Content is more important than channel.

For all the discussion on campuses, at conferences and in corporate cubicles about which social media channels are reliable or “the next big thing,” one fact remains: Without good content, your channels are not useful.

This lesson jumped out while I worked on our web and social media analytics report for March. Usually Pinterest drives virtually no traffic to oswego.edu (less than 50 refers per month) yet suddenly, for March, we had 1,076 referrals. Does this mean Pinterest had suddenly broken through to undeniable relevancy?

Not exactly. Almost all of that traffic (1,067) went to one page — a piece by Norman Weiner, emeritus director of our honors program, called How to Do Really Well in College. This was not the first time this page brought out-of-left-field traffic from a social network, and it appeared from several boards across Pinterest offering college advice.

For several months straight, StumbleUpon was always our third-biggest social referrer (behind Facebook and Twitter), except this month when Pinterest pushed it to fourth. What drives almost all of that StumbleUpon? You guessed it, How to Do Really Well in College. Weiner said he hears often about other colleges using it, and stats show now it has spread into the social sphere.

So those two channels have been viable traffic providers only because of one piece of content. How to Do Really Well in College is our 39th most-visited page on oswego.edu, and almost all of its traffic involves straight entries from offsite, many from social media referrals. As if we needed proof that content drives channels and traffic, not vice versa.

So I’m amazed about people always running to the newest, shiniest social media platform without any content strategy … it’s like deciding you’re going to open a business without any idea what you plan to sell. Content that tells stories — in text, photo or video — is the building block of every channel. That’s what you should pay attention to, first and foremost.

Crowdsourcing a cover shot? Sure, why not.

We’ve hoped to make the SUNY Oswego Facebook page more interactive without resorting to irrelevant claptrap (“How do you feel today?”), lame contests (“be the 14,000th to like our page and we’ll give you a prize, showing we don’t care about the first 13,999!”) or other gimmicks. So when suddenly an odd idea popped up to fit a content need, I decided to go with it.

The page still had a cover image of a snowboarder from the semi-recent Rail Jam, and as I pondered a spring shot to replace it with, I realized this would be a great time to get our tech-savvy and photo-passionate audience involved. So I posted*: “While we love our snowboarder photo, we feel like it’s time for a spring cover shot. Have any great images of campus in the spring? Post them on our wall, and maybe we’ll use yours (with credit, of course) as our next cover banner!”

[* Scott Stratten of Unmarketing would probably note that some organizations first would have to put together a committee to establish a focus group to test the message before posting it. I'm glad we can go with the flow for such things.]

The first post was a picture of a blizzard, followed by a good-natured jab or two about spring only lasting a week in Oswego, but before I had time to wonder if what seemed a decent idea would swirl down the drain, people started posting photos. Some pretty darn good photos, actually. Often sunsets, but some flowers budding and even a rainbow. Sweet!

Finally, after about 24 hours of collecting, we chose a winner:

Awesome photo by Tim Herrick

We posted it with the promised photo credit but also kept open turning some of the others into cover photos down the line. And maybe we’ll do this from time to time to see what happens. Pretty decent reaction: 165 likes, four shares and a few comments from alumni missing the famed sunset view.

It isn’t rocket science or a major innovation, I know. It’s a small thing, and I’m sure some way-too-serious sort is questioning the ROI of something that took a mere couple minutes. But it also isn’t cynically using your audience as pawns to get to an arbitrary number.

Anyone running a Facebook page will have content needs from time to time — photos are often a big one — so why not see what’s out there? There’s a pretty good chance your community has, or is willing to create, plenty of awesome! And in the process it becomes even more their community.

Networking and newsgathering: Breaking stories via social media.

When you’re Division III college or smaller school, your first former student-athlete playing in the pros is a big deal. If your institution also is the first outlet to put out that story and scoop traditional news media, it’s a bonus. As we learned this week, networking and newsgathering are critical to making this happen.

We knew that former Laker hockey standout Eric Selleck was well-regarded in the Florida Panthers organization, albeit perhaps more as an enforcer than scorer. We didn’t expect him to be called up so soon, but the Panthers didn’t expect so many injuries. So on Monday, a couple days removed from current crop of Lakers’ trip to the Frozen Four, former SUNY Oswego sports broadcaster Sean Balogh sent me this tweet.

Students from our sports journalism program, which has produced the likes of ESPN’s Steve Levy and Linda Cohn, don’t idly pass on such rumors. But I tweeted that I was seeking verification, which brought the semi-anonymous friend who runs @OswegoTweets into the conversation.

I checked @GeorgeRichards’ tweets and sure enough:

While that was retweetable, it wasn’t enough to build a story. I contacted Oswego Sports Information Director Adele Burk but also wondered if Selleck would be the first Laker to play in the NHL. We have a long and storied hockey program, but I couldn’t recall anyone getting closer than former goalie Brett “Stretch” Leonhardt’s celebrated one-night stint filling a jersey on the Washington Capitals’ bench. So I contacted Oswego Coach Ed Gosek, who also played with many Laker legends back in the 1970s, and Joe Gladziszewski, former Laker SID, lifelong Oswego hockey fan and now the associate director of athletic communications at Ithaca College. They were confident Selleck would be the first former Laker to play in a regular-season game.

This was important because it adds great news value. Players get called up to the pro ranks every day, but the first from their alma mater to play on the highest level is a once-in-your-institutional-history story.

So what about some kind of official confirmation, a story with more detail than a tweet? Nothing from the Panthers’ website or traditional media channels. Then this tweet from Chris Horvatits, WTOP sportscaster and member of our merry band at the Frozen Four:

So I hunted down that story on the San Antonio Rampage website, which sure enough led with “Florida Panthers Executive VP/General Manager Dale Tallon announced today that the club has recalled F Eric Selleck from the San Antonio Rampage (AHL) …” I sent the confirmation link to Adele so she could finish the official story but had enough for us to file an official tweet with full context:

Soon after, Adele had the official Oswego athletics story up and out via social media:

Which gave us an official story to post on Facebook, where it was very well-received:

… and even though it seemed to take ages to confirm it, we were still way ahead of the media curve on it. Does that matter? It does if you want to establish your social media properties as places to go for breaking news (and not just canned announcements, but real-world good news). When your social media channels break stories of interest to your audience, and you value accuracy as part of it, you’re bound to build a more loyal following. Having a good social network and some newsgathering skills can help make this happen.

Content, not contests, key to long-term social media success.

Over the weekend, our student paper The Oswegonian racked up an amazing 158 Shares (and counting) for a photo on its Facebook page. That includes 73 Shares through the SUNY Oswego Facebook page reposting it — with the repost scoring another 480 Likes.

What didn’t these posts do? They didn’t say “Like this page for a chance to win a prize” or “Share this page if …” Why? Because good content through a good channel speaks for itself. It makes it own friends and pathways.

Say it with me: Content, not contests, is the key to social media success.

Yet my Facebook and Twitter feeds are full of posts like “We’re giving a prize to our 1000th follower!” and “Become our 5000th fan to win a prize!” This is all stunt-based and has nothing to do with content. Also, if you’re one of the followers or fans who helped build the community’s success, how should you feel that some late joiner gets a prize for just showing up (and then may leave anyway)? You’re right, you should feel slighted and unappreciated. For that matter, many are running contests that don’t adhere to Facebook terms of service, which could get the effort shut down.

>> Back to this this weekend, what attracted that huge level of interest for The Oswegonian and SUNY Oswego? A photo of the Laker men’s hockey team celebrating beating Plattsburgh (our archrivals) to win the SUNYAC championship and a return ticket to the NCAA DIII Tournament. No, it’s not an image you can get every day. But …

… it also attracted that interest because it came via channels that have built their audience through content. People have stayed connected and even watch those Facebook pages for news because of years of providing useful, helpful content.

I’ve talked before about how you shouldn’t beg for likes. Contests for likes, while looking perhaps a bit less desperate, are short-term efforts … the long-term goal is having content strategy and a commitment to making yours a lively, engaging community.

If none of the above has convinced you yet, stop to equate a Facebook page with a personal relationship. You want your friends to like you because you’re an interesting person, right? Not because you have to bribe them for affection? Social media is the same way. You want to build a relationship with the members of your community. It should be based on much more than a stunt.

After all, providing useful, helpful content to your community on a regular basis is the REAL prize … the gift that keeps on giving.

No snow job: Celebrate who you are.

We get snow in Oswego. Sometimes a lot of snow. That’s just a fact. It’s also the subject of fake photos, fiction and folklore. But it defines our part of the Upstate New York experience. The story goes that the massive 2007 blizzard in Oswego County making national headlines attracted many passionate meteorology students. (Did I mention have our own lake-effect snow research center?)

But how do you handle this from an admissions standpoint? If you pretend it doesn’t exist, it would shift from a recruitment to a retention issue after a bad winter. So we’re pretty up front about it, including our winters in everything from our admissions video to a Pinterest board.

To a degree, it all involves accepting, sometimes even celebrating, who we are. As the only U.S. campus directly on the shore of Lake Ontario, we take the ups and the downs. Snow pictures can be beautiful too, so toward the end of my lunch hour on Tuesday, I trekked to take some iPhone photos of our statue of founder Edward Austin Sheldon in front of our signature building, Sheldon Hall. Since we adopt a “been there, done that” attitude with the snow I put on a caption of “A snowy day in Oswego? We get the feeling Edward Austin Sheldon has seen this before.”

Was by no means an award-winning photo, but figured it would provide some fresh Facebook and web content, maybe get a few likes or comments. I had no idea.

No idea, that is, it would become our most-shared photo ever. With a Tuesday afternoon posting, at last glance it had 70 shares, plus 319 likes and 24 comments. The shares, as I’ve said before, are valuable because it shows someone likes your content enough to “buy” it in a sense and pass along to their friends, as it eclipsed the record of the sunset shot mentioned in this blog entry about content and serendipity.

Were all the comments positive? Not really, as some did talk about not missing the snow at all. But others yearned for their snowy fun with friends, and one alum provided one of the more interesting testimonials ever: “I visited Oswego in a snowstorm and knew it was where I wanted to be. Miss the snowball fights.” (Note: We don’t officially condone snowball fights. Just saying.)

Snow is part of the Oswego family fabric. Our winters build character, and surviving and thriving in them become a badge of honor. So even if we don’t enjoy all that shoveling, the cold, having to wear layer after layer, we can still embrace opportunities to show how this makes us special. Judging by the numbers of likes and shares, many many members of our extended campus family would agree.

Favorited tweets, rising: On content, connection and conversation.

While not necessarily the most important Twitter metric, the favorited tweet could be the most meaningful in its own way. I tend to think of someone favoriting a tweet as putting it in their Twitter scrapbook or hanging it on their virtual fridge. So when we see a huge surge in favorited tweets for our @SUNYOswego account, we must be doing something right.

The number of favorited @SUNYOswego tweets rocketed from 9 in November to 52 in December — and with 47 faves in the first 8 days of January, a new high-water mark appears inevitable. So why this astronomical leap? Of course, this all starts with tracking, content and interaction.

You really should track what people are saying about your college or brand online. Tweetdeck is great for doing this in real-time (other instruments like Icerocket and Addictomatic are nice too). We set up tracking columns for “SUNYOswego” (where people use the @ of our account or something the #sunyoswego hashtag), “SUNY Oswego” and “Oswego State.” (1: If your college has only one name commonly used, congratulations. 2: A feed mentioning merely “Oswego” became unmanageable by all those referencing Lake Oswego, a large Portland suburb.)

What a busy, albeit awesome day, looks like in Tweetdeck.

Seeing a comment under these columns can spark engagement. If it’s a question we can answer or direct them the right place, responding is a no-brainer. Moreover, if it’s a student tweeting they’ve been accepted or offering up praise of something or someone at the college, we usually want to retweet it, perhaps with comment. Sometimes it’s as simple as “congratulations,” depending on space available, although we may add more commentary or humor when possible. (Acceptance tweets in all caps have been known to earn the #ALLCAPSWORTHY hashtag, for example.) Very often, our retweet gets a retweet from the person we RTed (if that’s not too confusing), we gain a new follower (or three, as others see the second RT) and increasingly the user (or someone they know) favorites the tweet.

As author, blogger and all-around smart guy Scott Stratten (@unmarketing) would say, if someone took the time to say something nice about you in social media, how can you not take the time to show them a little love and attention? This idea of kindness helps drive why we RT and engage with these acceptance tweets. But it also makes good business sense, presuming you’re into that kind of thing. Yes, these students now have a connection with and favorable view of our college and become an audience for our content (read: awesome things happening at our college). Sure, they now have a point of contact if they have questions if they’re weighing us vs. other institutions. Absolutely, they see other incoming students tweeting and can start to form a network with them via Twitter. But in a more personal way, we show that someone here cares and shares their excitement at getting into SUNY Oswego.

Note that even as these tweets sometimes come in every minute or so, we try to space out the RT stream a bit so it won’t be too much of a firehouse. We realize some students see these RTs and post so their own acceptances can be recognized too. We did see the rare snark or whine posted digging at the excited tweets, but you don’t let the occasional lonely troll keep you from crossing the Bridge to Awesomeness. It’s even nice to get positive feedback from others in social media enjoying the parade of good feelings:

Yes, we replied back and even favorited this lovely tweet, if that doesn’t seem too meta.

Buzzfeed recently published a minor buzzkill on this trend, saying favorites are likely up everywhere because of a change in way the option is featured and its use as a “Twitter fist bump.” The article actually traces this increase starting with a December 2011 redesign that made the option more prominent and may have fostered a culture and conditioning toward greater favoriting. Which in and of itself is good if their assumption that perhaps “it’s a sign that Twitter is getting a little bit friendlier” is correct. But note that change occurred a while ago, and the huge jump in favoriting @SUNYOswego tweets by far outpaces increases in other metrics.

And however you slice or analyze it, seeing a huge surge in the number of people favoriting, RTing and engaging positively with your content is a wonderful thing. Where and how this converts into those admitted students enrolling at Oswego remains to be seen, but at least we have some nice benchmarks (and feelings) to start.

new to working in social media? 5 common mistakes to avoid.

It’s the time of year when many places have new people working in social media management, whether interns for colleges or other accounts or new hires ready to roll in this field. Which is exciting. And yet. I look at my Twitter ticker or Facebook feed and see so many people making simple mistakes that make me weep a little. So here are five common mistakes in social media you’ll want to avoid to make it all easier.

Watch your @. If you are replying to another Twitter account, an @ is entirely appropriate. If you’re trying to promote something and start with an @, you’re restricting your audience to only those following both accounts. If you want this message to reach your full audience, the answer is simple: Don’t start with an @! If you work in social media, you should be clever enough to know how to reword it.

Avoid the horse latitudes. Different studies say different things about when is the best time to post in social media, but what generally matters most is the content. After all, our most popular Facebook post ever went up on a Friday evening, which many self-styled “social media gurus” would advise against. That said, you should examine when your target market is active and when it’s not. When I see accounts post things appealing to students at 4:30 a.m., that doesn’t seem very wise. Lazy Sunday afternoons are also not the ideal time to try to engage a wide conversation with a general (not necessarily inspiring) question. And if there’s a much-tweeted event (Super Bowl™, award shows, “Walking Dead” season finale, etc.), any tweets — especially off topic — will drown in the flood.

Don’t be a robot. A friend of mine who just assumed greater social media responsibility announced she was unhooking the auto-feed that blasted her school’s Facebook and Twitter accounts simultaneously. And there was much rejoicing. A tweet that is awkwardly cut off in the middle and sports a Facebook link is essentially saying: “I really don’t care about Twitter.” Twitter and Facebook are two distinctly different media with different strengths and different audiences. You don’t run a TV ad on the radio or vice versa. Your social media outlets — while they should be integrated — also should have their own lives. If you can’t find 15 seconds to post something separately in Twitter and Facebook, you really don’t care about your audience.

Have conversations. Social media is not a bullhorn; it’s a conversation. Or a series of conversations. If your Facebook account is just your news releases with hardly any comments or likes, or if your Twitter account is just your posts with no @s or RTs, then it’s not very social. Also, when you post, don’t throw out lame marketing taglines. Sound like a human (see above), as if you were having a conversation with friends. Because even if you’re working social media for a brand, you ARE having a conversation with friends.

Know which account you’re in. Yes, at some point or another, we’ve probably posted something from the wrong account in haste. This is usually harmless, like when I answered a question last week from @TimNekritz via Tweetdeck forgetting to switch over to @sunyoswego. But there’s always the famous “#gettngslizzerd” example where a Red Cross employee accidentally posted about drinking exploits under the official account. To their credit, the Red Cross responded magnificently so the story had a happy ending. In terms of mobile posting, I make sure my personal Twitter account and any professional accounts are on different apps so I don’t have to worry about signing in or out. Whatever method you use, check what you’re doing so you don’t become a social media case study.

All that said, if you’re new to the field of social media management: Congratulations! It’s not necessarily easy, but it’s very fulfilling to help others and make connections. And know that there’s a massive support group of others working in this area on Twitter and elsewhere always willing to help with advice and feedback. After all, social media is about humans being social and helpful, and it really is a great job and community.

how we use pinterest: it’s about goals, users and gut.

If you work in social media, you couldn’t help but catch the buzz over Pinterest, which repeatedly smashed records for fastest social media community to [insert just about any number] members. We’ve started up a Pinterest page — but not because it’s the next shiny object. The SUNY Oswego Pinterest page came about because we saw another way to connect with key users, fulfill communication goals … and because of an intangible gut instinct.

When I brought the idea of Pinterest up to our student social media team, the three young women in the group were immediately excited about it. That doesn’t happen when I mention working in Twitter or Formspring or Foursquare, so my gut instantly realized that if part of our target market was this into the platform, it had real potential. Of course, that Pinterest mainly appeals to women is considered a punchline in some sectors … but it’s foolish to pooh-pooh such a huge market (around 55 percent of our students are female, for one thing).

One intern, Jenna, immediately thought of two potential boards — photos of items students should bring when moving in (one of the questions we hear the most in social media) and images of places of interest in the Oswego community (ditto). Thus our ongoing goal of better communicating with potential/incoming students gives one great peg for using Pinterest. As I always say: Goals first, then tools. Ideas for boards about various living options, activities on campus, sporting events and even winter preparation followed … all produced by students on the team.

I’ve also talked to key folks in alumni relations, who are also interested in photos and items of interest to alumni. One of the alumni magazine’s most popular stories involved images and stories of famous performers who played Oswego over the years, so historic photo galleries are in the planning stages. Thus we can offer content that spans the student lifecycle — from when they’re choosing a college to graduates recalling their glory days.

Say what you will about Pinterest, but if your institution has goals, motivated people (students!) working on it and a focus on content of interest to your audience, it’s well worth pursuing.

fishing with shiny objects: the trouble with apps vendors.

Apparently we have an mobile app vendor on a fishing expedition around campus. He’s dangling shiny objects and looking for bites. This probably happens a lot, and it’s generally bad news for your college.

If this were, say, the 19th century, I could totally see app vendors being snake oil salesman, going from town to town vending miracle tonics that cure whatever is wrong with you. It’s no coincidence that app vendors almost never contact any college’s web communication office — they don’t want to talk to those who think about content, audiences and goals for the web on a professional basis. Instead, they fish around the fringes, trying to sell their Miracle App that can, well, cure your boredom and need for a shiny object.

When the conversation turns to mobile apps, two main questions tend to follow:
1) Will this provide a mobile solution to a particular problem or meet a specific goal? If so, then consider exploring it, but be wary of overpromising and underdelivering on the vendor’s part.
2) Wouldn’t it be cool for my office to have an app? No. Just no. Do not pass Go, please don’t pay a mobile vendor $200.

Our college explored and released a mobile site which, by all research, is the more reasonable way to address things like user need, content delivery and tasks people would handle on a mobile device. But apps — for the right task, the right price — are not totally out of the question. Once we learned the apps vendors were on the prowl, we’ve started discussing some kind of app policy. I’m not a huge fan of policies, but I feel like there should be some kind of check before someone bites on that shiny object and gets reeled in at great potential expense. Plus the consistency of things like names, logos and colors are important … as well as the hub-and-spoke model to let users know where they can go for other campus-related tasks.

hearing voices: doing a 180 on how we use 140.

When we launched the @sunyoswego Twitter account a few years ago, we weren’t using it in an ideal manner. But some evolution in Twitter itself and a change of our philosophy has led to a 180-degree change in how we use our 140 or less characters.

Going in, I knew Twitter was about interacting. But it began as One More Thing To Do, so the initial efforts were more push than interaction, and I didn’t do a great job budgeting time to responding to tweets mentioning our school. Of course, we had all those misleading polls and articles alleging Teens Don’t Tweet, although we discovered that was a fallacy fairly quickly.

So, with the help of great social media interns, we went more interactive, provided more live-tweeting, posted more photos in addition to answering questions. And it was good. But I realized that, while this painted a pretty good portrait of the campus, something was missing: Other voices.

Starting a few months ago, I placed greater emphasis on putting other voices into our stream, generally through retweets. Some thought-provoking #highedweb11 presentations provided inspiration, as did the idea from roller derby (and, before it, yes, professional wrestling) of “putting over” skaters, or helping audiences care and/or understand more about the players. I set up Tweetdeck columns for “sunyoswego” “suny oswego” and “oswego state” which keep us apprised of our mentions. Our goal: Weave in the stories of other accounts on campus and our supporters already tweeting our praises on social media — alumni, current students and incoming students.

The stream now features retweets of various organizations and offices on campus doing awesome events and programs. It provides value and validation to those accounts and their activities — growing not only their followers and participants but providing a better cross-section of what happens on campus. We’ve had accounts on campus ask for us to retweet them which we will do when they are providing value. A few times we’ll have someone ask to tweet their account’s existence, check to find they’ve posted no content and suggested they include @sunyoswego in a tweet of something they’re doing when they want a retweet. Saying “hey, check out this account that isn’t posting any content of value” lessens the value or our validations.

For the past week, we’ve had all kinds of students happily tweeting about their acceptance into SUNY Oswego. Here I stick with the awesome advice of Scott Stratten, aka @unmarketing: “I don’t know the ROI (return on investment) of tweeting back when a student says they’ve been accepted. And I don’t care. Just do it! It’s the right thing to do.” We usually retweet with a congratulations and/or welcome and/or something related to their tweet. A straight-up retweet seems lame and self-promotional, while adding some greeting or congratulations is more engaging and special to the recipient.

As a result of all this, we’ve seen a flood of new followers (the people we retweet will follow us, and often retweet our retweet, which leads to more followers), and a higher level of interaction than ever. We’ve been able to show those followers a wider swath of campus life. And most importantly we’re building a larger, more engaged and richer community experience … which is, as Stratten says, the right thing to do.