Students are the Story: Using Personalization to Create Shareable Content
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The document discusses how higher education institutions can personalize news stories about student achievements and activities to create engagement. It recommends focusing on distributing these personalized stories through hyperlocal media outlets and social media. Personalized stories that provide details about individual students are more likely to be shared online and seen as relevant by local communities. This can help raise awareness of the institution and support recruitment and alumni engagement.
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Students are the Story: Using Personalization to Create Shareable Content
- 1. Students are the Story: Using Personalization to Create Shareable SUNY Stories Amy Mengel SUNY CUAD June 9, 2011
- 5. University of Georgia Homecoming Court Internship in Hong Kong Induction into Blue Key
- 10. Personalization: A growing trend
- 12. The “ME” Generation In 2004, 70% of American college freshmen reported that their academic ability was "above average" or "highest 10%” Generation Me by Jean Twenge
- 15. How to exploit these trends? Personalize news stories about the activities and achievements of your students! Give them content to celebrate and share. Focus on two areas: -Hyperlocal Media -Social Media
- 21. The Hyperlocal Opportunity These outlets are hungry for relevant local content… but it can’t be generic!
- 22. Social Media Opportunity Articles with a positive headline are 30% more likely to be shared on Facebook Facebook accounts for 56% of all shared content online Sources: Wall Street Journal / Dan Zarella, ShareThis RubinsonStudy
- 25. Infuse Your Message People are already talking about your institution online. Are they including your messaging and branding in a positive, engaging way?
- 26. Infuse Your Message People are already talking about your institution online. Equip them with your branding and messaging when they do so!
- 31. Examples
- 41. Supporting the Admissions Funnel Link prospective students to current students they may know and relate to “ My old babysitter is performing a flute recital at State U? Wow, I didn’t know they had a good music program there. I should check it out.” “ Cool! Our neighbor’s son is spending the summer in DC interning on Capitol Hill. He must be doing well at State U.” “ State U just sent me a news story about how I won a founder’s scholarship! I’ll have to share this on Facebook.
- 44. Facebragging
- 48. Questions?
Editor's Notes
- Thanks for coming today. I know there were a lot of great sessions and I’m glad you chose mine
- My background – joined readMedia in the fall of 2009. Prior to that I worked in corporate communications Got my current gig via social media. SMBTV, Twitter, Blogging What about you? Who are all of you and where do you work? What are your roles?
- Here’s what we’ll discuss today. Personalization as a strategy to create engagement among your students in traditional and social media.
- Before we start, we’re going to do a quick activity
- Here are my three accomplishments. What are yours (around the room) Now here’s what you’ll notice about a lot of the activities and achievements you all named. Many of them are not “huge” things, from an institutional perspective. Your university probably didn’t make a big deal out of them But here you are all these years later, and you remember them. These accomplishments are meaningful to you. Keep that in mind as we go through the presentation today – we’re going to come back to this idea that all these little achievements are specifically interesting to a very small group of people
- So personalization isn’t a new concept in marketing, but it’s a lot easier to pull off these days. Technology makes it simple to take content or messaging or ads or even printed materials and make them specific to individuals. A common use of this in higher ed is variable data printing and pURLS, like this example from the University of Alabama. But in the corporate and consumer world, there are even more edgy and innovative examples
- This is a recent example from Intel – the Museum of Me. It’s a subtle ad for it’s Core Five Processor. But really all it does is take a lot of your publicly available Facebook data – friend lists, photos, status updates, links – and display it in a visually arresting way that’s interesting to you.
- This campaign only works because it’s interesting to the subject of the museum, the “me” It’s an innovative way of taking existing data, and then cutting and packaging it in an interesting way that calls out to an individual person
- Another very creative campaign is Arcade Fire’s “The Wilderness Downtown” video. It’s not exactly personalization, but it’s close. Entering the place you grew up generates a music video that includes Google Street View and aerial shots of familiar places Adidas had a similar campaign with a Google Maps mash-up – the Death Star. You could connect with Facebook and “blow up” your friends. It pointed a giant laser at a Google map image
- So this idea of creating more personalization in marketing and communications is growing. And it’s not just customization – but actual personalization that’s important. Customizing an experience through choosing options is neat and fun, but personalization is really taking data or information about someone and then tailoring a message or generating a specific piece of content that’s meaningful to them. You can see in this survey from eMarketer that over two-thirds of marketers plan to use more personalization in their communications this year.
- Why does all of this matter to higher ed? Well, your key demographics and target audiences are online, and they’re interacting with these campaigns like Intel’s Museum of Me and others all the time. They’re getting personalized recommendations from Amazon when they log in. They’re going in and setting up filters and news portal sites to get the information that they care about delivered to them. So colleges needs to figure out ways that they can deliver a personalized experience and messaging. This is especially important with the Millennial generation
- The Millennials. The “me” generation. These are the students applying to and attending college today, and are even your young alumni. You’ve heard about Millennials ad nauseum. But they behave in certain ways that are instructive.
- Millennials have no problem affiliating themselves with brands They will share these affiliations readily online – be it through participating in campaigns, posting status updates about different brand experiences, etc. This generation has grown up with sugary cereals with cartoon characters and flashy logos and constant advertising and media around them. They are comfortable with choosing and affiliating themselves with different brands in a very public way
- The Millennials are also the “every kid gets a trophy” generation. They’re entire lives, they’ve been praised and rewarded for a job well done, no matter how minor. Their parents constantly brag about them. They get certificates and medals for everything. In the past these accolades were taped to the refrigerator door or pasted into a scrapbook. The web is starting to change that. But these students are definitely used to constant recognition for everything that they do.
- So as you think of these trends; of marketers using more personalized campaigns, of the Millennials wanting to affiliate themselves with brands they trust and be rewarded for achievements, and of their parents wanting to document and store or share these achievements --- how can colleges exploit these trends From a PR and marketing perspective, a key strategy is creating personalized news and content about your student’s achievements. Provide them with personalized content that they and theier families will want to share. And do this via focusing on two areas: hyperlocal media and social media
- Some of you may be thinking “Why should we focus on hyperlocal media? You’d think we’d do better to land a big story about our college in the WSJ or NY Times.” Well, national news has changed so much. People have so many options now for where they get national news. A Pew study showed that 92% of Americans get their news from mltiple sources each day. Transition of the research university from a newsmaker to a news commentator: There is so much emphasis and pressure on landing those big national media hits. In some ways, that’s fine. Those things make your boss feel good and are good for the ego. But you have to wonder if passing mention in this soundbite format necessarily does much to attract students to your institution.
- Because national media is so commoditized now, over the last year there has been a very strong resurgence and emphasis on hyperlocal news. People have far fewer options for where they can find local news, about people they know.
- At the local level, however, there are fewer choices. When you go hyperlocal, it’s even less. Especially if you don’t live in massive media market like New York or Chicago (or even if you do), it can be harder to find local or geographic-specific news. How do you get information about what’s happening where you live, to people you know? Local can be considered what’s happening in your general region. Chicagoland Hyperlocal is your neighborhood. Roscoe Village or Evanston
- Hyperlocal has really seen strong growth in the last 18 months How many of you draw a lot of students from Long Island? There are dozens of Patch.com sites, as well as other hyperlocal websites, for towns and communities on Long Island
- And these editors and publishers of hyperlocal print publications and online sites want your content. It’s their bread-and-butter. Readers want it too. The appetite for really relevant, hyperlocal information is bottomless. You can see from the research here that newspaper editors really value and want hyperlocal news stories. Colleges often send these stories in the form of hometown news. [CLICK] In this survey of 1,000 community newspaper editors, these local papers almost always run these kinds of stories in print – 97% of them do. [CLICK] And 90% of the editors think that stories like this are valuable, must-publish content. [CLICK] However, less than half of those papers put these kinds stories on the web. [CLICK] But as Hearst found when it started adding links to hometown news stories about local kids away at college to one of its sites, this type of news is really is engaging web content – their clickthroughs jumped 250% in just six months. [CLICK] Leading schools are exploiting this by flooding the deck with more stories about students and giving hyperlocal print and web outlets valuable news content about their students. So tell me Bob, do you send hometown news at your school? [If yes]: Tell me a little bit about how you manage that process. [If no]: Tell me why you don’t send it. Your’re not alone [or] Well that’s surprising. Our research shows that 80% of schools have some type of hometown news program. Leading schools are really able use their hometown news program as a way to get lots of stories about their school and students into these outlets, which helps meet those institutional goals we talked about earlier. And let me show you how on this next slide.
- So it’s really a ripe opportunity to place stories about what individual students are achieving at your institution. But you have to do it right. We’ll talk about how in just a few minutes/
- But the second area of focus, in addition to hyperlocal media, is social media. And when we talk social media, the dominant property is Facebook. People like sharing good news on Facebook In fact, more than half of all content shared online is shared via Facebook So you want to make sure that your college’s messages are penetrating the Facebook news feeds of your target audiences
- So much focus on “institutional” strategies or tactics in social media. But a lot of it is still push messaging. Everyone knows you have to be “on” Facebook. I hear so much emphasis at conferences about followers and fans and getting more people and ways to make sure people are commenting on your page, etc. But again, it’s getting people to talk on your behalf that’s really what social media enables!
- Facebook also has a complicated algorithm called EdgeRank to determine what actual content to share in the newsfeed. Friends and people you interact with more frequently will show up more often than content from fan pages. So getting these personalized news stories to students and families, that showcase what they are achieving at your institution in a positive manner, is key to getting positive messages about your college in front of new audiences.
- This status update is a great example of a missed opportunity. This parent is obviously proud of her daughter for making the dean’s list. This is the online equivalent of posting a certificate to the refrigerator. But where does this Heather go to school? What is she studying? Some of Dona’s friends may know, some may not. It’s a missed opportunity because while Dona is celebrating her daughter’s achievement, she’s not doing it in a way that’s connected to the brand, that introduces others to the schools’ brand
- Now look at how different this appears. There’s a nice visual/graphical element, a link to a story that has Devon’s info and that ultimately contains information and links back to Widener University – this parent is not only bragging about her son, but also affiliating herself and her family with the Widener brand, and carrying Widener’s messaging out to her Facebook friends She’s doing that because Widener provided ready-to-share content
- So how do you make hometowners effective, both for newspaper editors and for web and social media audiences. This is a great example of what not to do.
- Instead, look at how ECSU has personalized each story for each student. Not a new concept, but the difference is that they’re publishing each individual story to the web, with personalized details about each student’s internship. It’s templated, but it’s still an individual story for each student. And publishing to the web creates a place on the web that this student and their family can link to and share. As well as get it to the right newspaper for print publication.
- So in terms of creating news and getting people to talk about you in social media, Students are an underused resource in terms of generating social media and PR buzz. Think back to all those achievements we listed at the beginning. All of those are important to you. You still remember them all these years later. Each of those activities is a chance to connect your brand to a positive event, and to do it via the lens of individual students and their families and communities.
- So I’ll share some examples of the kinds of personalized stories that we see a lot of at readMedia. We do have a technology that enables this type of outreach and many of you are clients, but even if you don’t use readMedia or another platform to assist with this, the principles are still there: make sure content is personalized and shareable. This graduation story from Rice was tweeted by the subject of the story to all of her followers. Multiply this type of engagement by the number of students in Rice’s graduating class this year and you really can see how this type of strategy can be powerful.
- So what you’re really doing here is creating an online equivalent of students running around in Geneseo sweatshirts or affixing Oswego decals to their cars. Just as we talked about earlier about millennials wanting to affiliate themselves with a brand – when you provide them with personalized content, they’ll affiliate themselves with your institution by pushing it into Facebook. And this becomes like an endorsement
- Top sources they seek for information. From Edelman 8095 survey. Internet was only 22% Equivalent of purchasing an ad in every little community newspapers in towns where students come from. Legacy tradition to spend on print. Not good understanding of technology and where market has gone or even knowing where to put where or how to spend money on social media / interactive. If prospective students are seeing family and friends posting stories in Facebook or reading in the local paper about the success your current students are having, it may lead them to investigate the college
- When you think about it in terms of the admissions funnel, this type of strategy, of generating personalized content and then getting it to local and social media, can be important at each stage of the funnel
- And in terms of alumni, making sure that they feel connected to what current students are up to is key to donations and engagement
- Since we’re talking a lot about Millennials, we certainly can’t forget the parents. If you can send personalized stories to the parents, even better.
- So what you see is that the older method of bragging by way of clipping articles to the fridge door or making scrapbooks has been replaced by electronic or Facebragging What’s important is not to miss the opportunity to infuse your institution’s message into these brags. Make sure that when students or parents share their good news, they’re doing it by posting the content and messaging you created for them
- You want them to share your message and link their name to a positive affiliation with your school This is vital for enhancing your student’s online reputation
- But we have GOT to stop thinking of Hometown News as dean’s lists and graduation announcements. Creating student-centered news and personalized stories is something that can have a HUGE impact in social media and turn into grassroots, word-of-mouth marketing.
- Q&A