Right Time, Right Place and… Ready
The final assignment of the Social Media Marketing for Higher Ed course I took last Fall asked us to explain the changes we could make at work to better integrate future marketing/communication initiatives.
After reflecting on lessons learned during the course and on the improvements our school needed to make in this area, I came up with a list of top-down and bottom-up actions – everything from working with the administration to better translate institutional objectives in to social media goals, to providing graphic templates and social media brand guidelines to staff and faculty.
In total my list had 13 items–which on paper seemed easy enough to accomplish – but in reality each action posed a unique set of challenges, with a high potential that many of them would get derailed by the common issues many higher ed institutions know all too well (silos, lack of department resources, etc).
Like so many ignored New Year’s resolutions, the majority of these actions may have never been accomplished, but for something remarkable that happened just a few months later.
72-Hour Silo-Busting News
Like a silo-busting missile the news quickly reached our 3 campuses (Europe, Asia, and Middle East). There was much work to be done and not much time to do it. Getting this announcement right would require everybody’s cooperation and participation. In very little time, representatives from the Senior Management Team, Events, Digital Communications, IT, Media Relations, Degree Programmes, Executive Education and Campus Services were mobilized with the Communications Department coordinating the efforts via a master plan.
Decisions that in the past seemed to get stalled in committee meetings, moved forward with little friction. Just as quickly, demands were coming in from staff, faculty, students and alumni for how they could help spread the news. We quickly set up a blog to put together all of the marketing materials, special social media graphics, and email signatures with instructions on how to share them online. We also used the blog to display all of the congratulatory posts coming in from around the world.
Despite pulling this off in the space of just 72 hours, the results were excellent, with our average number of online mentions doubling, and our highest performing posts to-date on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Lasting Organizational Synapses
Since then the initial excitement of the ranking has worn off a bit, however the coordinated efforts that happened between departments succeeded in creating new organization synapses, lasting connections that help shape how decisions are made even to this day.
All-in-all, the bar was raised and people now expect more guidance from the Communications Department in the form of key messaging, as well as web, social media and editorial guidelines–something we are more than happy to provide.
At INSEAD we were very fortunate to have such a great opportunity to help motivate people to work outside of their silos. Even if your organization doesn’t have a 1st place ranking to promote, try to find an event or celebration that multiple stakeholders in your organization are excited about and use this as an opportunity to work across departments. If you’re lucky the shared enthusiasm will lead to a successful project and pave the road for better collaboration in the future.
Silo-Busting Advice
- Identify an event that has the emotional value to pull together the different parts of your organization.
- Identify key decision makers from each department and encourage them to take an active role in the planning as early on as possible.
- Create a detailed communications plan with key deliverables and time schedule, adding in key messages as they get approved.
- Utilize an easy to update platform (website, blog, intranet, social advocacy platform, cloud storage, etc.) to give your community an easy way to spread the word before, after and during the event.
- Take the time to debrief after the dust has settled, figuring out what worked and what could be improved.
- Recognize that even if things weren’t perfect this was a team effort and celebrate the successes together.
In July we will be holding our MBA graduation at the iconic Palace of Fontainebleau, an event that will only be successful if we can again show that we are better than the sum of our parts. This is another great opportunity to make a splash on social media, but equally important a chance to keep reinforcing the interdepartmental ties that were made during the #1 FT Ranking announcement.
Meet the Author: Dov Campbell
Dov Campbell is the Paris-based Associate Director for Digital Communications at INSEAD, The Business School for the World. He is also a graduate of Higher Ed Experts’ professional certificate program on social media marketing for higher education.