Getting Started on Instagram

While I’ve had a personal Instagram account for quite a while now, I’m just starting to explore the possibilities for an Instagram account for my district. This smartphone-based photo-sharing app is popular with both students and adults, but it’s just starting to become a platform for brands and organizations.

So far, we’ve found this is a useful tool for

• Spotlighting school activities
• Recognizing student and staff achievements
• Announcing positive news
• Showing sneak peaks and behind-the-scenes looks at familiar subjects

Here are the top lessons we’ve learned as we explore this tool for engaging our community:

• Unlike Facebook, which publishes stories about interactions in users’ feeds, it is more difficult for Instagrammers to stumble on your account. This means you need to promote your Instagram feed more actively. 
• You can connect Instagram to your district’s Twitter feed and Facebook page. It’s a little tricky to connect it to the brand page instead of your personal profile, but the business page on the Instagram site has good tips about this.
• We tag our photos with the schools and locations where we take them. While we’re doing this, we check out the other photos tagged at our schools and hit “like” on appropriate photos from students, parents and staff. This leads active users to discover us.
• We are looking for more ways to make our feed interactive. This summer, we plan to  try a hashtag photo contest.

Have you used Instagram professionally yet? Any tips?

What Does This Have to Do With Me?

I scour my district’s Facebook insights, Twitter retweets, Instagram likes and YouTube views. Some posts blow up, with people responding in droves. Some molder quietly, with nobody seeming to care about them at all.

In order to provide more engaging content, I try to figure out what the most popular posts have in common.

From what I can tell, it comes down to one central theme: the popular posts connect to the audience in a personal way. They answer the question, “What does this have to do with me?”

Here are the top three best ways I’ve found to address this question:

1. News that affects everyone
   Posts about the newly approved calendar or about snow days appeal to everyone because they affect everyone. These are the posts that are so popular they attract you a bunch of new followers. 
2. Awards
   I was initially surprised by how appealing posts about awards were. We get huge responses when the district, a school, a staff member or a student gets a major recognition. This is because these awards give people evidence that they are in a high-quality school district. Our awards make them look good.
3. Pictures of people they know
   It’s becoming common knowledge that people respond to photos on social media sites. But I find that our best responses come when we post photo albums with lots of faces from around the school district. This increases the chances that they know someone in the photos. Photos+personal connection=engagement double whammy!

Social Media Sessions at NSPRA Seminar Will Take You to the Next Level

I admit it — I’m a nerd. I’m excitedly planning my trip to the 2013 NSPRA Seminar in San Diego and I’ve already printed out the NSPRA Seminar at a Glance document from the NSPRA website and started highlighting the sessions I want to attend.

Even if you’re not as big a nerd as I am, you can benefit from my geekiness. I’ve pulled out all the social media sessions for your consideration. It seems like this year, NSPRA is taking social media past the basics and up to the next level.

Saturday, July 6:

• Pre-seminar workshop: “Rise of the Mobile App: Mobile App Strategy in School Communications” — Cody Cunningham and Terry Morawski

Monday, July 8:

• “Beyond Twitter Basics: Developing an Effective Strategy for Twitter Success” ― Erika Daggett
  
• “Policy Recommendations to Guide Social Media Interactions for Public Educators” ― Stephanie Smith, Ed.D. and Virginia Conover, Ed.D.
• “Social Media for Schools: Diving Beyond ‘Should We?’ Discussions” ― Dustin Senger

Tuesday, July 9:

• “Dynamic, Digital, Mobile School Communication: There’s an App for That!” ― Mary Todoric and Mick Torres
• “Surviving Social Media Scorn: What To Do When Negative News Goes Viral” ― Laurel Heiden and David Richardson

Wednesday, July 10:

• “Facebook Forward – Expanding to Your Schools” ― Lauri Pyatt and Elaine Watkins-Miller
  

What Does the Upcoming Facebook Redesign Mean for Your District’s Page?

Get ready for the griping from your Facebook friends – another redesign is on its way over the next few weeks.

Facebook is promoting some features that should be good for your district’s page:

• People will be able to look at different feeds, including a “following” feed. This one will show them posts by pages they follow, including yours. This might help you recapture the attention of followers who haven’t looked at your page in a while. If followers engage with your content in this feed, Facebook is more likely to show it to them in their regular feed.
• Your photos, which are usually your most engaging content, will be more prominent.
• When someone likes your page, your cover photo will show up in the post that appears in the feeds of that person’s friends.
• Even the most change-averse folks on Facebook should find this change a bit easier because it will be familiar – the new design looks like the current design of Facebook’s mobile app.

image from Facebook Studio

It’s Time to Get on Board with Facebook

If using Facebook for your school PR program still feels innovative and cutting-edge to you, it’s time to reconsider.

A few years ago, I gave a social media presentation. I told participants that if these new social media tools did not fit into their communication plans, they should not use them. “Don’t just get a Facebook page because everyone else is getting one,” I said.

The times have changed, and my mind has changed with them, at least where Facebook is concerned. I still very much believe that these tools should align with and support your communication plans. But I no longer think using Facebook is optional.

Today, there are more than a billion people actively using Facebook, and thousands of them live in your community. In fact, they represent your most important audiences.

About 40 percent of Facebook users fall between the ages of 25 and 44 – roughly the age of the parents you target with your communications. And almost 75 percent of mothers in the United States use Facebook.

Facebook is how many of your schools’ parents communicate and gather information, and many key stakeholders in your community are using it to tell stories about your schools.

They expect to be able to interact with you on this platform, just as they expect you to have a website. And if they don’t find your page, some of them are tempted to make one for you.

That’s why it’s no longer just the innovators and the early adopters who are using Facebook for school PR. We’ve moved on to the early majority.

So unless you want to be a laggard, it’s time to figure out how Facebook can support your communication plans.

Need to Show Your Superintendent the Impact of Social Media?

Try this video from Erik Qualman, author and speaker on digital trends.

Using Social Tools to Combat Bullying

October is National Bullying Prevention Month, although the topic is never far from our thoughts throughout the year.

While social media are offering children more tools for bullying each other, they are also providing more tools to stop the abuse.

Facebook, the hub of most social activity, recently came out with tools directly targeting the problem. The site encourages users to report bullying and allows them to track the reports they submit.

Many schools use services that allow students to send the school text messages with reports of bullying. Some schools are even moving to mobile apps like iCare, which not only makes anonymous reporting simple, it lets schools track their bullying reports and it aligns with whichever bullying prevention programs the schools use.

Research Demonstrates that Online Photos and Videos are Social Currency

Do you post photos you’ve taken on Instagram? Videos you’ve created on YouTube? Then you are a creator.

Do you use Pinterest or Facebook to find and repost photos and videos someone else created? Then you are a curator.

These are terms for online activities coined by researchers Lee Rainie, Joanna Brenner and Kristen Purcell in their study for the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

Their research, Photos and Videos as Social Currency Online, shows that 46 percent of adults on the internet are creators, posting their own photos and videos online. And 41 percent are curators, using sites like Pinterest to share other people’s photos and videos.

“Overall, 56 percent of internet users do at least one of these creating or curating activities, and 32 percent of internet users do both creating and curating activities,” they said.

It’s when this study starts breaking down the demographics that it really becomes useful to school PR professionals:

• Almost a fifth of women online (19 percent) use Pinterest to curate photos, videos and links to other online content. Maybe it’s time to use some of Shane Haggerty’s ideas from his “Five Ways Your School District Can Use Pinterest” post to reach your district’s moms.
• Instagram users are mostly young adults, with 27 percent of all internet users between the ages of 18 and 29 using the mobile photo sharing service. If you have a lot of young parents, perhaps you could start an account and a hashtag for your school district. If you don’t, Instagram might not be worth your time.

Another Good Idea from NSPRA: First-Day Photos on Facebook

Somebody at the NSPRA seminar gave me a great idea, and I can’t remember who it was. Perhaps one of my MOSPRA buddies can post a comment to jog my memory, so I can give proper credit. We’ve all been implementing this idea this week in Missouri.

The idea is simple: Ask parents to submit first-day-of-school photos for you to post on your district Facebook page.

This was a huge hit on the Park Hill School District page – we received 78 photos and tons of interactions. Parents loved seeing their own kids and their neighbors’ kids, and they are even taking the time to look around at other content once they are on the page.

We posted the pictures throughout the day as they came in. Even though this got a little hectic with our already busy schedule on the first day, it generated excitement and motivated others to submit photos.

We continue to add photos to the album, even three days later, as parents see the page and decide to contribute.

A Fiber Future: How Will High-Speed Fiber Networks Affect School Communication?

I’m very lucky.

Remember a while back, when Google had cities across the country competing over who would get their new Google Fiber network? The one with speeds 100 times faster than our current broadband speeds?

Well, they picked my town.

For the last year, they’ve been building their fiber infrastructure here in Kansas City, Mo. and across the state line in Kansas City, Kan. Recently, my friends and neighbors and I watched with great anticipation as Google announced how they would connect Kansas City neighborhoods to this network.

We found out that the neighborhoods that showed the most interest would get the fiber first, and the public services in their neighborhoods (like schools) would get connected for free. Fortunately for me, my neighborhood will get Google Fiber. Unfortunately for my school district, it is in a part of the city that has to wait for the next round of installations.

This gives us some time to understand the implications for our schools. The Park Hill School District has a fiber network between its buildings, so we already benefit from these top speeds in our communication between schools. But will a fiber connection to the rest of the world open up new opportunities?

Fast connections will allow easier, more reliable video conferencing, which not only presents opportunities for classroom collaboration and professional development across distances, it also enables virtual town halls for community engagement and live streaming of district events.

Google Fiber is offering an option for low-cost connection and free internet. There might also be possibilities for increasing the availability of free WiFi hotspots. This could help us bridge the digital divide, connecting low-income families so that their children can use online learning tools and so that we can more easily communicate with them.

What else will be able to do when Google Fiber comes to my district? I’m still brainstorming – do you have any ideas?