SOC1: Guided by Voices: Why Institutions Need a Social Media Identity

Jack Daniel: Welcome. I'm glad I'm not the only one thinking WKRP jokes. Just...I had to say that. God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.

I hadn't actually thought about doing this presentation originally. This sort of came to me when I was at Ithaca College. We would get a steady stream, I would say pretty much daily, of people telling us--via Twitter usually, sometimes on Facebook--that "Wow, Ithaca College just gets social media in higher ed! They get that they have to actually talk to and with us."

And I hadn't really thought about it as such. I just sort of realized that when I was thinking about doing social media for the College that I didn't know how to communicate without sounding like somebody. It was there.

So I started thinking about it and realized that, unconsciously, I had really crafted something that was particularly the institution, a voice that to me resonated with what Ithaca College sounded like collectively. And apparently it resonated with a lot of other people.

So, anyway, that's what led me to this place.

So, voice. What's a voice? And by the way, just so you know, this is the fluff piece of the day. I'm probably not at medal competition, but I'm like the Jamaican bobsledders over here. This will probably not change you institutional plan at all. But it's nice to know.

So what do you mean by 'voice'? The voice of your institution, it's not so much the elevator speech but it's the tone and the cadence of it. It's what sounds comfortable. It's what your various constituent audience hear and think, 'Yeah, Ithaca. Yeah! That's good. I like that. I'm comfy there. I remember that,' or 'I want to go there,' or 'I hope my kid goes there.'

So the voice is really a conversational extension of your brand. It's all that work you spend doing brand identity, all that time and effort to establish your marketing platform so that you could say, "This is who we are. This is what we do. This is what we're about." And it's turning that into someone who had all those properties and then had to go to a cocktail party and discuss it.

[Laughter]

Jack Daniel: So how do you determine that? How do you know what that is? Well, there are a lot of factors, not the least of which is listening to your environment.

I grew up in Ithaca, New York and was at Ithaca College for eight years. And I knew, simply by virtue of living there, just by gleaning from the institution some pretty important things about it, a few rules to that. Be true to your school. Know what it is that your school does best.

Ithaca College is a performance school. When I was a kid, I knew three things about it: I knew that they did a lot of plays, I knew that there were a lot of musicians, and I knew that they played football because the coach lived across the street from me.

And all three of those, that's people on a stage, that's people performing, that's putting it out there. And once I started working at Ithaca, it became clear to me that pretty much all of the programs, everything that the institution did, everything that we encouraged our students to do, was about performance.

So having identified that, Ithaca's kind of showy. It's kind of 'jazz hands'. And the only people who know that is because in your tweets, in your Facebook post, what have you, you inflect this voice, this sound. You're not afraid to be funny. You're not afraid to have a little fun with people. And nothing sort of identifies you as a person rather than a machine quite like humor. And talking like a person is really essential.

People are so used to this institutional edifice. They're so used to just running up against the wall. I mean, "Oh, that's the institution and I can't go there." 

They respond really positively if you give them something to work with, and someone who's friendly and conversational and what not can do that. You want them to be careful. You want to make sure you're matching tone for tone.

Most people, when they're on Twitter or Facebook, they're just kind of musing, especially on Twitter. And TweetDeck was like the greatest invention in my life because I could just sort of put my ear to the ground to hear what people were talking about Ithaca all over the place. And they would say things often just sort of idly, like, "Oh, I miss Fall in Ithaca from when I was a student there." And you just put up a little photo there of Fall in Ithaca and they get on musing and give you money, and it's great! It's a great way to talk to people.

But they're not always just idly musing like that. Sometimes it's more serious. Sometimes they're going, "Oh, I can't register for classes." This is a chronic one that I see; there were some registration issues a while back. "I can't register. I'm struggling. I'm up at 7 am. I can't get my classes. This is a nightmare." So you change the voice a little bit. You want to be sympathetic and you want to be helpful.

Tread lightly, because there are hot button issues out there. And for whatever reason, there is always someone spoiling for a fight someplace. Usually you can avoid it, usually you can deflect it, and the fact is, if you've done the first three steps, you've made some friends online, you have people who trust you as the voice of the institution who identify with you, and they go from being potential critics to being advocates. So that really makes a big difference when you've got someone really pushing your buttons.

That said, if someone's really got an issue, if it's a legitimate concern, a gripe or like that, make sure you direct them to the right people immediately and not try to solve it yourself.

And finally, listen to direct feedback and the back channel. They are two different kinds of feedback. People are a little more open in one than the other. But it does help you shape the responses, help you shape your voice in the next iteration as you're learning. It's always evolving. It's always changing. If it's not working, you're going to know about it.

Why does it matter? Who cares, this voice? These kids, they come to school, they give us the money, we teach them the stuff, they learn and they go--what? What?

Well, it isn't always that easy. Your institution doesn't control the Web beyond your borders. People are already having these conversations. This isn't optional. And most of you know this--you've done this kind of stuff before--but the simple fact is, it never hurts to repeat that we're not the ones controlling the message.

The message existed long before us. And people were already talking about it. We just have the capacity to actually listen now. And so it's more important to be aware of how you engage with these audiences. It's more important to notice what your tone is and how you're responding.

Do you sound sort of petulant because everybody's complaining about the weather or the fact that the catalog is hard to read or what have you? You don't want to get yourself in that situation.

Broadcasting is hideous. And at my new job, where they're a little behind in social media, they're sort of proud of themselves for broadcasting everything on Twitter and Facebook, and I'm just now getting to the point where I can convince people, "Look, all you're doing is sending out another news feed. You're not telling anybody anything they don't already know."

Moreover, if you've gotten people on board, if you're in conversation with people, if people have needs and you meet them, if they have concerns and you listen, they're going to listen to you and they're going to like you. And then they'll take what you put out there and then they'll push it out.

Friendcasting is just the way we all get news now. I mean, I do my best to read the paper everyday but the simple fact is, half the stories I read someone forwarded to me on Facebook or what have you. So we want to be one of those stories.

And more than anything else, it's just another opportunity to shake your brand. The brand as you know is living. It's breathing. It's always changing in the hands of the consumers as well as those of us who are trying to push it. And this is another way to engage people in an area that maybe they're more comfortable with.

People don't always say things when they come to your campus and write on the comment cards or what have you, but they're thinking them elsewhere. They're thinking them afterwards. And this is an opportunity to engage them at that moment.

Now once you start to establish the voice, once you get to know where your voice is and what shapes it, you put yourself in a position where you actually can address a whole bunch of different issues. And when I was at IC, I found that Twitter for me was really where I was the most comfortable in contending with audience issues, concerns, things people were excited about, what have you.

So these are just some of the examples that we did.

We would acknowledge new students. It's always important when people are out there talking about, "Oh, I got in, I got in!" And they also probably got into five or six other places that I wasn't following, but there's no reason we can't engage them here.

And this is one thing, every time someone you know, puts up a little something, have a little fun with them. But we had people come in the last couple of years who would tell us, "You know, you guys are the only people who paid any attention when I was excited about coming here. Nobody else was listening. Nobody else engaged me."

I had a mother who--some government mucky-muck in the state of Massachusetts--had been musing about where her kid was going to go for months. And at each point I just sort of interacted. And when he got in, I said, "That's really great. I really think you guys will fit in well here," blah blah blah. And in time the kid ended up coming, and the mother told me, "You guys are the only ones who paid attention. No one else was listening." It's an easy fix.

Campus notifications are always good. You build these elaborate systems and what not to get the message out, but a lot of people are just following Twitter or Facebook. So, emergency notification system. Try to look surprised.

Academics. A little tough to push academics sometimes at 140 characters, but it can be done, especially the fun stuff. There's a lot of fun stuff with Child Development Psychology kind of stuff at Ithaca. So we would always push little bits like that.

Be seasonally relevant. April Fool's Day is a lot of fun, and so one year, because I couldn't do some big elaborate Web thing, I just started doing a Twitter thing on one of our integrated courses because we were trying to do more interdisciplinary at IC.

And so I said, "One of IC's new integrated courses, Literature in the Age of Twitter, aims to discover the 140-character soul of great works," EG, and then there were a whole bunch of them. This was kind of my favorite, "Of Mice and Men". Oops. "Anna", we went for "Ulysses", and a bunch of others. "Ulysses" was fun, snuck in one word or two.

And that led to some funny things and little back-and-forth. When you start to take on the voice, people begin to interact with the voice, and not just the institution, and it gets a little surreal, like this one. This is in response to all the literature ones, this girl wrote.

[Laughter]

Jack Daniel: And so you've just got to roll with it, what you've got yourself in there.

And by the way, this wasn't anything--I wouldn't say that this was officially sanctioned by the University that I started doing it this way.

[Laughter]

Jack Daniel: We simply had a conversation--there was a big committee on campus, a Facebook task force that was in charge of social media policy and opportunities and what not, and we put together a big proposal, and it died on somebody's president's desk someplace. And there was a void. I just walked into it. My boss was amenable and I was, "I'm going to go do this." "Go. It's your ass."

So we just did it, and it got a very favorable response. I mean, nothing succeeds like success, right? It wasn't called to anyone's attention in any sort of senior position until it was well on its way to doing really well.

It's always good to share your press. It's funny--people will sort of idly complain about a school or about whatever, a job, until they see something written about it in the mainstream press and then they're like, "Yeah, it's my school! Yeah! My school! Wooh!"

I live in the Deep South now and every Saturday afternoon there's just a lot of "Wooh! My school! Wooh!" So I'm sort of adjusting to that now.

[Laughter]

Jack Daniel: But this is actually--it's funny to actually look at this. This is actually the very last thing I ever tweeted for IC, and I only knew about it because I was flying back and forth for this new job.

This is a fun one. Do you know the peculiar habit people have of blaming or cheering your school for things you cannot possibly control? I just loved it. This was like a daily event that I'd see. People would muse about things, and the weather was a big one. People would always say, "Why is it snowing?" "Why is it raining?" "Why is it too sunny today at Ithaca College?" "What have you done to me?"

[Laughter]

Jack Daniel: And this one was funny. This was right after Cornell was in the Sweet 16 and they lost. And we were like, "OK, get a grip. There's some fun stuff going on in town."

It snows a lot there. Not as much as Syracuse or someplace, but it snows enough that people get irritated. And we got a huge mass of complaints one day because we wouldn't close. And these are kids who are like walking a hundred yards from the dorm to the dining hall. We got people who work there who had to drive 30 miles in from the country riding on the back of a snowplow.

But they couldn't get their heads around it. So sometimes you've just got to diffuse them a little bit, because if you get in a pissing match with them, then you'll lose. Then the voice loses. You've got to stay humble even when they give you the love. Awesome approach to it, yeah.

Now, the opposite of humble is hubris. And the voice got kind of big for me. I got to the point where I could sort of dream in the voice a little bit and was thinking about it more often than I should have.

And so we were getting a lot of awards. Kids were winning all kinds of stuff, man--Fulbrights and things--and it seemed like there was just so many. And so I wanted to express the volume, the total volume of all these great awards and how we were just like inundated with this stuff.

So I tweeted this. It took about 30 seconds before the first one came in: "So you're saying that the degrees are worthless the minute they're printed?"

[Laughter]

Jack Daniel: "Oh, no! I meant the volume and the number and"--oh, fuck it. [Laughter] I was ruined. But, you know, it happens. It happens if you've got the feel for it. You've got to kind of watch that it doesn't get away from you because, yeah, the voice will turn on you.

Now that used to be the end. But then I moved, and I needed an epilogue. And it's the only epilogue picture I could find. I don't know, what's in that blog look like, right?

[Laughter]

Jack Daniel: I was doing my thing there at Ithaca, and an opportunity came along. And I had to say goodbye to beautiful, serene, sophisticated, hippy-laden Ithaca and embrace the more beguiling charms of New Orleans...

[Laughter]

Jack Daniel: ...where I replaced this man as Director of Web Strategy at UNO.

[Laughter]

Jack Daniel: No, that's a joke. He works at Tulane.

[Laughter]

Jack Daniel: And it struck me that I really didn't know the school. I found myself with a handicap I've never had before. I knew about IC--I grew up 500 yards from the office I ended up working in. UNO, I didn't really have that benefit.

I knew a few things on paper. I knew that it was the first integrated public university in the South. That's cool.

I knew that it had a lot of really funky programs like Naval Architecture and an Urban Planning program that is like the gold standard right now because they've got a living lab. They've got a 300-year-old city they're rebuilding. It's kind of cool for them.

And I knew that, by and large, it was the school that pretty much created the middle class in New Orleans. It empowered a lot of people who had always been outside--things changed a little slower down there, and this was the school that really enabled a lot of people to have a much more vibrant existence.

But that was all I knew. I didn't know what the place sounded like. It was always metaphors going around. People were always talking about New Orleans, "Oh, New Orleans is..." and they would always invoke the music and the food and gumbo. What the hell does gumbo sound like? What are we going to do with that?

So I found myself sort of in a bit of a crisis my first month there. I was like, "Now what am I going to do?" This was my baby. And I was like this kid, you know? Like, wait a minute. I used to know how these things worked!

[Laughter]

Jack Daniel: And I don't anymore. It took me a little while.

And we had a little chaos. Our chancellor was fired by the LSU board exactly one month after I got hired. There was some bloodletting. And when things started to calm down a little bit, I sort of backed up a little bit. I got a little less panicky. I thought, 'What do you know? Why do you know what you know already and how can you work it here?'

Again, listen all the time. It's a fairly big canvas, kind of spread out. A lot of people don't actually live there. So I had to go around and start poking my head in in figuring out what people were doing.

The alumni magazine--which isn't technically an alumni magazine, but it's an alumni magazine--that's a great place to sort of glean what it is people are concerned about--not so much where the articles are or what we're trying to promote, but what people are actually really getting angry about.

UNO switched to Division 3 this year, which angered a lot of alums to the point that they probably played some role in the chancellor's dismissal.

And the thing is, it was a D1 school that was getting like 500 people a game. Nobody was supporting it. No one was there. The Chronicle of Higher Education said something like all but 14 D1 schools lost money last year. Any sensible person would know, you don't spend money when you don't have it on huge stadiums that no one goes to. But people love it. People who are vocal and people who spend money as alums really loved being in D1.

And so it's the kind of thing that shapes the tone of the voice, because the voice can't be so flipping about it like, "Look, jackass, you weren't going to win anything, anyway." You can't really say that and tell them to embrace D3 like, "Ithaca College is a great D3 athletics school."

D3 in the Deep South, you might just as well be talking Eskimo. They don't know what you're talking about. "D3 sports? What?" If it's not on TV, if I can't be in the barn on Saturday, "Wooh!" it doesn't exist.

So that's part of the education right now. Attend the class, go to group meetings, go to a protest, go to a pub crawl, something where you're hearing people in the environment of the university, in the culture that they are part of creating and changing at all times.

And when all else fails, just break it down into something they can all agree on. Gumbo, maybe not so much, but jazz? "Yeah, jazz!" Jazz in New Orleans, it's everywhere. You can't get away from it. It's in the stores as you walk in. It's coming from--it's in the airport, for God's sake. And everywhere you go, it's playing constantly--except this one coffee shop up by UNO that's playing cheesy fusion. I just want to shake them like, "You live in New Orleans, for the love of God!"

[Laughter]

Jack Daniel: "Will Louis Armstrong kill you? Jeez, Louise!"

So that's the voice. That's 'Guided by Voices'. And I'll take any questions you might have.

Audience 1: What happened to the Ithaca Twitter account when you left?

Audience 2: Could you repeat the question?

Jack Daniel: Oh, I'm sorry. And there's a mic up here. You all might want to try and--because we're doing podcasting. Not to get you out of your seat...but get out of your seat.

Audience 1: What happened to the Ithaca Twitter account when you left? Did your voice scale for the institution, or when you left, was the sort of humor and humanity gone?

Jack Daniel: They dragged it out to the back and shot it. No.

[Laughter]

Jack Daniel: No, actually it was funny. There was a young guy that got hired in a different position, actually, who had been one of our biggest boosters on Twitter and on Facebook, when he didn't even work at IC. And he'd been hired a few months earlier.

And he was just sort of a natural on the slot in because part of what had attracted him to the school was the fact that he felt we really got social media. So he was sort of a natural one to slip into that. I believe they're actually hiring a permanent person who this will be part of, and this was just a little part of what I did, but I think someone else will probably end up doing it.

Yeah, it seems to have translated pretty well. People expected it. People got used to a certain friendliness and a certain boosterism but in that kind of tongue-in-cheek kind of way without it just being sort of straight-up blah-blah, rah-rah. And I think that will help transition anyone into that spot.

Anybody else?

All right. Well, thank you very much--oh, one more.

Moderator: Nope, I'm going to bring you a mic that I hope... This working? It is working.

Audience 3: You work in the Web Development Department, correct?

Jack Daniel: I'm the Director of Web Strategy, so I'm in Marketing.

Audience 3: OK. How much does Admissions play in the Twitter field, both back at Ithaca or at the new place?

Jack Daniel: At Ithaca, it didn't, initially. And I know that there's been some talk there about how they might better do that.

The Marketing and Communications team at Ithaca College was sort of based on the idea of centralizing marketing control and taking it out of the exclusive hands of--the Admissions still plays a very big role there. It's a tuition-driven school much like UNO.

And much of this comes down to personalities of individuals involved and making friends. Relationship management is everything, just like it is anywhere else in an institution, but getting by and pretty much came from a) the fact that no one else was doing it and b) much of the messaging came down to things that weren't specific to Admission.

Ithaca College is very integrated with the community, with the city of Ithaca. Obviously there's a healthy alum support. So it's not just recruitment all the time. So we wanted to be in a sort of centralized position.

Now that said, I would often, during various points in the cycle, go to the Marketing and Communications person who handles the Admissions account and get from her things that are timely, what have you. There's nothing wrong with being timely and really staying on top of it, and you can integrate that into the voice, you know?

Audience 4: How often did you tweet?

Jack Daniel: I would try to do it at least a couple of times a day. You can flood. I mean, as we're seeing with the HeWeb10, it's pretty easy to saturate. But also, too much would get to the point of becoming a distraction, I think, for me, personally, because I would just be trying to be clever all the damn time and it would invariably bite me in the ass. So I really wanted to keep it sort of to a minimum.

But also, it's just easier to maintain like that. I mean, how many pithy statements to you really come up with in the course of a day? So I tried to keep it to a minimum.

I've seen in a couple of cases that I see at least--and now it seems to be a little bit more active, although that may be specific to given days where they're doing programming. I know they did the big Moving Day where they had a lot of people tweeting in about moving day. But that seems like it was really successful.

Yeah.

Audience 5: Do you use a special program to find out who are talking about you, who are tweeting about you? Do you aggregate that kind of information?

Jack Daniel: I aggregated it only in so far as I would keep track for my own purposes of ongoing kinds of conversations. And then I would sort of annotate, is this is a parent or is this is a student or is this is an alum kind of thing. So, no. No particular software. More just me sort of being sort of grandfathering it, you know?

Moderator: Now, kind of related to that--is anybody here using a paid listening solution like Radian6 at their institution? Somebody? Wow. I've been asking this question for a year, you're the first one I've seen who has done that. So how does it work?

Audience 6: I worked in the Admissions office... and they used it every once in a while, but...

Moderator: All right. I've been actually having conversations with Radian6 because their pricing structure doesn't fit in with my absolutely zero budget.

[Laughter]

Moderator: So I needed to see the value beyond something like social mention or building--I have built a Netvibes page at my institution. It just pulls in everything that's happening out there. And I've been yet to be convinced by Radian6 that it's worth the extra money, so I'm still... To me, I'm really interested when higher ed actually starts to do that.

So another question here.

Audience 7: Did you monitor any of your competitor schools' Twitter feeds--

Jack Daniel: Yeah, a little bit.

Audience 7: --to kind of differentiate, to make sure you were differentiating yourself from them?

Jack Daniel: Yeah, a little bit. Obviously you can't do anything at Ithaca without being aware of Big Red. I mean, they're just...it consumes all the oxygen in the room, basically. They're just huge.

They suck at Twitter. They've gotten a little better, but...and in fact, I remember one day, they put one out--and I can't actually remember what it was about but it was funny and it was so...I was so surprised that it was funny that we were tweeting like, "Hey, look who lightened up!"

[Laughter]

Jack Daniel: Had to mess with them a little bit. Look, they got a huge endowment; they don't need me.

But, yeah. When we started, it wasn't too far away from when Colgate decided they were going to have a kid tweeting the entire year, like a freshman. I think they had it on the homepage. And it was an interesting idea. It wasn't fully fleshed out.

But I was aware of it, and so that was kind of what spawned me to actually just start thinking about, 'I want to know what other people are saying,' especially in the region, because we're all kind of living in the same spot and there's a lot of schools jammed in that area.

But by and large, it was impressive to me just how distinct the Ithaca College voice was and how much it didn't really bear a lot of resemblance to anything around.

And I'm hoping to find that, and I'm starting to now, at UNO. I mean, the thing with UNO is, in the wake of Katrina, for whatever reason--well, I know the reason: because they got the money--Tulane has really sort of insinuated themselves in the space of, "We are the higher ed voice of a recovering city." And their president, Scott Cowen, is a really bright guy and he's done a really good job of making sure that he's sort of front and center for these conversations.

We, on the other hand, haven't really had that. Our chancellor really fought hard for the school in the wake of Katrina. I suspect it might've taken a real toll on him, and this is the guy who went in in a rowboat with a couple of state troopers to manually get out all the drives that held all the payroll information, the financial aid information, all that kind of stuff, because it was all living on campus.

But in terms of managing the PR side, in terms of insinuating himself into the conversation that the University of New Orleans is the university for New Orleans and for the people of New Orleans, it hasn't quite got there yet.

But the voice, the core elements of it exist, and it's probably up to me to a certain extent to shape them and to begin to really project that.

Audience 8: What about multiple voices? I live in--

Jack Daniel: Schizophrenia?

[Laughter]

Audience 8: Yes! I've been asked to, in addition to myself tweeting as a student leader and adviser leader, did you come out was schizophrenic?

Jack Daniel: Yeah. I mean, the question, if you didn't hear it, was multiple Twitter on campus.

NC State is the gold standard of this. Anybody who's sort of followed this, really--NC State has this extraordinary aggregation of all these tweets that's coming in. I find it actually overwhelming. I'm sure some people just love it. I just... I try to follow it, and I don't know enough about the institution to feel like I can really engage with it. But what they've done is really impressive.

We had a bunch of different people at IC tweeting. It's not so much at UNO. Actually, there are a few, but they're mostly just doing broadcast. But there are quite a few that I see.

What I found is that if I engaged them, they sort of recognized that some voices are more equal than others. Once they realized that we were sort of the main thing, we would engage, and the stuff that mattered, that they did, they would begin to sort of adopt the voice a little bit and it became easier to then retweet it, push it out, get the messaging out there.

The thing is, with social media, and I've been saying--I've been in social media a long time. I was at Bolt 10 years ago, long before Zuckerberg was out of his nappies. The thing about social media is it works best when people are already likely to engage in it. You know what I mean?

If you're not comfortable with it, you can't really superimpose a solution on it. "Simon says you need to have this kind of person in there." It's kind of hard to go out like, "I'm going to purchase one of these kind of people in the bookstore and stick them in front of the monitor and they will do as I say." It doesn't really work that way.

I'm not entirely sure why it is most of us can be trained to do a lot of things, but for whatever reason, when it comes to being conversational, it's not something you can just sort of superimpose.

So, I think it can work. I think the NC State model is a good example of a site where they've really taken their time to pull in all these different voices. I don't know what that sounds like institutionally, like I don't know if you can say, "That is an easily identifiable quality," "That is North Carolina State." I just know it sounds like a whole lot of people on that campus tweeting and musing and what not.

Yeah.

Audience 9: Moving on to that question. Do you think it's important for schools to take a segment of the population and target them? Like, is it important to target prospective students or to target, for instance, their alumni or...?

Jack Daniel: Yeah. The question is basically, is it important for the institution to pick a given demographic, a given audience, like prospective students, and target them?

That's actually a much bigger question than social media. That's, again, a question of school identity, and it's one of these to be sorted out at a higher level.

Obviously, if you're in a school like Ithaca or a school like UNO where enrolment really determines what the budget looks like every year, you're going to spend a little extra time making sure that recruitment and yield--yield in particular, I find, because yield is where you're selling, that yield is where the conversation really matters.

If people know about your school enough to apply, you can't really sway them--I mean, you can a little bit, but yield, I'll tell you a little yield story.

There was a kid who had been really actively musing on Twitter about Ithaca College for the better part of a year. And he would compare it to other schools. He was thinking about RIT, some other places. And I loved it. He was complaining about the weather in Ithaca but he was talking about going to RIT. I'm like, "Pal, you have no idea what you're getting yourself into."

[Laughter]

Jack Daniel: And it went on. And he would just say the quirkiest things about it, like why he wasn't pressing the gas because I would sort of initially be like, "Oh, yeah, come on and apply. It's a great campus. It's a beautiful, cool school." And that was not having the effect that it usually has.

And finally, just in the moment of idle curiosity, I looked at his Twitter profile and I clicked, he had a blog. And he was from suburban Philadelphia or someplace. He was a straight-edge kid. And someone had told him that there was some crazy drug culture at Ithaca and that everyone was just working the bong 24/7 and what not.

[Laughter]

Jack Daniel: It's actually only during daylight hours. No one knew that, but...

[Laughter]

Jack Daniel: And so he had it built up in his head that, like, "Oh my God, I'm going to this place. They're all these crazy juggies and what not." And all I did was I tweeted him, "If you're interested, here's some information about our substance-free housing." And the kid wrote back and he was like, "I wouldn't have even known to ask that." And so he ended up coming, which we all wish he didn't because he was a pain in the ass after that.

[Laughter]

Jack Daniel: Uptight little school boy.

But in the course of it, it was cool because this was--I had to think like a recruiter but I also had to think about, what's his life going to be like here? How do you keep some of this? Because everybody knows, man: it's cheaper to keep them than to go get some more. And recruitment has always been a big issue for us there.

So, yeah.

Audience 10: Hi. Greetings from Cornell University.

Jack Daniel: Woohoo!

[Laughter]

Jack Daniel: Woohoo! Come on, you guys learned it. It's the Sweet 16, there's the little 'woohoo'. I heard it.

Audience 10: I've got a couple of questions for you. One of them is about Twitter and sort of the younger generation, if you've done any research or aware of any good research about if these kids are using it? Obviously you think so, but I'd like to hear more about that. And--

Jack Daniel: Yeah. It's definitely... A few years back, that was sort of the joke with Twitter. It was like, finally someone invented a social media that only fogies used, and the kids weren't into it.

I had a spectacularly drawn-out discussion-slash-argument with the new president at Ithaca College about Twitter one day--one day, one month, one year--wherein he could simply not get his head around the fact that there was this social media tool that didn't cater just to kids. Like he just assumed, out of the gate, that it didn't.

And so it took a little while to get that point across. And then by the time I did, kids were starting to sort of grab on to it finally. Everything I've read is that it's trending younger and younger.

Now that said, they're not the only audience. And at UNO, actually, it's particularly important to recognize because we do have a lot of older students. Out median age is considerably higher than a lot of other state schools. It's traditionally a school for working-class folks in New Orleans, many from working jobs, takes them a little longer to get there, takes them a little longer to get through it.

So that's a big piece of it knowing that the demographic isn't as rigidly defined as 17-year-olds. But their parents, who remain their biggest influencers, are actively engaged.

And more and more--I would say, each year that I see, I noticed the kids increasing by a significant factor. Not just a couple more trickling in, but the time I left, they definitely held sway. They were definitely the main group that was responding. But there was also sort of just out there idling, musing about the school and about conversations they wanted to have at school but didn't know who to ask, posting questions about financial aid on Twitter, posting them on Facebook.

So they're there. They're definitely there increasingly. It may come down to the sort of things that they're interested in. Kids who don't really necessarily know exactly what kind of program they want to follow seem to be really actively musing about, "I don't know what to do in college. Can you help me, Ithaca?"

Audience 10: Here, I do have some data. I am involved with the Noel Levitz' E-Expectation Survey which we do every year of college-bound high school seniors.

And I've been adding social media questions to that survey for the last couple of years. Last year, when we asked that group, "Are you on Twitter or not?" 8% said yes. This was a telephone survey throughout the country, college-bound high school seniors.

When we asked that question the year before, it statistically did not even register. It was 3 out of over 1,000 respondents said they were on Twitter in 2009. Last year it was like 85 out of 1,000.

So you can look at that any way you want. One, only 8%; the other way, look at how much it's increased over the course of a year. So we will be asking that question again next springtime--

Jack Daniel: Did you parse your data as to whether or not they were necessarily college-bound? Because they're a broad--

Audience 10: They are college-bound. At least by the definition of 'as good as we can tell'.

Jack Daniel: Right.

Audience 10: And that's country--we actually see some variation in terms of demographics, both geographic and ethnic demographics, so--

Jack Daniel: Yeah. And that's true for a lot of tools. I mean, I think I waited just long enough to move down south for MySpace to die off. Thank God. So I have to deal with that. But if I'd gone a year or two earlier, they would've been insistent about MySpace.

Audience 10: And MySpace still exists in the Southwest.

Jack Daniel: And it does. It absolutely does in their schools. All the schools that ever did anything with it that was remotely successful were in the South. Auburn had a huge page.

Moderator: OK. We have time for a couple more questions. Let me...

Jack Daniel: Way over on the side there.

Audience 11: Do you focus primarily on, well, obviously Facebook and Twitter, but are there any other social networks that you're looking at or... I mean, there's YouTube and others but--

Jack Daniel: Some. Yeah.

Audience 11: --what's coming down the road, etcetera?

Jack Daniel: YouTube is a little tricky that I see because it wasn't always clear exactly whose shop it was sitting in.

There was some instructional technology people who had...we would try to work together. Sourcing was a little hard. It's a little harder to get good video source material because there's a lot of video on campus--obviously they've got a huge film production--but people are a little territorial about it, as you would expect. It's their work.

So I've primarily focused on Facebook and Twitter. The rubber hits the road sooner there. There's a lot... It's very democratic tools, very easily accessible. I had actually this year hoped to put together something on location-based media, and then Tim Nekritz and a bunch of other brilliant people beat me to it and would do it exponentially better than I ever would.

I also couldn't figure out... At IC, there were like five people who were on Foursquare. You become, "Your mayorship's changed." It was like a Banana Republic.

[Laughter]

Jack Daniel: It was just one coup after another. So I sort of missed out on having an opportunity do that. I had a student worker, she went to South by Southwest and then came back, "Oh my God, Foursquare's amazing! Everybody's involved, people all over the place!" I'm like, "Yeah, you couldn't fill a bathroom on this campus with the people who are using it." So it's not worth it.

But it's something I'm definitely interested in because I know it's going to happen. Especially in a place like UNO, campus is still recovering from the storm. The area around it was actually much worse hit. It's hard to find lunch, you know? So, a good location-based media can sort of enhance the living experience there.

All right. One more.

Moderator: Yeah, one more question.

Jack Daniel: One more.

Audience 12: Do you post simultaneously to Facebook and Twitter the same message or do you have a slightly different tenor or voice on Facebook?

Jack Daniel: The voice does sort of modulate based on what kind of conversation you're likely to get into.

Twitter remains Twitter, and it's still going to be kind of brief and punchy and what not. You can get a little get more involved than Facebook, and I certainly intended to. And the tone would be a little more engaging in the sense of welcoming, like expanding the conversation for that space.

So, yeah, it does alter a little bit. I would try and mix up the actual message so it is not an identical post, just for the sake of--my own sake, I don't know why. It just seemed like the right thing to do.

OK. Hey, guys, thanks a lot. I know it's early in the morning, we're all so sleepy, especially me, but thanks for coming down.

[Applause]