So, back to my college in Greece. After the group incident, it took me while to get my head wrapped around all the implications social media has on how people (and organizations and brands) communicate. In my mind, it all came down to this (and it still does): social media works because it promotes conversations.
In our marketing efforts for the college, we did a lot of hit-and-miss things. For 3 years in a row, our official marketing campaigns (using traditional media) were somewhat a shot in the dark. We would sit in meetings and get excited about concepts, work hard on executing them and then be somewhat disappointed with the results. We were shouting all kinds of messages to our prospective students about all sorts of things. Facilities, professors, tradition, international student body, whatever. We yelled but never listened. (That’s not entirely true. Recruiting officers listened and even answered questions. But the institution as a whole, oh, we were all about yelling).
I always thought we needed to change the game and let others talk while we listen. But diving into social media and networking was so scary for the top admins; it meant exposing yourself, it meant learning to deal with bad comments, it meant (brace yourself) listening and addressing issues.
Until we hit jackpot. Our external marketing agency had come up with a concept that had an embedded social networking aspect to it. It was a very traditional marketing campaign (judged by the channels it used and how it still somewhat yelled at people), but for the big picture to be complete, it had to engage people. The campaign revolved around networking and connecting and it showcased now-successful alums with high positions in important places. But instead of just doing a testimonial kind of thing where we talk about this and that person, we showed just a few details about who they are and where they work, and asked people to go to a place online and find out more about what sort of people had gone to the school and what the college is all about.
A FB page was the most obvious solution. I wanted us to steer clear of heavily engineered and carefully planned environments on our website. And we all wanted to offer an experience in a medium that the viewer is comfortable with. Top administration saw it as just one of the necessary components for the campaign to work, and we didn’t spend too much time explaining all the fine points of having a facebook page and what it meant. They simply knew we needed one. So, we just did it.
It took me just under an hour to set the page up. I spent the rest of the day adding the additional campaign content, setting up events and of course sprinkling the page with a good dose of links to our website. But then I thought, well – a lot of this was still just ‘yelling’. A lot of this was just giving out information. And while information may be good for the prospective student that ends up on our page and wants to know more, what else is there to engage people? And also, I had to make sure we had a solid fan base secured before we rolled out the campaign so that when prospective students did visit the page it would be full of life and have lot of activity. And then it hit me. Commencement photos. People always go nuts about old commencement photos. I was almost certain that at least alums would respond to this. So I did some digging in the archives and uploaded 1 full photo album for every commencement going 10 years back. And then I dug some more and found hardcopy photos that had never been scanned back from the mid and late nineties. Scanned those and uploaded them. Then I sent the link to the page to just a few very close alum friends. And then we waited.
And they came. The alums. The same ones we’ve had trouble engaging for years. As I said in my previous post, they are a largely inconsistent group of people and intercultural well…difficulties…sometimes rule their behavior. But they all came together here. There they were, in photos, all of them in the same commencement, sitting in class together, together at concerts and in libraries. They went crazy with the photos. Comments piled on tops of comments, people started reminiscing about college days, about funny haircuts, the clothes they wore, and the professors they loved or hated.
So about a month later, the official marketing campaign rolled out. By then, the page on FB had over 500 fans (it now has over 1000). And when people saw the ads in the papers and on TV and decided to log onto the URL we provided, they got to interact with real stories provided by real people. They could meet the folks we featured as success stories in our campaign and they could see them, what they were like back in college, what they wore, where they sat in classrooms. The greatest thing about the facebook page was that we didn’t really need to talk much about what we offer and how great of a school we are; alums and students were doing it for us. I don’t work there anymore and only visit the page once in a while, but I think they still do. And what’s most important – they are doing it in a way that I think is easier to understand and more relevant to those that need the information.
Does your organization/company have a facebook page? How have you used it as a tool in your marketing?
