Julie Winch, Social Media Director at Emory University, is one of the 15 higher ed professionals who presented at the 2nd Higher Ed Social Media Conference (now available on-demand).
Julie oversees the main Emory social accounts while conceptualizing and implementing the social strategy university-wide
In this 3-question interview, Julie tells us about her most successful initiative with social media, her biggest challenge and shares some advice on how to cope with the 24/7 world of social media in higher education. Oh – and she also granted my request for a selfie!
1) What is the most successful social media initiative you’ve run over the past year?
I’ve only been here at Emory for a few months, so I’m just getting things started!
But the biggest thing we’ve dealt with during that time was the first Ebola patients coming to Emory. The most success we saw was on the day Dr. Kent Brantly held a news conference after being released, August 22nd. We live-tweeted the conference and his remarks, and had a HUGELY positive response on all platforms. We garnered our most-liked Instagram post to date, and received more RT’s and Favorites on Twitter than we had ever had in one day before. It was a great example of how leading the conversation surrounding your school can be extremely successful.
2) What is the biggest challenge you face in your social media work? How do you cope with it?
The hardest thing I have faced since working in Social Media has been making sure I know everything that’s going on, in order to promote it.
On a college campus, we all know there are a million things happening on a small and large scale. To overcome the occasional disconnect, I make sure I’m very well connected with the various departments across campus, and keep a VERY close eye on our events calendar to make sure I don’t miss anything. Building relationships is more important than you can ever imagine when it comes to social!
3) Social media work never stops. How do you maintain balance in your life & work given this constraint? Any tips, techniques or tools?
A healthy work-life balance has always been very important to me, and it remains so working in social media.
For me, I always make myself available after hours, but within reason. I don’t necessarily look at my phone every 5 minutes if I’m at dinner, but I’ll be sure to keep an eye on things throughout the evening. The biggest lesson I have learned over the years has been that people will expect you to be as available as you make yourself. If you answer emails at 3am, people will assume they can reach you at all hours. If you make yourself available after-hours with the caveat that it may be a little while until you respond, people will understand and respect that. It’s all about expectations ¬- it’s almost humanly impossible to be on top of every single thing that happens on social media, so just manage what you can do and delegate from there. Plus, there are ALWAYS exceptions to the rule. Just be uber aware (follow hashtags, mentions on Twitter, convos on group pages on Facebook, Yik Yak conversations) of what’s going on on your campus, and know if you need to be in-pocket.
