Business Horizons (2014) 57, 657—665

Available online at www.sciencedirect.com

ScienceDirect
www.elsevier.com/locate/bushor

EXECUTIVE FOCUS

Managing your social campaign strategy using

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube &
Pinterest: An interview with Dana Howard,
social media marketing manager
Dana Howard a, W. Glynn Mangold b,*, Tim Johnston b

a
Murray State University, Murray, KY 42071, U.S.A.
b
Arthur J. Bauernfeind College of Business & Public Affairs, Murray State University, Murray, KY 42071,
U.S.A.

In this Executive Focus we interview Dana Howard,

social media marketing manager of Murray State
University. Under Dana’s direction, using the guidance
of a strategic management system and plan, Murray
State has successfully incorporated social media into
the university’s marketing and communication ef-
forts. Dana supports the university’s strategic goals
by furthering public awareness and recognition of
Murray State as one of the nation’s best public univer-
sities via messages that are consistent with the uni-
versity’s overall strategy and tailored to the
university’s specific target audiences. Dana’s job ne-
cessitates that she monitor communications occurring
across multiple social media platforms, engage and
interact with students and other constituents, create
and encourage social media content, and analyze and
report outcomes. In addition, she is responsible for
using social media to respond on the university’s
behalf during crisis situations. Dana researches trends
in social media, helps establish policies pertaining to
the university’s social media governance, and assists
in managing its many social media outlets.
Dana is an alumna of Murray State University with
a B.S. in Public Relations and an M.S. in Telecom-
* Corresponding author
E-mail addresses: [email protected] (D. Howard),
munications Systems Management. Murray State
[email protected] (W.G. Mangold), University in Kentucky enrolls almost 11,000 stu-
[email protected] (T. Johnston) dents annually and is consistently rated one of the

0007-6813/$ — see front matter # 2014 Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bushor.2014.05.001
658 EXECUTIVE FOCUS

best regional public universities in the nation. Mur- We have also developed a purpose statement to
ray State is perhaps best known for its perennially serve as a guide to our specific activities.
competitive NCAA Division 1 basketball program.
Follow Dana and Murray State (@murraystateuniv)
on Twitter. Who are the constituents with an interest in Murray
State that you reach through social media?

W. Glynn Mangold and Tim Johnston for Business

Horizons: Welcome Dana, and thank you for sharing MSU has many constituents. They include prospec-
your insights with our readers. To begin, could you tive students, parents, current students, alumni,
please explain your role as social media marketing donors, faculty and staff, community members,
manager at Murray State University? Kentucky state legislators, MSU sports fans. . .the
list goes on and on.

Dana Howard: Thank you for inviting me. Murray

State University has four managers in its Commu- Does Murray State have a particular target market?
nications Department: manager of publications and
printing; web manager (who coordinates the univer-
sity website); manager of digital services (who co- If I had to pick one primary target market, it would be
ordinates the creation of video content); and social college-bound high school students in the south-cen-
media marketing manager. These managers report tral region who seek a 4-year college degree. The
to the head of the Communications Department. region includes western Kentucky and parts of neigh-
The structure of the organization is important be- boring states: Illinois, Tennessee, Missouri, and Indi-
cause the managers make sure that each area is ana. But there are many other important markets,
represented in marketing and public relations de- including non-traditional students, transfer students,
cisions. All areas have a piece of the pie in terms of prospective graduate students, international stu-
Murray State’s communications activities. dents, and the constituents that I mentioned earlier.

One conception of social media is that it is free and How does your role in social media marketing com-
user generated. If so, then why does an organization pare to your previous experience in traditional
need a social media marketing manager? marketing?

I can think of several reasons based on my experi- One big difference is that traditional marketing
ence: among other things, to focus social media involves creating a one-way message, crafted by
efforts toward supporting the organization’s strate- the marketer. You should look at social media as
gic goals; to respond when positive–—and negative–— having a two-way conversation with your constitu-
content appears; to support people who represent ents. Engagement is the key to social media. This is
the organization via social media platforms and, to why strategy is so important. In addition to provid-
an extent, manage what they say; and to encourage ing information, effective social media entails
successes and mitigate potential disasters. building a platform for your target markets to com-
municate with you and maintaining those relation-
ships. Another huge difference between social
Do you as social media marketing manager have a media and traditional marketing is that you are able
strategy, or do you primarily support the university’s to see the effects of your message–—in most cases,
strategy? by looking at analytics. In traditional marketing,
tactics are usually not as measurable.

I am part of the university communications team,

which supports the goal of the Institutional Ad- Are people curious about your role, social media
vancement office: to further public awareness and marketing manager, within that bigger picture?
recognition of Murray State as one of the nation’s
best public universities. That goal supports a lot of
activities, such as developing financial, political, Definitely. I speak to many groups and organizations
and community support and recruiting students. and talk with local business people who are curious
EXECUTIVE FOCUS 659

about marketing plans and social media. Everybody week of. The next section would include the day-of
has questions about social media: Why is it impor- promos and content. Then, a third section would
tant? Why should it be used for marketing? Is it include post- and wrap-up content.
effective and does it take a lot of time? Even though Some examples of this might include starting a
social media in general is not that new, there are hashtag tracking program by creating a hashtag and
still a lot of questions out there about how it can be then developing pre-event promotions to familiar-
used in marketing and public relations. ize people with the hashtag. Any promotion pieces I
could go ahead and develop that might be used
throughout the social media plan would also be
Can you tell us about your life as a social media created at this time: images, print, signs, et cetera.
marketing manager; namely, what you do and what I schedule our posts ahead of time when I can, but
you plan for? also do a lot of daily posting to keep the message
fresh. When I am not planning or creating content,
the rest of my time is spent monitoring platforms
Much of what I do involves working directly on our and responding to people across them.
active social media platforms, so I will start there.
The Murray State Facebook page is one of the most
engaging social media platforms we maintain. With I understand that you use a lot of pictures to relay
over 23,000 followers, I have a lot of people to talk your message. Can you tell us about that?
to and engage with. The followers include a diverse
set of audiences encompassing alumni, current stu-
dents, prospective students, prospective families, Flickr is another platform we use at Murray State.
community members, and supporters of the Racers. We use Flickr to market not only externally, but also
So, I have multiple areas to cover, think through, and internally. Flickr serves as a landing page for our
respond to. multiple photographers to post photos of campus
events, portfolio shots, and other on-campus re-
quests. We provide this resource for people across
What other platforms are important to Murray the university to use these photos for their own
State for communicating with constituents? marketing. They are encouraged to incorporate
them into their own unit’s social media platforms.
Instagram is a tool that we started using 2 years
Twitter is one of our most engaging platforms and ago. Our audience has grown tremendously, with
commands about 90% of my time. It is something I well over 3,000 followers. Even though Instagram is
must monitor consistently because I have to respond not Murray State’s most engaging platform, it takes
quickly; people expect quick responses and imme- time and planning to manage. The user base of
diate information on most social media, but this is Instagram continues to grow, and with its integra-
even more true with Twitter than anything else. I tion into platforms like Facebook and Twitter, Insta-
watch our analytics to look at response rates, or how gram has become a large part of our overall strategy.
fast I am responding to people. The results are Just recently, I used a 30-day countdown on
sometimes good, sometimes not as good; it just Instagram as a promotion to capitalize on the ex-
depends on the activity in any week and month. citement our incoming freshmen were already ex-
I try to plan our social media activities a semester pressing online regarding move-in weekend. I
at a time. In a university setting, there are several key pushed daily pictures of the Murray State campus
events or themes that I already know I will be building from Instagram to all our social media platforms in
strategies around every year. For example, among order to heighten that excitement and engage our
other things, the fall semester always includes move- audiences in anticipation of a new academic year.
in weekend, homecoming, and December com- We also added Pinterest about 2 years ago. I went
mencement. I start my calendar with those and work back and forth regarding Pinterest, trying to decide if
in various promotions and important information as I it was worth our time or not. I saw a lot of my peers at
feel necessary. I have done this long enough now that I other universities doing some interesting work with
have learned when certain types of promotions, it, so I decided to move in that direction. The chal-
contests, or other fillers work in between larger social lenge with Pinterest is that there is little to no
media plans like homecoming. I also have a fairly analytics to tell you who your active users are. So,
concrete format for each of the bigger social media it’s kind of a guessing game with the overall strategy.
strategy plans. My written-out plan would include a To begin the Pinterest initiative, I observed a lot
section for pre-event promos one month out and the of other universities’ accounts, mostly the ones at
660 EXECUTIVE FOCUS

which I have peers. I made a list of all the audiences I to informational pieces about specific programs
wanted to reach via this platform. Obviously, Murray on campus and important announcements like our
State has alumni. They love memories; they love recent capital campaign total. We wanted Rainey T.
talking about their days at Murray State. And then Wells, Murray State’s first president, to announce
there are the current students, who want to see the campaign total, so we brought him back from
things like our All Campus Sing musical production 1922 with the help of actor and faculty member Bob
and traditions like the shoe tree–—where couples Valentine.
who meet and become engaged at Murray State Other types of YouTube content include Murray
place their shoes on the tree. Unique campus tra- State holiday greetings and viral video campaigns.
ditions are an easy visual that is usually popular For example, we published a dance we call the
among all of our different constituent groups. Murray State Racer Shuffle, which was built around
Then, I made a big list of everyone to whom we a rap song–—the Racer Anthem–—written by students
were talking, since I wasn’t sure which audience as a tribute to our basketball team. The video went
would be the most prevalent on this platform. From viral nationally.
that list I created Pinterest boards for each of the
constituent groups. So, we have a mix of boards that
span a very broad group of people. And it’s still a Are there any new additions to the group of social
guessing game in many ways; it’s still about learning media platforms that you use?
what people are looking for, what they get attached
to, and what catches their eyes and creates a desire
to make an action–—a view, a click, or a share. This is Storify is a relatively new platform that was interest-
no different from any other form of marketing: We ing to me for a couple of reasons. First, Storify brings
are creating a call to action. together content from multiple social media plat-
forms. When we manage a promotional campaign,
such as for homecoming, we use all of our platforms
What about blogs? to share content. Second, from weeks before home-
coming to weeks afterward, people are talking about
the events: they’re chattering, sending pictures,
We do use some blogging. If you could see the back sending videos, and creating a lot of great content.
end of the murraystate.edu website, you would find Somehow, we have to capture that.
that some of the pages are actually WordPress tem- Storify is a platform with which you create a
plates. You won’t necessarily notice it as a user story, and in that story you can collect all the
because the templates are branded to look like chatter from every platform: Instagram, Facebook,
the rest of the website, but they are blog pages. Twitter, YouTube, everything. It lets you literally
It’s an easy platform to use and it’s pretty cheap for click and drag things into your story, so it’s a great
us–—and it’s free to individual users. way for us to showcase what’s going on at the
Murray State uses blogging for different reasons university. We’ve done a lot of these lately. For
than you might expect. A special promotion like the instance, when Spike Lee was here, we collected
Where Do You Blue And Gold? photo contest, which we a lot of chatter related to his appearance. We also
have held for 5 years now, is hosted on a blogging post pictures from Great Beginnings at the beginning
platform. People take pictures of themselves wearing of the school year, Parents’ Weekend–—all of the
their Murray State colors as they travel throughout bigger picture events at Murray State.
the country and around the world. The blogging
platform makes it really easy from an administrative
standpoint because each week’s winner is announced It sounds like Storify plays an important role at
as a new blog post that I can then push out through all Murray State.
social channels with a click. In addition, it archives
itself every year and users can easily search or share
content to their own social channels. Yes, Storify is one of the platforms that has been
really important to me lately. One thing that is very
useful about Storify is that we have archives of
Is YouTube an important platform? everything that’s happened at the university. About
5 years ago someone on campus asked me: ‘‘How am
I supposed to collect all the stuff that goes on
We feature a variety of material on YouTube, online? With social media there are all these pic-
ranging from the university president’s messages tures, all these things we’re not collecting. We don’t
EXECUTIVE FOCUS 661

do yearbooks anymore. So, how do you find all the how that tweet from Murray State made their day! I
stuff, and put it together, in the Murray State ar- just interact with the people out there, with all the
chives?’’ different audiences we have across our social media
When Storify came along, I knew it was the platforms.
answer! Now for every story that I make through The next responsibility is to create and gather
Storify, I send a .pdf to the archivist in Pogue library; content. We must have a plan and a strategy to
there, they are available in digital and print for- create content. Sometimes crowdsourcing is an op-
mats. Consequently, via social media, people may tion for gathering content. Campaigns like #Racer-
have content that is a part of recorded history and Homecoming generated a lot of content through
not even know it: something they tweeted, a picture crowdsourcing–—as I talked about with Storify–—
they sent, or a video–—whatever it may be. because people were at the game, or were gathered
at Tent City before the game, and they took photos
and videos. The crowd was already doing the content
What are your goals in using the platforms we’ve work for me, which is always helpful and engaging.
discussed? What do you accomplish? A lot of times, though, I have to create that
content myself. I have to decide what’s going to
be engaging and what’s going to work with the
I would identify my responsibilities in seven main specific audience: what’s going to catch their eye,
categories: monitoring all platforms, engaging and what doesn’t matter to them, and what does mat-
interacting, creating and gathering content, analyz- ter. So, it’s really important that I plan and strate-
ing and reporting outcomes, governance, research, gize about the content we create.
and crisis management. And then, of course, I have to analyze and report
Let’s start with monitoring. I monitor all the outcomes. It is a misconception that social media
platforms that we just talked about. I have to be marketers do things on the fly and don’t have goals. I
watching; I have to be listening; I have to know actually have measureable goals for everything I do,
what’s being talked about. I also have to know so I work with a lot of numbers. I was never a
what’s not being talked about that we want out numbers person in school–—I hated math, I hated
there. If homecoming is 3 days away and nobody accounting; I didn’t want anything to do with it. Now
online is talking about it, we’ve failed as marketers that I’ve gotten into the social media world, I enjoy
because we haven’t helped to put that message looking at the numbers. It takes a lot of time every
out there and create a buzz around it–—foster the month to sit down and go over the analytics for each
spirit–—and that’s what Murray State’s homecoming platform, but it is time well spent. I use a company
is all about. I have to listen a lot and watch the called SproutSocial to help me build reports; it
conversations, and I have to notice the tone that generates all the charts and graphs and everything
people are using. for me, which is amazing. Before SproutSocial, it
There have been times that we didn’t realize a bit was 100 times more work because I performed all
of a public relations storm was brewing–—not nec- the functions manually.
essarily in the media, but just among people talking I compare current results with those of previous
about the university. And sometimes I have the months and previous years. Then, I report to my
responsibility of saying: ‘‘Hey, a lot of folks are superiors and fellow managers where we are from a
really mad about this. Can we do something about month ago, a year ago. Each report shows the
it?’’ So I monitor social media, I make sure we’re analytics and my take on the good and the bad
consistent with our branding, and I make sure that I for that period of time, which goals we reached,
know what’s being talked about–—good and bad–—on which we didn’t, and why.
all of our networks. Once we had a huge snowstorm and the university
In addition to monitoring the platforms, I have to did not cancel classes. There were crazy comments
engage and interact. To engage, I must be involved on Facebook; it was out of control because students
in the conversation. I have to know what people are and parents were mad. Our social media blew up.
saying about Murray State before I can respond, Looking at the numbers, though, it was great for our
which I try to do in almost every case–—whether engagement. I had to report: ‘‘Our engagement
the original comment is positive or negative. went up a lot, but it was primarily negative feed-
I try to answer questions that people ask about back.’’ And I have to ask myself: Did we respond to
Murray State. Or if someone posts, ‘‘Hey, I got that well? Did we take the time to understand what
accepted into Murray State today,’’ I give them a was really going on?
‘‘woot, woot!’’ and ‘‘Welcome to the family!’’ I love Or, I may report: ‘‘It was homecoming and our
when a prospective student responds back to tell me social media engagement was high, and this is why.’’
662 EXECUTIVE FOCUS

So, I compare the numbers a lot to know how we can person on campus who is an administrator of any
continue to grow the campaign. For example, in a public Murray State account on any platform to
recent month, there were 337,000 impressions on register through our office using an online form.
our Facebook page. Therefore, I have to keep up We’re up to about 200 accounts now; in other words,
with those numbers and make sure that next month there are 200 social media accounts on campus in
we’re getting 400,000 impressions. Those are some addition to those I administer. With this, we now
big numbers to play with for a university of our size know what accounts are publicly representing the
and I enjoy the challenge of creating growth over university, who the administrators are for each
time. account, and the kind of information the accounts
are supposed to have on them. We can identify the
authors of old information, for example, and get it
In listing your core responsibilities, you mentioned updated. It’s a lot of work. It takes a lot of time to
governance. Could you explain that? figure out who’s doing what.

Governance is a big part of my job–—a part I wasn’t Does the social media policy specify what happens
aware of when I took this position. This is not the fun when someone misuses a university account?
aspect of social media. It’s enjoyable in a certain
way for me to bring it all together, but it’s not the
side of social media management that most people The social media policy works alongside other poli-
are interested in. Governance has a lot to do with cies. For example, there is a Board of Regents
how we are administering the rest of the social conduct policy that applies to students, faculty,
media on campus; specifically, the pages I don’t and staff. There are human resources policies that
directly manage. apply to employees. Depending on which policy
I am the only person in social media in the applies, if there is misconduct, we can say what
University Communications department, so I man- happens from that point.
age the Murray State accounts, the Roundabout
U accounts for our TV show, and the Alumni Affairs
accounts. The colleges and departments, and clubs What if an unofficial social media account is putting
and organizations have separate social media ac- Murray State University in a negative light?
counts, so I don’t maintain those; that responsibility
is assigned to people in those areas. I help, but I
don’t maintain them. There have been Twitter accounts and Facebook
At one point in time, some Twitter accounts that pages that represented Murray State in ways that
were using the Murray State name but were not did not reflect well on the university. One day, a
sanctioned by the university were giving out false mother called my office; she did not understand that
information or representing the university in a way the university did not administer an account on
we didn’t want to be represented. For that reason, I which her son was being disparaged. Unfortunately,
helped develop a social media policy to deal with the message had Murray State in the title. I had a
those issues. 45-minute conversation with her, trying to explain:
We now have a policy in place so that every ‘‘Ma’am that is not an official Murray State ac-
administrator on campus knows how to maintain count.’’ ‘‘But, it says Murray State in it.’’ ‘‘Right,
his or her account without a centralized person but it is not a Murray State account. So, we are
telling him/her what to do, as well as understand unable to take the inappropriate comments down
the regulations he/she falls under. The policy helps today.’’ Those are the kinds of problems that we
Murray State ensure messages are consistent across deal with.
all channels, people are using the same branding, Any account that’s not registered, anything that
people are employing the same kind of voice, and is not an official Murray State account, we try to shut
accurate information about the university is being down. If an account has Murray State in the name, if
presented. The social media policy encompasses all it has Racers in the name. . .anything that seems to
of us: everyone who works on the campus and uses represent us or use our trademarks, we now report
the Murray State name on a public Facebook, Twit- it. Also, if an account has been inactive and the login
ter, Instagram, YouTube, or other social media ac- information is unknown, we will report it as well. At
count. this point we have successfully shut down two Face-
Implementing our social media policy led to con- book pages, six Twitter accounts, and an Instagram
siderably more work for me. I had to ask every account. It’s a start, and we’ll continue to do that as
EXECUTIVE FOCUS 663

time goes on. We need to know who is officially university officials–—need to be responsive and to
representing us and how they are representing the inform people. But I hadn’t been told what hap-
university. pened, so I couldn’t confirm or deny an isolated
crisis.
That was when I felt this huge burden of respon-
You mentioned that research is part of the social sibility on my shoulders for the first time. This was
media marketing manager’s job. . . 1 year after I had accepted the job. We hadn’t even
thought about crisis management. Nobody knew it
was going to be part of the job. That’s when we
Yes, research is a big part. I have to know what’s on realized how important social media is to crisis
the cutting edge and what’s coming next, so I have management because people try to fill in informa-
to look at blogs, I have to read articles, and I have to tion about what’s going on as things unfold. This is
know what tools people are using and what they’re true no matter what the subject. Whether it’s a
not using. I must be attuned to the latest technology tornado or a snow day, whatever the case may be, it
and the newest media out there. I can’t assume that could represent a public relations crisis. We can’t
everything I hear about social media platforms is know in advance, so we had to come up with a plan
correct, such as the rumor that started a few years for any situation. I had to know how to respond, and
ago about teens leaving Facebook. I have to re- respond quickly. That required a crisis management
search those things and have the facts to back it plan.
up before I change my focus. You should never jump
on new tools just because they are out there; rather,
you should research, benchmark other organizations What else have you learned while on the job?
that are using the tools, and stay in touch with the
news about those platforms. It’s all a part of staying
informed through research. Strategy! When social media started becoming a
part of day-to-day communications, marketers said:
‘‘You know, we’ve got to get in on this game, too.
How important is crisis management in social First of all, it’s free. It takes a small budget. It’s easy
media? to perform. How do we reach people through social
media networks?’’ I think a lot of people took for
granted that you have to plan and form strategies in
Crisis management is a responsibility that you prob- social media just like in any other kind of marketing;
ably wouldn’t think of as part of a social media as a result, they were simply throwing stuff out
manager’s job; I didn’t think of it when I took this there, doing things just to do them. For example,
job. I didn’t realize crisis management was a critical they wanted to get on Facebook because every-
component until after we’d had a crisis. body’s there. That’s the kind of planning we often
I’ll give you a very short but very sad story about saw.
how we learned–—the hard way–—the necessity of With social media, you must have a plan, goals,
crisis management. At a time when the Murray State initiatives, and a mission. If you don’t know what
basketball team was about to play in the NCAA your mission is, there’s no reason to use social media
tournament, there was a very public suicide on tools. Most of my focus is based on a 1-month time
campus. Most of us who had anything to do with horizon, although there are a few things I can plan
crisis response at the university were attending the for in a macro sense, such as homecoming. Even
game 225 miles away in Louisville, Kentucky. We though I try to plan out a semester at a time, I focus
were all in an arena with very little cell service and month by month.
no Wi-Fi when I suddenly started seeing tweets going I’ve also learned the importance of flexibility. A
across my phone that seemed odd, such as ‘‘Prayers good example involves renowned sportscaster ‘Dick-
for Murray State’’ and similar vague comments. The ie V,’ Dick Vitale, who came to campus as a com-
first thought that ran through my head was: Is there mentator for a basketball game. We weren’t
a shooter on campus? actually planning on that. It was a big deal to us;
I realized that if I didn’t get some information we definitely wanted him to visit. So when we got
quickly, I wouldn’t know how to respond. Parents word that Dickie V was interested in coming to
were saying: ‘‘What’s going on? Where’s my kid? Murray State, we kicked things into high gear. We
What’s happened? I hear someone’s dead on cam- had to figure out how to get students in on this so
pus.’’ All this was happening but nobody in the they could encourage him to come. We also won-
arena had any real information. In a crisis, we–—the dered how we could involve alumni. It wasn’t just
664 EXECUTIVE FOCUS

about Dickie V; it was about bringing the whole ESPN I try to shut off by 6 p.m. every evening, even though
network. It was about having the TV exposure that we I continue monitoring feeds periodically through the
cannot pay for because we do not have the budget for night. It’s difficult. I constantly check my notifica-
it at Murray State. We wanted to have him here and tions to make sure nothing crazy is coming across the
welcome him, along with ESPN, with open arms. As a screen. If I come in the next day and somebody says,
result, working with athletics, we put together this ‘‘Did you see so and so?’’ and I say ‘‘No,’’ I feel like I
really quick campaign, collaborated with students, haven’t done my job. How did I not see that? I’m the
and did a #BringDickieVtoMurray hashtag campaign social media marketing manager. I’m supposed to
on Twitter and Facebook. It obviously went well see everything. So, I really feel like I have to stay on
because he ended up coming here. So, sometimes, top of things. My husband says I’ve got an iPad in
we have to be flexible and willing to move quickly. one hand and an iPhone in the other, or I am in front
of my laptop, because I feel the need to be con-
nected. I’ve tried to pull back a little bit lately, but
What else can you tell us about your approach to the it’s hard.
job?

On what social media platform do you spend most of

Make campaigns, not posts. Campaigns work better your time?
than one-hit wonders. Occasionally, I’ll post some-
thing important that will last only one day and may
be on a single platform. But most of the time, my I’d say Twitter. I keep a running list of search key-
bigger stuff is in campaigns. By this, I mean that I words and key hashtags–—all the stuff that Murray
have a written plan with a variety of posts and State people use: Murray State, Murray State Univer-
promotions surrounding that theme that will last sity, Murray State Racers, #Racers, #MurrayState,
a longer amount of time. For example, it may have #WeAreRacers, #RacerNation. I monitor those hash-
elements like its own hashtag, a photo contest in tags and then respond to the people who are talking
which people send us content, or other marketing about us. A big part of my job is simply taking part in
materials that align with the campaign. the online conversations going on out there, whether
An example of a bigger campaign is All Campus people know Murray State is listening or not.
Sing. With that, we did signs and chatter for over a Recruitment is important for all of us who work at
month. I put a lot of thought into this. We went the university, and we use Twitter in the recruitment
around and we actually physically tagged people at process. I’d say at least five times a day, I stop and
All Campus Sing with stickers: ‘‘Here’s our hashtag, respond to tweets that include pictures of people
share your pictures and tweets with us.’’ It was all who have been accepted into Murray State, who
part of getting that chatter and keeping the spirit have received their scholarship information, or who
going. We stream All Campus Sing online, so we had are at some point in the application process. That’s
a huge undertaking: doing the stream, putting the a huge part of what I do now. I’m not in the recruit-
hashtag on the stream, and getting the widgets to ment office, but we all work together toward that
work so people could talk about it on the website end.
while they were watching the stream. There are a
lot of little pieces that have to go together to make
all that happen successfully. Are you able to show that more students come to
When we did the Murray State Anthem rap, there Murray State because of your tweets and other
was a whole lot to it besides just filming the video. social media activities?
Every scene had some kind of strategy to it: what
was in the background, who was in the picture, what
you can see, and things going on. You may not pick It is hard to quantify that and say: ‘‘Because I tweet,
them out specifically, but in your mind there are still we will have 50 more students in the fall.’’ There are
things happening that you are seeing and interacting times I’ve been asked to prove what my return on
with. We did a lot of different kinds of marketing investment is, and that’s a hard thing to do, even if I
around the Murray State Anthem. All the t-shirts and meet my goals. Can I really say that we had a larger
banners and everything from that whole semester fall class because of what I do? It’s impossible for me
centered on the Anthem theme. to connect the dots there. But, I can say: ‘‘Fifty
percent of my time this year was spent on talking to
prospective students.’’ Or I can look at the analytics
Are you able to get downtime in this job? to see where traffic is coming from and going to on
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the website. If traffic is going to undergraduate companies don’t know what to ask for or what to put
information or application information, then one in the job description. They just know that young
can connect the dots to recruitment in that way. people know how to use social media, and they know
they need to be involved in social media. So, for
many companies it is a guessing game.
Is it hard to pursue a career in social media? If I were trying to land a social media job with a
company, I would bring a set of recommendations to
the table: this is a strategy for you, here’s an area
It’s not necessarily hard, but most universities do where you can increase sales or increase your expo-
not offer a degree in social media marketing. The sure, and here are some tactics to go along with
positive is that you can approach the career from a that.
lot of different angles: you can have a marketing
degree, you can have a PR degree, you can have a
general business degree. Individuals from various Dana, thank you for your time and for sharing your
backgrounds can get to that point. I know I did, and experiences working in the emerging field of social
so did many of my peers at other universities. media marketing. Thanks especially for discussing
Not all companies necessarily know what they how organizations can manage their activities on
want, either, and that makes it somewhat difficult social media platforms and the importance of
for students who look for social media jobs. The focusing their efforts to achieve goals.