll achieve similar results. And what happens if you have such a talent…and she leaves? Social media is better at building a sustained engagement with your constituencies over time than pulling off a quick, hit and run campaign. In the long run, that engagement will yield substantial results and transform the way you recruit. If you’re going to get involved—and increasingly the choice is being made for you—you need to make an enduring commitment.

5. It will replace your current marketing tactics—not yet. Although these tools are revolutionizing digital communication and making a significant impact on the culture at large, traditional marketing still works. Yes, it’s clearly evolving toward digital strategies and platforms that will dominate the playground (probably within the next five years), but until then, I’d keep more than a few old-fashioned tactics in your back pocket. Social media tools work best in combination with other tactics—that’s right, we mean integrated—such as email segmentation, search optimization, advertising, etc.

6. It’s only for kids—Time online just ran a piece called “Why Facebook Is For Old Fogies,” which humorously detailed the reasons why older folks should get involved with social media: “The fastest growing Facebook demographic is 30 and up.” And recent research by the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s December 2008 tracking survey reveals:

• Share of adult Internet users on social networks quadrupled in the past four years—from 8% in 2005 to 35% now
• Adults make up a larger portion of U.S. population than teens—35% number represents larger number than 65% of online teens

I’ve often thought that social media might have a more immediate effect on graduate and non-traditional/adult recruiting than undergraduate programs. Traditional undergraduates are already well-ensconced in several kinds of communities in their high schools and throughout the college choice process, especially at college fairs and campus visits. Graduate and non-traditional students are more isolated in the recruiting process and clearly in need of community. Either way, it’s quickly becoming evident that social media can speak to a range of audiences and ages, not just teenagers.

7. It’s just another fad—unlike other fads that have come and gone—anyone remember TQM?—social media is here to stay. It represents an evolution in web technology brought about by a commitment to standards and major improvements in hardware, networking technology, and software on the one hand, and significant changes in user behavior on the other. In the future, we can expect to see more opportunities for users to develop content, not less, and a greater shift toward putting everything on web servers. And the success of the Obama campaign’s social tactics has not only demonstrated how powerful these tools can be but their ongoing impact on the American culture. Just last night, ABC ran a feature about how the U.S. Congress is embracing Twitter.

8. You lose too much control—there’s no question you lose some control on the social web. Users expect to participate, and often that means telling you what they think. Although we’ve all heard the horror stories about ugly comments on blogs, the number of these incidents occurs in proportion to the nature of the blog. Bloggers who rant about politics and celebrities will get ranted in return. College and university sites, on the other hand, should expect fewer attacks due to the common perception that they provide an invaluable service to society. You have every right to kick psycho-stalkers off your social media platforms—setting guidelines on blogs, for example, will help. No matter what you do, however, web content leaks from your site thanks to your students, faculty, and staff. It’s impossible to control what people say about you on the social web, but you can influence it through thoughtful responses…and by participating on external sites.

9. You can’t use it in a strategic way—tell that to the leading lights in this field, people like Larry Weber or Josh Bernoff or even Ochman herself, who has been creating social media strategies for Ford, IBM, and McGraw-Hill. Social media marketing strategy has helped a wide array of corporations from Dell to P&G—there’s no question it can help you. There are those who say you should just jump in, why waste time developing yet another institutional strategy that will only sit on a shelf, the time is now, etc. Usually, these are the true believers, the early adopters who have tried to turn social media into a cult. In many ways, they are similar to the San Francisco State students who begat Haight Ashbury who decried the invasion of hundreds of teenagers a day during the Summer of Love, an occurrence that quickly destroyed all they’d built. When you have a good idea, you can’t keep the world from coming to your door. This is the process—a kind of socio-cultural historic process—that transforms ideas into something everyone can use. We still believe that love is the answer, but now we know you have to work at it. The same holds true for social media.

10. All you need is a Facebook page—if this were true, then the countless institutional Facebook pages that have gone up in the last year would have revolutionized admissions recruiting. Unfortunately, they haven’t for a very simple reason—many are failing to build productive communities. It’s easy to find a fan page for a big public with some 16,000 students and only 300 fans, and easier to see groups pages where the only the entity writing on the page wall is the institution itself. With any form of social media, it’s not true that if you build it they will come. A successful Facebook page should be a key component of a larger social media strategy and requires a well-thought development process.

photo by: prozac74