doteduguru

Think about what goes into your social media strategy when launching campaigns. You talk about content, distribution, action, and community management. There’s helpful guides on how to track ROI after you launch a campaign and tools to provide analytics to your team members. If you step back from the computer and think about the true ‘power’ of social media, you may begin tracking something else too - the tangible real-life interactions and lasting connections that happen while creating your campaigns.

Let’s look at a a few examples of video-driven social media success stories developed by colleges over the past year. There’s the That’s Why I Chose Yale admissions video (which has garnered over 675,000 views), the President’s Day at Macalester College, and more recently, a flash mob performed by Emerson College students to promote theatre event.

The success of these videos was not caused by a just social media-savvy marketer behind a monitor.  These groups realized that in order to gain excitement, their videos would need the input of a variety of campus organizations and offices. The administration, students, and faculty all worked together in some capacity to finalize a product.

Here’s quick video explaining the story behind the flash mob. Think about all of the real-life interactions that took place in order to launch this social media campaign:

• 140 freshmen students producing work together in their very first week of school
• Faculty and administration collaborating on the event promotion
• Bringing a student production into the Boston community
• Involvement of the campus community in spreading the video internally, therefore promoting the event

Once that campaign launched, the excitement around the video was contagious. The videos became viral internally, and with some marketing during the buzz, other outlets picked up the video. Social became contagious, and contagious became viral.

Before you create you next social media campaign, start making connections in real life. You’ll need the support if you want to get more eyes on your product. We often complain about how higher education operates in silos, but what better way to break those silos than to connect the community in person AND online through social media. The benefits of social media go way behind view counts on YouTube. The difference-makers at your school may not be on Twitter, so get out from behind the computer and start shaking some hands!

How have you experienced the power of ‘social’ in your social media campaigns?

Picture credit: PictFactory