The Reverse Twitter Flub

I’m not proud of this post. It’s a little embarrassing. I know I’ve learned a lesson though, and I hope someone else might learn it too.

The Twitter-slip is well-known by now. The Red Cross getting “slizzerd”, the Secret Service going after Fox, and Chrysler bashing Detroit drivers, among others.

These were all the result of someone confusing a brand account with their personal Twitter feed. The things they tweeted weren’t acceptable to be coming from their institution. Big uh-ohs. Some handled it well; some people got fired. Live and learn.

I can say I’ve never made the same mistake (knock on wood). However, I was SHOCKED to find tweets from my former employer showing up on my personal Twitter account.

My mistake? The university had set up a Tweetdeck account before my arrival that I decided to use for social media management. I added my personal Twitter account because I follow people in higher ed, marketing, etc. It doesn’t make sense for the institution to follow those people, but it does make sense for me to know what’s going on in that community in order to be better at my job.

In the whirlwind that is transitioning out of the job, I completely overlooked that someone else would use this Tweetdeck account and have access to my Twitter credentials. Thank goodness no one had any ill will toward me. Unfortunately, my replacement hadn’t mastered the nuance of checking/unchecking the avatars in Tweetdeck when sending out updates. Which meant whatever the college said also appeared on my profile.

I had no idea. As I told someone: I almost NEVER check my own Twitter stream. I assumed I knew exactly what was coming from my account!

Thankfully there’s little damage done. One of my new co-workers saw the tweets and later said she assumed I was just very attached to my alma mater. But the account was certainly left open to be hacked or used inappropriately. I revoked access, changed my password and contacted my replacement to ask her to remove the account. Whew.

Lessons learned:
1. Use your own management tools, whenever possible, instead of institutional ones.
2. If you can’t use your own, keep your personal account off any institutionally-used tool.
3. Make a list now of transition items. If you won the lottery tomorrow and left your job, have a packet of information that would allow someone else to take over the organization’s accounts and for you to extricate yourself (and your online identities) from them immediately. Making this kind of action plan now, when you have time and a clear head, is presumably much better than trying to do it in your last few days on the job, when everyone wants a piece of your time.

In times of sadness

You can’t escape disasters. Some of them are big and tragic and immediate. Some of them seem very small and ordinary. But the small ones are no less important.

Last week, a recent graduate and enrolled MBA student at Rockhurst died. It was an accident – riding in the back of a pickup truck. The local news media covered it for one day. To the outside world, it may not seem like a big deal. Unfortunately, people die every day. But on our small campus, it felt a bit different.

I don’t want to dwell on the impact this may or may not have had on the folks here. What I was struck by during this process was how important it was for me to ignore some of my social media instincts.

I saw the news unfold across Facebook and Twitter Monday morning. It started with one student – leaving messages of prayers, an RIP – and started to spread. Immediately, I had the inclination to ask: what happened? Instead of doing it publicly, I gave a heads up to my boss that something was going on. She was already in a meeting discussing how the university was going to handle his death.

So I held tight. I wanted to start sending out messages saying “I’m sorry” or “he sounds like such a great person” or “I’ll pray for his family.” That’s what Kristin, the person, would do. And, really, I’ve been cultivating a more conversational, social presence for the university. But it didn’t feel right.

Early in the afternoon, we released a formal statement and quote from the university president. I put out a message across the social channels. It spread quickly among the community – retweeted by newspeople, alumni and other community members who hadn’t been exposed to the students’ comments earlier in the day. The link to the statement on our website quickly ratcheted up 400+ clicks. It’s the most we’ve ever had on one piece of content.

Because this man’s parents were in St. Louis, we were the official local source. That’s why it was important to hold back. We needed to get confirmation and permission from the family.

It reminded me of being a journalist – balancing speed and accuracy. I wanted so badly to say something quickly, but this was not a developing situation. There was no need for immediate knowledge. Whereas, if the students were wrong and he was in the hospital recovering, it would be terribly damaging for the school’s official account to send out condolences.

I am a big believer in being a part of the community on social media – participating in a conversation, being genuine and being very responsive are important. But it is not a vacuum. It is an official face to the world. We have to responsibly manage both of those objectives.

Diving into the new Facebook pages

The university I work for competes in Division II NCAA athletics. We don’t get much TV time. So when it was announced – back in the fall – that CBS College Sports would carry a men’s basketball game, there was a lot of attention and excitement generated.

As the day – Feb. 20 – got closer, I began thinking up a week-long Facebook campaign that would focus on the big game. Wouldn’tcha know it, on Feb. 10 – just four days before the campaign was supposed to start – Facebook decided to change their page design and functionality. (Note: I could have opted to wait a month before updating the page, but that’s no fun! I have to have the latest and greatest!)

For me, it was the perfect opportunity to put new features through the ringer, although it also made for some bumps along the way. A few things I noticed:

1. Finally! Facebook added the ability to merge the Page and Place without losing Insight functionality and without that bing map taking center stage. This was literally the first change I made, and I think it’s great. It gives the “check-in” feature more prominence and streamlines our presence.

2. New design with the photo strip across the top of the page. I was super excited for this. Why? Because I wanted to hack it like these insanely creative people did.  I spent three days and several hours trying to select the perfect picture, crop it and test it on my own profile. Once that was all done, I discovered it didn’t work on the page. The images wouldn’t display in chronological order (most recent displaying on the far left).

I have no idea if it was intentional to omit this feature or not. On the one hand, I can see the need to avoid a potentially offensive or negative image dominating the top of the page because users tag the organization. Disabling the chronology gives page admins slightly more control.

On the other hand, it’s a missed branding opportunity for a page that wants to take advantage of the feature. Hopefully Facebook will create a system that allows you to select a preference for that display (if they’ve done this, someone please let me know!).

3. Landing tabs can still be selected, even if it isn’t a “tab” anymore. Who-hoo!

4. The ability to ask a question disappeared for me. I’m wondering (guessing? hoping?) that this is just some temporary glitch and not a permanent change. I was definitely planning a poll for our basketball coverage but had to opt for an open-ended question instead.

5. There is no ability to individually message or “update” someone who likes the page. Since Facebook has already created a multi-layered system whereby “updates” are separated from messages sent by friends, I don’t see the necessity for this limitation. When awarding trivia winners, I would send a Facebook message to follow up on how they get the prize. In one instance, the user had their profile settings so restricted that I couldn’t send them a message, friend request, anything. It made the system very clunky. If I could have sent an update from the page to that individual, it would have solved the problem.

6. The ability to “like” other pages and status updates as a page is great. It makes it much easier to monitor the university presences that are run by students or departments; it also allows for better cross-promotion in a simplified way.

Mostly, I think the changes are positive. I’ve run into a few buggy things, but I’m hoping Facebook gets it worked out as things settle in.

Scheming

Resources, meet reality. It’s true of higher ed as well as journalism and probably a host of other professions. There are a million things we want to do but time and money aren’t on our side.

I find myself, all too often, getting an idea and then quickly dismissing it because of that time-finances conundrum. Instead of doing that, maybe it will be better to document the ideas for potential execution in the future. And if nothing else, maybe my little sparks will become someone else’s action. If one person benefits, that’s better than the idea dying with me!

The university I work for has overnight campus visits a couple of times per year, in addition to planned visit weekends and the regular campus tours, etc. The marketing department is involved in promoting these events but not in executing them. (Obviously, a matter of resources and expertise). However, I saw an article about Kmart providing a concierge service during fashion week and thought: why can’t we do something similar?

We could have an account that prospective students (or their parents) could tweet or text if they, say, forgot a toothbrush or couldn’t find the closest restroom. Students could answer them through the same medium or give a call. It could get unwieldy very quickly, but I think we have a small enough campus, with a tight community, that this kind of service would really be a testament to our brand and create an experience that would stick with students and parents.

Is anyone in higher ed doing something like this? I’d love to see what it looks like.

 

On social media, attention and language

It’s amazing how some words evoke an immediate response. It might be positive. Negative. Exciting. Fearful. Some of these words are very different, depending on the individual. Some are universal. As a writer, it’s important to be cognizant of these connotations.

I was struck today by one portion of Mike McCready’s post on choosing a social media consultant. He said: “Do they call themselves an ‘expert’ or ‘guru’? … The minute you call yourself an expert is the minute you admit there is nothing more to learn. Stay away from social media ‘experts’ or ‘gurus.’”

I couldn’t agree more. But, Mike also said that other people can call that person a guru and spread the word to others. On face, I would agree. But I had a moment last week when a colleague suggested following a local professional because he was the “leading social media guru in the area.” I was immediately turned off. Poor guy didn’t ask for the term to be used, but it was, and my perception was colored in a bad way. Guru automatically=snake oil (or pompous egomaniac… let’s be frank) for me. Again, language, even in casual use, is important.

This crossed over to me with this discussion of using cover letters for social media jobs. While using language to frame yourself – in a resume and cover letter – is a very important professional skill, it is also about walking and living “the talk.” For me, when I was hiring interns or consulted on the hiring of colleagues, I always wanted to know if there was a spark. Had they said or experienced or blogged or tweeted something that was interesting? Would I want to talk to them about it? Would I want to tell someone else about it? Personally, I believe that “sharing and engaging” factor is now the most important thing on a personal AND a brand level.

No one wants people to say: “X company, they totally have Facebook figured out. Their landing tab is so well designed.” They want people to talk about their content, about their deals, about their awesome customer service. Figuring out how to succeed on a company level isn’t really that much different from succeeding on a personal (professional) level.

The Engagement Obsession (I’m not talking about rings here)

Why are we so obsessed with engagement online?

Because we can be.

My experience has been mostly with news organizations, but I’m sure this is the case with many other businesses. We analyze the number of visitors, the length of their visit, the number of pages and links clicked, the number of people commenting, the number of people retweeting and any other number of “engagement” measurements.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Unless it’s used as an excuse.

From David Armano.

Example: Why should I invest precious time and resources into Twitter (or Facebook, etc.) when the number of users on that site is small? Isn’t there only a small reward?

I wasn’t in newsrooms when the Internet was the next big thing, but I’m guessing the fact that “not many people are using that darned Internet thing yet” was a frequent justification for doing nothing to address it.

No, not everyone needs to be tweeting or friending away. There are plenty of reasons not to. But not trying something because it lacks overwhelming audience engagement just seems like a cop-out. As information providers, shouldn’t we be ahead of the curve? And then, I begin to question the original premise.

How did we previously measure engagement? Before the Internet. Before Google Analytics. We looked at newspaper subscription and sales numbers. Did you care if your readers wrote letters to the editor? Did you monitor how many people mentioned articles to their friends? All you really knew was that the paper landed on the driveway. Who knows if it was even read. Did we ever question or fret about engagement? No. Because subscription payments came in and advertisers paid for the opportunity of exposure — not for a guaranteed number of viewers or clicks.

We’ve established a system online (when it comes to the $$) that relies on users interacting with our content and each other on a different level. One they haven’t been conditioned to. For decades, we’ve demanded those users be passive consumers. We wanted them to buy and read, and if they wanted to write a letter now and again we would humor them. But they weren’t allowed any real stake. So don’t throw your hands up and say “but they just aren’t interacting with us online!” You (the institution) probably helped create the problem. Can’t do anything about that except attempt to change it. Excuses don’t = change.

So back to the original issue. No, you can’t expect your Twitter followers to equal the number of households tuning in to your 10 PM newscast. But those viewers are slowly being reprogrammed.

My generation largely lives online. We participate and collaborate frequently thanks to easy tools like Flickr and YouTube. We, and those after us, will adapt more and more tools like these (and Twitter and Facebook) and you WILL have to be there in order to interact with us.

So if you are questioning devoting resources to auxiliary online efforts, I’d ask you to be a little more forward looking. Is this commitment today so financially damaging that the potential future good is irrelevant? If the effort were to fail, if Twitter disappeared, would you really lose so much investment that any gain would be mitigated? Otherwise, I see few excuses not to at least give it a try.

Additional note: If anyone knows of good data on social networking “engagement” metrics, I’d love to see it. This post is a direct result of a lot of questions from news folks about how many viewers are on social networking sites, the degree to which they use them and whether or not they’d like to interact with a news organization on them. I, obviously, have my thoughts but would love to have some data!