Connect Your Own Dots: Social Media Integration as a Best Practice for Marketing & Communications #casesmc

This is a live-blogged post during the 2012 CASE Social Media conference. This session was presented by Susan T. Evans from mStoner and Nyleva Corley from The University of Texas at Austin.

"Everything is connceted to everything else." - Michael Stoner 

It is our job as communications professionals to think about all of the channels we have at our disposal. Please, connect the dots for your audience. And integrate!

As communicators, how do we amplify our message in a way that doesn't annoy people... in a way that gets their attention?

Run a campaign!

• #getresults, a social media campaign = focused effort to achieve goals using a variety of channels appropriate to the results sought.
• Powered By Orange: the original focus was awareness and alumni pride. Tools used include: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, LinkedIn, and more. They had a photo contest called "Where's Benny?" for their audience to submit photos of Benny around the world. They also used Google Maps to visually show how Oregon State alumni are affecting the world. 
• Fight of the Flyers campaign from Nazareth College: A map was used to track where the flyers were located. They didn't require you to have a stuffed flyer to participate, you could print and color your own! Here is a post from the mStonerblog on this campaign. 
• The College of William and Mary Mascot Search: the campaign was to increase engagement and give people a window into the process. Multiple social channels were used including Twitter (@WMMascot) and Flickr. The announcement of the winner was even made on social media.

Integrate social channels with your web presence

• In the past, all you needed were social media icons on your homepage. But we need to do more.
• What is your digital footprint? This is the collection of content on the web that represents you.
• Clarskson University: They feature photos from Flickr.
• Vanderbilt University: They feed tweets, photos and Facebook likes into a footer on their news page.
• Washington University in St. Louis: They have a "trending" section in their footer of the homepage. 
• Elizabethtown College: Every single webpage has a large footer that brings in YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook content.

Social Media Mashup Pages

• UT Austin "Know": This is an "extension of knowledge" for the university. The IA for the site revolved around the subjects that people may be interested in learning more about. They also have a social media directory that is a comprehensive listing of their social media channels managed by various departments at the university. They continuously seek ways to bring content from Know into the main institutional site. One approach is to embed content on pages.
• Tufts University: There is homepage space that mashes up traditional narrative content with social content from Facebook and Twitter. They also have an excellent social media hub.

Stay on message (Campus coordination is necessary to break down silos, but difficult. #nosilos)

• Create an editorial calendar. Here is a post from Meet Content on creating a social media content calendar.
• Put together a social media group on campus. Meet regularly and share information. This increases collaboration. UT Austin even held a "Facebook boot camp" to discuss practices and policies. 
• Align and share campaigns. Connect to other institutional accounts from the ones you manage. Help each other out so no one is re-inventing the wheel.

Here's a link to learn more about everything Susan and Nyleva discussed in their presentation.