SOC9: Facebook Faceplant: Lessons Learned from Social Media Failures (and Successes)

Host: From Penn State, Cynde and Nikki, it's all yours.

[Applause]

Nikki Massaro-Kauffman: OK. So, this is Facebook faceplant. We have our Twitter information up here, if you like us. We have to warn you that our language may or may not be filtered. And so, if you have a problem with that, you might want to GTFO. [Laughter] If you like this, this is our hashtag for tweeting and our Twitter names. If you don't like us, we're Adam's faults and not Jared. So, just remember that if you happen to not like us.

Otherwise, yes, we both work for Penn State. Is there anything else that we want to talk about with that?

Cynde Fleagle: No.

Nikki Massaro-Kauffman: No? OK, screw it. Moving on. So, we wanted to talk a little bit about why we've wanted to cover faceplant. I've been having this conversation with people a lot. In fact, Chris and Dylan and I were actually out in the hall prior to the last session, talking a little bit about coming to these conferences. You come maybe you'd have this mutual bitch sessions and sometimes you come to get inspired. But you feel like, "Oh, man, my department, it's immature hour there. I come to these things. This is what we should be doing. Everybody is doing this great stuff. Why are we doing all this crap where I am?"

So, I feel like sometimes we're here to see these dog and pony shows, right? Really, really, really great stuff happening everywhere and you're like, "Why the hell am I stuck with crap in my department?" And so, I feel to be true to social media, you can't really have these dog and pony shows without a little bit of shit, too.

We have to be honest with ourselves. You can't really try anything without having some of those roadblocks. And I have to be fair to everybody that has presented today. And everybody has been honest about how well they've had some successes and failures. And so, when you start to lose heart and say, "What am I doing here? I get really frustrated. It takes 5000 communities to get anything done. I work with a bunch of boneheads," it's all learning process. And you have to have failures to get to your successes.

And so, we wanted to talk about some failures and how even those failures are learning processes. And to answer Dylan's question about, "What would I do if I went back 10 years ago?" if you happened to be in his session, I don't think I would change anything I did on higher ed over the years that I've been there because every mistake I made has been a learning experience for me, even when I bitch about it.

So, this brings us to one of the case studies we wanted to talk about, which is the big SNOMG or Snomageddon. How many of you are East Coast folks and remember the snowstorms back in February? And if you haven't, maybe you were following East Coast folks. And so, we did have a situation in Penn State related to those snowstorms. And some of you might even be familiar with them because there were presentations on them.

We're going to give you a little more back story. Prior to those, we had the H1N1 pandemic scare. There were groups that sat around and said, "Well, how are we going to deal with this when the students get back to class?" So, there were targeted messages. One went out to faculty. They went out through lots of different streams to make sure they got the message. There were letters from the president. There were Web pages devoted to this. These messages had things like, "Ill students are not required to provide a physician's excuse for missing class." There was even a policy about being reasonable in how they allow students to make things up.

"Teaching during a Pandemic" was a Web page they put out for all the technology that's actually available now, if you wanted to have your class or pieces of it done remotely through a course management system, streaming your content online. We had something out for the employees during the flu season, questions that they might have. And as employees yourselves, you might want to know, "Hey, can I tell a community? What happens if I have used up all my vacation and sick days? Can I borrow from the next month?"

All of that information was addressed. We hit the students with illnesses. So, they knew that they didn't need a physician's excuse. If you have questions, if you're having problems with somebody, here's the place you can go to really, really bitch about it. Call your associate dean. We included the helicopter parents as well because we recognized that that was an important group of people.

Let me back up. I didn't zoom in on this one. All it did was it let them look up on our LDAP. Basically, they're students, faculty members so that way they could email them.

Now I wanted to give you before we go into the video an understanding of Penn State University since the majority of you are not from Penn State, even though we have a very large contingent here. This is the Penn State system across PA. You have urban areas, Pittsburgh and Philly. Go Phillies. University Park is in the middle of it, an area called State College. We call it University Park, UP. It is our main campus, the largest campus.

It's considered a residential campus. But this is the breakdown of the residential on-campus population, the blue, versus off-campus or commuter. "We are" is our mantra. We're a very diverse group because we span the state. That's going to come into play when you watch the video we have.

This is what happened on the big Snomageddon or Snowpocalypse or whatever else people were tagging it with.

Cynde Fleagle: Or the state of the social media failed.

Nikki Massaro-Kauffman:The K-12 schools were closed in the State College area and the surrounding areas that were hit by the snowstorm. The branch campuses, the other Penn State campuses, were closing because they consider themselves to be campuses that were not necessarily residential. Snow emergencies were declared so there wasn't parking along streets. Inner states in the state were closed by noon that day. The con ed classes that were largely attended by adult students had opted to close.

So, all of that happened. Every year, Penn State puts out general weather-related messages. They weren't as targeted as the H1N1. H1N1 was new so we had a brand-new committee, brand-new group of folks looking at this. These weather-related messages, I swear, probably have not changed since I was a Penn State student. They're old as the hills.

And so, we had two messages. One of them says, "Hey, use your own best judgment. Charge your vacation time. Supervisors, make every effort to accommodate." Fair enough. The one for students, "It's your decision whether or not to come." But this is the part that really resonated with the students especially coming off of H1N1, "Ultimately, it's up to each professor to determine how he or she will handle these types of absences. Oh, we believe they'll be reasonable and understanding."

Most of you have reasonable and understanding people in your academic career. Any of you ever have somebody who wasn't reasonable and understanding, raise your hand. OK. So, this is what we had going into it. They had these H1N1 policies. They knew about them. All of a sudden, we were going back to policies from the '90s, when I was a student, that hadn't been revised.

We're going to play a video. If the access is working, you should be able to tweet some lessons learned as we play it. And you can have a chance to respond to it. Let's see how well this actually works. This is something that came out earlier that morning in a news story. Considering the tough economic times, they thought it would be nice to post the story about how we're saving money by saying, "When we close, it costs $1.5 million." People latched onto that one. A good story in and of itself, considering what happens later in the day.

This is typical response for what happens at other schools.

[Video Start]

Nikki Massaro-Kauffman: The number of the people that joined that group was almost identical to the number of people that responded to snarky admin.

I love that the community sort of rallies around creating these tools.

There's more.

Cynde Fleagle: Just when you thought it was over.

Nikki Massaro-Kauffman: Notice the use of all caps?

Cynde Fleagle: And then, you go thinking back to the policy. People are remembering how great of a job Penn State did with their fat message and how horrible of a job they did with this part.

Nikki Massaro-Kauffman: This is actually where the department that I'm from that offers the online degrees. So, I had to include it.

And now, we'll revert to the story somewhere else. My people were still commenting on those threads about how bad of a job they were doing.

This is the annual dance marathon that raises money for kidney cancer. It got some attention until they started noticing a deletion of a car accident post.

Cynde Fleagle: I think I actually saw it. I saw the post. Somebody had gotten their car into an accident. Those pictures are just Penn State. It's not there. They say they didn't delete the post. But if you didn't delete the post, then why not link back to it, too? Credibility. Come on, Penn State, you've probably deleted the post. They almost had them. And deleting posts for me is a cardinal sin. They almost had them with this song.

Nikki Massaro-Kauffman: Yes. And finally, success.

Cynde Fleagle: They get them with the wisdom factor.

Nikki Massaro-Kauffman : They were giving away something there.

[Video End]

Eventually, I will get this actually without me having to hold it. By the way, the images for this actually came from Flickr photos from the day of the snowstorm. Some of them were after things got plowed. Some of it was before the bulk of it. So, if you're wondering what kind of snow we got there, I thought it would add to the authenticity if I included photos of the day.

Reactions? Do we have some things from this room?

Cynde Fleagle: I'm a little slow.

Nikki Massaro-Kauffman : It might be the connectivity. So, if you guys want to offer something up, observations, lessons learned, ideas, Bueller? Why don't you come on up or step up, speak up?

Audience 1: I think I'm the first person to actually use one of these microphones that I've seen in two days.

Nikki Massaro-Kauffman: We want everybody to step up. Maybe we can put the squirrel by you.

Audience 1: Did anything change at Penn State after this? Were policies laid out or people even mildly talked to?

Cynde Fleagle: No, but I can tell you their page is taking a new turn, a new direction, because we have a group of people that we started Social Media Mondays. And some of the administration is in those, taking back what we say, talking about it and learning from their mistakes. No policy has been changed but their attitude on the Facebook page absolutely has changed.

Nikki Massaro-Kauffman: I would agree with that. I think there's some learning from actually participating in it. I think I would be more concerned if they completely pulled out of Facebook and said, "This isn't our thing. This Facebook is bad, bad. Look what happened." I'm actually on a committee for another group within the university that is developing a leadership certificate program for the future leaders that when all the boomers retire, everybody else will need to fill these positions.

They wanted to see what kind of technologies could be used. And I said, "You know, we should be getting them to blog and use more social media." And they said, "I don't know if I'm comfortable with that." These are HR folks. They said, "I'm really not sure."

Cynde Fleagle: "Control that message."

Nikki Massaro-Kauffman: Yeah. "What if they say something bad about the university?" I said, "You're grooming these people to be leaders. My God, woman!" This would be a really good teachable moment for the certificate program. What the hell? So, I think the message gets out that it's probably better that you participate and majorly screw up than not participate at all because then you're leaving it open for a thousand little screw ups later.

Other observations? Come on. Somebody step up to the mic. Go ahead.

Audience 2: What's the department?

Cynde Fleagle: That comes at the end.

Nikki Massaro-Kauffman: At the end, if there's time, you can get your picture. We'll try to get them out to some of our excursions later. Jeff?

Audience 3: One thing about the....

Cynde Fleagle: Yeah.

Audience 3: Right now the... favor. We all know that one of the the copies... What do you do on top of that? Or how do you address these...?

Cynde Fleagle: Well, I don't think there has been any deletion that day. I'm understanding that, OK, people are going to stay stuff to Penn State. But they still try a bit to control the message. But they're listening to that "I have a voice. You have a voice. We're going to all work together. We're not going to repeat mistakes. We're just going to work towards learning from them and going on."

Audience 4: Is there a danger in this..." So, if you're saying, "We're not going to repeat the same mistakes," did it happen right... what's going on? Or is that a possibility?

Cynde Fleagle: No, that's a problem in my mind, too. They want to keep their anonymity. One of our people in Social Media Mondays saw the one administrator out taking pictures and gave a quick shout, "Hey, I saw you around." She actually pulled her to the side and said, "Don't give away my identity."

Audience 4: Do you want everyone else to give their identity without...?

Cynde Fleagle: We don't want to be their identity, yes. And that, unfortunately, still hasn't changed. We're hoping and we're working towards that with the Social Media Mondays and Social Media Club. But, unfortunately, that hasn't changed and it's very frustrating to me.

Nikki Massaro-Kauffman: Let's move on a little bit. Feel free to tweet some of your reactions. We're going to show you some of our lessons learned. So, one of the things that we noted was to know when and how to respond. I'm sure at some point this has gotten around in our circles, the Air Force's Web posting traffic about how to respond to negative comments. If you haven't seen this yet, tweet at me, I'll try to point you in the right direction for it.

But it's a giant flowchart on how to respond to negative comments. The point I wanted to make with this is, I don't know if you need a frigging flowchart to spell out for you how to respond to angry people. I mean, this is not new shit, people. This has been around since Dale Carnegie. Angry people, people who are upset about something, you're not going to change their minds with your Boston Legal logic. You're not going to say, "Ha! But I saw you out there playing in the snow." Oh, shit! This mic is not cooperating with me.

So, you're not going to capture them with your logic and say, "Yeah, you're pissed off at me. I'm going to trap you in a logic loophole and suddenly, that's going to turn the tide." If you're not that person who can grab that, then maybe you're not the person who belongs on the Facebook page. Or if you're in the heat of the moment right now, maybe you're the person who just needs to walk away.

I saw at that one point, even with no delay, no cancellation, if they would have done something like this, I think it would have shut everything down, right?

Cynde Fleagle: Oh, yeah, which is a brilliant, brilliant post, by the way, good props out.

Nikki Massaro-Kauffman: Yeah. I mean, humor diffuses a lot of situations. Or the crowd would have just sort of thought it out amongst themselves until they got bored. Let them death-match it out and we would have just been done with it.

Cynde Fleagle: And if you saw the responses to this post, it was "Giggle, giggle, giggle."

Nikki Massaro-Kauffman: Yeah. There were maybe like 30?

Cynde Fleagle: Yeah.

Nikki Massaro-Kauffman: So, I mean, it wouldn't have been the issue that it had been if the admin hadn't decided to poke it with a sharp stick. Something else that happened here, that image isn't as bright as it could be, I have a dashboard here of a vehicle. It's "Know your numbers but also know the people that they represent."

I gave you that "We are" breakdown and I gave you that campus breakdown ahead of time because I wanted you to maybe notice who those people are that were responding, because one of the things that happen at UP, Penn State, and in all the positions I've worked in for the university is that we have this dynamic going on, where people say that old main, as Jeff said, the president's office, a lot of people in the centralized part of the university forget about all the other groups of people that are out there.

So, they might see resident students on campus, at the main campus, and forget that there are people, faculty and staff at branch campuses. Or they see traditional resident students and they don't see nontraditional commuters and adult students, students attending from a distance. And so, what we've often heard is that UP is the megaphone shouting out but they don't hear back. And so, what struck me with that post was they can't even see past their own front steps, where students are playing and throwing snowballs, to even read their posts.

So, knowing your numbers is good. They thought they were residential. They didn't even know their numbers. But the dashboard metaphor for me is this, when you're looking at analytics, sometimes we get caught up in our numbers. It's like as if you were driving your car and you just looked at your speedometer and you didn't even look at what the other people on the road were doing.

If you drove your websites just on the numbers, I don't think that would be good. If you drove all your decisions just on your numbers, would that get you anywhere?

The opposite is also true. If you drove it just by what other people were doing, you'd probably get pulled over for speeding. New drivers flip back and forth between the two. Hopefully, and not all people are good at this, we eventually learn how to merge the two ideas together. The numbers, the numerical representation are data with what's actually happening out there and we get a big picture.

That's what we need to do. We need to know who's on that page today and why. The people who are on that page are people are really ticked off because campus was open and they couldn't get there. They weren't the people who could actually get there because they were at class. They weren't on Facebook.

And so, one of the last lessons for this is that you need to learn from your successes. The swine flu H1N1 stuff was referenced a couple of times with streaming online, protections for students. We need to learn from our faceplants. And you guys wanted to know do they learn from this. You watch the tone change from "Snowballs" and "Comments will be deleted" to "Your safety's important".

Cynde Fleagle: "We are listening."

Nikki Massaro-Kauffman: And then, they posted about the thon... and defused. But they did learn. They didn't back away and say, "We're quitting Facebook." They even have a Twitter now.

Cynde Fleagle: Yeah. A Twitter feed came out after that.

Nikki Massaro-Kauffman: I mean, they learned. They learned over time. And they were able to recognize their failure and even react to it and react with people in a very nice, non-confrontational way.

Cynde Fleagle: OK. So, here's where I step in. I'm sure we all know about the gunman that came on the UT campus. At Penn State, we know when you should be silent and when you shouldn't be silent and when it is necessary to post. Now, I put together this video. Please don't feel that you're going to be able to read everything. I just did it so you can get the gist of what was going on during the day here at UT Austin and the UTPD.

[Video Start]

Try to get the gist a little bit here.

Now I want to start off with an aside. As you can see with the blue screens, they did a fabulous, fabulous job of keeping people informed by texts, by emails. They did keep people informed. But in this age of social communication, I thought it was strange that they didn't update their Facebook page and the page that was giving updates was their police department.

So, keeping in mind that over 61% of all Facebook users are over 25, you're hitting a big demographic here. And to me, this slide says it all, "My mom's on Facebook." How many people's parents here are on Facebook? I know my mom is. Now, how many people's parents have cell phones? Do they text on their cell phone? I mean, my mom has got a GoPhone.

To not update a Facebook page in a crisis like this just blows my mind because there are so many social media tools out there to use. Generally, people feel the one they are most comfortable with, and I can tell you from my mom and my family, Facebook is where they are the most comfortable. So, it's where the information needs to be shared. It all comes back to thinking about your audiences, all of them, not just the students, not just the people in the small area, the people that are around that wanted the information. My kid goes here. Are they safe?

In this instance, to learn from your faceplants, the first faceplant in my opinion is a cardinal sin, too. Both pages have their postings to the wall turned off so that only administrators may post. Why have a Facebook page at all? Facebook is about being social. Faceplant number 2, not updating the page at all when there's an event like this. And faceplant number 3 is not paying attention to any current threads that are out there when people were trying to engage the conversation.

And then, learning from the successes. UTPD had a major growth on their Facebook page. Here's a screenshot I took at 11:22 a.m., when they had 1070 fans; 1:06 they had 5001 fans. Here's my little piece of paper where I was writing everything down. Look at how the numbers increased throughout the day. I took a snippet of the day and the fan increase of both. There's pretty much 500% growth increase. And with growth comes opportunity, whereas now the UTPD has an opportunity to give more information to pass along anything else they want to because now they have a great fan base because they were sharing information.

Now you're all wondering what's with the squirrel. This little particular bugger is This Squirrel. It is the unofficial mascot of IT at Penn State. It does have a Facebook page. I'm going to give you a quick background on how it started. We had a series of magnets, hopefully you can see, with LOLspeak to hand out to the students. We needed to get the students to this Web page because they gave IT information at Penn State.

These went like hotcakes. We couldn't keep them in stock. The students kept wanting more. So, we thought, "Hmm, let's try something else." We repurposed the squirrel in many different ways using the LOLspeak. I'm not going to go into all the different ways but I can share that with you. But then, it came to our computer store in campus was having a grand opening. And a brainstorming session led to giant cutout squirrels. Basically, as you can see, he says, "Win this Wii." You could just enter to win a Wii. But if you got your picture taken with this squirrel, you got an extra entry into this contest.

Well, we had about five or six of them around campus attached to expensive banner stands. Guess what? They got stolen. So, we knew we were onto something here. When we repurposed our little friend again, we wanted to put a Facebook page on an iPod. I was too darn lazy to do it in Photoshop, mock it up. So, I created a Facebook page for him. I didn't publish it. I kept it there just for that.

Well, then, my superwonderful, awesome boss, who was sitting in the room here, I don't think he still is, we got to talking. And we thought, "How can we keep that Facebook page and repurpose it?" So, we decided that This Squirrel would talk about IT, mainly IT at Penn State and beyond Penn State.

So, we came up with This Squirrel's persona, sitting down. This is what he's doing. Yes, there are 15 bullet points. I don't know if anybody saw that yesterday. We added the 15 bullet points. But this way, we did come up with a persona so that anybody that steps in when I'm not there can be This Squirrel. It says the same things. It talks the same way. There it goes. I have to give props.

As of this morning, This Squirrel has 1534 fans and we are just getting started with where we want to take This Squirrel and use it. Currently, also, he travels around to different campuses with Penn State Computer Store, hands out prizes like the Disney did a couple of years ago. It's gaining more fans because it's so kitschy but we're also giving a message. So, we thought if anybody would want to get their picture taken with This Squirrel, we would leave a little bit of time at the end of our presentation to get picture taken with it.

Are there any other questions?

Audience 5: Was it the entry for a Wii?

Cynde Fleagle: Yes, it was an entry for a Wii, yeah. I'm trying to think of how many entries they ended up getting. But the fact that they got stolen was where we were onto something.

Nikki Massaro-Kauffman: A faceplant and a lesson learned all wrapped up into one.

Cynde Fleagle: All wrapped up into one. And we took that advantage, yes. The faceplant lost a couple hundred dollars because of the banner stands turned into an opportunity. We're going to keep repurposing it until it has had its life span.

Any other comments, questions? Yes?

Audience 6: [40:57 Unintelligible]?

Cynde Fleagle: Uh-huh.

Audience 6: [41:01 Unintelligible]?

Cynde Fleagle: Yeah.

Audience 6: [41:09 Unintelligible] that you struggled with what happened?

Nikki Massaro-Kauffman: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it was just shocking. I don't know if anybody else follows J.D. Ross. We were watching it together. And I just couldn't believe that they are not posting anything. I found out about the UT Austin's page from him and I'm glad I did because, I mean, it had such power rolling throughout the day. I'm just very impressed with that growth. I've never seen a page grow that fast, even during the Snomageddon. I mean, Penn State's page increased. But I don't think it had increased 500% and this page had.

Audience 7: Speaking of the Snomageddon, which page is actually more popular, the regular or the uncensored page?

Nikki-Massaro-Kauffman: The regular is, by far, more popular. It has probably over 50,000 fans. Uncensored has about 158 fans. So, it is a small portion. But it's not a drop in the bucket, if you think about that particular voice. There's now a platform for activism that can be reused if there's an issue that people feel passionate about again. In the example, it was used for somebody that rallied people around the board of trustees' election, Penn State Go Cage Free.

So, people are using it as a platform, I don't know how successfully. But it has the potential if there's another issue to be reused again because they already have that audience.

Cynde Fleagle: Yeah.

Nikki Massaro-Kauffman: Like Cynde said, with growth comes opportunity.

Cynde Fleagle: Anything else happens, yeah.

Nikki Massaro-Kauffman: It's already out there. They can reuse that to rally around something if they feel they're not being heard. People already know, "Hey, this is the place to go if you're not being heard."

Cynde Fleagle: And I also want to comment to it. Also, I forgot to say, I've got a logo. I'm the logo person on Twitter. But I want everybody to know I am the voice of This Squirrel along with my other coworker.

Nikki Massaro-Kauffman: There's a question back here.

Audience 8: [43:18 Unintelligible]?

Nikki Massaro-Kauffman: Well, I think the first "no delay, no cancellation" was at 6 something.

Cynde Fleagle: It happened from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Nikki Massaro-Kauffman: To 9.

Cynde Fleagle: Part of it is that we don't even know who the exact administrator of that page is.

Nikki Massaro-Kauffman: Prior to that day, they had just hired one person to do the Facebook page. I don't even know if she had started at that point.

Cynde Fleagle: To this day, we still do not know.

Nikki Massaro-Kauffman: So, again, because we're so...

Cynde Fleagle: We're so departmentalized.

Nikki Massaro-Kauffman: And they're so high behind everything, we didn't know who to call. But I'll tell you, the crowd handled itself. I mean, they told them exactly what you're doing wrong.

Cynde Fleagle: There were other Penn State employees who tried to very politely say, "Please don't post this."

Nikki Massaro-Kauffman: Yeah.

Cynde Fleagle: But they had to do it in a very public place because they didn't know who to get in touch with, which is kind of sad.

Nikki Massaro-Kauffman: And on the Snomageddon, too, again, you had people who were saying, "Get over it. Walk to class."

Cynde Fleagle: And I'd hate to say generational, but there's an administrative disconnect because I would talk to people who are in certain positions of power about the Facebook page. And they said, "What? Well, Penn State Live, the website, that's the place where people are supposed to be going for snow updates. What do you mean Facebook page?" And I'm like, "But don't you get it? Did you not hear that there were messages coming out through the Facebook page?" And they said, "But that's not where they're supposed to go for snow updates." So, they didn't even get it.

Nikki Massaro-Kauffman: Yeah. That's not where they are supposed to go.

Cynde Fleagle: They didn't get that Penn State has like 50,000 fans and some of them are alumni and prospective. They don't get it. They don't care. They're not watching, which is sometimes good for us because we can experiment but sometimes bad for us because they don't care.

Nikki Massaro-Kauffman: I'm actually glad it happened so we could learn from it.

Go ahead.

Audience 9: [45:27 Unintelligible] the director of R&D, and you may have something there. And you can tell him, this is why this happened. They do not understand how you are doing. Are you willing to share that video as a screenshot of that this is what happened... and literally show them that this won't happen again?

Nikki Massaro-Kauffman: Yeah, because between these, we probably haven't even used all of our screenshots.

Cynde Fleagle: And there are lots of people who will tell you the best thing might be, if it's a student, to contact them directly and say, "Somebody might see this later that would be considering hiring you for a job. And this would make you look bad. The same thing for a prospective employee, that this would look bad for you when you try to bid on other positions."

So, if you contact them directly and said, "Do you really want people to search this later and have a bad opinion of you?" if you contact them one on one, maybe they'll take it down themselves. I honestly believe that car accident post that everybody was talking about was taken down by the person when the people themselves had sort of figured out that maybe it was from another day and not that day and the person that had second thoughts about posting it. So, people self-censor once they realize it, yeah.

Nikki Massaro-Kauffman: And one other funny thing, not funny, somebody actually printed out the day on paper, 27 pages of paper, from the one Snomageddon day.

I think we're out of time, correct?