The increasing role of social media has been recognized as an increasingly effective marketing tool for a broad section of enterprises. This paper highlights the first stage of the engagement strategy using social media for an academic laboratory, and provides an insight for others wishing to take advantage of the various social networking tools that are available. The lab engages with different constituencies such as students, faculty, and alumni, industrial and governmental agencies. As these constituents online presence is fragmented over a number of different social websites (Twitter™, LinkedIn™ for example), there is no longer an effective single point of contact to engage them. With that in mind, researchers in the lab created accounts on, and started using Twitter™, LinkedIn™ and SlideShare™. Data about site referrals to the BSPA Laboratory’s homepage was gathered using Google Analytics™, in order to analyze the effects (if any) that social networks might have in promotional activities and increased interaction with the BSPA Laboratory home page (http://www.bspalabs.org/). Although this paper is a preliminary report on a short term progress, the data shows the differences in unique visitors before and after becoming active in social networks and will show data linking specific social network with an effect.

1. Case Study: Using Social Media to Promote an Academic Laboratory
Gregory T. Hales
BSPA Laboratory, Purdue University
Nathan Price
BSPA Laboratory, Purdue University
Jurica Seva
BSPA Laboratory, Purdue University / Faculty of organization and informatics, University of
Zagreb
Stephen Elliott
BSPA Laboratory, Purdue University
Abstract
The increasing role of social media has been recognized as an increasingly effective marketing tool for a broad
section of enterprises. This paper highlights the first stage of the engagement strategy using social media for an
academic laboratory, and provides an insight for others wishing to take advantage of the various social networking
tools that are available. The lab engages with different constituencies such as students, faculty, and alumni,
industrial and governmental agencies. As these constituents online presence is fragmented over a number of
different social websites (Twitter™, LinkedIn™ for example), there is no longer an effective single point of contact
to engage them. With that in mind, researchers in the lab created accounts on, and started using Twitter™,
LinkedIn™ and SlideShare™. Data about site referrals to the BSPA Laboratory’s homepage was gathered using
Google Analytics™, in order to analyze the effects (if any) that social networks might have in promotional activities
and increased interaction with the BSPA Laboratory home page (http://www.bspalabs.org/). Although this paper is a
preliminary report on a short term progress, the data shows the differences in unique visitors before and after
becoming active in social networks and will show data linking specific social network with an effect.
1. Motivation
The exponential growth of social media on the Internet
has caused nearly every industry and market sector to
change their strategies to utilize this phenomenon.
Historically, the media (newspapers and television
news) organizations provided content provided by
professional journalists. More recently, news websites
such as CNN, BBC, etc. have asked individuals to send
in material and comment on stories, in a form of citizen
journalism. Recently, the John Polk Journalism Award
was given to an anonymous citizen journalist who
recorded an event on a cellphone. In academia, the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has a
group of students’ blog their experiences on the
admissions homepage. Recently there have been
discussions within our own academic department on the
use of social media (namely Facebook™) so that we
become more connected to students. For an academic
lab, keeping a connection with students and alumni
could foster increased collaboration, provide existing
students with an established network of contacts. The
status quo of email communication no longer applies,
as students and alumni become more connected via
social networks. Acknowledging that the laboratory
was not communicating in an effective way with its
constituents, the Biometrics Standards, Performance,
and Assurance (BSPA) Laboratory at Purdue
University conducted an experiment to utilize social
media sites to update, promote, and engage the lab and
its research activities with its alumni, students and
“non-affiliated” individuals. This case study will
provide the initial results of this ongoing experiment, to
determine the effectiveness of social media by
analyzing the amount of new web traffic to the BSPA
lab website before and after the social media has been
utilized.
The Biometrics Standards, Performance and Assurance
Laboratory mission is to excel in the applied research
of biometric technologies. The lab works to achieve
this mission by creating a partnership between industry
and academia, bridging cultures to find solutions to the
challenges associated with developing and
implementing biometric technologies. To foster this,
researchers in the lab undertake a number of different
projects either sponsored commercially or internally.
Commercial projects include work for a number of
major biometric companies across a wide range of
modalities. Internal projects typically relate to

2. undergraduate or graduate projects where there is no
commercial sponsor. Many of our internal projects
have led to outside funding, as well as publications,
presentations and on-demand seminars, and new sub-
disciplines within the field. Because our researcher
groups interact with a number of different individuals,
maintaining and growing our collaborative network is
important. So too, is increasing the lab’s visibility,
across a number of increasingly complex
constituencies.
The BSPA Laboratory’s focus has been set to 4
functional areas:
• Biometric research,
• Teaching,
• Standards (US and International Information
Technology Standards),
• Testing and evaluation, both of new hardware and
software products.
Each of these functional areas had different needs,
either due to the message, or the target audience.
1.1. What is Social Media?
There are several definitions of social media or social
web, but most of them have a recurrent theme, that
there is some element of interactivity in the
consumption of the content [1], [2], [3]. Social media
has been growing steadily for many years, but since the
beginning of 2008 these sites growth has increased at
an exponential rate. Facebook™, at the time of this
writing, had over 350 million active users throughout
the world, with about 50% of the actives logging in on
any given day, and more than 700,000 active local
business pages [4]. Twitter™ grew at a rate of 1,382%
from February 2008 to February 2009, and the number
of unique visitors in December 2009 at 22.81 million
[5]. The peak number of unique visitors for Twitter™
was recorded in July 2009 at 29.2 million. The
LinkedIn™ community represents 170 industries with
over 55 million members in over 200 countries and
reports a new member joining approximately every
second [5]. According to [6], “75% of Internet surfers
used social media in the second quarter of 2008 by
joining social networks, reading blogs, or contributing
reviews to shopping sites; this represents a significant
rise from 56% in 2007”. It should also be noted that the
growth is not limited to teenagers - Generation X is
also increasingly populating social media as well.
These statistics all indicate that the time for businesses
to utilize social media is now.
1.1. Why is Social Media important?
Given the growth of social media, it has now become
so integrated with many individual’s online presence,
that there has been a shift in the communication power
towards an individual centric model. Therefore we now
have the scenario where a press release or
announcement is re-distributed through networks of
individuals rather as well a traditional media source.
This interactivity can also take the form of consumer
evangelism, with both positive and negative
consequences of such activity. Social web applications
include outlets such as YouTube™, Facebook™, and
MySpace™ have forever altered the way consumers
connect with one another sharing opinions and
perspectives on nearly every subject. Now, instead of
acting as a consumer of content, individuals are
creating a relationship with business entities [7]. As
Ochinero writes, because consumer interaction is
intertwined with experiences, and individuals tend to
influence others, social media cannot be ignored by
businesses [3].
Utilizing social media to market a company can be as
termed viral marketing; that is “marketing techniques
that seek to exploit pre-existing social networks to
produce exponential increases in brand awareness,
through processes similar to the spread of an epidemic”
[8]. Viral marketing therefore relies on the use of the
social media sites’ users to share information and
opinions. According to eMarketer, “more and more,
consumers are relying on advice from friends, family
and even strangers to make purchase decisions” and
“many of them are giving – and getting – that advice
online” [9]. Overall, the perception of social media
users (especially demographics) is misconstrued by the
general public. For example, Generation Y, who are
individuals born between 1977 and 1990 are normally
associated with those who are the primary users of
social network, however, the data would indicate
otherwise [10]. The only site that shows more appeal
towards a younger age group is MySpace™ [11].
According to Accenture’s 2009 Consumer Electronics
Products and Services Usage Report, “Baby Boomers
(individuals born between 1946 and 1964) are
embracing consumer technology applications 20 times
faster than their younger generations and have become
the fastest growing segment of the population to use
social networking” [12]. Knowing the user community
will give any company looking to use social media as a
marketing tool a better understanding of how to use the
technology and which sites to utilize. As mentioned
earlier, there has been a shift in the way we produce,
consume and share information. With this new
paradigm, encapsulated under the term Web 2.0, a new
mass communication model has been identified. This
model is shown in Figure 1. It shows the core essentials

3. of the new media and the relationships between the
participants in such a system. The two way relationship
is what defines the new media the most, where the flow
and accessibility of information increases and
contributes to effects such media has on its users.
Figure 1. Classic vs. modified communication model
[13]
Three quarters of adult Internet users under 25 have a
social network profile with an increasing number of
users across other demographic groups joining too [14].
The same report states that a quarter of social network
users check their profile at least once a day, which
makes them active users. The research results in the
same paper confirm those statements obtained for other
sources.
So far, the biggest efforts in using social media as a
marketing tool have been made in the business world
with the education/research facilities slowly
incorporating new ways of advertising and connecting
with current and possible future partners (students,
research partners, other educational institutions etc.). In
the last couple of years there has been an increasing
number of research and written papers about the impact
of social media/social networking sites in various
fields. Recognizing this new paradigm in social media
and marketing opportunities it provides, there are more
than a few “new media marketing” tools available that
use the power and the new approach of information
sharing. One of them, Social Media Release, is
discussed in more detail in [15]. The primary focus of
this tool is on the B2B segment, showing yet another
segment of human activity where new social media has
been accepted. Further, [15] states that “organizations
have found that in many instances their best avenues to
get their messages to target audiences in a credible way
are no longer through traditional media, but by way of
blogs and the bloggers who construct them”. In [16],
the popularity of all new media tools and
communication channels was analyzed and ranked,
with results based on 33.22% response to the presented
questionnaire (283 responsive subjects). Their results
showed that e-mail is still the most popular way of
online social interaction with social networking being
used by 24% of the subjects putting it in the category of
the lesser used technologies, making it opposite then
the one stated in [6]. Seeks and Grundin focused on the
increasing use of social media and possible
implementations in a work environment [17]. Their
results show that from all social networks available the
majority of people 25 and younger use Facebook™
followed by LinkedIn™ and those older than 25 used
LinkedIn™ and Facebook™ in a similar percentage.
The results are shown in Table 1.
Table 1. Social Networking Software Use (%) by Age
[17].
In another study, many non-profit organizations use the
social network Facebook™ as a promotional tool. By
using data from 275 randomly sampled non-profit
organization profiles on Facebook™ and analyzing
their content and how they interact with their followers
shows that “the most often used message dissemination
strategy was to use the discussion boards on
Facebook(74%)” followed by posting photographs
(56%) and providing link to external news stories
(54%) [18]. The authors further state that “non profits
have not incorporated the vast majority of the Facebook
applications available to them in to their social
networking presence”. In contrast to [18], [19] focuses
on the use of social media in the field of journalism; a
profit oriented field. Using the structured telephone
interview technique the authors interviewed 200
business journalists from influential publications, with
73% of them publishing text both in print and online.
Only 7.5% of them believe that social media is very
important to their work. The authors state that
“journalists embrace the concept of social media more

4. than they enact the practices”. [20] discusses social
contract and trust theory to “help us understand how
firms may successfully interact with transaction-,
interest-, relationship-, or fantasy- oriented
communities” and “presents several principles to guide
firm participation in virtual communities” participating
in the community within the bounds of the social
contract being the most important one.
If we refer back to the model in Figure 1, we can see
that the on-line communication is a two way
communication where the information consumer
immediately becomes the mediator/creator of
information (in a more passive by sharing the available
information, making it available to a wider audience).
By doing that the consumer is “gaining substantially
more power in determining the production and
distribution of information due to theflattening of
access on the Internet” [21]. Figure 2, presented as one
of the results of their study, show the structure of social
media represented Google search results.
Figure 2 Composition of social media represented in
Google [21]
1.2. Use Cases Conclusion
The impact of social media and their use by individuals
and organizations alike has been proven to exist in a
wide variety of fields, as shown in the use case articles
analyzed in the previous section. The data presented in
referenced papers show a strong increase both of
number of social sites (each having a specific role) and
the number of users on a yearly basis.
1.3. Case Study – BSPA Laboratory
Given the changing landscape of communication that
the social media provides, the BSPA Lab became
actively interested in the opportunities that social media
tools could provide as part of its engagement strategy.
One of the reasons to include social media to BSPA
Lab’s promotional activities is the ability of the social
networks to be able to engage the community in a two
way conversation. As [22] noted, social media provides
the ability to enable “companies to talk to their
customers, and second, it enables customers to talk to
one another”. By increasing the two-way
communication, there could be benefits to exposing the
research in the lab to a wider audience, and to attract
future students and research opportunities to the lab. In
order to do this, a classification of activities, and
metrics were developed. For that the BSPA Laboratory
has opened accounts on the social networking sites
Twitter™, and LinkedIn™ (the focus of this paper),
and also SlideShare™ and Eventbrite™. In developing
a social network site, the researchers took the four
functional areas and mapped related metrics to them to
establish whether there was a change in the traffic
levels. This can be seen in Table 2.
Table 2. Functional areas and Metric for the Social
Media experiment
Activity Metric
Increasing visibility of its
online domain
Increase in direct traffic,
search engine traffic and
referring sites.
Broaden its network and
foster research
collaboration
Identify and focus on
demographic target
groups
Number of new
connections to the website.
Number of hits on social
websites relating to
research (papers,
presentations). This
includes followers on
Twitter™, LinkIn, and
referring sites.
Engage industry in its
research efforts
Number of new contacts
with industry, outside of
current network
With the use of social networks having crossed from
personal use and entered the professional daily life in
every organization, the effort made by BSPA
Laboratory has merit in trying to attract prospective
future users of either its educational or research
programs. As shown in above mentioned use cases, the
use of social networks has been recognized by
organizations and they not only accept but also
encourage the use of social networks. These changes
can be explained by the general shift in overall
communication means, described by the web 2.0
dogmas whose guidelines can be taken as the guiding
force for those changes. As shown in [17] the choice of
LinkedIn™ as one of the social networks utilized in
BSPA Laboratory’s effort is justified. Also, the use of
Twitter™ as a quick, short news generator can deliver
the headlines to a vast number of There was no article
relating social media to educational/research facilities

5. like the BSPA Laboratory. The demographics to this
field is very specific and goal oriented, unlike health or
travel fields, which makes it harder to collect and
analyze based on the information available from basic
Internet usage statistics. Nevertheless, next section will
tackle the question of efficiency of social media in this
field based on traffic and unique visitor information
obtained from Google Analytics™ in the period from
September 2009 to February 2010.
2. Methodology
2.1 Dataset Description and Life Cycle
As this is the first stage of the social marketing
experiment, the sole goal as of now is to broaden the
labs visibility in the current biometric and educational
market. So the data for this paper pertains to any visitor
of the website www.bspalabs.org. During the time
period of November 23 and November 27, the lab’s
website underwent to a complete overhaul, moving
from a static series of webpages to a Wordpress™
template. Visual changes were made not only for
aesthetic reasons but also to help visitors navigate and
interact easier than using the previous website. It was
thought that this would be the time to implement newer,
more unique promotional strategies. The current social
media strategy was implemented during this time
period. The new website has built in social network
capabilities to a number of social network sites. For
organizational purposes, the analytics data was broken
up into different subgroups. The months of August,
September, October, and the first two weeks of
November each represent time periods prior to the
implementation of social media marketing. The time
period of January 19 thru February 22 represent post
implementation. It should be known that during
November 27 and January 19 all analytics data was
omitted. The primary reason for the omission of data
from this time period was due to the continued testing
and evaluation of the social media accounts.
2.2 Traffic Sources
In order to fully understand and identify the
demographic that represents BSPA’s online traffic,
many tools where used to monitor and analyze the data
that was made available. The software’s main purpose
was to monitor and identify these traffic sources. In this
research it has been denoted that each type of traffic
source has been categorized as either being a referral,
search or direct. A referral can be described as a link
between two web sources, A and B, where web source
B is being accessed from web source A because of
information of particular interest to the user. In our case
web source B is the index or any other page on the
BSPA Laboratory’s site. Referral site information can
be used to help visualize visitors and their intentions.
For instance if a visitor is referred to the laboratory
from a URL that can be linked to an academic
institution, such as a Purdue search, you could assume
that their intentions would be an educational based
inquiry.
The largest amount of traffic to BSPALabs.org stems
from search engines. Specific searches from search
engines produce results that can be very helpful in
reaching broad segments in the market. Monitoring the
amount of visits that are produced from searches is
essential in comprehending and acknowledging trends
and segments. Visitors that are directed from search
engines are usually in search of specific information.
Their keywords are a direct reflection of this.
Keywords are monitored and stored by the analytic
software to be analyzed. Trends can be found in these
searches by addressing specific commonalities in the
keywords. Keywords such as Purdue Biometrics and
Indiana Department of Corrections are (at the time of
writing) at the top of the keyword searches. If BSPA
Labs sole purpose was to expand traffic a common
technique would be to produce more material
pertaining to those keywords. Table 3 outlines these
search terms in rank order.
Table 3 Composition of Keyword Searches
Keywords in rank order (From Google Analytics)
Purdue biometrics
Indiana Department of Corrections
BSPA Labs
Biometrics in Healthcare
BioAPI Java
BSPA Laboratory
"Direct Traffic", as it will be called throughout this
paper, are limited to users who click on previously
saved bookmarks or visited the site by typing in the
URL directly into their web browser. This type of
traffic is the most basic and usually the easiest to
analyze because of its simplicity.

6. Figure 3 Composition BSPA Lab’s Traffic Sources
from August 1 – February 22
Figure 3 above shows the distribution of traffic to the
website across direct traffic, search engines, and
referring sites.
2.3 Data Metrics and Measurements
The process of tracking visitors and their movements
within BSPA Labs website was made possible by
Google Analytics™. Measurements such as visits, time
of arrival, time of leave, bounce rate, page views,
referral, and unique visits are all distinctive metrics
used to measure site usage. Time of arrival is the
simple measurement of when a user gained access to a
certain URL. Time of leave, being the opposing
measurement, states when a user left the website. Time
of arrival and time of leave are very important
measurements because they are essential and are
included in equations to produce average time. Average
time on site is helpful because it helps measure visit
quality. If visitors spend a long time visiting a site, they
may be interacting extensively with it. However, time
on site can be misleading because visitors often leave
browser windows open when they are not actually
viewing our using the site [23]. Bounce rate is another
essential measurement in determining visit quality. A
bounce rate measurement is the percentage of single-
page visits. For example if a visitor leaves the site after
their first page view it is considered to be a bounce
which cumulatively produces a rate. High bounce rate
usually indicates material not relevant to the visitor
causing them to have no further interest in the site.
Time on site is the last and most effective way of
measuring quality. When visitors spend copious
amounts of time on a site it usually indicates extensive
interaction. A high average page view results from
appropriately targeted traffic or high quality content
effectively presented on the site.
3. Results & Analysis
The BSPA lab has only been utilizing social media as
part of an online engagement strategy for six weeks at
the time of writing this article so all results should be
viewed as preliminary. For the purposes of this
preliminary research the metrics above will be analyzed
by comparing the monthly average prior to social media
use with the total we have post social media
implementation.
Table 4. Web Traffic Data before and after Social
Media use
Metric Pre SM Use Post SM Use
Avg. Time on
Site
00:01:44 00:02:05
Unique Visitors 411.75 620
Bounce Rate 60.1475% 59.20%
Avg. Pages/Visit 2.7175 2.46
Traffic Sources
Direct Traffic 257 269
Search Engines 158 401
Referring Sites 165.75 199
The data displayed above in Table 4 shows the monthly
average for each metric pre and post social media (SM)
use. Out of the seven metrics in this table, the analytics
data shows an improvement in six of these. The
average number of pages per visit did not improve, but
this might be explained by better tagging of results, and
better search engine optimization.
The largest improvements are in number of unique
visitors and in the traffic sources. The number of
unique visitors has increased by 50% since initiating
the experiment. Further examination of the traffic
sources to the website shows that the largest source of
traffic was from search engines (46.09% of the total
traffic). This increase may be due to several reasons –
the initiation of the in social media use, the new
website format, interest in biometrics, or the use of
Google as an advertising tool. After just a month of use
the amount of traffic from referring sites did increase
from the monthly average prior to social media use.
The amount of direct traffic is pretty comparable with
only a slight increase since the online engagement
strategy has been put into place.
Direct traffic remained relatively stable throughout with
the source of much of this traffic being the researchers
and other individuals involved with the lab (although
Google Analytics did not tally the hits from within the
lab itself based on IP range). It should be disclosed that
the lab did participate in the Biometrics Consortium
Conference at the end of September 2009 where many
of the researchers in the lab went to promote the lab,

7. talk to others in the field, and hand out marketing
material.
To analyze the quantity of Social Media traffic,
Twitter™ and LinkedIn™ data were compared to the
lab’s all time site averages. Visual representations of
the data are show in Figure 10.
Figure 4 show that Twitter™ visitors produced much
higher average scores (pages/visit; average time on site;
% new visits; bounce rate) when compared to the site’s
overall average. With respect to time on site, visitors
from Twitter™ stayed roughly three times longer than
the average visitor and LinkedIn™ users.
Figure 4 Composition of Site Usage (S.M. VS. Site
Average)
The percentage of new visitors is simply a
measurement of unique visitors compared to returning
visitors. This is the only metric that suggest Twitter™
is not ideal for growth and expansion of BSPA Labs. It
seems that the average Twitter™ user only follows
status updates on groups or individuals that they choose
to follow.
The last metric that was compared to the average visitor
was bounce rate. It was stated earlier that bounce rate is
a percentage of users that leave the website after the
first directed page. It was also stated that this is a very
helpful measurement when trying to determine visitor
quality. Again this study shows that Twitter users, on
average are more likely to be considered quality
visitors. These users have a much lower bounce rate
than the average. This effect is similar to the average
time spent on site. The conclusion is similar because
Twitter users are not in search of specific material.
4. Conclusion
Since the results of this study are preliminary it is
difficult to come to any solid conclusions. The results
we have presented have shown that the website appears
to be gaining more visitors, with those visitors staying
on the site longer. It also appears that the use of social
media has given the website more exposure so there is
more traffic coming from referral sites and search
engines.
5. Future Work
Since current available amount of information is not
enough for a detailed analysis of the impact each
utilized social network has that will be the focus of the
follow up work. After we gather more data we will
compare the effects each specific social network has on
the traffic to www.bspalab.org and the link between
activities on the specific social network (e.g. new
twitter post) and activities on www.bspalab.org.

8. Furthermore, the introduction of other social media
(Slideshare.net™ and Eventbrite™, will be reported on.
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