December 2010

Posted by Carlyn Foshee Chatfield on December 10, 2010

December 10, 2010 Virtual Coffee Shop

Social Media for IT Communications - part 1

Sheri Thompson, LSU IT Communications and Planning Officer presenting

• • social media for IT communications

  • tools that allow you to know what is being said about your IT division on the social media channels

  • office/team time spent on social media channels for IT messages

Note: Sheri's PowerPoint presentation is attached, scroll to bottom of this wiki page.

We started using Facebook and Twitter several years ago and recently added YouTube.Just under 900 on Facebook, far less on Twitter.

If I post on one spot, it replicates to other media, messages get shared, commented on and re-tweeted. If there is something big going on, even our university social media channels will pick it up.

We all hear students don’t read email and then want to know why they weren’t informed about issues. So we started exploring more modern channels for distribution.

Facebook and Twitter are both free, so the cost is my time. Most of us have multiple desktop screens, so I just keep an eye on the social media channels while I am working on other things. Getting paid to Facebook? How many people can say that? Very cool.

Hurricane Gustav really proved how critical social media can be in times of crisis. Our gas gauge was broken on the generator that powered multiple servers and applications and it ran out of gas so LSU.edu web site went completely down with not advance warning. I was at home with my laptop and I could post to Facebook and Twitter to say “hey LSU.edu is gone/down for now, pass the message” and could set up communication channel alternatives.

How to manage?

I’ve got two screens, and so I have it up all the time. But I’m not the only person who does it. I’m going home at 5:30pm. I FB all day, I’m definitely not doing it at home at night! The operations center and other support staff are authorized to update the FB page and Twitter for updates.

Tools:

• • HOOTSuite.com is free – helps you track what is being said about you and compare to what you are saying. It also has a paid service that you can purchase for tracking multiple channels. I don’t really use this much, I just check it from time to time. You have to have a personal account on this, hard to share.

  • TweetDeck.com is not something I use right now, but I did use it for several years. It is also free. I had some problems because it relies on AdobeAir and every time it updated, I lost stuff.

  • Seesmic.com is what I use most now. It is also free, really neat, and something I am playing with now more often. Has ability to post updates as multiple people at once.

  • Q: how do you find the tools you use?

  • A: I am constantly looking for better ways to track what people are saying about LSUits. One of my colleagues manages LSU’s presence on FB and Twitter and he also sends tips my way. He started a Moodle group and keeps all the LSU communicators who are interested posted on new trends and tools for social media.

  • Q: don’t you have to log in with personal information?

  • A: yes and no, can set up a bogus account, LSUITS is not a person. On business pages, you can set multiple administrators. You have to have a personal account first, then set up the business page and then make yourself and others administrators.

  • Q: did you have to get Legal involved?

  • A: we don’t have a legal department, but we have to follow the university guidelines. If we get spam, it is perfectly in my purview to remove it. If someone writes a comment that isn’t appropriate, I can report that student/person. I don’t really worry about inappropriate postings.

  • I was a bit hesitant to tackle Twitter at first, but it seems now that the Twitter people are more technical.

  • Oh, FYI, you have to be careful that the favorite pages on your campus department reflect only your department mission, not personal favorite pages.

  • Q: how do you resist reacting to every less than favorable comment?

  • A: it hasn’t been too much of a problem, think about responding and not reacting. It can be helpful to find out if the Help Desk is also getting calls about the problem that has been posted. Or, it can work out well for international connections, like a professor working in Morocco and not being able to connect.

  • Q: how do you decide on what kinds of messages to post?

  • A: when things come up on FB, it may be things they are already becoming aware of, like recent scams on FB or if the Internet is acting funky, or if a service is going to be down for maintenance, also events, etc. One of the things we’ll tie in to a March event is a FB challenge. Techpalooza; Learn, Discover, Engage; interactive day of IT fun. Professors doing interesting things, vendor displays (MS Xbox Connect). Give away an iPad or something, tie into the followers of the IT page. Directed to both students and faculty/staff. Pulling in several previous events that used to be directed to only students or only faculty.

  • Q: how often do you post? What do you post to FB versus Twitter?

  • A: I post everything on FB, which sends updates to Twitter, and just monitor Twitter, probably about 2 posts a day. I don’t want to be unfriended due to multiple posts and I don’t want to crowd anyone’s home page.

  • Q: do you ever struggle to find something to post?

  • A: if nothing is happening, I don’t post. It’s just another channel, but not my life. Also, I have a subscription to ZDnet.com, which has interesting things going on in the writer tech world and I can mention those.

  • Q: do you use FB to advertise IT services?

  • A: sometimes we do, depending on the service. As far as doing the actual FB Ads, we’ve done it a few times and it helped a little bit but wasn’t really cost effective and we didn’t pursue further. We’re going to be redoing a student training program on IT services and we’re about to revamp the entire thing so that is one of the kinds of service news we would post to FB.

  • Q: do you use FB to point to Grok (wiki, knowledge management/sharing tool)

  • A: actually Grok is followed more than FB, so we should probably use it to market our FB page, but yes, we do sometimes point to answer pages in Grok from the FB page.

  • Q: did you find students using the tool for asking Help Desk questions? Our Help Desk staff is very concerned about getting students to call the Help Desk instead of posting on FB.

  • A: If you do the cost breakdown, a phone call is actually more expensive than a FB post and response. We really want people to work online in FB or email Q-and-A.

  • Q: our Help Desk is outsourced to SunGuard, and we also have Yammer on campus now for our business school, but more and more people are going into Yammer. It’s more like a Facebook wall. One person posts a link to an article or a note about maintenance, and everyone then comments on that post. Everyone in the university is automatically added to the same page. Yammer doesn’t go into TweetDeck though.

  • A: at LSU, that is the kind of information we get on FB.

OTHER Hot Topics today:

• • Q: Does anyone have a core service implementation process? Formal tool that helps project directors know when to bring in communications.

  • A: well, technically, you should have a plan that all PMs follow, but do we do that?

  • A: Sheri from LSU – we use Footprints for our Help Desk. A communications request screen comes up in their work order/project plan template, will be glad to share. Anyone can use Footprints, but the IT Communications piece is only available to IT staff. See screen prints.

  • A: what helped up is an IT Communications meeting for all the people who are communicating about various projects, the IT project manager sits in on that meeting as well. Any major project has communication involved.

  • A: try to raise awareness in IT of some concepts like they use in Development, like softening the audience before making the ask. Try to make them realize you have to prepare customers to receive major news, not just say “email is going down now, bye.”

  • A: also, try to get more people to write things down.

Chat Notes

• • Carlyn - Rice: Hi Sheri, thanks again for doing this! I'll be calling in soon.

  • ITCOMM CG Leader 1: Hi Carlyn! Glad to play along

  • Carlyn - Rice: Hi Everyone, I am scribing today's session, please add any URLs you mention in the chat notes. Thanks!

  • Jennifer Gray, CU-Boulder: I appreciate your notes Carlyn and your presentation Sheri - A lot of my co-workers are excited to hear about our conversation today.

  • ITCOMM CG Leader 1: the pressure is on! =)

  • Kristin Lyman - St. Cloud State University: Don't you have to give your personal log in information in order for someone else to post to LSU sites on your behalf? Ours our set up so that it is manage your pages from my personal acct.

  • Kristin Lyman - St. Cloud State University: Yes, Facebook.

  • Kristin Lyman - St. Cloud State University: Yes, we had to set up a business page.

  • LeCarla CU-Boulder: Did you have to get your legal dept's approval to use and/or post to twitter and facebook

  • David Stack UW-Milwaukee: How do you resist reacting to every less than favorable comment you see on Twitter, etc? It seems like every comment regarding poor service could kick off a mini project to address the person's issue. Thx.

  • Kristin Lyman - St. Cloud State University: Is this event directed toward students or faculty?

  • Dana - Pepperdine: Do you use Facebook to advertise IT services?

  • Dana - Pepperdine: yammer

  • David Stack UW-Milwaukee: Thanks this was very interesting!

  • Kirsten Nagel- CWRU: Hello everyone - joining late after a mtg...

  • David Stack UW-Milwaukee: I'm 90% sure that we'd be interested in participating in such a panel!

  • Dana - Pepperdine: That's a great idea for a panel!