MDR's Free Webinar Series
Thursday, July 15, 2010
A Shifting Paradigm: The Growing Role of Social Media in Education Marketing

Sandy Fivecoat, CEO of WeAreTeachers and one of our presenters, answers questions asked during the webinar:

Q: Do you know how many people with Twitter accounts are actually using it actively?

A: I don’t have a definitive answer for this one; however, this recent data from Twitter itself might prove useful:

• Twitter now has 105,779,710 registered users.
• New users are signing up at the rate of 300,000 per day.
• 180 million unique visitors come to the site every month.
• 75% of Twitter traffic comes from outside Twitter.com (i.e., via third-party applications).
• Twitter gets a total of 3 billion requests a day via its API.
• Twitter users are, in total, tweeting an average of 55 million tweets a day.
• Twitter's search engine receives around 600 million search queries per day.
• Of Twitter's active users, 37% use their phone to tweet.
• Over half of all tweets (60%) come from third-party applications.
• Twitter itself has grown: In the past year alone, it has grown from 25 to 175 employees.

Q: Our senior management still sees social media as a "cool toy" but doesn't see the value in investing time and effort to implementing. How do we sway them?

A: First, ask your senior management to think about how his/her own online behavior has changed over the past few years. Sometimes you can get folks' attention by personalizing the question.

But there are also many excellent business reasons for companies to engage in social media marketing. Here are a few:

• Social media marketing can drive both primary and secondary traffic to your website. Primary traffic is that traffic that comes directly from SM channels. Secondary traffic comes from viral referrals in SM channels, or references and conversations in SM sites that link back to your site.
• Social media marketing programs that include user-generated content can give your marketing campaigns a much longer shelf life, as that content can be syndicated to multiple sites, communities, and tools. Also this content greatly increases your SEO scores, and after a period of time driving social media engagement, you will see your Google ranking improve.
• Social media marketing can leverage your investments in SEO. Your executive probably understands the importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). When a website receives a large number of natural links from trusted domains, it develops authority. Search engines trust it. If you optimize your links and website structure properly, you can easily start ranking for competitive keywords, which will in turn bring in search engine visitors.
• By adding a social media component to your currently planned or traditional marketing programs, you greatly leverage investments you may already be making. For example, just adding a hash tag twitter feed during a trade show, you not only increase your exposure with attendees, but you also push your brand to those who may not be attending the conference but are interested in the content.
• Given the large migration toward social media, it is simply a fact that if you are not involved, chances are your competition is.
• Most executives understand marketing funnels. With social media, it is possible to achieve brand awareness with large numbers of users. From there, it is fairly straightforward to achieve product consideration through community-driven contests and programs. Finally, social media tools bring to light your best brand or product advocates and gives them a viral voice to attract others.
• We all understand the power of relationships in education sales and marketing. Yet without social media tools, building those relationships can be very expensive and time-consuming. With social media, these relationships can be developed conveniently and inexpensively and can give your brand a very wide reach.
• Brand advocacy through social media is an inexpensive way to nurture your best users and turn them into advocates and references. Reference selling is critically important in the "show me" world of education.
• Social media can be a very valuable tool to conveniently reach
  teacher-practioners and affiliate them in positive ways with your products and brands--helping to ensure you keep the business you have worked hard to acquire. Most companies worry a lot about customer retention. While many education products are sold at the district level, utilization is at the classroom/teacher level. It is that usage that really drives renewals and retention of customers.

Q: Does building a reputation have anything to do with building a higher quality score on adwords?

A: Not really. "Reputation" has to do with two important areas. One, you gain credibility and reputation by positive engagements, quick response to concerns or problems, and affiliation of your brand with thought leadership and values your customers embrace. Social media is a tool to be sure you are listening to the conversation and, if used properly, adding value to that discussion. Second, "reputation" can be quantified in terms of its impact on sales or, in the case of negative reputation, lost business. Social media helps you "hear" conversations--good and bad--about your brand and gives you a chance to respond and improve. Two studies worth noting: Dell conducted a study on Word-of-Mouth marketing and reputation--and quantified the value of positive versus negative online reputation. By setting an average consumer "worth" at $210, they found an average detractor costs the company $57 and an average promoter generates $32.

Q: Are there any other teacher/professor social media sites/resource site?

A: There are several sites where teachers/professors gather, but each has a slightly different focus. Here are a few:
WeAreTeachers
The Apple
EdWeb
TeachAde
Google for Educators

Q: I disagree that blogging is a good idea for all marketers. It absolutely depends on your product, your resources, etc. It is not for everyone.

A: Agreed. There may be some companies for whom blogging is not a fit. But we find most modern companies today that are focused on improving their online marketing presence depend on blogging as a good way to drive traffic, provide thought leadership, and begin a conversation with customers.

Q: What I would like to know is the percentage of administrators, teachers, media specialists, counselors, etc., that actually use social media. Any stats?

A: From a study done by EdWeb in 2009, this data was collected, though it is hard to say if this study was extensive enough to be definitive, nor does it address the question of usage. It is, however, a good start.

The survey question was: "Are you currently a member of or have you joined a social networking website like Facebook, Ning, LinkedIn, or one of the social networking websites created for educators (e.g., WeAreTeachers or edWeb.net)?"
YES by group and %:
All -- 61%
Teachers -- 62%
Principals -- 54%
Librarians -- 70%

Q: When is Teacher Tuesday on twitter? What time?

A: Teacher Tuesday occurs every Tuesday. It happens any time during the day and is a time to recommend other teachers or people in education who you follow and recommend to others. It is a great way to find teachers to follow if you are new to social media. Search #teachertuesday to find teachers or other educators who are recommended to follow.

Another thing you might find interesting is #edchat, which also happens every Tuesday. There is a mid-day and an evening discussion. Generally, a topic is chosen on Mondays (via a vote). Then on Tuesdays, the same topic is discussed in each of the two sessions.

Q: Can you talk about blogging vs. creating an online newsletter?

A: While online newsletters can be effective (especially as a component of a direct email campaign), we generally find blogging a more effective way to establish ongoing dialogue and content to your audience. Blogs are generally less formal than e-newsletters and include other tools, like RSS feeds, Facebook "likes," and comments.

Q: We do not have one person who spends 50% of their time on social media. We have a social media team. This way we are not overtaxing any one person, and each person has a specialty on the team.
Note: This question is in reference to a poll conducted during the webinar.
Does your organization have a resource who spends 50% or more time on social media? Yes (14%), No (86%)

A: This can work well, depending on how your group is organized. Of course, it is an excellent idea to have more than one person in your organization develop these skills.

Q: Do you suggest using things like twitalyzer to assess your impact with Twitter?

A: Twitalyzer is a very popular and useful tool. We also like KLOUT, Twitter.grader.com, and Twitterfall (to track trends and discussions).

Q: What was your conversion off of Microgrant participants? What was your goal? To raise sales or goodwill or awareness?

A: At WeAreTeachers, we work with sponsoring companies to achieve a variety of goals and align those goals to other marketing strategies the company has in place. Generally, we support three categories of grants, designed to enable a kind of social media funnel approach. Once awareness is achieved, we move to product seeding programs and programs designed to promote best practice sharing. Because of the nature of social media, it is critical that the company first establish credibility with the target audience, adding value to the conversation, before moving to a more product-oriented conversation once that thought leadership is well established.

Q: Re: question on full-time resource with over 50% time dedicated to social media... My follow-up question: Is it equally effective to have several people on the team dedicating less than 50% individually, but greater than 50% collectively--i.e., 5 consultants at 10% vs. 1 media geek at 50%.
Note: This question is in reference to a poll conducted during the webinar.
Does your organization have a resource who spends 50% or more time on social media? Yes (14%), No (86%)

A: Of course, it depends on the nature of the company, the skill set of the employees and the organization. But we find it is important to have one primary lead, augmented with others on the team who also participate. It is always a good idea to have shared expertise but equally important to have clear ownership and leadership as well.

Q: Are you saying we can save budget dollars by establishing a solid social media footprint vs. just buying into SEO?

A: SEO and social media are closely tied. Active and numerous online conversations about your brand--particularly from trusted sites--will drive search engine optimization. If you can get user-generated content that includes reference to your brand and that content becomes viral, you maximize your brand's exposure. A solid social media footprint is a great leverage for your SEO strategy.

Q: How would you measure blog response sentiment besides reading the comments? Is there some way we can quantify it for the management to see? Thanks.

A: Automated systems for rating brand sentiment is still in its infancy and somewhat controversial. Of course, reading comments and engaging in conversation is the "old- fashioned way" to gauge sentiment. But there are a few emerging tools to automate this task. One is the Radian6 automatic sentiment analysis tool. It reviews on-topic posts; determines sentiment of the post at the sentence level; and aggregates a positive, negative, or neutral designation. You might check out http://www.ignitesocialmedia.com/radian6-sentiment-analysis-review/ for a good review and analysis of this tool.

Q: How do you attract influencers to spread the name of your brand?

A: First and foremost, you want to be sure you identify the category of customers or potential customers you want to attract. Then you establish the "thought leadership position" you want for your brand. You search for affiliated educ-bloggers, educators of that type on Twitter, professional associations, etc., that align. We recommend you do some kind of social media-driven awareness campaign--targeting the educators you want to reach, integrate this with a direct email campaign, augmented by a social media outreach. You should also engage online with the conversation–-by adding valuable content from your blog, participating in #edchat, or other relevant hash tags to connect.

Q: There's SO many social media tools out there. Do you suggest focusing more time on a few (e.g., blog, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube) or less time on many?

A: You are so correct. This is clearly an evolving space with many moving parts and new tools emerging almost daily. We recommend every company, at a minimum, have a FB fan page and an active Twitter account, as well as a corporate blog. Depending on the kind of content you want to distribute, you might also consider a Flkr, YouTube, and Teacher Tube channels. These are really "channels" vs. communities. In other words, unlike FB or Twitter, they do not require a lot of active content but are convenient ways of distributing the content you create elsewhere, or the content created by your users. We also recommend you participate in a popular teacher community to maximize your opportunities there.

Key to maximizing your impact but minimizing the time you spend in social media is to create content that can be distributed in multiple places and to instigate programs that inspire your best customers to create content that references your brand.

Q: What percentage of teachers is actually utilizing Twitter to get information for their daily work? I understand that they are using Facebook, but are there stats about Twitter use in education?

A: It is impossible to be sure how many teachers actually use Twitter, as Twitter does not share that information. However, if you participate in Teacher Tuesday or #edchat on Tuesdays, you will get a sense of the teachers and conversations there. You might also look at http://twitter4teachers.pbworks.com/. This is a voluntary registry of teachers using Twitter.

Q: Assuming that social media is about people following people and about people who have something to say being followed by those who want to learn something, how would you focus your social media efforts at a corporate level. How would you balance things--i.e., how would you balance the "data" side of social media versus the "conversational" side of social media?

A: Social media marketing is really about achieving that balance. That is, you first join into the conversation with those you want to influence-–being careful to add content the community values. It is all about "permission marketing" vs. "interruption" marketing. It is also key to turn your best customers into real advocates for your thought leadership and for your products. Once you get that level of engagement, the numbers follow. Remember that your SEO scores improve dramatically as more URLs and trusted websites refer content that mentions your brand. Once you have user-generated content about your brand (stories, product recommendations, best practices, general "buzz"), you also improve your search scores and, hopefully, your ability to reference-sell.

Q: I think I get the value here. My concern is time investment. In addition to everything else I do, how much time do you find yourself spending blogging or "chatting"?

A: Yours is a common concern. Everyone in our industry seems to have a very full plate. You have to think of social media as an integrated strategy--something you do as a way to enhance other programs. Perhaps there is something that can go away or be made more efficient with social media. For example, many companies are integrating social media into their customer support teams and are finding great leverage points there. Others are integrating social media into their online catalogue teams, using these resources to not only support their catalogue effort but also to get their best customers to say positive things after a purchase.

Q: Is there real ROI/value in services that harness several social media channels and report the results back to you?

A: Yes. There are lots of new tools. Radian6 has several tools for reporting, as does CoreMetrics. You might also use Twitalyzer, ReTweetRank, Twitter.grader.com, and Klout. All of these tools provide very valuable information and results.

Q: How do you get people to come to your blog?

A: First and foremost, the blog must contain valuable, interesting content. Bulleted lists are generally more well-read than long paragraphs. But the real traffic drivers include:

• Reference others blogs. Co-promoting blogs is an excellent practice. Find other bloggers in your space and reference them often. They willl return the favor.
• Read other bloggers and comment on their blogs. Again, this is the "I will scratch your back" approach...and it works.
• Provide other valuable links. If you link out to rich content, your blog will be valued and noticed.
• Put blog content into your e-newsletter, if your company has one. Then utilize an email campaign to push to the audience you want to reach. Be sure to include a hot link to your blog from the e-newsletter as well.
• Put your blog link in your email signature, on your business card, etc.
• When you create company slides, promote them on SlideShare and include a link to your blog there.
• Promote your company blog on all company collateral.

Q: What is it that makes a particular website come up first on Google?

A: Google regularly changes its algorithm for search ranking factors, so it is difficult to be certain which SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques on your website will be most effective. But there is lots of literature on the web and many companies that specialize in SEO consulting. Google "Search Engine Opimizaton," and you will find a wealth of sources with advice.

Q: In a situation where a company is targeting schools and districts vs. individual teachers, is social media still as effective since it seems that teachers are more inclined to participate as opposed to top-level administrators?

A: Excellent question! While teachers are not always the point of transaction, they do have a significant influence on purchasing. This influence is growing, primarily thanks to the power of social media. Teachers' voices are getting louder every day, as are the voices of consumers in other segments.

We find teachers especially important in customer retention. Once products are sold, it is important they also are utilized, and this utilization is what drives renewal business for most companies. Also, reference selling in education is a very effective strategy, and teacher-developed best practice sharing can be a powerful force in developing good references. Social media can be a big part of both collecting content around teacher usage of products and distributing that content so that it is visible to decision makers in a district.

Q: Based on the vertical of educators you are trying to reach, is there a better format than others (Twitter vs. Facebook vs. other)?

We recommend every company, at a minimum, have a Facebook fan page and an active Twitter account, as well as a corporate blog. Depending on the kind of content you want to distribute, you might also consider a Flkr, YouTube, and Teacher Tube channels. These are really "channels" vs. communities. In other words, unlike FB or Twitter, they do not require a lot of active content but are convenient ways of distributing the content you create elsewhere, or the content created by your users. We also recommend you participate in a popular teacher community to maximize your opportunities there.

Key to maximizing your impact but minimizing the time you spend in social media is to create content that can be distributed in multiple places and to instigate programs that inspire your best customers to create content that references your brand.

Our expert lineup included:

Presenters
Sandy Fivecoat
CEO and Founder, WeAreTeachers
sfivecoat@weareteachers.com
twitter.com/sandy5coat
twitter.com/weareteachers

Lee Wilson
President and CEO, PCI Education
lwilson@pcieducation.com
www.educationbusinessblog.com
twitter.com/pcieducation

<<< back