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CoSIDA CONVENTION 2011: MARCO ISLAND

June 27, 2011

MARCO ISLAND, FLORIDA

BILL SMITH: My name is Bill Smith from the University of Arkansas. I'm the assistant athletic director for new media. I'd like to welcome you all to our discussion this afternoon on gaining influence through crisis and strategic communication. What we're going to be talking about a lot today is what's euphemistically known as new media, specifically Twitter and some on Facebook. We've got two gentlemen joining me here on the podium that are experts in their field, and I think you'll have a chance to learn a lot from them. By the way, if you're Tweeting, and as you know, I'm the one that will tell you turn on your phones during this meeting, doesn't bother me if they ring, I want you messaging out, the committee has asked that's the hash tag if you're going to say something today.
When news breaks, we think today in terms of Tweets and Facebook and text alerts and websites, but you know, breaking news has been with us for centuries, for decades, the concept of the extra, and occasionally that extra getting the story wrong.
Twitter feeds aren't anything new. In Times Square in 1928 they built the Zipper so headlines could be broadcast to the crowd walking by. It's still with them today. But today, the Zipper, the headline, comes to your phone in the way of an alert. How do you manage that situation? How do you become a participant in the discussion that happens when news breaks?
On Twitter sometimes this news can bring us uplifting information like the Iranian revolution. Sometimes those Tweets are just a little gross.
Now, we laugh, but it's all real-time communications. If I could urge you to do one thing when you go back to your campuses and your organizations: Stop using the brand names. Stop talking about Twitter and Facebook and call it what it is; real-time reporting, real-time communication. And when you think about it in those terms, it's a little easier to wrap your head around your role in it. You're not doing some technical job, you're being a strategic communicator in the real-time. Often you are the reporter providing the information in the real-time.
Focus on that as your process and integrate it into your overall plans. How many of you right now have a social media policy for your department? Not your student athletes, your department. Take a look around the room, folks. Maybe a third.
How many of you have a crisis communication policy in your athletic department? How many of you have social media in your crisis communication policy? You'd better. I lifted this quote from the director of the Pew Research Center in his Excellence in Journalism report that came out earlier this year. The migration to the web is accelerating. The quick adoption of the tablet and the spread of the smart phone are only adding to that.
The reason I mention to you crisis communication plan is this: If you happen to be the media relations contact when the tornado comes to your stadium, and sooner or later that's going to happen here, particularly in the south, what are you going to do when fans are giving out the wrong information in their panic and you're not monitoring social media and you're not in the social media space providing the critical life-saving information. That's another take back to go home with, make sure you have social media monitoring and social media interaction in your crisis communication policies, too.
I want to share with you a few key statistics. Did you know less than 25 percent of the users generate 90 percent of the Tweets in Twitter? Well, that's because we're in that 25 percent. People want to know what athletic departments are doing just like they want to know what celebrities are doing. You're in that fought leadership minority that produces the majority of the information on Twitter.
Adults will get their local news via mobile device. 51 percent of them say they use six plus sources or platforms to get their info, so what does that tell you? The local newspaper, the local TV station, maybe local radio station; what are the other platforms? Is it your Twitter feed? Is it somebody else's Twitter feed? Is it a Facebook page? Is it a message board? The key is you cannot think in terms of one outlet for your information anymore. If the average of most mobile consumers is six platforms, you have to be a part of all the different methods of disseminating information.
75 percent of those adults use social media but only 15 percent use Twitter. Well, that would lead you to believe that you shouldn't be involved in Twitter and you should take all your time and focus it on Facebook, right? But 75 percent of all companies in America are using Twitter to promote. Well, you know, they know something. We might want to listen. And at the same time their ad agencies are saying that 74 percent of their clients are using Facebook to promote, so you really do need to exist on both platforms.
Let's talk a little bit about the difference, though, between the two. When I say real-time, and we think Twitter, it's something that comes to your phone, it's something that comes to you while an event is happening. Facebook is inherently a social tool. You're going to post information there and people want to comment about it, people want to relate to it, and the more you understand the differences, you'll stop doubling up your information and just send it to both at the same time. You should customize for the platforms. What comes out on Twitter? A higher volume of information with action-based items, the tip-off has been moved today to 6:00 p.m., actionable text fact items.
Text is primary, image is secondary, but if you're on Facebook it's almost the opposite, isn't it? It's longer form messages. You don't have that 120-character limitation. More graphics, more links, more video. Facebook, as one of our former athletes told me one day when we were talking about this, she said, look, if you're not in here, holding up her smart phone, you don't exist to me. But it's because that's the way she organized her day, around taking kids to events, planning things with her spouse, and then seeing that we're having an event tonight that she may want to come to. Facebook is about organizing, Twitter is about news.
Before we tell you what works, let me tell you a little bit about what doesn't work, how to get people to leave your Twitter feed. Anybody familiar with the fail whale? Content that becomes repetitive or boring, 53 percent say that's why they dumped your Twitter feed; the stream became too crowded with marketing 41 percent of people say, that's why they dropped a Twitter feed; company posted too frequently, 39 percent; company didn't offer enough deals, 27 percent; and last of all in the top five, Tweets were too promotional, 21 percent. I want to ask you all, do you see a trend here?
Three of the five reasons people leave Twitter feeds are over-marketing. It's because Twitter is not about marketing, it's about strategic communication. Put your mindset in that place when you think about real-time reporting. You're a strategic communicator. If you're using a strategic communicating tool to market, you will eventually drive people away. They will begin to see it as junk mail rather than information they need.
So what leads to successful real-time? Written strategy and policies, you all heard Debbie Jennings at lunch, her father's great admonition to her, plan the work, then work the plan. If you're just signing up Twitter feeds, let's do Twitter, everybody else is doing it without a strategic plan, you're not going to achieve goals.
Strong internal communications, because if one person is Tweeting X, you don't want somebody else Tweeting Y.
Clearly understood tactics go along with good strategy, and don't confuse the two. How you do your Tweets is one thing, why you do them is completely another.
Multiply the power, though. I learned this from Scott Bourne, and I'll show you his contact information later. If you have a Twitter feed and you cross-promote it on Facebook, that's not one plus two, that's one, then three times. If you have a YouTube feed and you're promoting, that's seven times. If you have a blog that's 14 times. It doesn't move forward in an -- it doesn't add forward, it multiplies forward. Use your different formats and you'll multiply your message.
Precision, though, is required. You don't have an editor to blame. If you make a mistake, you own the mistake. Be careful before you Tweet. Make sure you're using the right tools for the right task. There is nothing worse than making that mistake because you were thumbing instead of typing a key message that was going to be sent out.
Listen and learn. We'll talk a little bit about this on Wednesday when we talk about monitoring tools for Twitter.
In a mode of operation, back in the day, Ben should appreciate this picture, Richard Nixon's press secretary, Ron Ziegler, someone would stand at the platform and that's how PR worked, one spokesperson, one voice. These days you need to think differently. At the University of Arkansas we've taken the approach of having a lead voice, our ArkRazorbacks feed, and that's worked for us, but other schools have adopted that.
Scott Stricklin is joining us today because I think like they're a great example of multiple voices at Mississippi State where you have MStateAthletics and then you have Scott's own feed as the athletic director, then individual sport feeds. They have sort of a universe of different social media feeds that are coordinated together. One voice is not enough; you have to make sure that when you have a choir, though, that you've got a good hymnal, and Mississippi State has done a very good job of that. They're all singing off the same sheet music.
Think about creating your social media team, then. You want a team approach. People want to see names and faces. They don't want to see feeds. They want to relate to people in social media. This also puts your subject matter experts on the front lines. Why would you take a question for the ticket office that the ticket office director, if properly trained in their social media, could answer for you, and it'll have more validity because it was the ticket office manager that answered the question.
Having the social media team allows you to have front door service for your fans because whether you think they are or are not, the expectation of the fan base is that you're listening. We sort of learned this the hard way. We weren't paying a lot of attention to people that were retreating and asking questions through Twitter, and about halfway through the year we began to realize when people were randomly making questions to us, we needed to answer that. Again, you have to listen as well as send out information.
Build guidelines. I can't tell you enough times, do you have a social media poli for your athletic department? Do you have a social media strategy for your athletic department? Take the time to make a plan. Be willing to share the spotlight. More than one voice, just like using more than one feed is going to multiply your message.
Monitoring and encourage. Don't blow up a coach that makes a mistake the first time through. Give them some education, help them learn, encourage them to move forward.
Some quick nuts and bolts. Know your basics. These two gentlemen, you can write these down, if you're not familiar with Twitter and you want to know from two of the absolute experts in the field of how to use social media, Ron Harlan and Scott Bourne are them. Well, if you've got 96,000 followers and 105,000 followers, you might know a little something about social media. These two guys will give you great information if you follow their feeds, read their blogs, read their websites.
Enable your mobile users. The best investment your staff can make is smart phones across the board. I'm not going to tell you which brand or which platform, but get those smart phones in the hands of your people so that they will be able to do their job away from the office.
Hash tag ideas and etiquette. We got a lot of traction for doing Twitpics at Arkansas. We took some tickets and gave them away every home event. We sent out that hash tag and people would come and pick them up for free and we'd take their picture, and we got some social interaction out of it. We also used some tickets that weren't ever going to get used for some events. They're greatly appreciative.
Scott has done something at Mississippi State. He has Maroon Friday as a hash tag and it has created great interaction. Here is just one individual that on Maroon Friday was going to Twitpic out a shot of themselves in their Mississippi State maroon garb. This was in Italy, right, was it Venice? I know he's in Italy because I remember the Tweet.
And you know, it can be as simple as just sitting at home and expressing your love for your institution through a very simple technique of creating an interaction strategically done to get everybody to pay attention on Friday to their Mississippi State Bulldogness. Would that be appropriate?
I put an arrow, though, at the bottom because we're talking about nuts and bolts. You notice that they've got two hash tags and two @ signs, and this is a new thing, by the way. Google is now in the business of searching. You don't have to use Twitter anymore. But Google thinks if you use more than one hash tag in a Tweet that you're a spammer. If you're worried about your Google score or making sure that your Tweets rise up in other tools other than Twitter, never, ever, ever use more than one hash tag, no matter how much you want to. One hash tag at a time.
A lot of traction for Hail State out there, though; you can go find it and get a huge response. Scott has made a conscious decision that that's going to be what the message that goes out from Mississippi State will carry.
I know a lot of folks say, well, Twitter, our Twitter feed is about 10 percent of our Facebook. Well, let's look at the raw numbers, and at Arkansas we've got about 150,000 on Facebook and 14,000 on Twitter. Yeah, you should spend most of your time on Facebook because 150,000 is bigger than 14,000. How many of your 150,000 are doing likes and interacting?
But this piece of news from Apple a few weeks ago should help you change your mind, as iOS 5 will natively integrate Twitter. You won't need a separate app to send out messages to your friends, so Apple has bought into Twitter; you should, too.
Monitoring tools we're not going to talk about today. This is a shameless plug for you to come back on Wednesday and listen when we talk about that.
Without further ado, I'd like to introduce the athletic director at Mississippi State. He is one of our own. He rose up through the ranks, and I want Scott to share with us his vision of why that multiple voice approach has become successful for the Bulldogs at Mississippi State.
SCOTT STRICKLIN: Thank you, Bill, and that was really informative, so great job on putting that together. Bill has always been a guy who's not been afraid to dive in. I think the first time I ever heard about Facebook was in an SEC meeting down in Destin, and you started trying to explain to the rest of us what that was about seven or eight years ago.
The world has changed quite a bit in that time, and obviously continues to. To answer Bill's question about the multiple voice approach that we use at Mississippi State, you know, and you had it up there, but I think the personality piece is real important. You know, college athletics, while we're a big business and obviously we get national attention and we get tons of exposure through ESPN and other sources, it's still really -- what separates it from professional sports often times is that personal approach and the fact that we're all geography based and we're all tied into our local communities, our local states.
I think having that personality piece really plays into it, and we do what Bill talked about. If there's a question about how Bowl tickets are being distributed, you know, and they're coming across my Twitter feed, my Mentions column, I ask my Bulldog club director or my ticket office guy to respond to those people because they're going to have more direct info than I am on that because they're down there in the trenches working on that each and every day.
Same way if Joe or Greg from our staff were here, if there's questions related to men's basketball or football from a fan's perspective, they're going to be more inclined to answer those questions or be better suited to answer those questions than I am.
If it's a question that needs broad distribution, then we will re-Tweet each other like crazy, which does a couple things. Obviously it gets those of us who have more followers, it gets more information spread quicker. It also helps people understand, hey, Joe Galbraith has got a following for football or Greg Ellis has got a following for basketball, and it just helps us push those out a little bit more.
I think it makes our universe smaller, the whole Twitter approach or real-time communication. It makes everything we do so much faster and really shortens the time. I'm a Civil War history buff, and it took weeks often times for news of battles to get back to the major metropolitan areas up north, and you think about 150 years ago they had to wait for news to travel, and today it's so instantaneous, it's almost faster than the mind can even fathom. And that causes a couple things to need to happen. One, it's real important that you're as transparent as possible because if -- I think what Bill put up there about the over-marketing of Twitter, I think that is a turnoff for people. Our whole goal is to keep people engaged as much as possible.
So I think to do that you've got to seem authentic and transparent. That's something that in Twitter if you're not transparent, if you're not authentic it comes across pretty quick.
Back to the personality piece and having multiple users, I think one of the things that's critical there is that you do have coordination, and we will -- we talk as a staff and we have news going out, who's going to be the person that sends this out on their Twitter feed, why is it going to be that person, if it's the ticket manager, if it's the football media relations director, whoever it is, and everybody kind of knows from that point to take their cue to get it spread out as much as possible.
I tend to use the Twitter more than Facebook. I'm on both. I had a fan send me an email one time asking why I wasn't on Facebook, and I am on Facebook, and I accept friend requests all the time. I was sending out three or four Tweets a day, and this person was saying, I need to use social media, and I thought I was out there pretty good but I realized I wasn't doing much on my Facebook page. So a simple -- I don't always do this, but I have one Twitter client on my iPad that is synced up to where my Tweets go to my Facebook, also, which really helps.
But back to the speed thing, I think that in this day and age, what Twitter allows communicators to do is it's kind of like you've gotten off the aircraft carrier and you've gotten on a PT boat, and it doesn't take two days to form a response to a critical question that's out there; it takes 60 seconds. And that's a great tool for each and every one of you, for all of us in this day and age where people expect responses in that kind of time frame.

Q. Scott, you want to talk about one Tweet in particular when your football coach was being possibly rumored as looking at another situation, you formed this message and sent it out. It was re-Tweeted by 100 plus, and it's only because Twitter isn't going to show you more than 100 plus, so here's your athletic director with a strategically crafted Tweet to try and stop a rumor set?
SCOTT STRICKLIN: After one year as an athletic director I can tell you the absolute worst time in my job is hiring season for football coaches, because there's a lot of fans are convinced things are happening or they get things in their own mind that it's really hard to go out and defuse them of certain notions that they think is just fact because it's conventional wisdom. So this was actually the day that Urban Meyer announced that he was resigning at the University of Florida, and our football coach had spent some time at the University of Florida and there was public speculation that that would be a natural move. This was within three or four hours of that announcement coming out, and I was getting inundated on Twitter and direct emails and texts from fans just -- you've got to come out and say something, you've got to do something. They want action.
I don't know what in the heck -- I put it on media relations, I don't know what you're supposed to go out and say in that situation when it's really a fan-driven phenomenon, this occurring, that's really not based in any reality other than what they think might be happening. And I was actually up in New York the day that this happened. I was at a conference up there and was visiting with a friend of mine that I'd worked with at another school, and I said, I've got to send out something to calm people down, to get their mind off of this thing, and we had just accepted a Gator Bowl berth and obviously our fan base was very excited about that.
But they were in full-blown panic mode within the two or three hours after Coach Meyer had made his announcement. We probably spent about 30 minutes, my buddy and I, editing this Tweet before we sent it out coming up with different iterations. I know that doesn't sound like the instantaneous world of Twitter, but I added a sentence and we'd take one out, and finally came up with this, and the pressure that was released, you could almost feel it - I was in New York and you could feel it back in Mississippi, the pressure being released from our fan base, they kind of came to their senses, and to me this is a great example of the power of this medium because it did get re-Tweeted, and I immediately had people who half an hour later were blowing me up because I hadn't come out and done anything that were like, wow, you really put that in perspective, thanks so much, can't wait for New Year's Day, whatever.
And this is, like I said, the power of this tool to get a message across, and it can be something like this, it can be -- we had an unfortunate incident a couple weeks after this, you may have seen something about it, we had some basketball players visit Hawai'i, and a good media relations person, they're prepared, right? You bring it up before the other guy does. And we used Twitter again. Once we figured out where we were going to be on the discipline side of that altercation, we announced what we were doing through Twitter. In the old days this happened -- I spent most of Christmas Eve day dealing with this matter, and by 2:00 or 3:00 we decided we were putting the young men back on a plane and getting them out of there, and in the old days you would have waited for the news cycle to come around and report the information the next morning. But we used Twitter to basically get the message out that, hey, this is the action that's been taken, this is an embarrassment, we're not going to stand for it, and that's another situation where you give your fan base a sense that they're on top of things because we're not letting this fester, we're not sitting back, they're acting.
I don't know if the decision was made any quicker than it would have been without real-time communication, but the response was made so quickly that it gave people the impression that it was being handled quicker than what it might have been otherwise.
BILL SMITH: Also joining us on the podium here, Ben Porritt, who many of you heard this morning. If there's a part of American society that receives more attention than American sports, it is, of course, American politics, and Ben has been quite literally in the belly of the beast in the White House and in presidential campaigns. Talk to us a little bit about how the strategic communication messaging works within the campaigns and perhaps particularly when things don't go well.
BEN PORRITT: Well, first, thanks again for having me on here. This is my second time speaking today, so if I repeat myself, I apologize.
I think social media is interesting. One of the things that's interesting about it from a positive standpoint before I go into the crisis side of things, is that in business, whether your business is sports, whether it is a restaurant business, whatever it is, you can only offer your customers one of two things; you can offer them low cost or you can offer them experience. And I got this advice from the founders of Chick-Fil-a, and that's why one of the things that they do is they run the greatest experiential fast food restaurant that you can go to. They don't lower their price at all times. And this is the only thing that I really look at when I look at social media. I think it is the greatest opportunity for people in your position and people in Scott's position and Bill's to really provide something completely different than you could have provided five, six, ten years ago. This is an unbelievable opportunity to directly engage your fans and those who follow your program, and ultimately you can help with the goals of your organization or your business.
One of the things that's amazing, whether you're talking politics or sports, is that we cannot communicate quick enough. In politics we perfected the 24-hour news cycle and got rid of it about a year later, and one of the things I said this morning is we don't have a news cycle anymore, and I think that's mostly because of politics. I think that we have kind of left the idea that we can, like Scott said, wait around for different reporters to cover different things and wait for deadlines. There's no deadlines. People want to make sure that they break the story, they're the first one to tell it; whether they tell it on their Twitter page or whether they tell it on their blog or their news outlet's home page, it doesn't matter.
And the reason is because we don't have -- people don't have time. We don't have time to do anything. I think that we're thinking in a world of 140 characters. One of the things that we do with Outside Eyes is we help clients boil down hundreds of words or hour-long presentations into one or two sentences, which is what Twitter tries to train all of us to do each and every day. All of my clients will tell me I have a 45-minute presentation I need to give to you. I'll say, you need to give it to me in five minutes. It's hard for people how to understand how to do that. So we have to think in 140 characters.
The second thing is we have to be monitoring each and every thing that is being said about us or around us when it comes to politics or sports. And so the second beautiful aspect of social media is monitoring and using a war room, and we have perfected that since the Bill Clinton campaign in politics. He was the one that started a war room in 1992. If you haven't seen the movie, you should see it. It's an incredible documentary. And then in 2000 and 2004 the Bush campaign used social media quicker and faster than you can use anything, and it was more effective.
And then came the Obama administration, and there hasn't been an organization on the planet except Google that has used social media better than anybody, the way that they solicit donors, the way that they talk to their constituents, the way that they talk to people who might be straddling the fence, the way that they directly approach those who say things negative about their candidate. What the Obama campaign did in 2008 was something that we could study for social media for the next 25 to 30 years.
In politics, speed is key, but message is the most important thing, and for us one of the things that is difficult about social media is that we like to repeat ourselves in politics because we have a saying, by the time we say something for the thousandth time, somebody is going to be hearing it for the first time. So social media has become a little bit difficult for politicians who are trying to get across the same exact message, not just one day after the next but for weeks at a time, and so that's been one thing that I have actually noticed in politics that's difficult to adapt.
The one thing that I see in politics that we really use social media for is make sure the positive and the positive stories grow legs. We like to see positive stories out there for two, three, four days. We usually only get a day. One of the ways we do that is by using social media and Twitter, making sure we're sending out things a couple days later, making sure we're using people who are Twitter followers, using them saying we need you guys to send this out next.
We have a very manipulated set of marketing tools in politics, like nothing is accidental. If somebody is Tweeting something on our behalf, it's because we've asked them to, and I think that's probably something that you guys can take into account, as well.
I think with this conversation you can go 100 different ways, and I bet Bill and Scott have dozens of different examples and questions, but I do think that social media is something that for crisis management we can use all the time. That's kind of what I've spoke about in the past here, and one of the things I was saying to Scott beforehand is that the problem with most athletic departments that I've worked with, and it's not just athletic departments, it's most organizations that I've worked with, is that even in 2011 we're operating under rules and infrastructure from 1997, and we have got to find ways to really become adapted to what is going on each and every day, because if we can't respond in times of crisis, then we're certainly missing opportunities to promote ourselves and our organizations. And that's to me what -- that's where I see the interest in social media.
BILL SMITH: We want to save most of the time for your questions so start queueing up at the microphones, but I want to start off with this question for Ben, and it's sort of dovetailing off of what you said this morning, every athletic department should have a social media team, but you mentioned something this morning in making sure when you're making a crisis communication team or your social media team to include outsiders, and I believe it was expanding the zone of coverage. Talk a little bit about how Twitter and Facebook and bringing those outsiders in can expand that zone of coverage.
BEN PORRITT: One of the projects that I work on is I work with a real estate firm that is making an attempt to return the NFL to Los Angeles, and that's one of the biggest projects that we work on. And when I took over the project from a public relations standpoint about a year and a half ago, I realized that unless we went to the Los Angeles Times or the LA Daily News or maybe one of the smaller papers, we had a real hard time getting our stories out there because they got to the point where reporters would say to me, it's been 16 years; until you get us a team, we're done covering what you guys want to talk about. So we came up with a policy of expanding the zone of coverage.
And we went out, and each and every day we monitored every single Facebook site, every single Twitter feed that talked about returning the NFL to Los Angeles, and there were dozens. And we spent months bringing them in, sharing with them our presentation, sharing with them our vision of what our stadium and our plan would look like, and ultimately we converted hundreds of people who use social media so that when we had something to announce, we did not need a mainstream member of the media to report that for us, we could simply put it out to Twitter followers or Facebook groups or whoever was out there, and they would carry the message for us, and probably -- they probably had some similar reach as some of the major newspapers in LA once you totaled them all together. That was one aspect of expanding the coverage zone.
The other thing is that there are clear influencers, whether they're on social media or not. In politics, any time you see people who go on television to stick up for the candidate, a specific candidate or whoever, I guarantee that that was a request made by the actual campaign. A couple weeks ago, I'm supporting one specific candidate in the primaries, and their campaign asked me to do a round of television interviews. They put me on there because they knew that I would say good things about their candidate.
I think that we can do the same thing with your organizations. We know who people are out there. If you provide them a little access, if you bring them in, if you show them a little love, I guarantee they're going to go out and act as your surrogates or third-party voices to make the statements when you need to promote things but certainly stick up for you when you need the help, whenever that time comes.

Q. Scott, your examples of when you were in Hawai'i, the two examples that you gave, did you guys also put out a statement to the media? Did you put anything on Facebook? Did you put anything on the website? Or did you just leave it as a Tweet?
SCOTT STRICKLIN: I'm looking at my guys here. I think we sent out the statement, I think we emailed that out to our regular email distribution list that the media relations staff maintains. But to me that's almost an afterthought these days because every one of our media guys, correct me if I'm wrong, Joe and Greg, they're on Twitter. Their blog in many ways has moved to 140 characters. You know, I can't tell you the last time I picked up a print newspaper, and I know there's still a lot of people who do, especially some of our older constituents still do read the print papers, but more and more people of our generation I think are getting away from that.
I take the approach that if it's going out on Twitter, you're getting your message out. Now, that doesn't mean, to Bill's point, you can maximize your exposure if you make sure you hit all your -- hit your website, make sure it's on your Facebook page and hit the emails. I think the Twitter piece is pretty powerful, though.

Q. Do you find the media that cover you guys are now quoting you from Twitter?
SCOTT STRICKLIN: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. There are -- I'm trying to think if there's been a recent example where the newspaper article that was written the day after quoted me and attributed it to a Tweet. Yeah, it was a cowbell issue that we had. There's always something about that darn cowbell.

Q. Just to follow up on that, with the way websites help drive revenue, were you concerned by releasing it only on Twitter that you'll drive people away from your website into your Twitter accounts?
SCOTT STRICKLIN: I'm really not, and I'll be honest with you. The website -- I mean, yes, websites are nice. They do generate some revenue. That's never been really a concern, though, as far as taking that away. I'm much more in the -- the old argument about do we put a football game on TV or not, is that going to make people not want to come to the game, I think that's been proven that if nothing else that it's the opposite. If anything else it's the opposite. It promotes, it encourages people. So I kind of believe in filling the hole with as much information from whatever source as possible and the rising tide lifts all boats.
So what I'm trying to say is the exposure you get to the real-time transmission, I think that's going to drive more traffic to your website eventually, it's going to drive people to buy season tickets, it's going to drive people to give donations.
The other piece that I think is critical is there's an invisible barrier between someone in the public eye and the public, and whether it's a high profile coach, political figure, you know, in our world in some areas, athletic director, there's this divide. And the social media, Facebook, Twitter, it breaks that down a little bit. There's more of an immediacy, there's more of I can reach out and touch you.
I can't tell you how many of our fans that I meet at alumni events or ballgames or something, one of the first things they say is I follow you on Twitter. That's their connection. They feel like they -- like we already have a relationship because they've heard my thoughts or they've read my thoughts or whatever on Twitter. That's pretty amazing if you think about it, that thousands of people I've never met feel like they know me, which I don't put personal information out there, but from a work standpoint it's a pretty positive thing.

Q. Scott, do you see a lot of that because you do those Bulldog meetings around the state and the region where you're doing branding but it's converting into bonding?
SCOTT STRICKLIN: Yeah, absolutely, and I think that there's a -- Mississippi is a state obviously that doesn't have a lot of -- doesn't have a major media market. Jackson would be the biggest media market we have, and my predecessor in my current position, Greg Byrne, who I mentioned at the panel today, Greg left Mississippi State and went to Arizona, and three months later I was looking on his Twitter feed, and his number of followers had actually gone down. I took a lot of pride -- anybody from Arizona here? I'm not running down Arizona, but if it could get back to Greg that I was, that would be great. (Laughter.)
Greg and I were talking about that. I brought that up to him, and he's since built it back up. I think he had to pay people. But I do wonder if the fact that in a state where there's not a lot of major media markets that the people who do want to follow our program feel like this is the way they can get access as quickly as possible, whereas if you're living -- if you're a Gator fan living down here and you've got all these different media markets that are covering that program, they may not feel like Twitter is as valuable for getting information as quickly as it is for the schools in Mississippi or schools in areas where there's not as much traditional media feeding that information.

Q. Scott, you sort of started touching on the subject in that last answer, but with your men's basketball SID Tweeting and your ticket guy Tweeting, is there any concern when those guys leave and get new jobs that your momentum that you've built up through your Twitter page with those guys sort of walks out the door and you're starting from ground zero?
SCOTT STRICKLIN: You know, we have not experienced that. We've had -- I don't know that we've had that happen from someone who's been -- well, when Greg Byrne left it kind of happened, and within two or three months I had gone past where he was. I think that if we had somebody in those positions leave and take another job and we hired somebody new, we'd get them on Twitter and I would probably Tweet, hey, follow this person. I think the equity of the position is not in the person, so our fan base is following me not because it's me but it's because of the position I'm in. I think you could build that equity up pretty quickly because people want to know because of the position, if that answers your question.
The other thing that we haven't touched on this, and maybe it's understood, but obviously a huge concern, because as great as Twitter and real-time communication is for people in media relations and people wanting to get a message out, it keeps you awake at night when you think about student athletes and their use of it. There's probably not a person in this room that hasn't been touched in some way by a student athlete not using it the right way, and that's something that we don't have an answer for at our place yet, and it's something we'll have to figure out.
I think at the end of the day -- we actually shut down a program from using Twitter, one of our teams during the season last year. We banned it for the rest of the season because it was getting out of hand. So what we tell them is, look, you've got to act like what you type on the 140 characters right here is the same as when they put a microphone in front of your face. You wouldn't use profanity in the post-game locker room or in the press conference with a microphone in front of your face; don't go out and do it here. And their response is, I'm just talking to my buddies. No, you're not, because most of the time student athletes don't have protected accounts and they have a number of donors and season ticket holders who are following them, and that's been a challenge for us and I'm sure for many in the room.

Q. College division type people who are doing most of their Tweets and Facebook posts via Sidearm or whatever, which is a great way, quick way to get the message out, but most college division people don't have the staff or time to make unique Tweets, et cetera, except for maybe rare occasions when you're overstaffed. When can the college division folks do to improve that with the time resources that are such an issue?
BILL SMITH: I'm going to jump in with one thing here because this is sort of a constant theme. If you're at Arkansas and you've got a big fan base, ArkRazorbacks is pretty much one person; it's me. StricklandMSU is one person; it's Scott. And the thing that I would say to a lot of the folks at smaller schools and the one-man shop is this is an important tool that you just have to begin to integrate into your life and work around, hey, I'm going to make a few Tweets, schedule some Tweets, do some things to interact, because it is that key to bonding with your fan base. You know, we've got 14,000 followers for ArkRazorbacks, and again, Arkansas is not exactly a large media market. We are blessed to not have a pro component to compete with, but the reason that we have a big following is because a lot of the information that we put out can't be accessed any other way. Same thing in Mississippi. Same thing for almost every school that would consider themselves a smaller.
But you've got a very dedicated group of fans that are very interested in what you have to say. There's probably more value in the time that you take relating to them because they can't get the information about your college or university any other way than from you. A lot of it is going to be prioritizing it and then starting to learn the tools so that you can save time with it, and I'll ask the other guys to comment.
BEN PORRITT: Yeah, I think one of the things that we deal with all the time is that we work on behalf of our clients and manage that for them. What you gain in that is probably for clients that don't have a lot of resources and certainly don't have a lot of staff, you gain a presence on social media, whether it's Facebook or Twitter or whatever. What you lose on that is what these guys are talking about, is the idea of going from branding to bonding, which I've never heard, and I will steal that phrase for the remainder of the week.
But there are upsides and downsides. I can't imagine at the college level ever being short-staffed with students. I mean, I don't know what the ability is to bring in interns, but at Outside Eyes, I wouldn't call it -- we don't pay a lot of people, but we bring in a lot of interns from whether it's the University of Miami or Nova or whatever, the local universities. It's a great opportunity for us to put people in high-profile situations or high-octane campaigns where they get to really kind of learn social media in and out, and they love it. They're more aggressive with it, they're more interested in it, and once you put them on a path and you can trust them, then it's certainly worth it. You do lose a few things, but I think that if resources and time become a problem, then certainly doling it out to either interns or firms is a good way to do it.
SCOTT STRICKLIN: I just think your point is to me Twitter is kind of the great equalizer. You don't have to have a big budget to get on there and be effective with it. You just have to be interesting and pertinent and relevant so people want to follow you. You're only as powerful as the number of followers you can get.

Q. My question is you talked at the beginning about needing a social media policy for your department. Can you elaborate a little bit more on that, like what type of things you have in that policy?
BILL SMITH: At the University of Arkansas we've got essentially a three-part policy. There's one set of guidelines for staff, a set of guidelines for the student athletes, and they kind of mirror each other, and then we have something called our confidentiality and proprietary information policy that applies to both. This is in there so folks understand people have access to our schedules, people have access to roster changes. There are certain transactional things that happen within the athletic department, and in the state of Arkansas we checked to make sure that we could actually restrict that because it's in board of trustee policy about contracts that staff members understand there's certain things they can't release without clearance, so that's what the confidential and proprietary information policy kind of undergirds it.
And then it's just a matter of education. You've got to educate your people so that they really kind of, as Scott said, understand that you're typing to the world even though you think you're typing to your 50 friends. Scott, what about Mississippi State?
SCOTT STRICKLIN: We actually do not have a written policy, and I'm not -- I can see the benefit of that. I've never been someone that wants to sit around and come up with policies, and so we kind of use a common sense approach to how we go about it.
You know, Bill said something earlier that I wrote down here, talking about marketing is different than strategic communications, and I know the point -- I understand the point you're trying to make, but really strategic communication is part of the marketing and the branding. I may be parsing your words and I'm sorry if I'm doing that. But I think y'all heard me say this morning if you were in here that one of the things I feel like that we are at our institutions to do from an athletic standpoint is promote our universities. That's why they allow us to do what we do on their campus. We're a part of the university, but we're there to promote the university, and the marketing piece, it's not the marketing department's job to market, it is everybody, every student athlete, every coach, everybody in our athletic department, it's their job to sell Mississippi State each and every day. And we take that even to our fans. That Maroon Friday thing, it's their job to wear that shirt on Friday to help promote us, and everybody has a role to play if we're all going to get this thing going.
We don't really have a policy for the social media, but it's more of what makes sense and what is allowing us to put our best foot forward is how we sell ourselves.

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CoSIDA CONVENTION 2011: MARCO ISLAND

June 27, 2011

Benjamin Porritt

Bill Smith

Scott Stricklin