Leveraging Your Students' Internet Fame
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In these times of social media saturation, anyone can become famous. What if it's one of your students? How can you get your institution into the conversation?
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Leveraging Your Students' Internet Fame
- 1. LEVERAGING YOUR STUDENTS’ INTERNET FAME AND GETTING A SHOUT-OUT FROM BEYONCÉ #EDUWEB15 JON MCBRIDE | BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY @JMCBEE84
- 3. LEVERAGING YOUR STUDENTS’ INTERNET FAME AND GETTING A SHOUT-OUT FROM BEYONCÉ #EDUWEB15 JON MCBRIDE | BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY @JMCBEE84
- 6. TODAY WE’LL … • Look at internet fame in 2015 • Examine a case study of a university taking advantage of one of their students being in the national spotlight • Pull out key points for a plan of attack when your student gets internet famous • Beyoncé #EDUWEB15@JMCBEE84
- 7. CHANGE OF FAME • Cultural perception of fame/popularity/influence has shifted #EDUWEB15@JMCBEE84
- 10. CHANGE OF FAME • Enter digital media. #EDUWEB15@JMCBEE84
- 12. WHY IS FAME IMPORTANT TO US? • Creates interest • Gives us an opportunity to tell a story • Allows us to tap into a larger/different audience #EDUWEB15@JMCBEE84
- 19. ANYONE CAN BE FAMOUS #EDUWEB15@JMCBEE84
- 20. WHAT IF IT’S YOUR STUDENT? #EDUWEB15@JMCBEE84
- 21. WHAT TO DO WHEN YOUR STUDENT GETS FAMOUS 1. Identify (Try to) identify potential fame before it happens 2. Decide Decide if it’s someone you want representing your brand 3. Strategize Constantly, strategically be planning the next step 4. Monitor Monitor personal profiles, hashtags, news 5. Go big! (Because you can!) #EDUWEB15@JMCBEE84
- 37. SOCIAL MEDIA AND MEDIA RELATIONS CAN LEARN A LOT FROM EACH OTHER. #EDUWEB15@JMCBEE84
- 51. WHAT TO DO WHEN YOUR STUDENT GETS FAMOUS 1. Identify (Try to) identify potential fame before it happens 2. Decide Decide if it’s someone you want representing your brand 3. Strategize Constantly, strategically be planning the next step 4. Monitor Monitor personal profiles, hashtags, news 5. Go big! (Because you can!) #EDUWEB15@JMCBEE84
- 52. SOCIAL MEDIA AND MEDIA RELATIONS CAN LEARN A LOT FROM EACH OTHER. #EDUWEB15@JMCBEE84
Editor's Notes
- As a reminder, use hashtag e-d-u web 15 to tweet about anything you might like from this session. I also have my Twitter handle on the slides in case you have questions or want to connect with me there. Nacho and Encarnacion thank you for being here today and for tweeting about this session..
- OK. So this session is about Leveraging Your Students’ Internet Fame. Promise this is the last time I’ll use the word leveraging in this presentation. I’m Jon McBride from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. I’m a Media Relations and Social Media Manager there.
- If you don’t know much about BYU … I unfortunately don’t have time to tell you more. But I’ve at least got to show you the campus I get to work on every day. I love it there. Because I’ve only got 30 minutes, I’m not going to go into any more depth about my role, my team, my institution … but I’m more than happy to connect later and talk, if you’re interested.
- And this is Team McBride that I get to go home to every day. Fia, Sam, Rachel and one on the way.
- So that’s a bit about me. We’ve just got 30 minutes for this session. Here’s what we’ll cover.
- First off, let’s note that fame is not what it used to be.
- Obviously actors and musicians have been in the spotlight for a long time. And still are today.
- Professional athletes as well.
- But then we had digital media, including social media come along.
- All of a sudden we had normal, every day people becoming famous solely because of the internet. You may have seen this pretty exhaustive survey that was put out by Variety last year. Really interesting to see what teenagers are gravitating toward. For the first time social media stars are becoming more popular than movie stars.
- So why is fame important to us as communications professionals in higher education? When someone is famous, all of a sudden people want to know everything about them. We can use that sudden interest to tell our stories and join the conversation, while tapping into new and very large audiences.
- So real quick, here are a couple of examples of normal, everyday people who the internet made famous over the past few years. First off … Alex from Target.
- The Eh Bee family.
- Bat Kid. Such a cool story. Without social media, does it have legs?
- Marina Shifrin. The girl who quit her job with an awesome dance video on YouTube. She now works at the Huffington Post and Comedy Central.
- The overly attached girlfriend.
- And “apparently” this kid got pretty internet famous. Noah Ritter. If you don’t know who any of these people are, reach out to me on Twitter and I’ll send you some stuff … because some of these are funny and some are fascinating to me.
- So as you can see from those examples … really, anyone can become famous these days.
- What if it’s your student? Really … the odds are pretty good that at some point in time it’s going to happen.
- So what do you do when your student gets famous? I’m going to go through a case study that exemplifies these principles, and then we’ll circle back and cover these in more depth.
- Let me tell you about Kate Hansen … our BYU student who found internet fame. As you can see, she competed in the Sochi Winter Olympics in Luge. We identified her early on, before the Olympics, knowing that she would be competing in the games … actually the only BYU student competing in this year.
- So we wrote up a small feature story on her. This was plan No. 1. We wanted to introduce her to the BYU community and mobilize our fans to follow her throughout the Olympics. It worked out well that she won the final World Cup event going into the Olympics. This made it the perfect time for us to feature her.
- One other part of early strategy was that we actually mailed this BYU hat to her in Latvia before the World Cup stop. We asked her to just send us a pic to use with our story. This turned out to be a small thing that was very helpful to the brand.
- An interesting part of her background was that she actually never told anyone of her fellow students at BYU about her luge career. No one knew. We felt like we had a real opportunity to introduce her to not just the external community, but to our internal audiences as well.
- So we pointed to this from our social channels and sent the release out to our local media, and for all that we knew, that was it! She wasn’t predicted to medal in the event. We didn’t know if NBC would even be showing the entire event. Luge isn’t the most popular sport in the Olympics. So at this point we sat back a little, were happy with the response we got from our efforts and though this might’ve been it. Then this happened …
- NBC picked up on her pre-race routine. Which … if you can’t tell, is a little different than stretching out and staring off into space (like most athletes). Kate’s routing is to put on the headphones, pump Beyonce (and only Beyonce … remember that) and bust some pretty fresh dance moves. Anyone want to try imitating that? Any dancers in the room?
- And the coverage continued. All of a sudden, Kate’s dance moves were being shown all over the place. Also … a small note, the color commentator on the broadcast actually made a comment about how he didn’t like what she was doing. He said he wanted to see something a little more “sport specific.” The internet did not like him saying that.
- So at this point, we now start monitoring like crazy. What are people saying about Kate? Turns out … some pretty cool stuff.
- We especially liked this one from CBS Sports, and strategically chose to share this one with our social media following.
- And this is why we chose it. These are the first two paragraphs of the story. The key for us is this BYU mention. Not all of the stories had that. We felt like we needed to push this one to make sure that got in the conversation.
- We also tried to be strategic about which content made the most sense for which social channels. Story on FB. Vine on Twitter. GIF on Google+. Video on Instagram. So we shared all this, the results were awesome and reached another one of those breaking points where we asked ourselves, “what’s next”? How do we make this even bigger? The answer?
- Beyonce. The answer is always Beyonce. We were in our weekly planning meeting talking about different ideas when someone threw out the idea of pitching Beyonce and seeing if she’d say something about Kate. There was audible laughter in the room. It may have even been said as a joke, but I perked up at that point and decided to go big. I told everyone that I was going to find the publicists info and go for it.
- And FYI … this is Beyonce’s following on Facebook.
- So how was I going to get in touch with the publicist? Well … thanks to Google and Buzzfeed, it wasn’t hard finding this. You might remember when there was a big deal made about Beyonce’s publicist trying to tell sites to take down unflattering pictures on Beyonce. Well, Buzzfeed thoughtthis was pretty funny and decided to publish the email. As you can see, they tried to preserve the privacy of the publicist a little by blacking out the last part of her email address … but omitted to black out the first part! I felt so investigative at this point. Now all I had to do was guess the domain that the email would be associated. That wasn’t hard. It was obviously the same as the organization’s website.
- So … I fired off an email, still thinking this was a huge longshot. But I just sort of laid out the stituation. I didn’t feel like I had to make a crazy hard sell. I included a couple of links to show what was being said and then just explained why this would benefit Beyonce for sharing it. I also mentioned the part about the color commentator, and sort of framed it in a way that showed how Beyonce could stick up for the little guy here. I should also mention at this point that I was very thankful for having the responsibilities that I have in my job. You may have noticed that I’m a media relations and social media manager. That means I do traditional media relations with news media for 50 percent of my job and social media for the other percent of my job. I’m not sure how many other communications shops are set up like that, but we feel like it works pretty well for us. So I get a lot of experience “pitching” to media. That’s kind of what this email felt like. And I’ve found myself doing more and more social media pitching now.
- It’s my opinion that social media and media relations can learn a lot from each other. I wish I had time to talk more about this, but wanted to pull this out as a separate takeaways from this Kate Hansen/Beyonce experience.
- So … I sent off the email at 2:17 … and I’m not sure if I ever really believed that I would hear back, but I definitely hoped. Then … later that night …
- … I get this while I’m in the parking lot at the grocery store. Certainly not the most committal of students as to whether or not they’d be sharing anything … but hey, it was something. I sat in the parking lot for a while, pondering the next move. I didn’t want to come across as needy and email her back right away pushing. I also thought that there was so much out there already in the media, that now that she could look for it, she’s going to see more and more content about Kate. So I decided to wait it out, and if I didn’t hear anything more back from her, I could reevaluate in the morning.
- Then one hour later, I got this back. Boom! We’re in!
- So it was at that point when I responded and had a bit of a back-and-forth and ironed out details with Beyonce’s digital strategy team.
- Then … this. Just two words. But two words from Beyonce to her 63 million followers is gold. We were so happy. Even our bosses were happy. We regularly get placements in our office with the New York Times and the Washington Post, but even they understood that this was awesome.
- Needless to say … Beyonce and I are now tight. You can see me here as one of her backup dancers with Justin Timberlake and Andy Samburg.
- So now, after Beyonce posted, we entered another unexpected phase. Now we started seeing the entertainment industry, which covers everything Beyonce says, cover this story about Kate. And things just got bigger and bigger.
- Here she is dancing outside of the Today Show set on camera with some fans. Wearing her vans high tops. We really liked Kate’s style. I should mention that. She just turned out to be such a good ambassador for us. She definitely bucks the stereotype of what a typical, Mormon, BYU student is. She is Mormon, by the way, but a cool one. And those exist! And that was cool to show.
- Here she is with Lester Holt on NBC’s set. Great headline by Deadspin here. Now check out the other girl on set here. This is the day after the luge event completed. Kate finished 10th. Which is awesome … 10th best in the world at something is incredible. But people who finish 10th at the Olympics do not ever get much media attention. So the other girl dancing on set here with a bit of a forced smile on her face, is Kate’s fellow American luger, WHO FINISHED SECOND! She had a silver medal! But she’s getting overshadowed by her dancing teammate. We started feeling kind of bad for her, that Kate was stealing the spotlight.
- Kate also partnered with Jimmy Kimmel on one of his prank videos. You can see the views here.
- And that wasn’t the end of it. When she came home she was invited on America Ninja Warrior, more talk shows, being a guest judge at various hip hop dance competitions … and the list goes on.
- We also used Kate to kick off our new institutional spot/commercial.
- It was a wild ride, but really fun to be able to have something so cool happening real time where we could spread the message of BYU.
- So … those steps we spoke about earlier … to wrap up … We were really glad we were able to identify Kate early on. Thinking about what we were able to do, it would’ve been much, much harder if we didn’t start as early as we did. Kate really represented the brand well. We did a lot of scouring of social media as well as basically checking references before deciding to put so much effort into this. Hopefully you saw that this took constant strategy and planning in a number of different stages. There are a lot of little decisions to make along the way that can make a big difference in the end. Like picking the story that mentions BYU, waiting a bit to respond to that initial response from the publicist, etc. etc. The monitoring was a big part. Finally, Go BIG! There are so many times in higher ed when we want to go big on a project or campaign, but it’s really hard because we’re not dealing with something that has mass appeal. This was cool to go big with because it was a lot easier to go big with! It’s my hope that this session at least gave you some awareness of situations you can take advantage of at your own institutions.
- And I’m going to repeat this slide one final time because the more I went back through this presentation and looked at what made this a success, the more I realized the important of this in the case study.