What words come to mind when you think of KFC? “Fried chicken,” of course. “Double Down,” perhaps. What about “Social Media in Higher Education?”
KFC is offering a $20,000 college scholarship to a graduating high school senior who can produce the best tweet beginning with, “I should be a #KFCScholar because…” It’s a strategy that shows Col. Sanders’ commitment to education.
Each year, KFC gives away 75 student scholarships and this year, they are looking for the best tweet from a high school senior with a cumulative GPA of 2.75 (or higher). The best tweet will be selected based 40 percent on creativity, 30 percent on need and 30 percent drive.
We’re seeing about 100 tweets an hour with the hashtag #KFCScholar. For a ten-day contest, that equals to over 24,000 tweets. While I’m not a fan of the Double Down sandwhich (ick!), I’m thrilled with this brilliantly simple social media campaign. It engages the appropriate target audience, gives back to the community and promotes free marketing and advertising.
What more could a company ask for in terms of ROI… And what more could a high school senior ask for with an ROI of 140 characters for $20,000?
You should first know that this thing kind of blew my mind at first.
The canned description is that this is Foursquare for the Internets. In other words, a way to “check in” at just any ol’ website as you surf, thereby communicating where you go and tagging you as a “fan” of frequently visited sites and therefore the, “one true fan” of sites you’ve visited more than anyone else (like Foursquare’s, “mayor”). It also has patches/badges for browsing accomplishments and a point system that builds by visiting and sharing pages through Twitter, Facebook and more. It’s easy to lazily make this the web’s analog to Foursquare. It can be a lot more than that.
Step back from the mechanics, which require a downloaded plug-in for your browser, and you can see that in some ways this turns web analytics a bit on its head – in fact it reverses the magnifying glass, showing you the interesting detail beyond your simple history. It really forces you to take a different look at your browsing culture and personal identification.
As Co-Founder Eric Marcoullier (@bpm140) reflected openly in a Twitter conversation with me:
I pretty much always look at who visited the page before I read the article now. The context is fascinating.
During my first week I really stayed open with my browsing. I installed the One True Fan plug-in on my main browser and allowed auto-check-ins on basically every site I visited (in full disclosure I did hide check-ins on exactly three sites, for client sensitivity reasons). Doing this while on the AGLA Hiring Heroes tour was particularly interesting since my check-ins ricocheted between scheduling which tiny town we’d be in from Dallas to Los Angeles and keeping up with news and work from the world outside the bus.
There’s a stat dashboard I don’t visit very often, but does contain some sample activity:
And here’s the bar that subtly appears at the bottom of websites – it’s small at first but when moused-over shows:
I too found myself checking who else had been there, both from a crowd-sense and a breadcrumb sense. It doesn’t just include anyone with a OneTrueFan.com plug-in, but also anyone sharing these sites on Twitter, Facebook and more (lots more, coming soon, they promise). Yes, there are privacy concerns (that can be easily assuaged with just NOT sharing site visits or un-checking “auto check-in”) but it still makes for an interesting personal if not public experiment.
Consider how this lens, of our internet life, combines with other lenses. How our patterns and likes, our real-world favorites and virtual world favorites begin to make up our personal identity. Consider the generational differences and how OneTrueFan.com data could illuminate our perceptions of demographics… The mind blows.
Business, healthcare & higher education institutions… what if you could actually identify who your biggest fans were?
For more on One True Fan, here’s video of Eric from their Disrupt 2010 presentation:
“The (social media) blackout isn’t really that bad. Anyone with a 3G phone can still view these sites on campus.” – Harrisburg University Student
I think it’s safe to say that we aren’t surprised at the results of Harrisburg University’s social media blackout experiment. Reports are trickling in that the number of students who actually went cold turkey without any social media for the week averaged between 10% – 15%. Students were found hiking to a local hotel to log into Facebook through the hotel lobby’s wifi. And of course, anyone with a 3G phone could access social media sites.
As listed on the Harrisburg’s website, the goal of the social media blackout was:
“To get students, staff and faculty to think about social media when they are not available.”
Many are reporting that this experiment failed. The most obvious observation is because trying to block social media in this day and age is nearly impossible. And with only 10% – 15% of the campus “playing by the rules,” is this a true assessment of how the university’s population is affected? Perhaps the university should have researched the campus first, as Feedback EVP, Dean Browell stated:
If the statement they want to make is that the students should re-evaluate their communication methods and the effect such methods have on their life, it would do great justice to their cause that they understand the lesson before it is taught.
Like we mentioned before, there were a lot of assumptions made without any research or in depth understanding of how/why certain audiences on Harrisburg’s campus communicate. How was communication and productivity measured beforehand in order to reach a true assessment of this experiment?
Perhaps it was a public relations stunt. If so, brilliant for getting your name out there! Even if Jimmy Fallon did say on NBC’s Late Night with Jimmy Fallon,
Harrisburg University blocks students and faculty from using all forms of social media for one week (on computers):
Inside Higher Ed reports on Harrisburg University’s plan to shut down all forms of social media on campus for one week. Provost, Eric Darr has decided to block student and faculty access to social media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and AOL instant messenger. He is also disabling wiki and chat features which will make it impossible for students and teachers to communicate and collaborate using the campus’ intranet system, even from off-campus computers.
Darr says, “It’s not that, as an institution, we hate Facebook,” Darr told Inside Higher Ed. Instead, he wanted to see what would happen if colleagues and classmates were forced to talk instead of IM, to walk to offices and dorm rooms instead of emailing. He wondered if people had forgotten how to communicate face-to-face rather than online.
Mr. Darr, how are you going to block access to social media through cell phone usage? Are the cell towers clipped for the week? Dean Browell with Feedack comments on the article,
“There’s a disturbing angle to all of this that smacks of assumptions. Two of the four channels they propose to shut down are in drastic decline among their demographic (AOL, MySpace) and as other commenters have pointed out, the other two channels don’t require the campus system at all to operate. They sell $100 iPhones at Wal-Mart people, they haven’t needed your computer labs to get on Facebook for years. Twitter is utilized by a diverse demographic even through an inexpensive, non-smart-phone via text messaging.”
We look forward to the results of this experiment.
iPads in the Classroom:
Notre Dame’s assistant professor Corey Angst is taking his class paperless, and in a pretty fun way. His class is first and only class taught with Apple iPads. All 40 students get to use iPads in place of textbooks and other learning materials during the course. This is part of a year long study of e-readers by the University. Angst explained,
“We want to know whether students feel the iPads are useful and how they plan to use them. I want them to tell me, ‘I found this great app that does such and such. I want this to be organic…We have an online Wiki discussion group where students can share their ideas.”
They are hoping the iPad’s will help students manage real world projects, and will help the university enhance the educational experience.
Survey says social media is less expensive and yields significant result in higher education:
Lipman Hearne and CASE partnered together to survey 212 CASE member institutions to research how marketing dollars are being spent in higher education and the return on that investment. Institutions that have integrated strategic social media campaigns with traditional marketing/advertising efforts have seen a wide margin of positive results. Key findings are significant and provide powerful real time success stories. Moderate-to-heavy users of social media were actually spending less overall per student on marketing activities. The moderate-to-heavies spent $83 per student, and the light-to-non-users spent $121 per student. Visit the blog and survey report for more data and key findings.
Higher Education Checks Into Foursquare:
Several Universities are leading the way with geolocation checkins. The University of Oregon, for example, incorporated Foursquare into their Welcome Week student tours. Friending the Oregon Duck and checking into 10 locations on the tour earned students a badge and 20% off at Oregon Ducks Sportsware. Another example is The University of Nebraska at Omaha. They have a microsite in conjunction with Foursquare that provides deals and encourages students to visit alcohol free businesses in the area. Harvard is another great example. They were one of the first colleges to embrace Foursquare with custom badges. Perry Hewitt, director of digital communications and communications services at Harvard, explained
“Harvard is more than classrooms and buildings. It is an interconnected community of people, ideas, and experiences, and we are actively pursuing ways to enhance those connections.”
Higher Ed Cartoon:
A snarky cartoon (sadly, mostly accurate) ridiculing the tone-deaf design of many college home pages, published on July 30 on the website xkcd and circulated widely in social media circles and on campuses:
About a week before xkcd published its cartoon, the higher ed consulting firm Noel-Levitz released a study of how prospective students are using colleges’ websites, based on more than 1,000 responses from college-bound high-schoolers.
Key findings include:
1 in 4 students reported removing a school from their prospective list because of a bad experience on that school’s Web site.
92 percent said that they would be disappointed with a school or remove it entirely from their lists if they didn’t find the information they needed on the school’s Web site.
76 percent of students supported schools creating their own private social networks for prospective students.
