Social media at UniSA

Steve Berlin Johnson presented a keynote at the recent MarketingProfs Business-to-Business Forum talking about how Twitter is a great tool for finding out what our/your customers are thinking and reading about, and leveraging that for your business. He also recently featured the cover story on Time magazine.

You can also see a short video on what his keynote was about.

If you’re not on Twitter already and want to find out for yourself what it’s all about I suggest you get yourself an account and start following people and/or organisations. If it all seems a bit overwhelming here’s a great article on where to start to find people on Twitter.

Don’t worry, this isn’t turning into a Twitter blog but a colleague passed this clip onto me earlier and I thought I’d share. It’s a comic representation about what Twitter is.

As it’s easier to watch a video and understand concepts sometimes I’ve included a couple of other clips about Twitter also.

This one shows why people love it and why they use it.

Lastly, this one explains what it is and how it can be used for business. It’s an hour long video though.

I wrote earlier about UniSA using Twitter and I mentioned it’s also possible – to a certain extent – to monitor what people are saying on Twitter. This can provide valuable insight to us, or any, organisation about what we’re doing well, or not.

So how can you monitor what people are saying on Twitter?

If you go the web address – http://search.twitter.com/ and enter a search term – eg UniSA into the search box and click the Search button, you’ll see everyone’s who’s used the term ‘UniSA’ in their tweet.

The only trouble with using UniSA as a search term is that the University of South Africa uses this acronym too and wading through results can be a bit time-consuming (hint - clicking through to the person’s Twitter page might inform you as to their location).  A search using the term University of South Australia yields results mainly from the media.

It may be that Twitter takeup is more predominant in South Africa than South Australia and we’ll catch up here soon and therefore have more to monitor.

It is also possible to subscribe via RSS to the search results so they show up in your feed reader to save you remembering to have a look in Twitter search whenever you remember to do it.

 Note that, unlike Facebook, it is possible to view Twitter pages without having an account or being a friend.

We have dipped our toes, and are starting to get our feet wet into the sea that is social media with accounts on Flickr, YouTube, Facebook and blogging but are yet to delve into Twitter. At least I think so as I’m unaware of any UniSA specific Twitter accounts. Updated: UniSA are now on Twitter.

There are myriad uses for Twitter, but first of all, what is it?

Twitter is a micro-blogging platform which allows 140 character status type updates and a very quick way of getting the news out there. When the plane crashed into the Hudson River people were Twittering about it before news reports happened. It was also an immediate way of finding out what was happening with the Victoria bushfires.

As a regular reader of social media type blogs, and others, Twitter is mentioned a lot and while I can’t find out how many users there are, its use is very widespread as Barack Obama,  Stephen Fry, and you can see others on Twitterholic use it. I read just as much about Twitter as I do about Facebook, if not more, and its recently taken off in a big way as more and more people use it.

So how could Twitter be used within higher education? My initial thought was that it would be good in an emergency or crisis situation and hopefully we won’t have one of those. But there are other potential uses. 

Jeremy Wilburn suggests using it as a substitute for live chat in admissions. For us it could be Campus Central and perhaps Student Admin using it to help out new students enrol and feel their way around studying at UniSA.

Mike Volpe on HubSpot suggests we could engage our CEO (our Vice Chancellor) in Twitter, have live updates about events, or keep in touch with media.

I had a scout around to see which higher education institutions are using it, or what Twitter might be used for in higher ed. This is what I found:

• Twitter tweets for higher education
• Twitter in education: practical solutions
• Master higher ed Twitter list - a pretty comprehensive list of those in higher ed who are Twittering
• Twitter – a different kind of conversation
• Activating alumni networks with Twitter (includes a white paper)
• Uses of Twitter in higher education

So there’s some reading to keep you going for a bit.

But I haven’t mentioned another powerful use for Twitter, that is monitoring the conversation about an organisation. That’s for the next post.