The Digital Campus

Swiss Higher Ed Goes Social

Author Archives: meganmansell


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Fall 2011 Study Tour: Day 4

Thursday was a city day, complete with the realities of San Francisco in the summer: sunshine one minute, fog the next. Sandrine Wenger, Alumni Network Coordinator for the University of Lausanne, was kind enough to create a delightful little photo montage of day four of the study tour. She documents our workshop at swissnex San Francisco with Michael Stoner, lunch at the ferry building, the subsequent bus (MUNI) ride, followed by an afternoon at UCSF’s Laurel Heights campus, where we met with Lena Shaw, the university’s social media marketing manager, and Sarah Paris, Director of Communications for the UCSF School of Medicine.


Markus Zinsmaier, Web Editor-in-Chief of the University of St. Gallen (HSG), gives us these reflective thoughts on day four as we near the end of the study tour:

It’s time to get real about social media
By Markus Zinsmaier

The communications landscape is changing. Institutions have lost control of the message as electronic channels and social media enable individuals to communicate rapidly with each other. Everything nowadays is connected to each other, says Michael Stoner in a workshop morning session @swissnexSF. It’s Day 4 of the swissnex Study Tour and it slowly feels like home.

Have you ever thought about multi-channel strategies, targeting multiple audiences and measuring success in social media? Sure you did, but Michael Stoner brings it all together and shows possible ways of organizing these strategies.  After days of visiting the big shots in the Silicon Valley, hearing PR driven statements – but also discovering the spirit of the Bay Area, of the universities and companies – it’s refreshing to break social media down to its essential: realism, not hype.

To try it and to start with social media activities is actually a good starting point for any sort of engagement. But sometimes it’s also important to pick up a phone and make a call, says Stoner. Social Media is not a one-way street. Having a Facebook page is not a social media strategy. We know all this. We’ve heard it before. But using these tools, discovering new tools
(scvngr.com for instance), discussing problems on our way, we get closer to our own strategy. There’s no other way than doing it. Right on!

Swiss start-up Webdoc, which we learned about on day three, seems to have struck a chord. Here, study tour participant Guillaume Conne, Responsible for Information at the University of Lausanne, creates an engaging webdoc to summarize Lena Shaw’s presentation at UCSF. Remember to click on the webdoc below for the live version.

swissnex San Francisco’s overview video of Day 4:


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Fall 2011 Study Tour: Day 3

On Wednesday morning, Vincent Borel of Webdoc gave us a demo of his company’s innovative technology, which allows for rich conversations that go way beyond links and photos. One of the guest bloggers for the day, Anne-Dominique Salamin, Responsable Centre e-learning // HES-SO Cyberlearn, actually created a webdoc (click on the screenshot below to view the full document) to describe another product and company we visited later in the day, Wildfire. I’m loving her creative approach to blogging. Thanks Anne-Dominique, and Webdoc!

Day three also included a stop at the San Bruno headquarters of Google-owned YouTube. Sara Fedele, Marketing Communications Manager for the Executive MScom Program at the Università della Svizzera italiana, gives us her thoughts:

All you need is… Google!

“People don’t work at Google for the money. They work at Google because they want to change the world!” Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, has said. In fact, today when visiting the YouTube headquarters in San Bruno, there was the impression that we’d landed on a different planet where employees were sort of super heroes with super hi-tech powers ready to save us from some kind of cybernetic war. But, was it like this or it was just an impression? Or maybe it was just an amusement park?

Certainly Google is not a conventional company, and as they affirm, “we don’t intend to become one.” Everything in Google is about creating an experience and, as a consequence, a strong loyalty to the brand. Employees are not simple employees…they are Googlers , they are cool! Google wants them to be part of the community, more than that to feel part of the community, creating a voluntary commitment to the brand.

“At Google, we know that every employee has something important to say, and that every employee is integral to our success,” according to Schmidt. “…Googlers thrive in small, focused teams and high-energy environments, believe in the ability of technology to change the world, and are as passionate about their lives as they are about their work.”

And this is the point: I am not sure there is someone at the employees’ backs with a shotgun ready to fire them if they leave their desk at 17:30. I’ve heard of people sleeping overnight at Google, and I think they voluntarily did it. Walking into Youtube I was stopped by an employee and when I asked him if he was an engineer he told me “well, I am a Google Engineer.” Not a surprising answer! Google created the sense of community by giving employees the instruments: they are free to use them the best they can if this helps them to be productive. This is the deal. And I think it is a quite clear policy inside the company, indirectly written everywhere.

I am not saying this is the best strategy or that it is correct but, as a matter of fact, Google is successful. Every book of brand management tell us about the commitment to the brand, and I was happy to finally experience the theory.

Our last visit of the day was at LinkedIn. I’ll shut up and let guest blogger Hans-Dieter Zimmermann, of FHS St.Gallen, Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften, inject his impressions. Read more about the study trip on Hans-Dieter’s blog.

LinkedIn

Our final visit on the third day of the Social Media Study Tour led us to the LinkedIn HQ in Mountain View.

Here Christina Allen, Director, Product Manager for the University and Student Initiative, presented the latest developments of LinkedIn for universities, colleges, and students. The overall goal of the initiative is to make LinkedIn more relevant for all stakeholders in the education sector – and thus to develop a new market. Some major developments will go online shortly or have already been released.

For students LinkedIn shall serve on the one side as a safety net providing a network. On the other side it shall be something like a lottery ticket as students could be found by interested employers searching for a specific profile. Students will be able to request a profile review in order to present themselves in the best way possible. Through the LinkedIn network, in which students will be able to indicate whom they know within an organization, they shall find their first job after having finished their studies.

Following the student’s lifecycle from getting into college until having their first job LinkedIn shall support them accordingly. For example, the network allows students to gain insight where they might find a future job or what kind of internships might be possible.

For colleges and universities LinkedIn will introduce respective pages in the system. Based on the information already given by users prospective students get an insight into the institution or former classmates could be found. A ranking of institutions based on current career outcomes will be provided as well.

For companies LinkedIn will provide targeted search functions in order to search for student profiles.

As students are used to social networks they shall be motivated easily to register their profile which then can be integrated into the institution’s LinkedIn page.

Covering the whole life-cycle LinkedIn might have the potential to serve as the institution’s Alumni site as well.

And finally we met the three language localization teams which cover the French, German, and Italian language versions of LinkedIn.

In summary, LinkedIn will roll out some very smart solutions to integrate students, universities and professionals. From all the three groups we learned about the localization challenges and could discuss further issues about more localized versions of the service.


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Fall 2011 Study Tour: Day 2

Day 2 of the study tour took the group to Stanford University. Guest bloggers Olivier Schwarz, from the University of Neuchatel, and Sylvie Fournier, from the University of Geneva, bring us up to speed on the day’s events and lessons learned. They co-wrote the following post:

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Day #2 began with a meeting at the Alumni Building of Stanford University. Ian Hsu, who is Director for Media Outreach at the Office of Public Affairs, welcomes us. Today, the Facebook page and the Twitter account (@Stanford) are the third and fourth most visited sites of all Stanford University pages on the web. How did they manage this, we ask? In 2005, Ian Hsu launched the first Stanford University Facebook page. Since then, the platform has never stopped growing and now has more than 233,000 likes. What are their tips and secrets? We all want to know.

First, they try to understand what kind of information people read. They do a lot of surveys on the web, but also by phone to know who are the people following them, how many times per day do they go one Facebook, and where did they learn about the Facebook page, etc. Understanding who is out there helps Ian’s team to know what to say in posts.

“The most important thing is to make people interact,” says Hsu, “And for that there is nothing better than hiring interns to take care of posts. Our survey shows us clearly that since we’ve had them, the traffic on Facebook and Twitter has increased more than significantly.”

Hsu finds interns through interviews and trains them over a few weeks using staging Facebook and Twitter pages. They then go out on the real pages and are monitored until they are ready to have the key of the house. “It’s quite a long process but it worth it,” explains Hsu. “Last year we had three interns. This year we’ve hired twelve!”

Apparently, the key to success on social media is students speaking to students who then share with their friends.

What do these pages bring to the institution? They sure bring visibility, they support the core messages of the university, like reputation and innovation in research, but according to Hsu they also change the vision people have of Stanford.

After an overview of the “Global Stanford Unit” social media strategy, we walked through the gorgeous campus to the Stanford School of Engineering (NB: Schools are similar to Faculties in Switzerland). Their way of acting on social media is much closer to Swiss universities in term of resources and organization.

Staci Baird, Community Manager for the School, is a very joyful person who did not hesitate to share her secret with us on how to act on social media: “Just be there! Show up!” Unlike others, her communication style is to be very transparent, as we can read on the Facebook page description of the School “(…) I’m Staci Baird, community manager for the Stanford School of Engineering! You can find me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/stanfordeng.”

Very spontaneous, she only manages a schedule for the Twitter account, not for Facebook, LinkedIn and Flickr, where she posts directly. She posts at least one news every day on each channel (NB: for Ian Hsu, one post per day is a good balance). About a third of her posts are self-created and two-thirds come from other people that she re-tweets and shares.

Of course, good posts drive traffic, but it is unlikely to increase fans and followers. Well, Baird found a leverage strategy to do so. Each year, every graduate receives a t-shirt that nobody else can gets. The communication team always takes pictures of graduates, and this year decided to upload those photos on Flickr and share them on Facebook. After graduation day, an email was sent to congratulate students and “by the way” recommend they have a look at the photos online. Facebook fans increased significantly that day.

After meeting all those people, we could think Stanford is very well prepared to face crises on social networks. Nevertheless, even if Ian Hsu and Staci Baird have clear strategies, none report to global Stanford directives which describe ethical acts or procedures (as Swiss universities actually). So guys, we do not have to be afraid of anything. “Just show up!”


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Fall 2011 Study Tour: Day 1

Day 1 of the study tour included a few words about swissnex San Francisco from Executive Director and Founder, Christian Simm, and some specifics on our work with universities as described by Vanessa Drigo. Chuck Darrah gave us an insightful overview of Silicon Valley, and Florencia Prada, Julia Kuhn Mirza, and Megan Williams went over basic logistics of the study tour. Then it was off to UC Berkeley for gorgeous weather, beautiful scenery, and presentations from a variety of staff working with social media and online content at the university.

In this guest blog post, we hear from Guillaume Fort, an Assistant for Cyberlearn at HES-SO Valais (Institut d’informatique de Gestion). He shares his thoughts Chuck Darrah’s presentation:

Characteristics of an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley
by Guillaume Fort
I really like the way Chuck Darrah described the profile of entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley. It seems that Entrepreneurship, Business and Technologies are part of the DNA of people working in the Bay Area. Most of them work as employees for large companies only because they want to get enough money to launch their own Business and to create a strong network of fully qualified people. They are not afraid of the failure of a startup and want to take their chances and see what will happen next. If things go wrong, the can still go back to work for a large company in the region and try again. In the Valley, the failure of a startup is not seen as shameful but as an opportunity to learn from one’s errors. This way of thinking encourages people to shape their ideas. Unfortunately, it seems that in Switzerland, we are most inspired by the well known “Failure is not an option” quote of the NASA engineers.

University of Basel’s Matthias Geering was kind enough to film and edit a video of highlights from Chuck Darrah’s talk:

As for UC Berkeley, our marathon of informative meetings allowed study tour participants to hear from university representatives who are fairly new to social media and who are trying to use the tools to engage with their vast audience. Here are University of Fribourg’s Reto Siffert take-aways from the day:

Call for Engagement: the UC Berkeley Style
by Reto Siffert

We’ve heard it before: Social Media – and Facebook particularly – are all about engagement. And Dan Mogulof, Executive Director of Public Affairs at UC Berkeley, makes a clear statement to underline this: “Any post on Facebook that doesn’t bring up a question or doesn’t imply a call to Action is a wasted post!”

The other side of the Interactivity-Medal is the loss of control, and along with this, some potential public criticism. But this is no reason to panic for “Cal’s” community manager. Their motto: Don’t act as a censor, ignore the unwanted behaviour and let the community stand in for their university. And even more important is to create the space for the open exchange of opinions. Need an example? UC Berkeley will soon extend the real Sproul Plaza, with its long history of discussion and protest, to the virtual level by offering a special Facebook App.

Thanks for your thoughts, study tour guest bloggers! Looking forward to more impressions, videos, and ideas!


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Fall 2011 Social Media Study Tour: Hands-on Learning and Content Exercise

If you’re reading this, you must be very interested in social media and how it can be utilized and optimized for higher education, particularly in Switzerland. This post is geared toward an even smaller audience: the attendees of the Fall 2011 Social Media Study Tour to San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Read on, though, even if you are not attending the study tour, to find out how you can follow along with our activities virtually.

Attention participants: We are just days away from welcoming you to San Francisco. As you know, we have prepared what we feel is an outstanding program that connects you to social media practitioners at leading universities and provides introductions to major players at well-known social media companies and new start-ups alike. But what kind of study tour would this be if it didn’t also include a little participation?

Hands-on learning

If you thought you were coming to San Francisco to sightsee, think again. We will have fun, of course, but we’re also going to put you to work—and will work hard ourselves—to implement the tools and lessons we encounter throughout the week.

Bring your laptops and mobile phones, hopefully with data plans that allow you to be online and active while here. We expect you to snap and post photos (perhaps even shoot some video), to tweet, to check in, and most of all, to share and connect. Experience is the best way of learning, as we say at swissnex San Francisco, and experience we will.

We will all use social media as much as is comfortable throughout the study tour, but it won’t be for naught. We will collect and curate our activity as we go and compile our very own “newspaper” on Paper.li, from Swiss start-up Small Rivers. Through this service, we will have access to a shareable, digital publication (updated daily) chock full of resources, contacts, and memories.

Content streams

Of course it’s up to you, but we highly encourage you to take part and show your commitment to learning and experimenting, with the aim of better guiding your institution toward the future and assessing new tools. We expect you to update your social media accounts prior to arrival or start new ones (if only to experiment with them), and to engage with the people you meet along the way as well as with each other.

Twitter: Please tweet! Twitter is the most important stream for our Paper.li and also the most immediate, meaning it is the perfect tool for real-time reporting and interaction. To facilitate activity and engagement on Twitter, we created a list of study tour participants and the companies and individuals we will be interacting with so that we can easily, and in one place, follow, respond, react, and connect among the group. Please take a look at the list and let us know if your account is missing.

To tag study tour related tweets throughout the week, please use the #fallstudytour hashtag. Remember to use the rules and best practices of Twitter to engage with others effectively. Include links, re-tweet, and be nice. To refresh your memory if you are new to Twitter, take a listen to the Twitter 101 webinar.

Facebook: Our Paper.li will also pull from the program’s Facebook page, so be sure to post and comment on the wall and “like” the page if you don’t already.

LinkedIn: Is your profile up to date? Do you have one? Remember to connect with each other and with those we come in contact with throughout the study tour. These connections may be important in the short- and long-term.

Blog: Study tour participants will be split into small groups on Monday, the first full day of our program, and each group will be assigned a “Guest Blogger Day” on which they will collectively be responsible for one short blog post (500 words or less) on our site. Don’t worry, we will provide more instructions, and this can be very basic! We just want to hear from YOU about what ideas or activities stuck out each day. It wouldn’t be as much fun if you only heard from us, now would it? :)

Media: Don’t neglect multimedia. We will hopefully all be taking photos and video throughout the week. swissnex San Francisco will upload ours to a dedicated Flickr group for the study tour. You are welcome to submit yours there, too, by joining the group (FYI: you need a Flickr account to do so). Video will be posted to our YouTube channel. These links will be useful for sharing across all other channels, and they will make products like our Paper.li and blog posts much more fun, too.

Homework

So here’s your homework: Update your social media accounts or set up new ones if you are willing to do so. If you have a LinkedIn profile and haven’t yet connected with your fellow study tour participants and with us, do so. Same for Facebook and certainly for Twitter. Please also share your Twitter handles with us so we can follow you back.

Also, do a little homework on the companies, individuals, and institutions we will visit. What social media channels are they active on? Are you following them? What questions do you have for them on how what they do is applicable for Swiss higher education? Coming prepared and connected will make all of our interactions, digital and in-person, all the more fulfilling.

Resources and Required Reading

We’ve prepared a full list of useful articles and links about the people and places we’ll be visiting, including social media accounts, websites, presentations, interviews, and more. Please take advantage of these and come prepared. See you in a few days!