This presentation provides an overview of the social media arena for a higher education audience (news focus), and uses my work with Twitter and York University\'s Research website to illustrate some of the ways social media can be tied to strategic communications.
I made the presentation to Huddle 2010 at the University of Toronto on July 22, 2010.
Tying Social Media to Your Communications Strategy
1. Tying Social Media to Your Communications Strategy Elizabeth Monier-Williams Research Communications York University Huddle 2010, University of Toronto July 22, 2010
14. Isaiah Mustafa must be really tired. He filmed hundreds of commercials in 48 hours as part of Old Spice’s campaign to relaunch their brand through Internet domination. They’re also well written, which is impressive considering how quickly they were made in response to tweets by celebrity and regular tweeters.
17. as the ultimate shout-out moment. Look at the equal visual weighting given to the fans and band. Note the customization for the local audience. How would you feel if you were one of those women and present at this show?
Mark A. Greenfield introduced me to this succinct graph in his presentation to PSEWeb 2010. Check him out. http://www.markgr.com/
Courtesy Mark A. Greenfield
If I was a musician making most of my money through tours, I would be also looking for interesting ways to encourage my fans’ enthusiasm over the live concert experience.
This is York’s Research website, which I administer.
These are the stats for the old research website. I looked for a screen shot to show you how dated it was, but even the Way-Back Internet machine refused to go there. Most alarming were our traffic sources, which were too reliant on direct traffic. These folks had navigated the labyrinth, bookmarked the hell out of what they needed, and never cruised the site again. More power to them.
When we launched, the traffic volume and sources improved almost immediately, but I had work to do on the bounce rate.
Looking at our content numbers told me the Support section was very popular (not surprising that researchers would want to know how to support their work) and that we had way too many errors. Google Webmaster helped me fix that by identifying redirects as one of the big problems.
Search engine traffic is now the highest incoming source to the site. Our traffic has improved even though these stats were captured during the summer term (typically the slowest of the three for university sites since the campus is quieter and most of the students are gone). And the bounce rate is coming down thanks to lower 404 errors and better content on key pages. We have some work to do, but it’s progress.
This is a screen grab of the backend of WordPress, which I use to post news content on the site. This particular page shows incoming links.
This is Topsy.com, a search engine powered by tweets. My pages were showing up here, courtesy of . . .
. . . Twitter, where people were blithely tweeting about my content.
This is a screen grab of www.twitter.com/YUresearch, the account I run to promote York University’s research.
The last tweet was posted during a NASA mission earlier this year.
This is my account on bit.ly, which I use to shorten my links. It also lets me track when others have retweeted them, so I know . . .
. . . when @sickkids, who has 16 times the followers I do, picks up a tweet about a joint project between our institutions. They also decided I was worth following, which was great.
Looking at bit.ly data over time helps me identify popular stories, so I can be more focused in how I use my time.