The cost of social media

The cost of utilizing social media in your admissions office is relative low in comparison to the travel budgets, publication materials, etc. that most typically incur.  So what’s the true barrier to entry for social media?  One aspect has to be staff education.

Our office doesn’t happen to have a full-time person doing web development, graphic design, or e-comm.  We attempt to do as much of that as possible in-house, and then we look to IT for any additional support.  Our staff of 16 counselors has their plate full with all kinds of different non-social media programming, so to learn anything new often comes at a great price in terms of time.

My thought on this: be deliberate.  The occasional technology/e-comm update in staff meeting may get people excited about learning social media, but it will quickly end there unless you engage your colleagues.

1.  Set up extended training on the tools your team is already using. We are lucky enough to be using Google Apps for Education as our email/chat/docs/calendar tool on campus, but have we unlocked all of its potential in our office?  Probably not.  An hour one sleepy January afternoon might get us there in terms of getting everybody on board with the product.

2.  Get people using the tools that are out there. The only way to learn Web 2.0 is to do Web 2.0.  Encourage your colleagues to get on Facebook, to participate on Twitter, or even to open a Flickr account.  Often times the cost of these things is free.

3.  RSS. Seems like old news, right?  It’s amazing how often people ask me how I stay informed about what’s going on in our field and in technology, etc.  We all need to have some kind of RSS literacy.  It’s the not the future of news, it is how news is being delivered.  The next step: sorting our signal vs. noise — this is where people generally get hung up.

4.  Don’t be afraid to delegate. If you’re the one person working with social media/e-comm in your office, it can be frightening to think about letting go of your “babies.”  Trust your colleagues, and know that if they have genuine interest in the project, they are going to get it done and get it done well.

The most important point here: don’t let social media become a summer project.  Good ideas have a way of being forgotten or lost along the way to May 1.