ICTlogy

Social media content curation: tips, tricks and winning strategies
Chair: Jessica Winters, University of Groningen, Netherlands

What is good content? How to find good content? What to post where?

Mandy Reinig, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, USA

What is content curation? search, filter, sort and present content.

1. Spot it
2. Stock it
3. Share it

Curation is manually sourcing and posting content relevant to your niche and audience, while aggregation is automated feeds/content collected from using key words/phrases. Content curation takes more time.

Kellie McMullin, Nova Scotia Community College, Canada

Content curation strategy:

• Who is your target audience? Knowing your audience, their interests, is key.
• What are your goals? You have to have them, so that you can measure your performance and your impact: contact, inform, customer service, recruitment, branding, etc.
• What types of sources do you want to draw from?
• What content collection tools do you want to use?
• How often will you check for new content? It depends on the platform and, especially, on the goals. Consistency is key.
• Who will check for new content? It is not as important the who but consistency in who is in charge of it. Using students can be a good bet, as they often are the target audience themselves, are savvy on social media use.
• How often will you post the content?

Jessica Winters, University of Groningen, Netherlands

Posting on Facebook:

• Best length is 80 characters or less (80-130 characters). The goal is to tease the user to click on the link, not to make them read the whole stuff on Facebook.
• Visual: add a picture or a good video.
• As questions.
• Be authentic, be honest.
• Quality, not quantity. It is better to post once a day a good thing than posting noise several times a day.
• Content: pride (being a student at the uni, stuff about the university, local/regional news/information), current events (only the relevant ones), college-humor, student-related, famous people.

It is important to identify one’s social ambassadors.

Kellie McMullin, Nova Scotia Community College, Canada

Content curation tools: how to choose the right tool for you? It depends on your goals, your audience and the form of content (pictures, videos, articles) that you want.

• Keep content simple. Simple things is what people will read.
• Be real and relevant.
• Post your passion. Don’t post because something has to be posted.
• Student-produced material. And tag the students’ content!
• Contests.

Jessica Winters, University of Groningen, Netherlands

If you aim at recruiting international students, you have to be on the social media that they are using, the sites that are popular in their respective countries, with their cultural codes, in their language.

Using Hootsuite as a content curation tool, not only for social media, but also to follow/subscribe to RSS feeds.

Discussion

Q: What about sponsord posts on Facebook? Winters: they work a little bit better than regular posts, but not too much. You can do that every now and then, it is not very expensive, but it is not terrific.

Ismael Peña-López: what about content produced by faculty members? Winters: the problem with this content is not quality —which is good— but the focus, which is usually too narrow and addressed to a very specific/specialized audience.

Q: What about trolls? Winters: we usually ignore them and, in fact, students themselves will many times fight them back.

Stepping into a new era
Jan Muehlfeit, Chairman of Europe Microsoft Corporation

What is technology today? What is and what is not technology? A new Mercedes has 16 computers in it and 60% of the whole budget is related to these computers. So, what is Mercedes building, cars or something else? Technology is deeply transforming most businesses, related or not with technology.

The more technology we have, the more a commodity it will become. And, thus, the more important human capital or human potential will be. Is the educational system preparing students so that they can develop their potential?

School, and society at large, is obsessed with the things that do not work, with what is wrong, with failures. We should be devoting more time and energies not to weaknesses but to strenghts: the development of people should focus on the strenghts of these people and not in trying to develop (in vain) their weaknesses. And this development should be based on self-awareness, on knowing who you are and what you can and/or want to do.

We need a new education model. Technology will change education in three ways at least:

• Enabling individual learning.
• Learning will be much more global.
• Learning will be collaborative.

How to change things? Leadership is not about the what and how, but about the why, about having and sharing a vision. Managers can motivate, but leaders can inspire.

Discussion

Q: What should universitties do? Muehlfeit: the major gap in education today is we don’t teach self-awareness, so that we don’t understand who we are and, thus, we don’t understand the others or the world. We have to learn from young people.

Q: How should we do that? Muehlfeit: we have to apply technology to all aspects of life.

Q: How do we let people that are inspired or that have a vision to advance? Muehfeit: Decide, act, follow what you are doing and correct according to your observations. And we can help people in these four steps: helping them to decide, to take action, to follow and monitor their acts and to react and correct.

Game On! Gamifying international student recruitment.
Justyna Giezynska, Studybility; Joachim Ekström, Uppsala University; Yu-Kai Chou, The Octalys Group.

Justyna Giezynska

4 aspects of innovation:

• Recognized need;
• Competent people with relevant technology;
• Financial support;
• Understangind needs.

Innovation requires governance, management and financing (the Golden Triangle of innovation).

Gamification is an engaging process. Gamification in student recruitment can help in raising awareness on your programme, can increase enrolment, can work on retention, can lead to knowledge growth and sharing, etc.

Yu-Kai Chou

Everyone has the capacity to enjoy games. And games can get people to voluntarily do hours of secret grunt work (called "grinding" in the gaming context) voluntarily and even enjoying it. Let’s think of gamification as "human-focused design", as opposed to "function focused design": a system that is designed to optimize for the motivation sand feelings of the human inside, instead of assuming the people within are robots that will complete the task.

There is more in gamification than points, badges and leaderboards (the PBLs). The social part of social media is about engagement, just like in gamification. In gamification one has to start with the Core Drives, not the Game Elements: how do I want my users to feel, and not what are my users going to do.

Core drives:

• Epic meaning & calling. Can relate with a certain (positive) degree of elitism.
• Development & accomplishment. Goals, acknowledgement..
• Empowerment of creativity & feedback. Create, provide feedback, fix things, start again. An improvement/virtuous cycle.
• Ownership & possession. Virtual gifts, virtual currencies. But also customization, personalization.
• Social influence & relatedness. Care about the group and being part of it. Group quests.
• Scarcity & impatience. You want something just because you can’t have it.
• Unpredictability & curiosity.
• Loss & avoidance. You do something to avoid a loss or something bad to happen.

Left brain, extrinsic motivation: accomplishment, ownership, scarcity…
Right brain, intrinsic motivation: empowerment, social influence, unpredictability…
Meaning and avoidance belong to both kinds of motivation.

Extrinsic motivation usually kills intrinsic motivation and vice-versa. E.g. we have an intrinsic desire to learn… which gets spoiled when we have to do it for marks or a certificate

Stages or facets of a game: status, access, power, stuff.

Joachim Ekström

• Be clear about what you need.
• Reward good behaviour.
• Know how to handle abuse.

Can gamification (doing "funny things") affect negatively your brand? The difference on impact or on engagement may be the one between explicit and implicit gamification. Sometimes it’s better to use implicit gamification strategies rather than inviting people to play in a straightforward way.

Discussion

Q: What would you change in universities? Yu-Kai: the problem with the university system —which is broken— is that extrinsic motivation is killing intrinsic motivation. Partly because the things that we have to learn are very much complex, much more complex than in the past. Maybe technology —and/or gamification— could have a role on simplifying things (without necessarily having to trivialize it). And once things are a little bit simpler, then motivation can come back. It is urgent that education provides a purpose for what is learnt, so that the student can have a feeling of accomplishment (different from a feeling of having successfully performed at the exams).

Q: How to use gamification for international students recruitment? Yu-Kai: motivation is the key, what motivates a person to go to your school? Is it scarcity? Is is ownership? How do we make it an epic quest? What about creating a game to help people figure out what they want to do with their lives?