Marketing SM in the Unis

Undoubtedly, the social is as important as the media in social media. Like all marketing, knowing the punter is as important as knowing the product. Just because of where I will be next week, I am thinking about social media services and universities.

Social Media School

I am still interested in social media school. It promises a good bread-and-butter line for many people. It is self-contained - you can see where it starts and finishes. It is scalable across clients. It allows self-development. There is nothing like teaching to get your ideas organized. We complement each other which is great value for clients. We can also have redundant teams. If someone has to go off to do something more lucrative, more fun, or more urgent, someone else can probably step in at short notice without much damage.

At the moment, I am thinking about social media schools and the university outreach programs. Not academia - that is a different ball game. I am talking about straight training. People who want to know and want you to show them how to do it.

What I need to know from you:

What you could show people how to do.
Any constraints you have timing, geography and price. Conflicts of interest too. Maybe you have already got a market and your comment is “not here please!”

Another marketing idea for unis

I am comfortable in the university world. British unis have constraints that are slightly different from other countries. All academics though are under pressure to publish research. All Vice Chancellors are under pressure to make money from research.

This is what we could do: Tout ourselves in universities to organize the social media for a research project.

Work with the academics to establish
- who should be reading their work
- milestones they will reach reliably
- feedback that will make their work easier
- competition from other centers and reactions to their efforts (every action has a reaction)
Extract funding out of Deputy Vice Chancellors for Research. The first year we may have to approach quite a few until they routinely make budgets for social media (then we will see an upsurge in competition - so we must be ready for that)
Do the work
- The community work - who, what, when and day-to-day maintenance (these are academics - they don’t do reliable)
- The marketing - marketers think in terms of rewards, glitz, glamor - bring it on
- The creative (I need help - I have the style of MK railway station)
- The technical (I will have my hands full herding cats)
  - Facebook
  - Website (have you seen some of the local unis and looked at their Alexa rankings - quick, easy, participative, editable)
  - Blogging campaign
  - Twittering
  - What else?
- What else? Here’s a link to the process.

I am comfortable around academics. I understand the pressures on them. And I understand why they swing from arrogance to shyness. I am happy to handle finding research units we can work with and then finding people among us more familiar with the discipline to help communicate.

I also think that this could be a good market. The academic world is dominated by US journals who are dominated by Americans for reasons that are obvious to anyone who understands communities. Content is not key. Conversation is key. It could be fun to work with unis to lift the rank of a research unit just by helping them manage their conversations. Because the academic world is international, this is exportable too!

Anyone?

June 12, 2008 | Filed Under Jo Jordan