RED5: Talking to Your Boss About Twitter...

Lori Packer: My name is Lori Packer and I'm at the University of Rochester. My official title is Web Editor. It's one of those odd communications titles that doesn't really mean anything; I haven't edited anything in a long time. I'm responsible for designing and maintaining the university's homepage and a lot of the central administrative pages and a lot of the social media profiles that we have out and about.

When I first put together this presentation, I had a very specific story in mind. Actually, this happened this summer. I wanted to start by telling you a true story. None of the names have been changed because no one is innocent.

Last summer, I was sitting in my office, as I often do, and I got one of my bosses' famous cryptic emails at about 10 o'clock in the morning, saying, "Lori, how many university presidents are on Facebook?" Sent from 'my iPhone'. And I thought, 'Hmm, I don't know. I'm going to go with 12. I have no idea. No clue.'

[Laughter]

Lori Packer: In my head, I thought that. But in reply to my boss, I said, "I have to imagine the number is fairly small. Do you want me to go and look and see if I can find any examples? Would that be useful?"

So I go to Facebook, and I start looking around trying to find university presidents on Facebook, searching for some names of people that I know are university presidents... I actually found two... and I was compiling a little list.

I got a second email from our president's administrative assistant, who is also my boss' spouse, saying, "Lori, we're having a meeting in the president's conference room right now to talk about Facebook. Can you join us?" And I thought, 'Oh, God. What fresh hell is this?'

I checked out our university's Facebook page real quick to make sure nothing had exploded that I wasn't aware of that I was going to be asked to either explain or, worse yet, remove. And everything was fine. Everything was sizzling over nicely. So I grabbed my notebook and ran upstairs.

I get to the conference room, and in addition to my boss and my boss' spouse, the university president's senior administrative assistant was sitting in there, the legal counsel from our law office was sitting in there, our tech support person, our executive IT person who does the desktop support for the executive folks, the provost's executive assistant, the board of trustees' executive assistant, and one other random person.

So there was like eight people in this conference room. And I walk in and... The long story short is, our president had received what turned out to be a Facebook invite from one of our trustees. And the boilerplate language says something to the effect of, 'Share stories. Share photos. Become a friend on Facebook.'

They misunderstood that to mean that this particular trustee was trying to share specific photos, like she had photos that she was trying to send to Joel, and he couldn't get them because he wasn't on Facebook. So he convened this group to find out how he could get these photos so that he could view them because they were sent by the trustee.

The immediate question, though, that they needed me for was, of those eight people in the room, nobody had a Facebook profile, so they could not log onto Facebook to even see what this message was about.

[Laughter]

Lori Packer: So I had to get on the presentation machine in the conference room and log into my Facebook page so they could look at the invite and look at the mail and poke around. So that turned into a conversation about, 'Should the president have a Facebook page?'

Once I figured out, I was like, no, she's not actually sending him any specific photos. 'She probably just joined Facebook and she's looking for people to invite, and she knows your email address and she invited you.' Now, the question is, should Joel have a Facebook page?

That kind of went back and forth for a while, and I'll get to this a little bit later, but the main conclusion of the story, to finish it off, was that, no, Joel should not have a Facebook page because Joel doesn't want a Facebook page. If he wants one, fantastic, but if you are on Facebook, you have to do it because you want to do it. He doesn't have to do it. He doesn't have to accept an invitation from somebody.

And worse yet, he doesn't have to have one that he never maintains, that his secretary is maintaining, or just sits out there like someone pretending to be the president. So, no, our president does not have a Facebook page.

But that story was illustrative to me and I thought it would be a great kick-off for the revamped version of this presentation, because it really gives you an indication, I think, of some of the obstacles that we face when we're trying to talk to other folks in our units across our universities about social media generally.

So when I was putting this presentation together for this year, I asked the Twittersphere, I asked you all about your experiences with talking to your bosses about Twitter and social media. So I put out a little call, "When you talk to your boss about Twitter or any social media idea, what do you say? What's worked?"

And I got a couple of responses, which was cool because they were from both ends of the spectrum. Jenny replied, saying, "I say, 'Hey, I'm going to do this fun, new thing on insert-social-media,' and they say 'Cool! Go for it.'" So that's what Jenny's found at her place.

But then Tony Dunn replied, saying, "There's no point talking to anyone on my campus about Twitter. Management doesn't get it, Twitter or social media in general."

What are some of the obstacles that we face when we're trying to talk to folks who maybe don't do this for a living? What is interesting or why are social media ideas valuable?

The first one is that Twitter specifically... And I'm going to be picking on Twitter a little bit during this presentation, but it's really about social media. I'm going to be using Twitter as more of an example. And you might notice that throughout my presentation... I did my entire presentation last year as tweets. So each slide is a tweet.

That was a really cool idea I thought last year, not knowing that by the time I got to Cincinnati this year, my Twitter profile picture of me sitting in my baseball hat at Citizens Bank Ballpark in my Phillies hat on the day after the Cincinnati Reds swept the Phillies in Cincinnati might be a little inappropriate. So any locals in the audience, please don't throw things until I'm done.

[Laughter]

Lori Packer: But that is me at the Phillies game with my...

The first obstacle, specifically with Twitter and for a lot of these social media tools, they're easy to mock. Twitter is easy to mock. It's called 'Twitter', number 1. It comes with all sorts of weird vocabulary. You have to go to meetings and speak like an intelligent human being about tweets and retweets and DMs and @replies and stuff that people have no idea what you're talking about.

These are all direct quotes from people I work with in Fuller. "If you're on Twitter, does that make you a twit or a tweeter? Ha ha ha." And I get this one before most meetings with the same guy: "So Lori, what's going on in MyFace or Spacebook? Ha ha ha."

The second obstacle with these folks is that they know about these tools, but they don't know about these tools. They're smart people, they work in higher ed, so they've obviously heard of Twitter, they've heard of Facebook. When the New York Times is writing articles about senators tweeting from the floor of Congress during Barack Obama's State of the Union Address, you do hit sort of a tipping point, so they've heard about these things.

But they don't, for the most part... sort of a generalization... but for the most part they don't use them. So they don't really know. But they think they know.

I answer this question a lot... "I'm brushing my teeth," "I'm eating my pizza," I mean, who cares?... where people think that that's what Twitter specifically in this case is about. And Twitter's a little bit to blame for this when they first started. If you remember before New Twitter or Twitter 2.0, there was a simple little screen that just said, "What are you doing?" And that idea, because it was so simple, which was why it was so cool, also got imprinted in people's minds that that's what Twitter is for and that's all it's for.

And it's not really. It's not really 'What are you doing?' It's not like a litany of every step I do through my day. It's more of, 'What am I doing? What am I experiencing? What am I reacting to? What am I learning? What am I finding? What do I feel like sharing with you?' And, yes, sometimes I do want to know that you're eating your pizza, if it's really good pizza and I'm in Boston and I don't know anything about Boston pizza. That is valuable to me, too.

So there is some personality, but it's not just a list of 'What am I doing?' And that can sometimes be a misperception that you have to correct.

And those first two obstacles, these quotes again, I think they go hand-in-hand, the fact that Twitter is easy to mock and the fact that people don't really know how to use it or what it's for. We mock what we don't understand. It will inoculate you against embarrassment if you can make fun of something if you're not willing to admit that you don't understand it.

This quote in particular, "What's going on in MyFace and Spacebook?" that was a guy... he would generally slip and call Facebook 'Spacebook' and it was funny and we all laughed. But now it's like his little joke to ask... he's basically asking me to report on my social media activities, but that's the way that he asks.

But he does that because he's a great guy, he's sort of buddies. If he's not on the tools himself, he doesn't want to admit maybe that this is something that's new to him, it's not something he's participating in. So you inoculate yourself against embarrassment by making fun of it.

Obstacle Number 3: Shouldn't you be working? There is a perception that Facebook and Twitter are just fun and games. They're free, number 1. Monetarily free. They have a certain fun factor about them that goes a long way to making them as useful as they are. If there wasn't that fun factor to these social sites, I don't think we would use them nearly as much.

But it is definitely work. It will become someone's job if you start doing anything real in social media. It will become someone's job to keep up with this stuff and to maintain it and to feed it, as you will see later. But if it's not considered work, you won't get the resources you need to do it and do it well if it's just considered fun and games.

Just because it's fun doesn't mean it's not work. 'Maintaining a social media presence will be a task that someone or some ones will need to take on,' is my argument. And I would say that, along the way, whenever you get an opportunity, whether you're just broaching an idea or starting a new project or trying to get more resources for an existing project, this is a statement you need to make over and over again.

When someone says, 'We need to have a Facebook page,' great, who's going to maintain it? It's going to be someone's job. It's not going to exist on its own. You don't create it and set it and forget it. Someone needs to be doing something with it. Who would name him? Who in your office is going to do this? Is it a group? Is it one person? Because it's going to be someone's job.

Obstacle Number 4: Justify often equals quantify. Yeah, it looks kind of a bummer. This one kind of bums me out because I've been trying to learn a little bit more about the metric side of all this stuff.

This is the only one I've been able to find by Jim Sterne called "Social Media Metrics". You may have other books that you've been able to check out on this. This is coming more from a corporate standpoint. I think a lot of these probably are turned to social media marketing. But it has some interesting ideas about how you can start to measure things.

Honestly, I don't do a lot of anything like the metrics side doing the website other than knowing our follower counts and how many times we've been listed and how many times things get retweeted. And I honestly don't know how to put especially a dollar sign number around those things. I'm more one of those 'How do you measure the value of conversation?' people.

And I know it can't stay that way forever. I know there needs to be real data around these things. But right now I'm not the expert on that side of things, but I am trying to do more on that front.

So what can we do to overcome these obstacles and actually talk to our bosses about Twitter?

Over the last few years, I've been asked to do a bunch of presentations to different groups in our university... to the board of trustees, to the president's cabinet, to some of the deans, the department chairs... really just about, 'We noticed you've maintained the university's Facebook page. Can you come and talk to us about Facebook?' or 'We noticed you're on Twitter. Can you come and talk to us about Twitter?' And over those last couple of years now, I've helped land on a couple of tips, I think, that just help you have that conversation with folks who maybe don't use these tools themselves.

And I should say, too, if anyone has any questions or comments as I'm going along, just feel free to chime in if you've had other experiences or just have a question you'd like to ask. Feel free.

So how do we even get started? I would argue that the very first thing we need to do is convince our bosses that this stuff is real.

I think because of the fun factor and because there's no cost involved and because it just feels like something the kids are doing, for lack of a better word, that it's not a real communications vehicle, it's not a real tool that you should be using. So we need to convince our bosses that this stuff is real.

And to do that, statistics can be useful door-openers. I said earlier I don't have a lot of good information yet about individual social media metrics, but there are some statistics that can really open somebody's eyes, open some doors to just establishing the fact that, you know what, this is not going away. This is not Santa Claus. This is real stuff that we need to be paying attention to.

And your bosses might be forgiven for thinking that something like Twitter is the next dotcom bubble. If they remember the Pets.com sock puppet being thrown on the dustbin of history, they might think, 'Oh, this is just another one of those.' So some overall statistics might help make the case.

This is a slide from a presentation that's now about a year and a half old from March 2009. And this was one of those very basic overview 'What is social media?' presentations.

At that time, I described Facebook and what it was. 'It's the flagship social site for college students and young professionals.' And at that time it had just turned five years old in March 2009, had 175 million active users.

The 99% figure was the number of incoming freshmen who already had a Facebook profile. That was a study from a college at Amherst. I don't have any updated data on that, but I still believe it. There were 300,000 new users being added a month. Yes? Yes? And our university page had at that time 4,300 fans. 300,000 users a day, sorry. Not a month.

If I were to update that slide for today... professionally, of course...

[Laughter]

Lori Packer: Jump ahead to now, six and a half years later. Facebook is six and a half years old. It now has 500 million active Facebook users... these are Facebook's own numbers... and they're growing at a rate of 475,000 new users a day. And our university Facebook page has 8,800 followers. So that's in the span of a year and a half.

When I first showed this slide about the 175 million active users, I mentioned in the room that if Facebook were a country, it would be the sixth largest country in the world, more than Brazil, more than Bangladesh, more than Pakistan. Now, if Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest country in the world behind only the United States and China.

And there were a couple of members of the president's cabinet in the room who were just smiling like, 'Really? Really?' looking back and forth to each other, and it seemed a little light bulb went off. It sunk in with them. 'Really? That many people are using Facebook?'

So the next thing I would do in these meetings is let them see for themselves and take them for a test drive.

You may have seen and experienced yourself people doing a demo of Twitter for someone else who's never experienced Twitter. They might send out a tweet saying, "Hi, I'm showing Twitter to a friend of mine. Who wants to say hello?" And you have friends from Seattle and L.A. and Pennsylvania and New York saying, "Hi! Hi, friend! Welcome to Twitter!"

And it's very simple. It's been done a lot now. It never fails to impress the person you're showing, because as soon as they start seeing the responses that your friends are sending back to you from these far-flung corners in real time, it starts to make them think about the possibilities and starts to let them have some ideas.

This is our engineering school dean, Dean Clark, and he started this last year. He was a new dean at the time. And he started a Twitter profile for himself and he sent out this tweet. This was like the second or third thing he ever tweeted, saying, "The first student to call our office" at the phone number "will receive a University of Rochester banner and a Decal."

I just realized this just when I was putting this presentation together again: he sent it at 6:17 in the morning.

[Laughter]

Lori Packer: So it was kind of weird. I didn't notice that last time. But he got a reply at 6:18 in the morning, and that was his response, saying, "Wow! That was quick!" And he was just floored.

I thought it was cute that he used a phone number. He didn't just say, "Retweet this." He was like, 'Call me on my phone!' Ring-a-ding-ding!

[Laughter]

Lori Packer: But it worked. We had a new engineering publicist in our office who wanted to try and experiment with the new dean, and he was game, and he gave it a whirl.

I've got to say, he was very out-of-the-gate excited, and then it kind of fell down again. And then as the semester just started this past month, he's sort of back and trying it again. So we'll see. It's definitely an experiment, a work in progress with Dean Clark.

So it's much easier to let them see the conversation that's going on than to try to tell them for yourselves. That's where that demo comes in. That's where what Dean Clark did with his experiment with the phone comes in.

The other thing that I would do in those meetings... for example, when I would show people Facebook... is I actually would bring up... this is a slide from another presentation... I would bring up my Facebook page and say... At first I'd have this slide, 'This is me on Facebook,' and then I'd go to Facebook and log in, making a joke about 'I hope none of my friends are up to anything naughty' while actually really seriously hoping none of my friends are up to anything naughty.

[Laughter]

Lori Packer: And the coolest thing, you have to talk at a very simple but not simplistic level, if that makes sense. Because these are very smart people. These are administrators. They don't need someone like me coming and explaining to them what Facebook is, but they kind of do. So you need to play that game a little bit.

And I think being funny and having a little bit of humor about it works, but you really have to talk about it at a simpler level. The thing that people... the light bulbs would go off and they get excited about what they see happening, and the questions that you get are things like, I'll go through my little feed, my wall, see things like Shelly Keith posting something about her housewarming party, and I'm like, 'That's my friend in Arkansas. She's having a housewarming party this weekend.' 'That's my sister and pictures of her new baby.'

And they'll ask questions like, 'So when someone writes something on the Facebook, you see it? It shows up on the screen?' or on whatever that is, the wall, the feed, and you say, 'Yeah!' and they're like, 'So if you wrote something back, they'd see it on their feed?' and you go, 'Yeah! It's pretty cool! It's really fun!'

If my friend the filmmaker has a movie opening in L.A. and he'll post something on his page about it and everybody comments back and you see all the comments, that's when they start to have little light bulb moments where they start to understand it.

And it's a conversation that you really, I think, have to have at someone's desk while they're... maybe they don't have a Facebook page themselves, or you have to have it live in a meeting instead of trying to explain that there are these things called pages and profiles and status updates and comments. You need to walk them through it, and then they get it.

And it's fun to see. It's fun to see when people actually understand the purpose of something that they maybe knew about but didn't try themselves.

The other thing they may start to do, though, is get a little nervous. At this point, your boss may start to get scared.

Another piece of the demo that I like to do when I show people stuff on Facebook and Twitter or YouTube is... and if you haven't done this with your bosses, I highly recommend it. Dan Frommel said in his presentation today, "Have courage. Do one brave thing today and then run like hell."

So this is your one brave thing. Go on to Twitter or YouTube... YouTube especially... and search for the name of your institution. And just see what comes up, because something will. And it's probably not something that anyone at your office had anything to do with, and that's probably a great thing and that's probably a not-so-great thing, depending on what comes back.

And this is when your boss might start to get really scared. 'Why is all this stuff out there? Could you do something about that?' I'm like, 'No. Absolutely not. I don't even want to. I think it's fine that it's out there.'

Luckily, we have an acapella group that has an amazing YouTube channel. If you do a search for 'University of Rochester', the first 18 of 20 videos you see will be their a capella concert videos, which is fine by me. They're a great group and they do a lot of great stuff.

But this is the point where you have to start, I would argue, making the point over and over and over again... you're not going to have to make it just once... that it's not about control, it's about authenticity. This is the authentic voice of your institution, or a authentic voice of your institution. It's coming from your students, your faculty, your staff, your alumni. Why would you want to control that? Why would you want to stop that?

This is a slide from that earlier college dean presentation that I liked to end on when I gave that presentation... but I've moved it up a little bit in this one... where I try to make that point a little clearer that the line is between participation and domination. You want to participate, but not dominate, the conversation.

This is like the flip side of that when something good happens. We'll post something to the Facebook page and you'll get 50 comments and 60 likes and you're all excited, and people will say, 'Hey, this amazing spontaneous serendipitous thing just happened. Let's do it again."

There's this sort of temptation, because in my office... I don't know about you guys, but in my office they're PR people. They're not doing their job if they're not affecting the message that comes out at the end of the day. That's their job. Their job is to get more than their fair share of traditional media coverage. If they're getting their fair share, then they don't need PR people. They need to get more than their fair share.

So when something good happens, they get excited and they want to do it again. And I'm like, 'Well, I didn't know that that would... ' I posted a picture of our dining hall renovations and I thought it would get a lot of response because it's food and everybody likes to complain about food.

But everyone thought it was great and they were all excited about it. But it was just construction photos. Who knew? You post construction photos and people go crazy. 'Could we do something like that again with the installation of the new heater/chiller plant?' I doubt it, actually. I'll post a picture of it but I don't really know why.

So there's this temptation to want to spin gold out of straw, and sometimes you can do that, sometimes you can't. But what's more important is that I don't think that can be your mindset going in. It will happen, and it's great, but I don't think you can have as your mindset, 'We're going to make such and such happen,' because the good things that will happen will be mostly the kind of things that you would never have predicted.

So the second point gets to that. The institutions in this new world, they need to be able to find their feet in this virtual world and learn that it's about contribution and not control. You need to contribute to the conversation but not control it.

And then the last point I tried to make for these guys is, we're not lame ducks here. It's not that we don't have any role to play at all... I'll get to this a little bit more later... but our role above all else, I think, is to be useful. To give them, our audience, something that they can use, something they can do, something they can have fun with, something that they can't get from anybody else, and then get out of their way.

I work in a communications office. We have photographers, we have videographers, we have writers. We have content possibilities coming out our ears. So we have stuff to offer. We have really interesting stories that we can tell and great writing and all that kind of stuff. They can't necessarily get the kind of stuff that we do from anywhere else. So your content is valuable to these conversations.

But it's not the only piece of it. It's not the only thing that's ever going to be out there. That's your contribution. You need to learn to participate, but not dominate these conversations.

This was a quote that stuck with me from... I can't remember his actual name; he's from Wired magazine, Scott Ross something... where newspapers and traditional media... and I think we in higher ed fall into this category sometimes, too.

They want to go social or do something social. And in the newspaper's Facebook, what they did was, in his opinion, turn on comments and then walk out of the room. 'OK, I'm being social now, I'm being interactive. There's a comments feature.'

But that's really not the end of the story. Being social is actually pretty hard work. It's like being the host of a party. And I would argue that at that party, your content is the cocktails and nibbles. Your job as the host of the party, think about all the preparation that you do for a party. Your job as the host of the party is not to dominate the conversation, not to keep everybody from talking to everybody else.

Your job is to create an environment that people want to be in and hope that they enjoy each other's company and to provide them something to drink and snack on while they're doing it. And I think what you provide to drink and snack on is your content. You give them something to react to and react with that they can't get from anywhere else, and then let them have some fun with it and get out of their way.

And this can be a little hard. Again, it's definitely a different model because it's not really talking about writing a message or creating a message or delivering a message in a traditional maybe marketing sense. I don't know how many of you guys work in marketing offices where you have branding or message calendars or things that are a little more formalized. It's definitely not that.

It's more about the conversations that people are having with each other around you, and you have an important role to play. But you are not the person that's sending stuff out and then, that's it, nothing happens with it. And that's the good thing about it, but it's also the different thing, a potentially scary thing about it.

So another tip I give folks in our office that has worked well with us... How many people work in a communications/marketing area? About half. And how many work in an IT area or something else? Half and half?

[Laughter]

Lori Packer: Yeah, that's true. It's not really both, is it? Or it's not either/or.

In our communications area, I've asked... and some of the folks that I work with have done this just because they want to... that if you're trying this out, if you're starting something, it might be an idea to experiment with your own personal social media presence first rather than your institution's, because it's sometimes... and I'll get to this a little bit later, too... it's sometimes a little murky trying to figure out what your institution's presence on Twitter is as opposed to yourself.

So some of our younger publicists, for example, they'll start a Twitter account for themselves, and then there's lots of resources on Twitter to help a PR professional actually do their job. That's the argument that I make for Twitter all the time when people ask, "Why do you even do this? Why are you on Twitter?"

"I learn something new everyday on Twitter that helps me do my job," is my standard response to that. I consider it like a professional development tool. Sure, it gets distracting sometimes when people are talking about fun stuff too, but that's also part of learning about someone else's personality and knowing them as a person, because all of those stuff is all about people and persons.

But at the end of the day, I do learn something new everyday that helps me do my job. I didn't know anything about the new changes to Facebook groups, I didn't know anything about the new Twitter. I was the last person on the earth to get new Twitter. Probably not, but it felt like it. And I don't really use it so it doesn't really matter.

When Google cancelled Google Wave and we had an earthquake in Rochester, everything that happens, I find out about it, whether it's breaking news or something specific, because of the people I follow. The people I follow are tweeting about this stuff and then I get to hear about it, and I hopefully get to contribute something useful every now and again myself, too. But I do learn something new everyday that helps me do my job.

And for the folks in our PR office who've been excited to try it, they've done the same thing. There's a couple resources for those of you in PR. The one that I'm most familiar with is called Help a Reporter Out, HARO, and reporters will use that service... I guess it's actually... yeah, this is more of a service. They submit it to the HARO and then it gets tweeted out under the HARO Help a Reporter Out name.

They'll just send out media requests for things. And I think there are different lists for different categories, but they'll say something like, 'I need two undergraduate students to talk about the impact of the economy on financial aid' or 'I need a college administrator who can talk intelligently about the student loan scandal, and I need it in an hour' because they're always on deadlines.

And we've had a couple of minor hits from that. If you've got someone who can legitimately answer that call, it's just like someone cold-calling your office, except now they're sending it out through this service. And if you've got a good person that can respond and can respond quickly, it's a good way to get your job done. This is another tool that you can use to get your job done.

So if you're uncomfortable starting with something as big and as murky as your college's presence, see what you can do with yourselves. See what you can do with your own personal presence and see if that gives you some ideas about what you could do with your institution's presence.

Another strategy that I've employed a few times now is this sort of pilot program. I love the word 'pilot program'. I just think it means like, 'We're just going to do something. We're just going to try it out, just an experiment.' And sometimes the word 'pilot program' or 'experiment' is a little more palatable.

So try a pilot program one specific event, something concrete that's happening in real time, in real space, on your campus. Like this conference. The first time I saw Twitter take over this conference in 2008 it was like, 'This is adding a whole new layer and level at which to experience the conference and I'm actually getting as much out of it, or a different kind of stuff out of it, than I am physically being at the sessions.'

I was using it as a note-taking tool. I was basically getting other people's notes. I can go, 'Everyone else is in the four sessions. I'm only in one. I get to see everybody else's notes while I take my own? Awesome. That's perfect.' Like there's suddenly five of me and they're smarter than me and they're telling people what they think about the sessions there.

But if you try something like that on your campuses, I think it's better to focus on it and call it a pilot program if that helps. Try one specific event like commencement or, in our case, reunion weekend. Last year was the first year we tried to do a social media roll-out for Union Weekend, which in our campus is called Meliora Weekend. And this year, unfortunately, our reunion weekend is this weekend coming up, on Friday, so I have to go back to work on Thursday and go right to Meliora Weekend. I know. Last year it was before the conference. It's usually before the conference; this year it's after.

But this year we've actually got a social media team. We've got four people who are going to be live-tweeting from the different events. At UofR, our reunion weekend is kind of an intellectual reunion weekend. We have a football game, we kind of have a football team...

[Laughter]

Lori Packer: And they play a game. We have reunions, we have alumni come back. It's mainly built around a series of speakers, so it's like this. There's lots of talks going on. They bring in people to do lectures. So we're going to be live-tweeting from different events, we're going to be posting photos to Flickr much like we're doing at this conference with Ann's photos, having a live feed on the alumni site of the pictures coming in.

I don't think we're going to do anything with video. We couldn't really make a case for video. There's still a little bit of scare of just shooting video and uploading it to the site like you do. But we are going to do photos, we're going to do Twitter, and there's four of us. We've divvied out the calendar to cover events and people on top of things.

And we sold it as, 'We just want to try it out.' We've all been to events where this has really worked. We've promoted the hashtag. We put the hashtag on all the materials, we've got a Foursquare location... have no clue if anyone's going to check in or use it or do anything useful with it, but why not? Why not try? You work in higher ed. If you screw up, who's going to find out? That's a quote from...

[Laughter]

Lori Packer: Because I think it's true. I mean, it's not 100% true, but I think we have the luxury of a little bit more flexibility than maybe if you were working in private business where they're a little probably less capable or willing to give up on the control versus authenticity side. And maybe in our world, that flexibility exists a little bit more. I don't know, I haven't worked for a corporate person in a long time, so I may be completely wrong on that.

But pilot programs, I think, are a good strategy. If you're trying to get started, pick something narrow. Pick something focused.

And this is something a little new that I'm trying with the UofR account that I wanted to bring up.

I was able to successfully make the case that we should be more personal and less institutional on our university's Twitter account. And this was the book that convinced me about that. It's called "Twitterville" by Shel Israel.

It's a really great book that basically... again, it's targeted to businesses, but it spells out lots of case studies from companies about what they've done, specifically on Twitter, and successes that they've had, everything from small non-profits to big, huge Fortune 500 companies.

And his big theme is the idea that if you are on Twitter, you are a human being. 'I am not a logo. I am a free man.' That the people who are behind your Twitter account are people. No one's automatically writing things, unless you've got some RSS feeds set up to spit things out, and if you do, please stop. Unless it's maybe sports scores or something. 

But the people who are tweeting things to an institution account are still people. So why are you pretending that they're not? And is there value in showing that they are? And it took a little bit of a back-and-forth in my own head to figure that out.

But in August of this year... This is a post on my blog. If you go, you can check out a little bit more detail about what I was thinking when I made this change. To paraphrase Jon Stewart, be an effing person. That we're all people. So just be a person. Just acknowledge that you're a person.

And to be honest, when we set it up, there's our little logo, there's our UofR, Rocky, and I liked the idea that there was an institutional face and that it wasn't me. Because, 'Who am I to speak for the university?' was my feeling. I can hide behind the logo. But then, after reading this and hearing out people talk about that, I thought, 'Well, I am speaking for the university. I send things out under the university's official Twitter.' We describe it as, "This is the official University of Rochester Twitter account" and nine times out of 10 it's me, unless it's my assistant when I'm not there. For Meliora Weekend there will be four of us.

But it is just me, so why don't I acknowledge that? And then I can say, when someone asks a question or has complaints or is just spouting off about something, which doesn't happen too often, but I can acknowledge that. 'Hey, I'm just a woman who works in Wallace Hall and I'm going to do what I can to help you, but I'm not the University of Rochester who's the biggest employer in the region and who am I to speak for them?'

We've only been doing it since the end of August. I think it's freed up a lot about how we can talk about it. Our followers have gone up since I've done this, but I have no idea whether that's because of this or just because this semester started, to be honest. There's no cause and effect. I did it right at the end of August, so there was probably going to be a natural uptake in followers once people were back, anyway.

But we have had an increase in followers at a more precipitous rate than we had before, and I just think it's made it easier to think about how to use the Twitter tool to communicate.

It was always a little bit, 'I knew what I was using Twitter for. I knew what it meant for me being on Twitter and how I was responding to people.' I was always less clear what it meant for the University of Rochester to be on Twitter. It always felt weird. And now it feels a lot less weird. Now I can post a picture of goofy stuff that is happening or some examples of that. But I can do it in a way that feels more natural, because it is.

Sure.

Audience 1: [38:42 Unintelligible]

Lori Packer: I did. I don't sign my posts, but I rewrote the bio that you see on the Twitter page. I didn't use my last name. I really don't know why, because it will take someone two seconds to find out who I am. But I changed the bio to say, 'This is the official University of Rochester Twitter feed. My name is Lori. I work in Wallace Hall. I'm your head twit.' Something like that. So that's what the bio says, so that's where my name comes in.

And then for Meliora Weekend... I'll maybe show you the live Twitter page in a minute... we updated the profile picture again for Meliora Weekend. Because there's four of us, we took a new profile picture of the four of us and we're holding that hat. I think I'm going to start using that hat as like a talisman or a little cool thing to add to photos and stuff. It gets the 'R' up there nice and graphically and then also is just fun, I think.

So we've got the four of us, and one of us is holding the hat out in front. And when I changed the picture, I wrote, "Meliora Weekend is on Friday. Your Twitter team for the next few days is Lori, Sabra, Brie and Michelle," and then put our initials after us so when Brie types in something she'll write "Brie" and then when I do I'll write me. And then when I'm out of the office, I'll say, "Lori's out of the office" and "Donna will be tweeting". So, yeah, we've only been doing this for two months now, but that's how we've done it so far.

I'm going to show the few examples of some interactions that have happened since I did this change. So this is someone who, it turns out, is an alumnus, who says, "I really hate to say this, but I miss @UofR"... that's our Twitter name... "Mailing a meal plan, even if their food was absolutely terrible".

And the other thing I do is if someone tweets that and I see it in my mentions column, I go and look up who he is. He is an alumnus, so I follow him back. And sometimes they get all proud like, 'Oh, my alma mater's following me!' They get all excited that someone's following them.

So then I replied, "I don't know. I think we have some fairly decent eating establishments" with a Twitpic of our vending machines.

[Laughter]

Lori Packer: That's where I eat lunch most days. That's the vending area in what we call the Garden Level, which is really the basement of Wallace Hall.

Audience 2: Your dining services will love that.

[Laughter]

Lori Packer: See, you know what? I don't know if they knew, and if they did, my argument back would be... I mean, he replied back, saying, "It gets old. I lived out of them while I was studying for my Physical Chem test."

[Laughter]

Lori Packer: I don't know why... I hope the dining wouldn't have a problem with that, and I honestly don't know why they would.

It's a college. It's food. The only thing that keeps our campus together as a cohesive unit is that everybody hates the parking and the food. Everything else is so decentralized. If you can't complain about food at a university, if that's the thing you're going to get upset about, I think that's kind of... But it's interesting... yeah, you're right... that there could be some folks who live and breathe that more than me who would be less sanguine about the fact that people are complaining about the meal plan.

Another thing I've started doing is called the Daily Twitpic. So I'll actually take my little phone and go out and take a picture... I always have it with me... and if I see something on campus that's either beautiful... a nice building... or strange or different, I'll post a picture and call it the Daily Twitpic.

And they get about... it's not huge, again, but I'm of the 'Why not?' school. They only get about 100 and 120 views. If you go to Twitpic it will let you see the clicks. So it's not a massive number. We have about... I want to say 1,400 followers of our Twitter account, @UofR, the institutional one, so it's not a huge number, but I hope it grows over time. And if it doesn't, it's not a huge investment of time, although it is part of that resources question. It's definitely scope creep. Sometimes it will be like, 'Oh, it's two o'clock, I haven't done the Daily Twitpic,' and I have to think of some reason to go to the library so I can kill two birds with one stone, go over and get something done and then take a picture and come back.

So for this one. This is a tricky one. Can you guess where this is?

[Laughter]

Lori Packer: Sometimes I'll do little quizzes or I'll ask people to guess. And then this guy, he's an undergraduate student and he's studying abroad, and he replied, "That was tongue-in-cheek, right? Only a month until I get back on campus. Definitely get ready." So it's building excitement. He's not here, he's out in South Africa, he's studying abroad, so he sees that and thinks it's funny and responds.

Again, can I measure the monetary value of that exchange? No. I wish I could, but I have no idea how I'd begin to do that. But he's a very active person on Twitter and he responds back and forth, and if you have a little bit of goodwill with an active vocal student, I don't see why that's a bad thing.

We've moved to the bonus presentation: Talking to your boss out of Twitter. Does anyone have any questions about anything we've talked about before now? Yeah?

Audience 3: [43:59 Unintelligible]

Lori Packer: True. I mean, we were only on Twitter for less than a year before this and we had a small... I think part of it it's an upside and a downside. Part of the reason we're allowed to get away with things, and I would say that I probably do get away with things, is because people don't realize how interesting, important, fun, powerful they can possibly be yet.

So I'm trying to lay the groundwork for what I think it can be and want it to be before people start to notice. I absolutely, of course, had my boss' approval to make that change. He was skeptical about it at first and asked me to comment and describe it a little bit more. I wouldn't do something like that on my own at all.

But since I did that... for Meliora Weekend, for example, when we were pitching this idea of a team, I asked the guy who runs Meliora Weekend, 'If we really want to do this, can we identify the four people who are going to be in charge of it and then leave them alone? You've picked the right people. We all work here. We all love the place. We're all excited about Meliora Weekend. Just pick us and leave us alone.'

The Alumni folks and the Advancement folks are a lot more about message calendars and approvals and 'I need to see the language'. That was the email we kept getting back from this guy. He's a great guy and he's very excited about trying it, but always would be like, 'Could you send me the language on the Foursquare on Twitter?' 'Could you send me language on the live tweets?' and I'm like, 'No, I can't send you the language on the live tweets. It hasn't happened yet.'

But for him, I wanted to get to a place where he was comfortable saying, 'OK, these are the four people that have said they're going to do it, and now go ahead.' And that's where we're at. I wouldn't have done it otherwise. I didn't want to have to get individual tweets or schedules or anything like that approved by anybody but us.

So we've been able to successfully make that case, partly because I think they were not really paying attention yet. But when they start paying attention, I want to have that grounding established a little bit. So it wasn't a big change because we hadn't been doing it for too long in the first place.

I was going to say, we did a lot of construction for this.

[Laughter]

Lori Packer: We had made jokes about, it's summer in Rochester, of course every campus is the same where the parking lots are being paved... For us, the big excitement honestly, and it was a one-off, but they completely shut down the Student Union over the summer and renovated it.

So the whole building was closed and they did a big renovation. And then when it opened, it was completely different. And the dining area was called The Pit and it's called The Pit for a reason. And now it's not called The Pit anymore. It's called The Commons, but of course everybody still calls it The Pit. And it looks really nice. So we were doing like staged photos.

And photos. On both Twitter and Facebook, our audience is almost 50/50, I would say, alumni. Alumni is a little bit more than 50% of our audience base. And it makes sense, if you think about it. They're people that have a connection to the place but aren't physically at the place anymore.

So for people who are at the place, for current students... we have current students, too, of course, if you just go by the age demographics on Facebook. But they're already here. They're doing their thing. They're experiencing the place. They're busy, they've got classes.

But for the people who are gone, who are trying to maintain connections, I would say maybe think about alumni and the kinds of things that they would like to see over the summer because, you're right, over the summer there isn't actually anything, so there's often not a lot of events with things happening.

But just beautiful pictures of traditional... We have a wood carving of a yellow jacket. It's one of our symbols. So a picture of that at sunset. Or something that gets them feeling nostalgic and connected to the place that they like or they love for... following you. That seems to have worked out so far. And photos often have more of a conversation around them than text can.

I guess that's a nice segue to this next segment about when do you need a Facebook page or when do you want a Facebook page or a Twitter account. We haven't had that because the institutional Twitter account, the one that I manage, is basically most of the time just me and one other person... and now for the first time we're bringing in this group... but it's like the adage about movie-making. If you get the right cast, you just leave them to it. That's kind of my approach.

If you've hired the right person, you hope, and you've asked them to do something, you wouldn't have asked them to do it if you didn't think they were capable of doing it. And if something happens that isn't following what the expectations are or what you thought was appropriate at that point, you can have a little chat with the person involved. But I think the bigger thing to get right is just having the right person who's doing it. And trusting them, because you wouldn't have asked them to do it in the first place.

I think it's great to have student workers. I wish I had some; I don't. I think it would be great to have student workers doing this kind of stuff. Just hire good students. And there's a lot of good kids who will have fun, have personality with things and not post their love of Justin Bieber on the university's Facebook account, unless there might even be a legitimate reason to post your love of Justin Bieber on the university Twitter account. Can't think of one, but there might be.

So I added this to the end for this year because it's another flip side of that conversation as well where I'll get people who ask me to explain social media things and what's good about them, but then I also get the phone call from Parking... and this is true. I got the phone call from Parking, saying, "Can we have a Facebook page?" And then I think, 'OK.'

[Laughter]

Before I move into this, though, Ito be on the record, I'm of the opinion that any office... we don't have what I would call a university-wide social media policy. Maybe we should. Maybe that's something we need to look at. I know there's been a lot of conversation about that was... in a way it's all of us, all of you guys, but we don't, and I am of opinion that if an individual office or academic department has a reason for doing something and has a community they think is sustainable, that has a community that will appreciate it, go for it.

If the English Department wants a Twitter account called UREnglish, why not? If they're going to use it for classes, if they're going to use it for their events, I don't have a problem with that. And so far, my boss doesn't either, but we'll see.

What the problem becomes, I think, is when people feel like they have to be on a particular website or platform or application. They have to have a Facebook page, they have to have a Twitter account, they have to have a YouTube channel. So you'll get the phone call from Parking saying, "Can we have a Facebook page?" "Hi, I was wondering if you can help me. My office needs a Facebook page." And they know that I do the university's Facebook page, so I get the phone call.

So I answer back, "OK. How many times are you updating your website now?" Blank stares. If you're not updating your actual... if you don't have enough content to keep a website fresh, what are you going to do on a real-time social channel that needs a lot more care and feeding than maybe your website does? What's going there?

A Facebook page, again, is not a 'set it and forget it' thing. It needs care and love. It needs care and feeding. It needs cocktails and nibbles. You need to provide that. Who in your office is going to do that?

And you have to want to do it. You can't do it because you think you're supposed to or because you think you have to. You have to really want to be on the platform and everything that that entails.

This goes back to the first story with our president. If he wanted to be on Facebook, if he wanted to have his niece friend him and share pictures with the trustee's wedding and create groups around whatever, absolutely, great. If you don't want to do those things, don't do those things, because that's part of what you do on Facebook. So you have to actually want to be in the space.

And then my last little tidbit, not an original thought at all, but still never goes out of style: Goals, not tools. There's sort of a question, 'Do you need a strategy before you go into these things or should you just do it?' I'm definitely of the 'just do it' variety often because I think you don't know what something is usable for or what's interesting or was interesting about it until you start playing with it.

So if you get approval to do it, you should definitely just do it. But you should have something in mind that you're trying to achieve through it, and you should be quick to abandon it if you don't think it's getting there.

Things like Facebook and Twitter could become the next Web, possibly, the next social Web. Any individual company or website could disappear tomorrow. Ask Groban about Google Wave. It could just go away. Nothing.

But I would argue, on the social side, that the idea that we're using the Web to connect with individual people in interesting ways on the Web and on our mobile devices is not going away, even if particular companies and software packages and platforms change. So that idea is here to stay, I think. That one of the key uses of the Web as a set of technologies is to connect with individual people on a personal level. How institutions find their feet in that space, how brands find their feet in that space is the tricky part at the moment.

That's a good question. I've never deleted. I mean, you can. It's technically possible to remove a Facebook page. I never have. And I don't really know what the threshold would have to be to make that decision because, you're right, the first thing I would do if I were to notice it would be, 'I notice you haven't been posting anything to your Facebook page lately. Are you struggling with content ideas or have you found that it's not meeting your needs? Can we just delete it?' Maybe ask them the question.

Yeah, and if they had some access to their insights, they can see what their active... the insights panel in Facebook gives you a lot of data about just individual use of it. Are people even visiting it anymore? If you've got some data, you can go back to them with it and say, 'This looks like it's not really generating a lot of activity. Have you considered deleting it?'

I'm sorry, I forgot to mention that there's a great... and this will be posted with my conference materials... there's a great little one-sheeter that Rachel Reuben, now of Ithaca College, that was shared with her by Queens University that she calls The Social Media Brief, and it's five questions about...

It's basically answering the 'We need a Facebook page' and it's like, 'OK, who's going to maintain it in your office? How often do you think you're going to need to update it? What materials do you think you have now to update it with? How much help do you need updating it?'  It's four or five questions that has saved me from the Parking people, I will say.

[Laughter]

Lori Packer: Our HR office wanted a Facebook page, which I just thought... And the reason they wanted a Facebook page was because they were worried about recruiting and they wanted to have a presence on Facebook. I'm like, you perform a very important service for the university. That does not translate to 'I need a Facebook page.' What would you do on Facebook that would help you do this service? Maybe there's a good answer to that, but they didn't have one. So they shouldn't have a Facebook page.

People that I've kind of talked down, I'll say, have been grateful to feel like... It comes from a place of... 'fear' is too strong a word, but they feel like they're not doing something that they should be doing.

And when you reassure them that, you really don't have to do this. You have to be able to do it and have a reason to do it if you want to, but you really don't have to as a unit, and exactly what you said, I'll say, 'If you ever have anything that you think should go on the university's Facebook page, send it to me and I'll consider it and it goes out to the whole community. You don't have to create your own necessarily.'

And so far, the two departments that I've talked out of it have been grateful that they've been talked out of it, I'd say. But that's the response that I've given to them.

I think I'm done. Cool. Thanks, guys.

[Applause]

Lori Packer: I'm available for questions or anything afterwards.