Interview: Campus Sonar Founder Liz Gross on Social’s Role in Identity, Engagement, and Crisis in Higher Ed

Crisis on campus

“A crisis is when a campus really starts to understand how important social is,” Liz says. “I think that honestly for a lot of campuses crisis monitoring and crisis detection is what really gets them interested in social listening, and it’s often a top of mind use case for them.”

Crisis detection might not be a top of mind use cases for every organization interested in social listening, but it’s easy to see why educational institutions need to be aware and in control of developing issues – especially when they can occur pretty regularly.

Crises on campus can start as all sorts of things, from the obvious, like violent incidents, through to weather conditions. Liz gives the example of stray cows (or bulls) ending up on campuses and causing safety issues (a surprisingly common occurrence – just type “cow on campus” into Twitter).

“What surprises me is every single social media manager you talk to has had the experience, because it’s something that happens on a regular basis, and very few of them have received any sort of official training in how to handle it.”

Something that the prevalence of crises has prompted is an organic community of campus social media managers who have connected and started to learn from each other, using hashtags and Slack channels to supplement a lack of external resources that can help them do their jobs better.

“They often find themselves being the only person supporting the campus on social media in a time of crisis,” Liz says.

How do you do, fellow kids?

I hear a lot about brands treading a delicate line between engaging appropriately in informal meme culture and completely destroying their reputation. I imagine that this is an even more difficult conundrum for universities – their students speak the language of Twitter, yet the institution needs to square that with not compromising on their studious reputation. It could go wrong quite quickly.

“It’s the campuses that are completely out of touch with who they really are and how people see them that will try to do funny memes and just look silly.”

Luckily, Liz has some examples of institutions that are doing this really well.

For example, the University of Central Arkansas wanted to provide their students with quality GIF content that respected copyright and promoted the brand. “They identified the most popular gifs used among their students and had the campus mascot and their president enact them all. They created their own GiF library.”

The University of Florida used a similar tactic – in a video that welcomed students back to campus their president (purposefully) awkwardly reenacting popular YouTube videos. In both these cases, the president comes across as approachable and willing to get involved, without compromising the serious reputation of the overall institution.

Another example of great online practice comes from Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). Liz tells me (a clueless Brit), “the students who go there are nerds. The nerdiest of nerds. And they get that.” Knowing that the students they attract are nerds, and that nerds tend to hang out on Reddit, RIT has done some great work on there.

“Most campuses are terrified of Reddit. But their social team knows what it is to be an RIT tiger and how do that on the internet,” Liz says.