I use Mint to track my spending and set a budget, but it doesn’t tell me how to align my budget with my values or stop me from making frivolous purchases. We use HubSpot to send you this email and build a profile of your interests and engagement, but that alone won’t grow our business. Zoom certainly makes it easier for us to connect from a distance, but it’s up to us to have a productive dialogue. Zoom didn’t make meetings better or worse. Zillow won’t sell your house.
Founders and sales people tend to give software more credit than it deserves for human-driven outcomes. Conversely, users (that’s you and me) often blame software for problems rooted in human behavior. Software is a tool that enables automation, infrastructure, and processes scaling. It’s also better at math than most of us. But as anyone who has implemented a CRM, SIS, or even project management software will tell you, the tool is only as good as the toolbox in which it sits and the understanding of the job it’s intended to accomplish. That is—your strategy, and the skills of the people implementing it.
This semester I had the opportunity to speak to a graduate class called Public Relations Evaluation Techniques. As you may suspect, I talked about social listening. I emphasized the common PR objectives social listening could evaluate, what metrics matched each objective, and the importance of finding software that supports your needs. Among the follow up questions was one that made me pause: How do you train software to know your audience's and brand's priorities? My simple answer—you can’t.
I’m grateful this student had the chance to ask this question in class, where learning is the objective. Yet similar thinking happens within campuses and organizations. The thought persists that a different/better/newer software product will perform strategic functions core to your goals and make you better at social listening, marketing, fundraising, or recruitment.
Do you have goals and strategy that software is supporting? Or do you have unrealistic expectations of your software to perform strategic functions?
Liz Gross
CEO + Founder of Campus Sonar
Is Software Sufficient?
by Steve App, Business Development Manager
In my second month at Campus Sonar, we ran a free social listening snapshot for a small, private liberal arts college in Indiana. As I previewed their demo dashboard before our call, my eyes were immediately drawn to March 2018. March contained one of the highest months of conversation volume, but more so, an obvious spike in negative sentiment. My first thought was a campus crisis. In reality, it was anything but.
Upon digging into their conversation, I realized the spike in volume and negative sentiment were related. The campus’s men’s basketball team had gone on an impressive postseason run, led by a 5’11” point guard from Ohio. Their success earned plenty of social mentions and news coverage along the way. And that’s what led to the spike in negative sentiment. How did winning basketball games drive a spike in negative sentiment? Their point guard’s name was Cam Fails.
A star athlete with a last name that triggers sentiment algorithms is a rare occurrence. But online campus conversation can be muddled by any number of consistent factors: a common campus name, political polling, mascot overlap, or generic acronyms. Consider this sentiment graph from the past 30 days for a small, private liberal arts college in New England. One of those spikes is real. The other is irrelevant. And knowing which one is genuine has potential ramifications for the brand.
Software wasn’t designed to navigate that nuance on its own, of course. And if you haven’t invested in the human resources to maximize its features, you’re seeing an incomplete picture of your reputation at best, and at worst, making ill-advised decisions based on inaccurate data.
Back in the spring of 2020, a prospect asked us a question. They had run a marketing report the month prior, based on tens of thousands of online mentions.
How many could we find from the same time period? The answer: three times as much.
When we onboarded that campus a few months later, it became clear to them that we had buried the lede in those conversations. The primary value of #Sonarians wasn’t the increased conversation volume; it was the degree to which they could finally answer crucial questions about their brand on the structure and segmentation of that conversation. Questions about student life, how alumni perceived campus announcements and policies, the role of athletics, or whether admitted students intended to enroll.
And that’s really the crux of the software vs humans question. Why are you listening in the first place? If you need to check a box—if you need to report a few high-level metrics that your cabinet or board won’t question—software will do the job. There’s no need to invest further.
But if you want to quantify your brand and reputation, improve the student experience, increase alumni identity and philanthropic activity, and generally make decisions with more confidence, it’s worth asking if software alone is sufficient. And if not, what are you going to do about it?
The first three episodes of our training series are out and they are 🔥. The moderators are bringing the book content to life, the experts are bringing unique perspectives, and the discussion is on point. Register and watch them on demand now.
Establish social media strategy goals that reflect your campuses values and priorities with Episode 1: Goals and Purpose.
Define your audiences, find the platforms they’re on, and reach them where they are with Episode 2: Know Your Audience.
Then connect the dots—goals are your WHY and strategy is your HOW. Determine how you accomplish your goal with the strategy you set in Episode 3: What Strategy Means.
Be sure to sign up for upcoming trainings; a new episode is released each month!
Steve and Liz present How the Pandemic Changed Conversation About Higher Ed, sharing multi-year social listening data to help you put pandemic-related metrics in proper context and insights to inform a pitch for a larger marketing investment on your campus.
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