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e School News 

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Technology News for Today's K-20 Educator

Volume 12, Number 11

November/December 2009

How Social Media Can Enhance School Communications

 

By Nora Carr, APR, Fellow PRSA

Described by some public relations pundits as the “new word-of-mouth marketing,” social media are still an enigma to most of us tasked with school communications. 

Sure, Twitter use has exploded during the past year, but to what end? Americans may hang on every word twitted by a celebrity, but will soccer moms really welcome tweets from their child’s teacher or principal?

On the other hand, President Obama’s historic campaign was fueled in large measure by the strategic use of social media, which galvanized online communities and reversed decades of youth voter apathy. 

Sifting through the hype and the hope, this much is clear: the web has spawned a new communications revolution, one that shifts the power from the information producer to the information consumer. Social media networking sites, in many ways, are just the latest evolution of this digital transformation. 

Empowered citizens also now have new tools to voice their approval—or their dissatisfaction— with the status quo. In the Wild Wild West of citizen journalism, truth often gets shortchanged as misinformation is recycled endlessly in the mash-up between social networks.

Just like consumers can choose which brands they want to engage with online, parents, potential employees, senior citizens, and other community stakeholders can choose whether they care enough about public,

private, and parochial schools to start fan clubs, discussion groups, dialogues, and other interactive web-based forums. 

While I still have more questions than answers at this point, my initial and admittedly timid forays into social media communications have already driven home one key lesson: the web communications fallacy of  “if you build it, they will come” holds true in this arena as well. 

I’ve been twittering, linking in, and blogging for a few weeks now, and even people who are trying to find me online can’t. While this is likely a blessing in disguise— after all, I’m a newbie when it comes to deploying these tools— communicating to no one makes it hard to justify the time. 

While I intend to keep plugging along, I already suspect that the real value of social media for school communicators is the unvarnished market intelligence now available online. It’s fascinating, and sometimes a bit scary, to see what people care enough about to post online. 

For example, the biggest YouTube draw for my school district, North Carolina’s Guilford County Schools, is a two-year-old “investigative” news story questioning the accuracy of the district’s annual crime and violence report to the state. With 1.7 million views, it far outpaces the superintendent’s strategic plan launch speech, which we posted on YouTube as part of our new media experiment. 

This underscores why asking whether school districts or individual schools should bother developing a social media presence is a bit like debating whether to close the barn door after all the horses have escaped. Chances are your school or district already has an online presence on Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, or Twitter—it just might not be the one you want. 

Although many social media conversations are banal, others are insightful. Either way, online chatter could serve as an early warning system for simmering issues that are ready to ignite into a major crisis. Increasingly, parents are using personal web pages, blogs, and other new media tools to share news, discuss concerns, and rally support for everything from PTAfundraisers to indoor air quality investigations. 

The ultimate “two-way” communication channel, social media requires listening as well as responding. It is, after all, a conversation. Most web marketers advise keeping blogs and web pages interactive, allowing visitors to post comments and ask questions in a public manner. 

This can be risky for school superintendents and others who daily experience the growing lack of civility that such anonymous forums encourage. A few years ago, the Pinellas County, Fla., superintendent, one of educational administration’s pioneer bloggers, shut down his site when the conversation turned increasingly ugly. 

That cautionary tale has led many school public relations professionals to keep the interactive portion of blogs “turned off,” much to the dismay of the medium’s purists. The compromise position of providing an eMail address for personalized (and non-public) responses to questions and concerns works well for many school leaders, but won’t score as many points on the transparency scale. 

As with many communication tools, getting started in social media seems easier than keeping it fresh, participating regularly, and making sure people get the answers they’re seeking in a timely manner. Jon Rognerud, a search optimization consultant in Los Angeles, offers a number of solid tips on his website, www.chaosmap.com. 

I particularly like his posts titled “Social Media Marketing Beginner’s Guide” and “The Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing.” For Rognerud, the profile or identity you create online (the first pillar) is like an “expanded business card” that declares your “value, who you are, and where you can be found.” 

According to Rognerud, the focus of this crucial first step should be on how your site can benefit the marketplace, not the reverse. For educators, this might mean sharing more information with parents about child and teen development or how they can reinforce a new reading curriculum at home and less about the superintendent, school board, or new district initiatives. 

Identity through association, the second pillar of social media marketing, is like giving parents, employees, students, and others the opportunity to wear your school or district logo, according to Rognerud. 

By mutual agreement, interested parties get to associate themselves with you, and you get to associate yourself with them as online “friends” or “colleagues,” or through social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, technorati, or BlinkList. 

The third step, user-initiated conversation, is probably the most unnerving for educators, who already find themselves short of time, energy, and patience. The thought of responding to hundreds of additional eMails or queries, especially in a public space that opens them to further criticism, can put leaders over the edge. 

Yet before dismissing this opportunity out of hand, school communicators might want give it a whirl. By serving stakeholders in a new and more responsive manner, you might win some converts. At minimum, it could give you the opportunity to set the record straight when misinformation rears its ugly head online. As with other communication channels, all groups, message boards, and forums aren’t created equal. Google, Yahoo, AOL, and MSN Groups are among those most popular and might be a good place to start. 

The fourth pillar of social media marketing, provider-initiated conversation, is “your chance to find out what your customers think, feel, love, and hate about your product,” writes Rognerud. “Ask them. Challenge them. Present yourself to them, but do so respectfully.” 

In-person interaction—or good old-fashioned face-to-face communication—is Rognerud’s fifth pillar. Research has consistently shown that facial expressions, body language, and other non-verbal cues account for more than 80 percent of what is communicated when two people interact.

When it comes to changing hearts and minds, even interactive online communication is insufficient. People are emotional beings. The silent majority often needs what the late, great Pat Jackson, one of the nation’s
pioneering public relations gurus, called a triggering event to get them moving. 

Triggering events might start with technology—a text between two students can create an audience of hundreds in just minutes— but change tends to happen not only face to face, but one to one. As another PR sage noted years ago, the web and other new media tools won’t replace other forms of relationship-building communications, but they will help us connect with people in new and important ways. 

Award-winning eSN columnist Nora Carr is the chief of staff for North Carolina’s Guilford County Schools.