ctucommunity-blog

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The Results Are In!

We're honored to receive the "The Unsung Hero" award for our community management practice of "Kicking it to the Community." Last night, we were speechless to be among such talented and deserving social media pros.

Thank you to this year's judges, fellow entrants, and most importantly - our students and alumni who make our thriving communities exceptional.

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SoMe Award Entry Detail

Category: The Unsung Hero - Honors the community manager who has best used social media to grow, support and provide value to an online community.

Organization: Colorado Technical University CTU Communities: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn

Community Manager: Kristin Clifford

Kristin has implemented a number of community management practices - including "kicking" questions to the community, "boomerang dialogue", an influencer recognition program, 12-hour monitoring 7 days a week, a set of social brand standards, and more - all to provide value and support our community members. The use of these practices keeps our communities thriving, healthy, and deepens relationships with our current students and alumni - all while demonstrating to aspiring students what they can expect at CTU.

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How We Revolutionize the Education Experience Social media allows CTU to serve students and alumni in ways other universities don't - by being transparent and putting our reputation in the hands of our most important stakeholder: students. Oftentimes, the most authentic voice is that of another person in your same position. This being the case, we never presume to answer a student's question about the actual, in-the-trenches feeling of being in a certain course or taking a certain professor. That's why we feel these questions are best answered when we amplify them to the community, so others can offer their honest insights from personal experience. 

For example, Amanda was feeling anxious about her Project Management Course, so we asked students to chime in with their own experiences.

Hearing from other students about their achievements, struggles, and solutions is motivating and helps students feel more secure and excited about tackling new challenges. 

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Celebrating Student Achievements

Our students are high-reaching achievers, and are very proud of their success. We like to let them shine by reminding them periodically of how much they've accomplished. Emails are sent outlining specific achievements with a built-in social sharing component. 

When we're tagged in the tweet (or mentioned) we amplify the tweets to the whole community and start a positive, motivating dialogue with each student.

It's a great way to keep achievers motivated and let others outside the community know what we're accomplishing.

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Our fans are very active and we encourage them to show their pride and cheer each other on to achieve greatness. For example, whenever we have a graduation we post a congratulatory photo or text post, and encourage others to offer a word of encouragement. 

This results in a slew of positive comments and conversation about graduation, and motivates students who are working toward their degree.

We've also begun tweeting quotes from graduates using the hashtag #CTUgrad to highlight achievements on Twitter.

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We want to motivate students by letting them visualize how far they've come. We celebrate how much can be accomplished in just a few weeks time through the use of metaphors. 

We do this to show the difference between where they were, and where they are now. It's similar to how personal trainers motivate clients by visually showing them their weight loss. A client who has lost 5 lbs. may not feel like it's a big accomplishment - until they look at 5 lbs. of butter in their shopping cart and realize what they've done.

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Promoting Professional Advancement

One key function of CTU as a University is ensuring student success during their time here, and after. We want all our graduates to succeed and as such, we work to continually offer valuable career advice.

Our cyclical content plan includes all our important messaging high notes - and career advice and networking are an important part of that.

We frequently include posts about digital identity, LinkedIn best practices, and career services resources available to students.

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We're able to work with our Advising and Student Services team to provide the best support for our students. Through this combination of social media best practices and customer service, we're able to identify students who are struggling or who simply desire more involvement from their advisor, and solve the problems proactively.

For example, Carol, a new student at CTU, posted to our Facebook wall about how she was excited, but a bit nervous. We engaged with her there and then noticed she was also following us on Twitter. Through responsiveness, and collaboration with our advising team, we helped Carol feel less nervous and more secure about starting. This can make all the different as far as keeping students engaged and on track to finish their degrees.

We also continued to check in with Carol after her start date to see how she was doing, and she appreciated the positive encouragement.

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Handling Tough Questions - Head On

Joshua was encouraged by a campus president to ask this question. He received nearly 20 replies from credible sources – his peers – on how to defend his choice to study online. 

View Joshua's post here, and see our post to the community here. This is another example of how we kick things out to the community to answer our fans. After all, sources like Nielsen  suggest that as many as 70% of people trust strangers over expert recommendations and traditional advertising.

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Responding to Detractors We aspire to be transparent in all our interactions. When someone has a negative complaint, we acknowledge how they feel and respond with information or resources that can help them, while reminding them of our community atmosphere if necessary. We track frequent detractors and keep this in mind when responding to them, so as not to set them off.

Here, Debra makes a negative comment about the mentorship program, and we provide her with details about criteria in a polite manner, encouraging her to cheer along the selected mentor.

Trisha is upset that a beloved teacher has been let go. We empathized with her, and offered her an opportunity to discuss further, which she gladly accepted.  Di was upset about CTU's pop-up ads. The last thing we want to do is upset others with our marketing plans. Since Di was so bothered, we assisted her with some resources and steps she could take to remove ads from her Internet browsing experience.

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As with any community, difficult members crop up from time to time. We take pride in being transparent and offering answers to even the most difficult of questions from the most negative commenter.

However, when community members are disruptive and have been helped to the extent of our abilities, yet refuse to pursue the proper channels to resolve their issue, we must draw the line. After all, this is a safe place for our extended university family.

If a poster impacts other's enjoyment of the community, is repeatedly negative or making claims that have been proven false, refuses to take advice on proper channels to contact, or otherwise delights in antagonizing the community as a whole, they will be banned.

For example, this student had been assisted multiple times by advisors and other high-level University officials. He was abusive to them on the phone, screaming and swearing. He would not allow himself to be helped, but repeatedly attempted to stir things up in the community, commenting on unrelated statuses and comments with his own opinion. Since he'd been assisted but refused the option of retaking the course or any other method of help offered to him, he was banned from posting on social sites.

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CTU Deans on Twitter

Our students and alumni expect real-time access to their professors and our academic leaders for their real-world perspectives. To respond, our Deans and Program Directors participate in program-specific Twitter accounts.

The academics follow established best practices for growing their accounts and engaging with current and aspiring students. Some of our accounts are managed by multiple subject matter experts to ensure response time and engagement.

We encourage the Deans to curate content in their subject areas from sources they trust to share with the community, as well as share their own publications from the CTU blog or other academic publications.

In addition to supplying them with best practices, we give our students and potential students access to our Deans and Program Directors via Live Q&A sessions on Twitter. We interview the Deans on Twitter, and allow key advocates in our communities interview them with their own questions. Anyone is welcome to participate and ask questions during the specified time frame, and the interviewees do their best to answer each query that comes their way. 

We use the hashtag #CTUchat so anyone can follow along with the conversation.

Find our Deans and Program Directors on Twitter:

@CTUHomeland: Stephen Recca, Director of Homeland Security

@CTUBusiness: Dr. Emad Rahim, Dean of Business

@CTUHealth: Dr. Kathy Wood, Dean of Health Sciences

@CTUTech: Dr. Myles Vogel, Dean of IT, Dr. Bruce Harmon and Dr. Imad AlSaeed

@CTUJustice: Rich Holloway, J.D., Director of Criminal Justice

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Maintaining Lasting Relationships We work hard to give our students access to academic leaders - it's one of the many reasons why we assisted several Deans and Program Directors in setting up their Twitter accounts. We often like to offer the information to students over the course of a conversation as an add-on. Our Deans are activated and ready to respond and connect - as seen in the example with Rich Holloway, our Program Director for Criminal Justice. 

When students are interested in a specific program, we will point them to the expert access on Twitter as well as the relevant student blog topic area.

In addition to our experts, we make sure to remind students and alumni of all the resources available to them, like Career Services. It is important to consistently reinforce the benefits of CTU, which continue well after they've graduated.

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Nurturing Prospective Students When prospective students ask questions on the page, we like to kick the questions out to the community for the most authentic responses. As you see with Alyssa and Melissa, current students and alumni are only too happy to offer their advice and feedback to those considering CTU.

This type of transparency makes our own communication more authentic.

Once the student has received replies from the community, we will point them toward official advising and enrollment channels as appropriate.

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Jennifer posted on our wall that she was uncertain about attending CTU. She stated mixed reviews as her reason. Other students chimed in with their opinions, and ultimately the honesty and transparency led Jennifer to decide to enroll.

It's important to allow students and alumni the freedom to express themselves - and fight the urge to control or chime in at every conversation. Chiming in too early can kill a conversation dead - like when your parents show up at the middle-school dance.

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12x7 Moderation

It's important to answer student questions and attend to their needs - a timely response can make all the difference in a student's desire to stay enrolled or enroll.

Therefore we make it a point to monitor past business hours and on weekends. In order to stay on top of the conversation we actively monitor the page from 8am-8:30pm CDT on weekdays and weekends.

Our goal is to provide the most complete answer or direct a student to the appropriate channels where they can get such an answer. If we cannot, we acknowledge the comment and assure the student we are looking into it so they don't feel abandoned. In order to keep up with the conversation we may preschedule content to keep a constant stream of updates flowing their way.

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Cyclical Posting Strategy

Our community of achievers wants different things at different times. When the session begins, new and experienced students want motivation, announcements of new resources, and other information relevant to starting out.

Mid-session is when students are looking for a boost, and at the end they need just that last little bit of motivation and pride to spur them on to the finish.

Our cyclical posting plan includes all this and more - and curate content and use our assets to build out a constant flow of posts that addresses students' needs, piques their interest, and promotes our offerings.