Creating useful guidelines for social media use

Social media is becoming more widely used in schools – even if your district hasn’t fully embraced it. Parents and community are sharing accomplishments, students are communicating with teachers and media are using much of this for content.

If your district is considering, or has even already started using social media tools – Facebook, Twitter and the like – it is important to have appropriate guidelines in place. Guidelines should address a number of items: directions for set-up, content recommendations and rules for use.

In Hutto ISD, our guidelines reflect our transparent communication style and help staff to set up social media. The guidelines are relaxed and informal, and even read in a light-hearted, playful way.

Consider some of these tips when creating social media guidelines:

1. Make it a group effort. Cast a wide net when organizing a team to create guidelines for your district. You should consider including those who use social media and those that don’t as well as educators and external stakeholders. It will give you a good perspective of what your users and followers expect. And be sure your attorneys and school board see the effort.
2. Consider your district’s culture. What do your administrators, board members teachers and students believe concerning social media? What are concerns and praises of social media? Do you communicate formally or informally on expectations? Is your district strict or relaxed in your communication guidelines? These will help shape your guidelines to ensure they are used properly and respectfully.
3. Find resources and use them. We are all aware of the four-step communication process. Use it. Focusing on research and evaluation will help ensure that your district puts guidelines in place that fit your students, staff and community the best.
4. Communicate, communicate, communicate. Share your guidelines. Make them visible and easily accessible to parents, community, students and staff. This will ensure the best use of the tools and save you headaches later down the road.
5. Evolve when necessary. Be sure your guidelines are designed to incorporate change. Your action plan should be a living document that allows for periodic review and adaptation to the quickly evolving landscape of social media. This should be done at least annually, if not more often depending on resources.

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!

The Infographic Explosion

Infographics have become my favorite online obsession. I post appropriate infographics on my Pinterest page, Facebook page, and Twitter. But how to create your own infographics?

There are several options.

• Hire an infographic designer
• Purchase infographic services from dozens of online websites
• Ignore the infographic explosion altogether (but that didn’t work out too well when you dismissed Facebook, did it?)

Here’s what Visual.ly, an infographic design website, recommends if you’re looking to hire an infographic designer:

“…look for someone who understands the ‘info’ part. Infographics are used to display information in a way that’s easy to understand. Many infographic designers focus on fancy design that actually makes the infographic harder to comprehend.”

It’s also wise to examine how you would use your infographic designer. Visual.ly recommends that you create a “design brief,” which most good designers will expect. It should answer these questions:

• What stories are we trying to tell that can be better told using an infographic?
• When will we use an infographic designer most? Strictly during the budget season? For our annual reports?
• Where will we use the infographics once they’re completed? In print? Online? Both?

Because many of you currently use page designers, it might be wise to ask if they’re able to produce infographics. Ask for samples.

But know, too, that many websites also provide infographic design services, providing a way to take smaller steps toward creating infographics, on a project-by-project basis.

Any number of sites offer these services, and some even provide templates so you can design your own infographics.

Visual.ly This popular site, through its Visual.ly Marketplace, can provide you with infographic designers and even data researchers who will pull together customized infographics based on your needs. If you’re considering this option, be sure to check out their offers for “organizations,” including non-profits. Prices for customized infographics on Visual.ly can start at $1,495 and take at least 18 days to produce.

But Visual.ly also has a limited number of infographic templates you can use. You can import your own information into the template, check out how it looks, and then download the infographic as a PDF or JPEG. You can also use an html code to embed your infographic on your website, or simply link to the URL of your masterpiece. Here’s what I did in just five minutes of tinkering — a look at the“Facebook life” of the White Plains, NY, School District. 

Piktochart: This site provides three membership options, including a very limited free option. But trying out the free option (which will include a Piktochart watermark) can give you a general idea about what it’s like to create an infographic. Their professional option, at $29 a month,  provides you with 100 themes, some customization options, and more than 1,000 graphics and images.

Easel.ly This site provides 15 themes that you can customize with your own information. The site is currently in beta, which means that it can only offer you so much in terms of customization. But if you’re just getting your feet wet, Easel.ly might be a good option.

Don’t forget that you might occasionally want to use a great infographic, created by someone else but available for free use, because it contains fascinating and pertinent information about public education. I post these often on my school district websites, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, and especially on Pinterest. As a curator of useful information, consider this (yet another) part of your job.

Related articles

• 5 Free Tools For Creating Infographics (fliptop.com)
• 10 Tools for Creating Infographics and Visualizations (seomoz.org)
• Infographic Data Visualization with Visual.ly (teksocial.com)

Speed at What Price?

One of the most often cited reasons for using social medial channels to share a district’s news is the speed with which messages can be sent. Whether it’s Facebook or Twitter, the near-instantaneous distribution of information from a district central office to students, patrons and the community is a huge advancement for school PR professionals.

One drawback to using these channels, though, is the temptation to skip some of the steps that are part of the process, namely, proofreading and editing. It’s so easy to knock out those 140 characters and hit “send.” It’s so hard to reel them back in when we realize that there is an error that has just been delivered to 10,000 of your best supporters.

Whether because of auto-correct or fat-thumb complex, mistakes and errors are bound to make their way into your messages, especially if you’re working from a mobile device.  The phenomenon is so prevalent that it’s a feature on The Ellen Degeneres Show and has a website dedicated to it.

The message here is to pause a moment, review your text, and then hit “send,” confident in the knowledge that your message will be what people are talking about, not your mistakes.

Getting the troops on board: Social media monitoring

Social media, specifically Twitter, can be a great information tool during a crisis, in more ways than one. You can keep up with developments, get information out quickly and stay in touch throughout a situation. However, with all that is going on in any given crisis, monitoring the air waves may not be top of mind. That is when having assistance – and not necessarily an assistant – comes in handy.

Recently, the Hutto Police Department was dealing with a situation where a homeowner had barricaded himself in his home. Police had blocked a major thoroughfare in our town, so everyone knew something was amiss. Because we collaborate well with the PD, we were aware and watching for a resolution. None of our campuses were in danger, but it’s always best to be safe. As a precaution, administration had campuses limit activity to indoor only and notified parents that some bus routes may be affected by road closures. Mindful that social media would be buzzing, but tasked with writing, calling and texting parents, I wasn’t at a point to monitor my social media feeds. That is, until a parent emailed me a screen shot of a tweet.

The tweet, sent by a user I’d never seen, mentioned “may be my last tweets” “lockdown” and “serious.” The parent even ran down the previous tweets and let me know this person was subbing in our district that day. The police situation was resolved shortly after I received the email, all was well and our students went home safe. But the tweet bothered me enough to look up the user, check the times and figure out the situation. From it all, I learned some critical lessons:

1. Build your troops. Without the email from this parent, I wouldn’t have caught this tweet. I have built close relationships with many parents (in person and on social media), so it was quickly brought to my attention. Make sure parents know how to inform you and that they feel comfortable doing so. Be sure you have developed the relationships that will allow them to assist you.
2. Make sure your staff is on board. If your staff sees anything on social media, they should inform you as well. A quick email with a link, screen shot or details can help you get a hold of a potential social media disaster. Your staff can be built in assistants.
3. Get out the necessary info. In a crisis, if you aren’t informing your staff members of what is going on, they are going to make assumptions and they may post their assumptions on social media. And don’t forget front office staff, subs and coaches. Give them relevant details they need to know and what they should tell parents who call, tweet and post. Let them assist you.
4. Discuss the best information to share. It is never too early to have a conversation with your staff about the importance of what they tweet, post or share during a situation. Their safety, students’ safety or the sanity of a parent may depend on it. Remind them that vague and misleading information only serves to scare parents and make the situation that much more difficult to handle. Instruct them not to send cryptic tweets like this sub did, because the district has a protocol for when and how to notify parents and you will follow it.
5. After action, after action, after action. As in any situation, be sure you follow up after the event to monitor residual effects that might have arisen. Consider it an after-action debrief.

Work Smarter, Not Harder…Repurpose Content

Working in education, we have all heard the phrase “work smarter, not harder.” It’s easy to talk about, but not always easy to implement. If your district is like ours, your communications department is small and there is usually more work than time, so working smarter is key.

While in college, I learned about the marketing rule of seven: individuals have to see your message at least seven times before they will remember it. I don’t think it is the number that really matters; it is more about the meaning. Individuals need to see your message multiple times in multiple formats to remember it.

In order accomplish this; our district makes a point to repurpose content. Our philosophy is simple: when we write something to put out to our audiences, it has to be used in a least five different places. By doing this, we are saving time and we are reaching our audiences via multiple communication channels.

For example, we might write a short new release about an upcoming play at one of our high schools. We distribute it to the media, we then include the same information on our district website announcements, in the parent e-newsletter, in school e-newsletters, in the staff e-newsletter, on our mobile app, on Facebook, on Twitter and in our monthly youth activities publication. By writing one story and repurposing it, we reach our audiences via 10 communication channels.

Here are some tips on repurposing content:

• Write content so it can be used in multiple formats, exactly as it is or changed only slightly.
• Write content so it is a quick, easy read. Readers want quick, short blurbs they can scan on their mobile devices, not long, complicated reads.
• Stagger the timing of your messages. Sending the same message out via five different communication channels at the same exact time probably isn’t as effective as sending it out in five different ways at staggered times.

Using YouTube to Promote Safety and Security in Schools

Like many districts across the nation, school safety and security has been the topic of conversation in our community for the past couple of months.

We’ve sent letters to families, posted information on our website and provided talking points to all of our administrators, building leaders and key communicators about school safety. But we struggled with how to really show our community everything we have in place to keep their children safe. That is where YouTube and social media entered the picture.

Our department produced the video below in January of 2013, and then we posted it on YouTube in early February. We also shared the video on Facebook, Twitter, on our website and in our e-newsletter. Although we don’t have a staggering number of views so far, we really see this as something we can share with our community again if other school-related safety events happen in the future.

The response from our community has been overwhelmingly positive.

We also showed this video to law enforcement officials from the seven different police departments in our district. The feedback from police officers was positive as well, with them thanking us for helping keep them on the same page in terms of the safety measures our schools have in place.

We have used Facebook and Twitter for many years, but our department is just starting to produce videos and use YouTube as part of our social media toolbox. Right now, our YouTube channel is a work in progress. We’re working to improve it every day and continue to find new ways to connect with our staff, families and community.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. I hope you find this video helpful as well as somewhat entertaining. But if possible, please take it easy on the quality of the voiceover guy…

Marco Rubio Could Be You

Let the Marco Rubio-sipping-a-Poland-Spring moment on national television be a lesson to us all.

No matter what your politics are, it was a surprising moment when the U.S. Senator from Florida first glanced at his water bottle during his Republican response to the State of the Union Address the other night, then bent down on national television to grab the bottle and take a sip, mid-sentence.

Less than a decade ago, we would have seen it and then — poof — it would have been gone.

But today, embarrassing, awkward and even worse moments become sensations. They are repeated, remixed and retweeted, then discussed and dissected by, well, the universe. Just moments after Rubio reached for the water bottle, Twitter exploded with tweets about the awkward moment, the words “watergate” and “Poland Spring” immediately trending. Among my favorite tweets, by the way, was “Zero Dark Thirsty.”

And Twitter was just the beginning. Dozens of Rubio parody videos have been uploaded to YouTube, friends and family members are discussing the incident on Facebook, and the senator’s own political action committee, Reclaim America, is now offering a Marco Rubio water bottle to supporters for $25. It helps to poke fun at yourself.

Along the way, of course, the senator picked up 13,000 new followers on Twitter.

But the Rubio moment and its subsequent virality should be a wakeup call to those of us in the public relations business. Our videotaped school events and Board of Education meetings, superintendents’ speeches, Facebook posts, tweets and transparency are all good things.

But we need to remind ourselves and those who work in our districts that those moments are now etched in time, permanent examples of how we behave and what we say, photograph and write.

The Rubio incident is also a chance for us to remind those we work for how important it is to prepare well for public appearances, press conferences, speeches and presentations. That includes hydrating.

The world is watching. No one wants to end up on David Letterman’s Top Ten List.

Social Media Comments Really Aren’t That Scary

When I hear other districts talk about why they haven’t jumped into the social media world, it is most often because they or their district leaders fear the comments they might get. When we started, our district wasn’t much different. Regardless of this fear, we forged ahead with social media. Our philosophy was that we would rather have people tell us their opinions and concerns about an issue so we have a good pulse on the community, then talk about them in private.

To help ease the minds of our administration and protect our district at the same time, we published rules of engagement on each of our social media pages. If and when we have to remove a comment, we reference these rules, which can be found here. In reality it hasn’t been an issue for us. In nearly four years, we have removed less than 20 comments across all of our district pages.

Here are some tips in handling social media comments:

• Develop response guidelines for your district. Ours were modified from the United States Air Force response guidelines and can be found here.
• Not all comments will be negative. Most will be positive. Thank individuals for sharing their positive stories and comments. I save really good comments in a folder and use them to show the positive side of social media in education.
• Know the difference between an opinion and blatant misrepresentation of facts. Opinions are not removed from our social media sites. Not everyone will agree with district decisions, and that is ok. Use social media to understand what individuals don’t like about a decision and see if their issues can be addressed. Make sure to let individuals know you have heard their concerns. If individuals are publishing misinformation, we take the opportunity to make sure correct information is out there.
• Comments will monitor themselves. The truth of the matter is that in Nebraska, we occasionally have snow days. When we cancel school we place this information on our social media channels. Sometimes parents agree, sometimes they don’t. Often times parents who don’t agree with our decisions back down or remove their comments because other parents are praising our district for keeping kids safe.
• Not every comment needs to be answered right away. Depending on the issue, wait and see if the issue monitors itself or if you need to jump in with a response.
• If and when you do remove a comment, contact the individual. Explain to the person why the comment is being removed. In addition, if it is something that the district needs to address, like a personnel complaint or student concern, put the commenter in touch with someone who can address his or her issue.

Newtown and Social Media

We all feel helpless. And we certainly remember feeling the same way during Columbine, 9/11, Aurora and countless other events in recent memory that took far too many lives in an instant. Today, when people feel helpless, many of us turn to social media. Some to argue and provoke. Others simply to vent and be heard.

Laurie Ruettimann, who writes a blog called The Cynical Girl, posted an item the other day noting that even with its many drawbacks, social media “knits the world together” during a crisis. At the same time, many have noted that social media is little more than a community bulletin board. We post, but we do little.

So I want to take this opportunity to focus on how a number of people have turned to social media after the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT, to do one thing: make a difference.

• Brian Mauriello, a near-lifetime resident of Newtown, established the Newtown Memorial Fund within hours of the tragedy, creating a website, Facebook page and Twitter feed to accept donations for the purpose of building a memorial playground in honor of the Sandy Hook victims. He has already applied for 501c3 status and has named a board of directors that includes an accountant, an attorney, a member of the police force, a public school teacher and others. Mauriello’s six-year-old son attends a different elementary school in Newtown.
• On Twitter, NBC News correspondent Ann Curry launched #26ActsofKindness, encouraging people to perform acts of kindness in memory of Newtown’s 26 victims, and share what they accomplished on Twitter. The movement has spread, with thousands of people tweeting their acts of kindness. Beth Steinberg, for example, tweeted this: “Just paid the school fees for 26 children with AIDS in Mombasa, Kenya.” And Heather Fournie sent this tweet out: “Just left dinner for two at Applebee’s for a town police officer on his car.”
• The Emilie Parker Fund Facebook page was created by friends of the six-year-old victim’s family to raise money for their expenses through a fund set up with a credit union in Utah, where Emilie was born. Since the page was created on Dec. 14, more than 322,000 fans have joined.
• Ryan Kraft, a former Sandy Hook Elementary School student, turned to crowdrise.com, a popular crowdfunding site, to create a Sandy Hook Elementary School Victims Relief Fund page. Kraft hopes the fund will support the victims, families and all others affected locally by the shooting, and the funds will be donated directly to the school’s PTSA. So far, Ryan has raised $103,170.
• Earlier this week, Colette Connolly of my staff posted a message on my Facebook page about how the Connecticut PTSA is asking people to make paper snowflakes and send them to Newtown. The snowflakes will be used to decorate every corner of Chalk Hill Elementary School, when Sandy Hook students move in there in late January. I posted the information on my page and suggested that our district hold a snowflake-making day. On Monday, Jan. 7, our employees will be dropping in at our Snowflake Central to try their hand at making hundreds of paper snowflakes that will be boxed up and sent to Newtown. And NSPRA colleague Jim Cummings, a Facebook friend, posted that same idea on the Glendale (AZ) Elementary School District Facebook page, where he works. The snowflakes have gone viral.

No doubt, we have all read posts about gun control and revamping the way we treat mental illness in this country. But instead of using social media to simply yell from the rooftops, some people are using it to take concrete, lasting action.