December 2015

Two-part ITComm Virtual Coffee Shop on social media:

• Part I: Creating and Maintaining Transparency in Communications During a Crisis

• Part II: Social Media Guidelines for a Multi-Person Team

December 4, 2015

• Presenters:

  • • Nikki Sunstrum, Director of Social Media, University of Michigan

    • Katie Rose, Senior Director for User Services, Office of Information Technologies, University of Notre Dame

• • Moderator: Alison Cruess, University of North Florida

  • Notetaker: Carlyn Chatfield, Rice University

Resources

• • Presentation by Nikki Sunstrum (PowerPoint)

  • Presentation by Katie Rose (PowerPoint)

• Recording: This coffee shop was not recorded.

Presentation Notes

Alison Cruess opened with a shout-out to Carlyn (who is crying while listening, so please forgive any typos...). Carlyn is stepping down to ex-officio role on the IT Comm Cabinet in January 2016. Alison said, "Picture me handing a heavy glass award to Carlyn with our thanks!"

Part I: Creating and Maintaining Transparency in Communications During a Crisis

Nikki Sunstrum (@NikkiSunstrum) is the Director of Social Media for the University of Michigan, where she is responsible for innovating the way in which one of the world’s top universities strategically leverages and advances interactive communications. She is a recognized leader in the development and evaluation of emerging social platforms for high performance and goal orientated results. Her early adoption and proactive engagement on Snapchat and Yik Yak have become leading best practice examples within higher education globally. Prior to assuming her current role, Nikki developed and coordinated the State of Michigan’s statewide social media footprint for four years.

Talking about how she kept her university's leadership informed during a crisis — the hacking of three U-M Facebook accounts on August 12, 2015. See case study. Everything I talk about today is available for you to read at your leisure:

http://socialmedia.umich.edu/blog/hacked/

Everyone remembers their wedding day, the birth of their children, but for me August 12 is a day I will always remember — woke up to phone calls, texts, email. About 3:00 in the morning on August 12, three of our major Facebook accounts were compromised.

We operate on every leading social media platform. We have the largest social media account of all universities in the U.S. Our Athletics sites are also the largest in the U.S. It was a highly visible and calculated attack, intended to do the most damage possible.

Our user community alerted us first. They used the same communication channel as they'd use to say "wifi is down." ESPN and every major news and sports network was reporting it starting about 5am.

Immediately went into "crisis communications" mode. News Director, Director of Public Affairs, primary communicators for Athletics, etc. all have my cell number, I shot out a text message to those 50 people — who has a contact at Facebook?

U-M doesn't advertise at all on Facebook, we don't have someone's phone number at Facebook, so we had no direct line to get help.

One of the things we wanted to do immediately is notify the user community — Thank you! We know this is what's happening, and here's what we're doing to fix it. That made all the difference.

We regained control at 8AM and phase I was over. Then at 9AM, phase II attack launched. Because leadership in UMich knew we had had it under control and IT was searching out all the unique user names associated with our accounts, we had credibility when Phase II launched. We were concerned it was a disgruntled employee, but it wasn't. We'd recently had a very qualified new hire and the most popular social media posters are often targeted. This person — through human error only — was hacked through their personal Facebook account, which was then used to link to the UMich accounts. Facebook and Twitter share an enormous amount of Higher Ed data — we don't publish SSN, birthdates, etc. Building that trust relationship with your readers is critical.

So we published this hack timeline (see article) so the social media community can learn from — and even live with us — through the attack.

When the second wave began, we lost control of the account for six hours. Facebook could not tell the complexity of the attack and wanted to be sure it was really "over" this time.

We had to tell our leadership that we'd lost control again. The second time, we lost some credibility with our leadership. Of course the news media was all over it, so our leadership had some hard questions for my team so they could deal with media. We were in group phone calls and conversations — here is what we know and here is what we're going to say.

Our Social Media teams took the time to reply to EVERY message they received, whether those were complaint or tips saying "hey, did you know this was happening." That was huge. We actually gained followers through this event.

See slides for examples of messages to fans on Facebook. We also asked our followers to please spread the word and that also helped.

We issued our case study within 5 days because we wanted to let everyone else learn from us. One of the things I've found in working in Higher Ed vs. government... I was so grateful for the way people who work in the Higher Ed industry step forward and show appreciation for the way we were willing to share our story.

Several other examples of transparency. We jumped onto SnapChat in 2014 and put types of messages like wellness (e.g.: World Suicide Prevention Day) because we work hard to keep transparent relationships with Public Affairs, Student Wellness, etc. Preparing for our biggest game of the season, we posted about safe tailgaiting (don't drink and drive, responsible drinking) with a collage of short videos from campus leaders — "Important message for you". Really reached a much, much greater number of people than we could have with only the same old email about safe tailgating that had been sent out for years.

Also doing a "Wolverines of Ann Arbor" series, like Humans of New York, and had some interesting backlash but then we were able to turn that around into understanding cyberbullying. Yik Yak — the first branded community was on our campus and although Yik Yak gets a lot of flack as being negative, we found that we can influence more positive if we all work together to try and change it. On intern works solely on monitoring YikYak.

Another social media challenge: We lost a major football game in the final seconds and the player who made the error immediately began receiving death threats in social media. We had the U-M President, Athletics Director, others express support on social media, say "This is NOT OK. This is NOT how you treat a player, a student." A very good way to address cyberbullying as well.

Steady stream of Amplify. Building brand advocates.

• Q: What tool do you use?

  • A: Digital Group — based out of Northville, Michigan, work with Big 3 Auto, and this is their first foray into Higher Ed but they are fantastic.

• Q: What is your team like?

  • A: Nikki has 4-5 interns, 1 full-time staff member. Interns focus on specific channels: Yik Yak, Instagram/Pinterest, Facebook & Twitter, cross-populate

• Q: Compare government to higher education.

  • A: HE is a lot like big government, but we also have bottlenecks for information sharing. In government, I was able to write the social media policy and everyone has to follow it. At U-M, spent my first year meeting people and finding out who could be the social media primary point person for that group, department. Really a policy — hey, you can't just go out and create a Facebook account.

• Q: Multi-factor authentication?

  • A: All our social media account holders — except for my immediate team, which controls the primary UMich accounts — cannot share passwords.

• Q: Interns run content by you before posting?

  • A: Yes, they run content by me. We use an internal messaging platform named Slack to vet all content first.

Part II: Social Media Guidelines for a Multi-Person Team

Katie Rose (@NDKatie) is the Senior Director for User Services at Notre Dame. Her team within the Office of Information Technologies is at the central point between people and technology — managing the central IT Help Desk, departmental IT support, Service Repair Center, IT Training, transition/change management, infrastructure change management, IT communications and marketing, and IT professional development. Katie has worked in a variety of positions at Notre Dame for the last 16 years, having started by answering calls at the Help Desk, which led her to be a passionate voice for customers and a key resource in building relationships between the OIT and other areas of campus.

Bringing in other departments, working together with all Social Media team across ND, we ensure we are posting appropriate content.

In IT, our social media team is 3 people and social media is on top of our other jobs. We cover for each other, monitor, depend on rest of IT (230 employees) to tell us what people might care about, just in case we are not aware of something.

Questions to ask yourself:

What are you hoping to accomplish when you engage in social media? Is it only to promote your services?

ND OIT's three main goals:

• Info in a place where people will see it

• Share info about IT services that people need to know

• Share info about IT services that people can use

Who is your audience? Is it the entire campus community?

Maybe. Maybe, it is a smaller group. Audience determines channel. If you are reaching students, YikYak MIGHT be the appropriate place. If Faculty and Admins, probably don't need YikYak.

When we looked at what our audiences were using, we found students were using Twitter and Faculty/Staff using Facebook, so we use those channels aimed at those audiences.

Our content was also meant to be short snippets with links to details. We didn't want a photo-based or video-based channel. So Facebook/Twitter were the right channels to use to launch.

What guidelines?

Six factors — also tips. Don't hashtag too frequently. If we post on "things are running," that's one hashtag. Banner down? That's another hashtag.

How to handle engagement? Do you plan to respond publicly to people who contact you through social feeds? Yes, unless specific situation when we take it offline. E.g.: campus cable connection did not carry football game in HD; after several tweets, I called them on the phone to explain the situation. People pleasantly surprised when they get positive response — useful way to engage with IT.

Don't beat up the trolls but do admit / own up to problems like outage. Trolls — it is a fine line to walk, but you can't win against trolls, so don't even try.

Also work with Vendors that we use; students realize there are other avenues of support.

Content — we decided that since we were new at social media and our previous content was long and detailed (tech docs, newsletters), we knew we needed to learn to write in short blurbs. Twitter has its own shorthand, and you don't want to go too far down that path. Remain true to your organization. Avoid the obvious — unless it is an outage, in which case just say it. We have a guideline for that.

Frequency: if Gmail is down, we'll post every 15 minutes. Otherwise, students will ask you every 15 seconds (practically).

Timing: students tend to be on end of the day, end of the day, then at night. Students similar. That is when you want to post.

Tools and Security — we actually use two-step authentication for Twitter. We use Hootsuite as our tool for keeping an eye on what's happening. It lightens the burden to some extent. Remember you have to be nimble. If you preschedule content and then have an incident, you need to make sure you don't step on your own toes (e.g.: inadvertently dilute crisis communications posts with a forgotten pre-scheduled post about help desk services)

If you use a mobile device or a desktop device that is unlocked, make sure you tighten up the security on those tools.

• Q: 2-step auth — what phone do you have the code sent to?

  • A: that is the trick, right? It is going to my personal phone now and I send it to my compatriots.

• Q: What hashtags do you use?

  • A: Examples:

    • #itstatus

    • #ndbethelight (employee highlights)

    • #gmail

• Q: Strategies to gain followers (Twitter)

  • A: Put your handle on business cards, web sites, email footers, lawn signs, digital signage.

• Q: Link shorteners?

  • A: Thread from chat:

    • Kelly @ Miami University: You mentioned short links... where did you say you can purchase those?

    • Stan - NC State: You can purchase domains that work for you, given the many new top level domains or country codes.

    • Stan - NC State: E.g. NC State bought the domain "thinkand.do" to use at the unviersity level and go with recent branding.

    • Stan - NC State: E.g. thinkand.do/tGTcvM

    • Stan - NC State: OIT provides a link shortening service for the campus called GoLinks

    • Kelly @ Miami University: Thanks!

    • Stan - NC State: E.g. go.ncsu.edu/ITStratPlan

• Q: Who in your team is "on" during peak hours?

  • A: We rotate so one of us is not always "on" at 11pm. We leave it up to each person when "sleep" hours are — she typically sleeps midnight to 6AM unless there is an outage.

• Q: When to put info on other social media when there is an issue?

  • A: Err on the side of early notice. Escalate as problem grows. Social media is one of our first ways to let people know that we know there is a problem.

• Q: How did that social media announcement decision get made (to use it as one of the first ways to notify people about an outage)?

  • A: We (communications team) realized that is the quickest way to reach the most people. For example, our web site tools are clunky and don't work on mobile devices, so we can't update the web site from our phones — say, if something happens over lunch.

• Q: No backlash on using social media for those types of IT alerts?

  • A: None so far. Good feedback once we started using Twitter. Techies liked that they didn't have to create an account to read the feed. Facebook can be done like that but Twitter just worked better for us.

• Q: Frequency of social media posts?

  • A: We post 2-3 times a day to let people know we are still there and are aware if there is something going on that we're online and will talk about it. By limiting to 2-3, it is obvious that we're not going to post about the "up" status of every service.

• Q: How to get info if you aren't on Twitter?

  • A: Color-coded announcements on web site with links to Twitter feed on those services. We don't pull the full content from the posts from Twitter onto our web site, just the links.

• Q: How do you keep people from thinking they are not being answered (avoid the black hold of communications) and still provide balance? Do you post about every wireless complaint?

  • A: We try to answer publicly on the social tool they are using.

• Q: What are the "other jobs" your team?

  • A: Team member #1: Communications person in charge of all IT communications to campus, newsletter, maintenance updates, marketing updates, service updates and upgrades.

  • Team Member #2: Help desk manager, supervising 10 staff members and 15 students.

  • Team Member #3 (me): Senior director for user services, managing 30 staff members.