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September 13, 2012
by Julia Kuhn Mirza 2 Comments

Meet Roger Stupf, Head of Web & Information Management at the University of Zurich

This blog post is part of a series of posts highlighting social media champions in Switzerland. We’ve previously portrayed Katja Wenk, Web and Social Media Officer at the University of St. Gallen and Yan Luong, Social Media Manager at Radio Télévision Suisse (RTS). This time we have the pleasure to introduce you to Roger Stupf and his team at the University of Zurich (UZH), who manages the university’s social media presence during a one-year pilot project.

Roger Stupf, Head of Web & Information Management, in front of the University of Zurich

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June 6, 2012
by Julia Kuhn Mirza

Meet HSG’s Social Media Officer Katja Wenk

With more and more universities hiring a full-time social media expert, we think it is time to put the spotlight on these faces and give you a glimpse into their daily work. During the course of the next months, we will interview various social media officers in Switzerland in a new series of blog posts. Today we meet Katja Wenk, Web and Social Media Officer at the University of St. Gallen.

Katja Wenk, Web and Social Media Officer at the University of St. Gallen

Still impressed with the professional launch of HSG’s official social media channels at the beginning of this year, I make my way up the hill to campus to meet one of the main players in that launch: Web and Social Media Officer Katja Wenk, who started in this newly-created position at the end of last year.

It has been a few years since I last set foot on the campus when I was still a student waiting to get my master’s degree in communications. Social media was definitively not the main topic of our studies back then. We touched on the subject and our professor pointed out that this would be the next big thing in communications, but that was five years ago and social media was basically nowhere. At least in Switzerland. I hadn’t heard of Twitter and official company or university Facebook pages were extremely rare to non-existant. Needless to say, at that time, my alma mater had no intentions to join Facebook or start tweeting. Today, 27 percent of Swiss universities and universities of applied sciences have a social media manager and 42 percent intend to hire one in 2012.

So here I am, approaching the campus and getting ready to meet HSG’s first full time social media officer. I am eager to ask questions about her daily routine, barriers she is facing, or which Facebook posts get the most comments.

My knock on her office door is answered by her co-worker Markus Zinsmaier, whom I met last fall during the first social media study tour. Katja is sitting behind her desk, concentrating on her screen and my first guess would be that she probably has Hootsuite open to quickly monitor or send tweets before we sit down for coffee and a chat. A few minutes later, Katja and I make our way towards one of the coffee spots in Building A, surrounded by students who grab a quick coffee before their next class begins at 10:15am.

Increasing awareness and knowledge

“I usually start with screening all social media channels to see what has been going on,” says Katja when asked about what she does first thing in the morning. But she quickly points out that her usual position is not in front of her computer screen, ready to tweet or answer comments on Facebook.” I have a lot of meetings to explain to my colleagues what my job entails and how we intend to develop the social media strategy.” Her calendar is filling up quickly with these meetings. Most of them are initiated by her colleagues from other departments, ranging from university professors to administration officers, which is clearly an indicator of the interest in social media on the campus and the high demand for more information about the tools.

Besides making others on campus aware of the new communication tools, she also spends a fair amount of time helping them get familiar with Twitter, for example. Many are eager to start using the channel and willing to learn, but some are afraid. For that purpose, the communications team also provides a handbook for everyone working at the university about how to use social media and how to set up a presence at the university.

Integration of existing presence by departments

HSG launched their official social media presence with a Facebook page, Twitter account, and YouTube channel that give information about the university in general, but they also introduced four hubs: HSG START, HSG CAMPUS, HSG PROFESSIONAL, and HSG RESEARCH. These hubs focus on different topics, target a specific audience, and are very much organized like a portal, retweeting and reposting content created by other official pages, such as the library or a faculty. The Facebook page of HSG CAMPUS, for example, frequently shares status updates by the official Facebook page of the university’s library.

The goal in the coming months is to integrate all official university social media channels for a cohesive experience. The HSG campus store’s Facebook page, for example, which has existed since 2010, was integrated into the HSG CAMPUS hub. It now appears in the same orange color scheme and style settings as the hub it belongs to, but it is still administrated separately.

HSG’s official Facebook page highlights the four hubs

Each hub is managed by a different individual or group of people, while Katja manages the official presence by the university and oversees the integration. She is mindful of each department’s independence, and emphasizes the fact that the integration is voluntary and that she is certainly not giving instructions to these departments. “I am more of a contact point or help desk if questions come up. But branding is obviously important and we support departments with guidelines,” she adds.

Facebook community taken by storm

Of course empowering colleagues throughout the university is a high priority for Katja Wenk, but just as important is building up a strong community around the institution on social media: “You have to get to a point where the social media community knows the university and its channels.” And the university has definitely gotten there quickly. The growth of the community around HSG since the launch of the official presence in December 2011 is almost unbelievable. In only six months, the official Facebook page has climbed to nearly 7,500 likes. Compared to some universities in the US, this number is not earth-shattering, but compared to the social media landscape in Switzerland, it is very impressive. The two Swiss institutions leading with regard to Facebook likes so far were EPFL, who launched their page in June 2010 (3,976 likes as of June 6, 2012) and EHL, who launched their presence in February 2011 (4,718 likes).

Secrets to success

When meeting the person responsible for such community growth, one has to ask for the secrets behind the success. “So what works best?” I ask Katja. She thinks for a second, but quickly names a few examples that have proven to create a lot of engagement. Just as Christina Sponselli, UC Berkeley’s director for social media pointed out a few weeks ago during our last study tour, “pretty pictures go a long way,” says Katja. Polls also get people motivated to interact, she adds. Another post that was liked by many community members was a news story about the “Best Teaching Award”, given out by the students to the most popular teacher at the university. They also ran a few Facebook campaigns to increase their reach and grow their community.

Facebook statistics for HSG’s official page

Growing the community with the right objectives in mind

But just increasing the number of Twitter followers or likes on Facebook is not Katja’s primary goal: “If that was my goal, it would be achieved rather quickly since you can acquire new followers and likes easily. It’s about building a meaningful community around the brand and we have yet to see if this new community is also our target audience.” This doesn’t mean that she is not measuring the impact of her efforts. She knows well what posts generate the most interactions and likes and uses tools such as Social Bro to analyze her Twitter community.

It’s 11am and the building is flooded with students again. Two actually interrupt our conversation to ask us if we would be willing to sign a petition. We decline and I realize it’s time to let Katja go back to her desk to tend to her community, internally and externally. I quickly take a picture of her in front of one the signs outside the building, with the tents from the recent St. Gallen Symposium in the background. The university campus has not changed much since I last visited, but the face of the university online has definitely changed from a collection of websites to a whole array of platforms on the social web.

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The University of St. Gallen on Social Media

Official Facebook page
Official Twitter account
Official YouTube channel

Follow Katja on Twitter.

September 28, 2011
by meganmansell 2 Comments

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!”

September 27, 2011
by meganmansell 2 Comments

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!

The Digital Campus

Swiss Higher Ed Goes Social

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