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Social Media Measurement
by Peter Kowalski and Katie Delahaye Paine Social media is a new and unfamiliar development for many companies and institutions. It is growing so quickly and taking on so many new forms that many organizations are at a loss to understand its present use and future possibilities. Georgia Institute of Technology found itself in just that position. It wanted to organize and improve its institutional use of social media, but needed help to understand the myriad options, and to develop effective new programs with realistic goals. Georgia Tech is home to some 22,000 scholars, faculty and administration. It is consistently ranked in U.S. News & World Report's top ten public universities in the United States. Georgia Tech is in competition with other top-ranked universities for students, faculty and research grants, so it was important for it to understand not just its own social media usage, but also how it compared with that of competing academic institutions. To better understand its social media presence and options, Georgia Tech asked KDPaine & Partners to undertake a major study of social media use at academic institutions. Presented below are the major results of that study, as well as benchmarks that institutions of higher education can use to compare with their own use. Social Media: Where to start, and what to expect? It was clear at the start that social media was an important communication tool, especially reaching for Georgia Tech's student audience. For U.S. Internet users:
Earlier research had shown that social media is an important tool for academic admissions departments, and in many cases is more commonly used in academia than in the corporate world (Barnes & Mattson, "The Game Has Changed: College Admissions Outpace Corporations in Embracing Social Media"). In this case, 88% of responding admissions departments said that social media was Very Important or Somewhat Important to their marketing/recruitment strategy. 61% said that they used social media. In particular, 33% used blogs, 29% used social networking, and 19% used video. So Georgia Tech had no doubt that social media was important. The question was how important, and which media were more important than others? Research Goals With the above concerns in mind, KDPaine & Partners designed a research program for Georgia Tech. The following major goals were decided upon:
Research Methodology To best achieve these goals, it was decided to observe and explore a range of social media channels for Georgia Tech as well as a small group of peer academic institutions. Typical patterns of traffic and usage could then be determined. Four peer institutions were chosen by Georgia Tech as its closest national competition for students, faculty, and research resources. The following social media channels were observed:
Data was gathered for a 30-day period between September and November of 2007, and included all references to Georgia Tech and the four peer institutions. To ensure comparability and a manageable data set, content related to athletics was not included. To allow context comparisons, back content for discussion volume was collected for Facebook groups from January - November 2007. Research Results Goal
#1: Summary chart of net results for all media across all institutions (click on the chart to see it larger):
Findings for specific social media: Blog
Findings And for institutional blogs (hosted on the domains of an institution, like gatech.edu, for instance), we found that roughly 2 out of 5 postings included at least one key message of the institution. Note that this level of message communication is about what one would expect for articles in traditional media. This is a counterintuitive result; the institutions are writing their own blog articles, so we would expect a somewhat higher level of message communication for the blogs than for traditional media. (GT has suggested that this result is likely due to its desire to generate content that is less calculated, less "marketey," and more authentic.) Thus a good benchmark for message inclusion in articles in internal blogs is at least 2 out of 5. YouTube
Findings Social
Bookmarking Findings Facebook Findings This research found 27 types of Facebook conversations. See Sidebar #1, below. Also:
Special
Research Question #1: The data shows that the answer to this question will never be simple. Academic discussion is much more fragmented and diffuse than corporate or nonprofit discussion. University society and interests are far more diverse, and so the answer is usually, "These three or four things," or, "These three or four other things." It is rarely just any one subject that audiences discuss. In general, dominant topics of discussion for each medium are:
Special
Research Question #2: To what extent does content in the traditional media trigger social media content, or is distributed via social media channels?
Goal
#2: Recommendations to Georgia Tech Based on Overall Analysis Analysis of the data lead KDPaine & Partners to make the following recommendations to Georgia Tech:
Note that recommendations #1, #2, and #4 are definitely counter to current practice, based on our observations. Also, #5 is original and innovative; to our knowledge no one does it yet. Goal
#3: KDPaine & Partners' data provided summaries of activity for both Georgia Tech and the four peer institutions. As Georgia Tech enacts new programs, it can compare itself to these benchmarks to determine if it is meeting with success compared to its past, and compared to its peers. Can
other schools use these social media benchmarks? There are only five institutions in this sample, so the benchmarks given here should be considered directional. Still, this study is one of the first of its type, and there are as yet no other benchmarks of this sort to refer too, so these are relatively informative. It is tempting to anticipate that these effects will vary with certain attributes of institutions. For instance, we might expect that smaller schools, with their more cohesive social atmospheres, might have more success with social media programming than big public and private institutions. However, we tested the social bookmarking data for effects based on size of student body, size of incoming class and price of tuition; none of were found to have an effect. Of
course, the more new programs are developed, the more new data will
be available for future comparisons. What
was very obvious in the data was that different institutions were
trying to help to guide their social media content, though for the
most part, it was organic, gritty and, well, natural. Using a horticulture
analogy, we're talking about watching plants grow to figure out how
we can use grafting and other techniques to get plants that we want. Sidebar
#1: In this study, KDPaine & Partners identified 27 specific types of conversations taking place in Facebook, including:
Sidebar
#2: In this study KDPaine & Partners identified 19 types of videos posted on YouTube:
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