Our Twitter Initiative
Listening to the good, the bad and the ugly.
This is the theme (or should be) of any social media initiative by any company or university. The idea of social media to many administrators is just a place where students are listening and will read anything thrown at them. The truth is completely opposite, students have a great BS meter, they will tune you out in a second if they know your trying to sell them something or take advantage of their time.
Truth is if the administration is not vested in truly changing what is broken its best to stay out of this realm. When students are in control of their own space the truth comes out, the truth being as blunt as possible. This scares people, it scares anyone to think people are trash talking their company or school. Although it is uncontrollable, it can be managed.
Just the thought of having a student post about the horrible experience with the admissions department at your university on their Facebook page where hundreds of their peers check every day can send chills down the anyone at the university’s spine. The thousands of dollars spent on marketing and building the reputation of a university can be smashed down by a few bad comments.
Unfortunately this is not a nightmare you can wake up from, it is happening every day. It doesn’t mean people are fleeing universities because of a few students bad reviews but it does deteriorate the overall impression of a university. With the many options and high prices of education now a days those perspective students are going to try to get all they can out of their hard earned dollar. If it means avoiding the hassle they will.
So what can you do?
Fix the problems. Realize that education is a business. And offer a high quality education with the customer service to go with it. A lot of universities do this and I am not saying they are slacking but there are some cracks. Some universities just have more cracks then others, the job of these social customer service representatives is to figure out where these cracks exist and how they can be filled.
Most universities don’t have these positions currently, not because they aren’t important but because they are new and have not proven their value yet. That is the way it is here at Wayne State, we do not have a dedicated customer service department but, we do have a marketing department which, has a web communications department inside of it. We have taken it upon ourselves to put together the experiment to become part of these spaces and really listen to students and respond to help them out and let them know we care.
Experience is something you cannot pay for, it just happens and undoing a bad experience can take ten times the effort it took to ruin it.
We choose twitter as our main contact point, not because all of our students are on it but because its viability to listen globally outside of our network and to respond to students without feeling invasive into their network.
We created the account “waynestate” then started to track any mentions of the words “wayne state”, “waynestate” or “wsu”. Anyone that mentions any of those terms we follow them. The conversation was quite for the first 2 months. We use the account start adding value to the students, we posted deadlines and events going on campus.
After those two months students started talking more about Wayne State both positive and negative. We made it a point to respond to everyone, figure out what they are having issues with and offer our help. Although we don’t have direct contact with all the departments on campus since we have interacted with all of them when working with the homepage (wayne.edu) we have contacts all over. We can at the very least get the student to the person they really need to talk to to solve their problems.
We now have over 120 followers and follow over 85 people who are affiliated with the university. We are hoping this will grow exponentially in the next few months after school starts. We also have done absolutely no promotion of our twitter account besides in this article and recently just adding our updates to the current students page.
What’s Next?
We are here to help. Ask us a question and we will get you an answer, no matter what the question. We will not sweep your request under the rug, we will work with departments on campus to get you an answer.
We are truthful and transparent, we know we cannot change the university ourselves but we can do our part and share our knowledge with those who can make a different.
September 14th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
[...] to get in touch with interested Twitterers interested and finally addressing their questions. Read Nick DeNardis’ blog post about how they did [...]
October 12th, 2008 at 8:57 am
Some major corporations are now using Twitter to listen to their customer base. I think it’s a smart move, and a really good one because the demographic is certainly good for a college.
January 20th, 2009 at 8:15 am
[...] and involve students. I have posted in the past about Studying Students Social Network Usage and Our Twitter Initiative, since then we have been actively pursuing the popular social networks. Just recently I was quoted [...]
April 4th, 2009 at 9:51 am
[...] the past year we have been present on quite a few social networks. We started out with Twitter last year then moved to Facebook and beyond. We made it a point to not promote our presence on [...]
June 3rd, 2009 at 9:07 am
[...] approach with Twitter from the beginning has always been quality. We are not in it for the numbers and we only follow back accounts with a [...]