Guest blogpost: Social Media Degrees

The internet and social media especially have changed the ways people around the world interact.

Organizations have gone ahead to make millions in profits by simply incorporating social media in their marketing campaigns. Everyone is now taking notice of social media as powerful communication and advertising tools.

However, there's no standard operation manual users all get. Figuring out successful social media use involves a lot of trial and error, burning of fingers, and learning of lessons along the way.

It is against this background that some universities and colleges have developed courses in social media practices, culminating in either bachelor's or master's degrees. A good percentage of people are still not convinced these degrees are worth tuition, and it's understandable given how fast the digital world evolves.

However, for anyone hoping to succeed in using social media in business or corporate interactions, such a course of study can at the least be a valuable foundation.

The Northeastern University’s College of Professional Studies offers a series of social media courses in their master’s in corporate and organizational communication program. Students undertaking this course will cover areas such as:

• Introduction to the Digital Era, which basically touches on the power of social media, their concepts, potential applications in different organizations, career management responsibilities, and social media leadership. Students get the opportunity to apply the concepts learned and assess the digital presence of others.
• Social Medial Skills, which surveys tools and techniques used and platforms available. Students learn social media strategies for effective engagement in public and private contexts.
• Management of Social Media Channels. Students lean how to establish and grow an organization’s presence across different online platforms, define metrics for short- and long-term success, manage online communities, and know how and when to revise strategies in line with feedback received.

As anyone who's ever tried to operate an online business will affirm, online success doesn't just happen. You have to know how to blend with people’s ideals, sell your idea without imposing, and most importantly, provide a solution to your online community. Social media can boost your success, but they can also be your downfall when used incorrectly. This is what degree courses dedicated to social media aim to educate students on.

Antonelli College covers this and more in its social media management degree program. The course is based on the growing necessity for social media in business marketing and equips students with knowledge and skills necessary for emerging social media careers.

Birmingham City University was among the first universities to offer graduate programs in social media. Its MA in social media program explores social media techniques and research.

The aforementioned social media degrees are becoming prominent at a time when startups and established companies are reaping the benefits of social media marketing. Despite its tangible benefits, there is a huge debate among marketing and PR professionals as to whether social media is exclusively a marketing initiative or if it’s a general PR initiative.

Depending on the requirements of marketing efforts, social media may or may not be included in general marketing curriculums. An argument could be made that social media tools should be used liberally by entire companies to enhance its brand image and personality towards its consumers.

In that sense, employees, marketing departments, PR departments, and management figures, may all have roles in pushing out the company’s message through social media outlets. This would push for an education model that incorporates social media marketing techniques into general marketing and business curriculums.

On the other hand, some social media marketers view the trade as an art in itself. In-depth techniques are used to use search engine optimization, social networking, and technical proficiency to push through “viral” marketing campaigns. In this light, social media programs should be delineated from traditional marketing degrees.

Regardless of the institution, it's important for students to examine program details and curriculum before enrolling, to ensure a social media degree provides valuable information and know-how.

Some courses are too shallow, touching on issues students likely already know from their online interactions or can easily learn independently. However, a well-researched social media degree is invaluable.

Blogpost by Elaine Hirsch

Final round up - using social media for crisis communications

This is the final blogpost based on my article for Communication World.

Linking other platforms such as Twitter, Facebook or traditional websites

If your organization  already has a presence on Twitter, Facebook or any other social media site it would make sense to use what I call “platform independent publishing” techniques through your crisis blog’s RSS feed.

RSS feeds can be used as a publishing system - pushing your updates to other online platforms. This way you can publish once, from your blog, and automatically syndicate this content to other sites.

Your crisis blog feed can be linked through services like Feedburner, Feed Informer or Ping quite easily. Once this is set up, every update you make about the crisis at hand will automatically show up on your Twitter channel, Facebook page or other online identities.

Speed of Twitter during a Crisis
On 15 February at 08:28 several trains were involved in an accident in Buizingen, a small village on the main train track towards Brussels, the capital of Belgium.

Later that evening the media announced 20 people had lost their lives in this terrible crash.  That morning I was driving towards the office and heard a short announcement on the radio about “a possible train accident”.

As I live only three kilometers away from Buizingen I checked Twitter and searched for updates containing the word “buizingen”.

At 8:38 I found an update with pictures of what happened  - making it clear that people died in the crash - while it took traditional media more than half an hour to communicate information about “possible injuries”. (Picture by @cdrik9)

Using Social Media after a Crisis

Once a crisis is “over” it is crucial to keep communications channels open. A lot of organizations underestimate the aftermath and tend to quickly return to what they consider "business as usual".

Although this makes sense from an operational point of view and even from a crisis management perspective, it is crucial for communication professionals to manage the “post-crisis” communications as well. Social media can play a role in this respect.

Social media by their nature tend to gather people around a certain topic or event; this is even more true during times of crisis. The social media tools you have used during the crisis could become a platform for transparent ongoing communications. In some cases an organization can even turn its own platform into a service to the community of its constituents.

One example of such an open social media driven crisis platform is Ushahidi.

The Ushahidi Engine is a platform that allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, email or web and visualize it on a map or timeline. Their goal is to create the simplest way of aggregating information from the public for use in crisis response.

The platform was developed in 2008 to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout that year. Today the platform is open source and free for all to use and tailor to their needs.

I can see a company adapting this platform into an ongoing communications and awareness tool, using it as an advanced alert post, gathering information on potential risks and integrating it into its ongoing crisis planning.

In Conclusion

Social media are here to stay and are part of our daily lives. Traditional media, marketeers and more and more communications professionals are embracing them. Social media make everyone with an internet connection a potential global communicator - including during a crisis situation.

The first step is to listen to these online conversations and to learn how to transparently engage with your online influencers. By trying out and using these tools you will quickly see how to integrate them into your crisis planning.

Although the ultimate goal is never to have to use them, it is definitely the right moment to start adding them to your crisis communications mix.

Article originally published in Communication Magazine - Author: Philippe Borremans - Date: July 1, 2010

PS: Interested in more ? Check out the e-learning page on this blog or let me know if you would like to test an enterprise grade online monitoring tool for free (no strings attached) for 2 weeks.

The ash cloud, crisis communications & social media - the Eurocontrol Story

Now that the (ash) cloud has settled on the European continent I thought it would be good to look at the use of social media during this crisis.

Just to recap: an ash cloud from the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland prompted governments in Europe to close the airspace in all Scandinavian countries, Belgium, Germany, France and other parts of Europe for about a week.

Apart from the thousands of flights grounded and the millions of people stranded across the globe the ash cloud also had serious financial impact with more than 1 billion euro lost in the tourism industry alone...

As we can imagine this was the ultimate test for thousands of crisis plans and PR professionals in different industries and governments.

In this blogpost I will focus on the use of social media during this period and specifically on the excellent work EUROCONTROL has done in this context.

The European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation, is an intergovernmental organisation made up of 38 Member States and the European Community. Their primary objective is the development of a seamless, pan-European air traffic management (ATM) system.

As you can imagine this organisation was the "go to" European player during the crazy week of the ash cloud.

In order to give you an overview of how they used social media channels in the context of crisis communications I interviewed Aurélie Valtat, the Online Communications Manager at Eurocontrol.

Below the Q&A:

Q: What kind of social media communications channels were in place before the crisis and what was their purpose ?

We launched our corporate social media presence in September 2009, by first evaluating our existing online reputation, and then securing profiles called "eurocontrol" on the main social media sites.

The next step was the actual launch of our four main channels which was done concurrently on 1 December 2009:

• EUROCONTROLTV on Youtube,
• A Facebook & Twitter account
• A Linkedin company profile & EUROCONTROLers group.

At the same time our website and electronic newsletters were adapted to always feature the "join us" icons for these 4 channels. The objectives of our social media channels are the following:

1. Increase traffic to our website
2. Improve our visibility and credibility at large, but primarily targeting aviation partners and national / European decision-makers
3. Develop and nurture a sense of community among the European air traffic management (ATM) community
4. Serve as almost real-time communication channel where appropriate.

Q: Where these channels part of the crisis communications plans in place at Eurocontrol or did you find out during the crisis that they could be included in your crisis communications ?

All communication channels were included in the crisis communications plan, because our current website is based on an old technology and content is only visible 40 minutes after it was pushed to the live environment. But the extent to which social media would be used was actually not mentioned nor planned.

Q: How many people "managed" the regular updates during the crisis and how did you manage the response/feedback ?

Our social media profiles are normally updated by a trainee. During the crisis, I decided that I would take over, due to the sensitive situation. So I Aurélie Valtatwas basically on my own, feeding Twitter, Facebook, and the public website (I'm also EUROCONTROL's corporate web editor, so I would edit/approve all content published) with the latest info.

The process for gathering the latest info was the following: I was sitting close to the press office which would issue all official updates, I had access to the NOP portal (the operational information portal for aviation professionals) and I had contacts in the CFMU (the operational centre managing air traffic flows across Europe).

With these contacts I was capable of both updating the social media channels almost real-time but also of responding to any request concerning the opening or closing of airspace in Europe.

I mostly interpreted for the general public the maps, charts and information available on the NOP portal, which was also a steep learning curve for me.

Q: Are their any specific tools you used to manage these channels ? (CoTweet, Hootsuite etc...?)

At EUROCONTROL we are using Hootsuite to manage our social media profiles (Twitter, Facebook page and Linkedin profiles) and found the tool to be very handy during this crisis situation.

Q: How did you monitor the online crisis communications situation ? Did you have a listening post in place before the crisis ?

There was no listening post in place before the crisis on that specific topic, because in this case we were at the centre of the crisis. Indeed the recommendation to stop air traffic has been made by us and then transmitted to Member States, so we knew exactly when the crisis would unfold.

In general, of course, we monitor online conversations mentioning EUROCONTROL and relevant keywords through various tools (Backtype, Social Mention, etc.)

Q: Overall, what are the main learning points now that you were able to use social media during a crisis ?

There are a few lessons we've learnt from this crisis regarding the use of social media:

• Keep it simple - 1 person was enough to manage the Twitter and Facebook activity (although during the weekend I was glued to my screen from 09am to 12pm and could have done with some help), this made it easier to manage the flow of information published and its consistency across the different channels. This however requires someone with both good language skills (questions were asked in several European languages) and sound political judgment as the topic and situation was highly sensitive for us.

• Act like a person - this may sound trivial but it was the human touch of our feeds (+ the exclusive nature of the information we possessed) that ensured the success of our Twitter account. Be simple, be honest, be authentic, but all this in a professional way. I have my personal opinions on this but I believe the fact that I am a woman did make a difference here. Many followers were just amazed by the empathy they could feel on the other side of the feeds, an empathy that wasn't faked (as some of my family was stranded too I could really relate to their situation).

• Don't sell anything - we didn't try to push anything about EUROCONTROL during the crisis situation, nor take advantage of the sudden surge in popularity to push certain messages.

• Stay focused - we only informed people about the status of European air traffic and answered their questions on this topic. I read tweets that were making fun of airlines who had posted annual report or budgetary information during the crisis while at the same time they weren't satisfactorily dealing with passenger requests.

Q: Do you have some metrics which give us a feel for the online impact of this crisis and how Eurocontrol handled it ?

During the crisis we moved from 350 followers to 7,300 on Twitter, from 2,000 fans to 3,000 fans on Facebook. Our public website was visited more than 1 million times during the crisis, and we increased the average no. of visits by 5000% on average during the crisis. We posted almost 1000 tweets during the crisis.

Q: Any anecdotes - (crisis situations are full of them) - that you would like to share ?

Two anecdotes I really like (among several):

An important Spanish airline sent me a direct message to thank us for the useful and updated information that we provided... This is quite amazing that an airline should thank us for that via Twitter when they have direct access to operational information from the CFMU, but I gathered that the communications people received the info faster from us than from their own operational colleagues)

A follower told me that his girlfriend had been stuck for 5 days during the crisis, and that he couldn't communicate with her during that time. Only thanks to the EUROCONTROL Twitter feed could this man bare this difficult situation. - I know this sounds cheesy but it was really heart-warming!

Learnings:

The interview with Aurélie pointed out some specifics I saw in other cases:

• The multilingual aspect of European communications: it is very difficult to find staff with strong language skills, even in Europe, but they can make the difference during a crisis communications effort.
• You have to be present on social media channels before a crisis strikes. Social media needs to be integrated in the planning and channels need to be used actively for ongoing communications.
• Integrate you social media channels into your other corporate online communications efforts and "classic website".
• Keep it simple, transparent en focused - in short; tell it all, tell it fast and tell the truth.

Timeline

To get a full overview of what happened during that week in Europe you can check out this interesting timeline on the website of Eurocontrol.

A big thanks to Aurélie (also member of the EACD) for answering my questions and for helping the numerous stranded travelers out there.