Last June, at the end of my “Student Affairs Social Media Plan” post, I mentioned that I was in the process of building a “Tech Team” for the Rondileau Campus Center (RCC) at Bridgewater State University. With the first month behind us, I have morphed that idea into a full fledged marketing initiative! Today, I’m happy to share some thoughts on how I have structured it and why I took this approach.
“The Why”
Over the last year, it became evident that marketing was the other side of the Social Media coin in Higher Education. While I focused much of my energy on building solid online communities, a natural byproduct of these communities was the power of “word of mouth.” I noticed that more and more organizations, departments, as well as the entire University was using Social Media more for marketing, some better than others. This summer, I spent some time developing our department Marketing plan, building on our success using Facebook Pages, Twitter, and a Blog.
The How
Our approach in the Campus Center was build community and LISTEN first, then utilize that technology for creating connections through word of mouth marketing purposes whenever possible. Looking back, I realized that we could not have done what is outlined below, without first establishing and maintaining an online community.
This is how we structured it, with job descriptions included:
RCC Design
Our RCC Design team is at the heart of our Marketing efforts. It is comprised of two students who are Graphic Design majors, two students who are Marketing Majors, one student supervisor who is a Marketing Major, and one Graduate Assistant who has a degree in Marketing. Their focus is to provide full marketing services to University departments and student organizations for FREE, provided they give the team a 10 day window. They still have to pay for any copies or posters made at our Print Shop, but the design services are free. This gives our team some hands on experience outside the classroom, and our departments and organizations a chance to focus on the others aspects of program planning. (GA Job Description, Student Job Description)
RCC Video:
The RCC Video Team serves two functions. First, they compliment the RCC Design team’s marketing efforts, but also creates original content for our RCC YouTube Channel, including video blogs. If an RCC Design client wants a short video developed as part of their marketing plans, the Video Team can do that. They also meet weekly to discus what other types of video content they want to film, edit, and produce. For example, their first two projects are a 90-second Campus Center commercial and a weekly video show based on our “University Announcements”, to be released in a few weeks. The members of the team include six Communication majors, who were all heavily involved in Campus MovieFest at BSU over the last two years. This team is lead by a student manager. This opportunity continues to build their skill base while providing a valuable service to the community. It was inspired by my own experience in video production this summer. (Job Description)
Social Media:
With all this great content from the Marketing and Video teams, we appointed a student staff member to help us promote this content while maintaining our daily conversations. Our professional and graduate staff help in these efforts by promoting other events from BSU organizations and departments, looking to tag them in Facebook status updates and tweets whenever possible. We do our best to listen first, engage second. (Job Description)
The RCC Blog:
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the RCC Blog, which has grown so much over the past year. When we launched last spring, we had slightly over 100 subscribers and averaged just under 1,000 page views a month. In the month of September, we have grown to over 250 subscribers and just over 3,000 page views. We attribute this to blogging four days a week (Monday’s – Thursday’s) and marketing through our Facebook and Twitter pages. (Job Description)
What has your approach been to marketing? What other types of Social Media tools are you using and how do you create community online?
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These are some great ideas. I’m going to try to incorporate some with my programming board. Our Marketing coordinator is a graphic designer and this is the first year we’re having committees so, I plan on using this structure as a starting point for how to develop our’s. Thanks!
Thanks for reading and commenting Pete. I’m interested to see how your efforts go as this continues to be a learning process for us all!
Thank you for sharing the process you went to implement this innovative and NECESSARY component to our SA profession.
Thanks Lulu for reading and commenting! I think marketing and social media proficiencies are important in our student affairs work. I’m always interested in learning from and sharing with other folks in these areas!
Great post Ed,
I think this is a solid framework to get an efficient, modern service going.
Having a service like this continues to build community when face to face interactions are diminishing daily. Good luck, and I think this will be “emulated” a lot across many schools!
Thanks Mike! I like that it involves our students and gives them a great engaged student learning opportunity that we can measure while still providing a valuable service to the greater campus community. I appreciate you reading and commenting on this!
Great post, Ed! I focused my graduate capstone research on uses of technology to effectively enhance student engagement. In researching, I found a lot of instances of a department or a division attempting to use social media in the “if you build it, they will come” fashion, without a clear plan, or even set goals. This comprehensive marketing plan is an outstanding approach to effectively engage with students and the community!
Thanks for reading and commenting Kevin, I appreciate your thoughts. I have been puzzled to that approach as well! I’m glad you found this helpful and hope it starts conversations in other Student Affairs departments everywhere!
Our approach in University Housing at is eerily similar, except without that much staff support. We spent over 6 months developing our community on facebook before we officially advertised it in publications. Twitter has been slow to develop, but we still receive feedback via that medium. We launched our Life at UWM Blog this year (www.uwmhousing.blogspot.com) and it’s been visited over 1,000 times. I’m just now getting into all of the analysis so I have numbers to back up my “hunch” that social media is helping us make better connections with students, and in turn market our events.
Thanks for reading and commenting Liz! According to our stats, people are getting to our blog from both Facebook and Twitter equally. Last spring, most of our traffic was being driven from Facebook, but I think Twitter has given us an audience outside of BSU, which remains interesting to me! I think you all have done a great job with your blog and the traffic can only get better, as long as you remain consistent in your posts. Overall you are doing a great job!
As always, a great post with great ideas. My department sort of put the cart before the horse and jumped into the social media game before developing a clear plan and now that I am in the main office full time, I am trying to pull it all together to make it work for us instead of being additional work with no returns. I like some of your thoughts here, it helps me as I try to figure out how to market our department and harness the power of social media to build our residence hall communities.
Hey Ed,
I’ve been reading a lot of this stuff during the past few weeks when Joe our director of student activities here at Nichols pointed it out to me. I remember you came to speak to us last year at our student leader dinner. Ever since you came the ideas have been flowing and actually right now I’m working with the help of student activities and our social media department to get a show just like this one for our community. This is awesome! I’m glad Joe sent me this. And thank you for sharing!
You are welcome Daniel, I appreciate you reading and commenting. Let me know if I can ever further assist you!
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