January 2011

Posted by Carlyn Foshee Chatfield on January 10, 2011

January 14, 2011 Virtual Coffee Shop

IT Communicators from the University of Texas at San Antonio and the University of Oklahoma talk about how to respond to an angry social mob when your IT division is targeted in a slam campaign.

Carla Gomez, UTSA describes what happens when social media gets beyond your control.

When the registration system (ASAP) went down at a critical time, a thread began on FaceBook. USTA's office of communications pasted on the university FB page and in the UTSA IT page, saw a lot of anger from students, trying to acknowledge and respond, coordinating with other university offices to streamline messages and get everyone on the same page. There were so many students calling, emailing, Twitter, FB, etc. we needed to coordinate as a university. In the few hours the system was down, we kept students informed and answered inbox messages from student on FB, commented on the UTSA Communications FB page.. Made final announcement when system was up and running.

Presentation displayed sample comments from angry users. It is SO easy to be flippant, angry, profane on FB. Once during a spring outage, a FB page was created called "I hate ASAP" and we stumbled upon it. It has been taken down now, so I don't have it to show.

Nick Key, OU (University of Oklahoma), talks about similar type of "out-of-control" FB thread. We transitioned from a mostly home-grown student system to a Sungard/Banner student system and we knew ahead of time it would cause a lot of concern and possibly confusion among students. The "I Hate oZONE" campaign is what Nick described. 30,000 students... we spent a lot of time planning, we had a full communication plan mapped out and we found out a week into the transition the plan was useless because the students were bringing everything they didn't like to us. Instead of having an out-going campaign we were placed on the defensive.

From the official plan, we hit the ground running with Ozone alerts, face-to-face presentations in critical offices, events, promotions, visibility and awareness created. We prepared an extensive communications plan and did all the prep work.

The UN-PLAN or what really happened. Students acting as a social media angry mob, protested the conversion, insulted the product and the people who implemented it, and the administration and departments involved were suddenly in an unfamiliar territory. We felt pressured to handle this new onslaught in an old way, with a press release. Now before you read all the materials in the presentation, remember this was not an unsuccessful launch. In many ways, it was a successful launch but we were going from a very mature and slick product to a new, out-of-the box kind of retail product. We didn't have outages, but there was a loss of perceived features. All the tools they needed were there, they just didn't find/see them. There was an un-related financial aid issue and the recession had resulted in a 25% increase in fin-aid apps than in previous years and our vendors had changed over the summer...but the breakdown in fin-aid processes were "linked" to the new system in the customers' minds so Ozone got blasted for it. More than 4000 people took the Ozone customer survey and not one was positive.

We had 5 open forums where we were ready to accept the rotten tomatoes and complaints, and only 25 people showed up. So we're sitting in an empty room wondering why no one showed up. Guess what, those conversations we were ready to have were already taking place without us in another location...online. Two people sitting at home and feeling the frustration with the system created a FB page called "I Hate oZONE" and we could not control anything on it. 2000 people were posting to this page 24 x 7 and we only had two communications people in IT that were trying to handle all this and we were completely overwhelmed.

Take aways: Relevance and impact are critical points for students. You can never communicate enough, just search "I Hate oZONE Facebook" for proof.

Remember, we had been working on the system migration for 30 months and people were still mad about change in general. The second issue was that the old system seemed perfect and the new one seemed immature. The third front was within; the advisers were leading the I Hate oZone campaign because they had been left out of the planning and when students came to the advisers, the advisers were complaining about the system and some even passed out the link to the FB page to their students.

Teamwork required: There is no "I" in Team, but there sure is in "I Hate oZONE!" - we couldn't just put one person out in front of the angry mob. People were speculating on everything from root causes to side effects without any research whatsoever. So how did we start to turn the corner? It really came down to teamwork. We threw away all our old communication strategies from Public Affairs and we empowered the team to respond without the official approval process we usually required. We were getting 2 posts per minute. We put a face on the project, rather than create a fake persona or a high-level administrator. We had 3-5 actual people on the project who had the answers reply back with their personal FB accounts. Three different faces (examples in presentation), we were all working together. You have to go in with no fear. You have to be brutally honest, but you don't have to throw up your hands either. If it looks awful, admit it and say but we're working on that. The entire budget was detailed in FB, it was open information anyway. We also tried to stay within the bullet points we had agreed were the important points to communicate. Let the venters vent. If someone wants to scream, let them get it out. Once they got out their frustrations, we could try to change the tone of the conversation away from I Hate oZONE to how can we work together to fix this or make it better? How do we get to where you want?

One other tack: we went to the two students who started I Hate oZONE who were really good students and wanted to start a dialog about the problem not just a hate campaign. They ended up getting married and we got invitations to their wedding, so we ended up working everything out. So we were working through everything and the administration says, "let's just cut this off at the knees" and have a forum where the FB people can come talk to us to our face and find out how to have a positive discussion. We had 500 people say they would attend the forum and only 3 students came. Even the two students who started the FB campaign sat with the employees and were encouraging people to come, but more people were on FB during that time than in the actual forum.

Lessons learned? The implementation team was more interested in getting the communications team to handle the public than in getting student buy-in in the beginning. The tide was turned, even though students didn't show up to the forum, they saw how committed the administration was to changing oZone to make it work for students.

Knocked the communicators and project team out of 6 weeks of work, all they could do was focus on the oZone communications.

See the presentation for full notes and the wrap up, how to prepare, how to manage the unexpected.

Back to Carla, UTSA:

• • Respond to situation as soon as possible.

  • Respond contextually to match the communications channel you are using

  • Keep the conversation open

  • Let your audience know they are talking to a real person

  • Event though the customer doesn't comment, that doesn't mean they aren't following or appreciative of your response

  • Convince upper management that social media feedback is just as important as other feedback methods

  • Keep consistent and active, don't start up FB and then not log in.

  • Increase followers or friends whenever possible

CHAT NOTES from Adobe Connect:

• • ITCOMM CG Leader 1: I am having trouble getting audio.

  • SNM-NC State Univ: I just heard you.

  • Sheri - LSU Geaux Tigers!!!!: you are on my computer but not on the phone

  • Carlyn - Rice: for audio, use your phone: 877.944.2300 code 99234#

  • Mark - OUHSC: Does UTSA, or other schools, have a social media policy that applies to faculty, students and staff?

  • ITCOMM CG Leader 1 2: Mark, UTSA does not have a specific poliy regarding social media.

  • Carlyn - Rice: Ditto for Rice, we don't have a policy but Public Affairs has some suggestions.

  • Sheri - LSU Geaux Tigers!!!!: Did your communications staff start responding directly on their page?

  • Sheri - LSU Geaux Tigers!!!!: We had a similar response with I Hate Moodle when we switched

  • Sheri - LSU Geaux Tigers!!!!: getting buy in from students prior to instituting a change is critical

  • Sheri - LSU Geaux Tigers!!!!: =)

  • ITCOMM CG Leader 1 2: I would like to present on some generalizations/lessons learned from my experience and some current social media challenges, if we have time.

  • Carlyn - Rice: can't hear Carla

  • Carlyn - Rice: Nick and Carla - BRAVO! please add your PPT to the wiki page if possible: http://www.educause.edu/wiki/January+2011

  • ITCOMM CG Leader 1 2: Carla: Thank you to everyone!