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Student Live-Chats: An Admissions Yield Tool

All of you in higher ed world are probably involved in the same thing that we are at Duke in the month of April: Admissions yield! We admit our students at the beginning of April, and they typically have until May 1 to decide which of their college admissions offers to accept. We, of course, want them all to pick Duke!

One way that we try to help our admitted students to figure out if Duke is the right fit for them is by giving them access to current Duke students. Our Duke Students channels on Instagram, Snapchat (@DukeStudents), Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr are great ways to reach them, but we also want them to have some real “face time” with our current students. Enter our student live-chats.

The Set-Up

Choose a time. We usually aim for a time when our east and west coast students can join, and also a time that works for high school and college students. (Basically, that means nothing before noon.)
Set up your tech details. We use YouTube Live (Google Hangouts On Air), but you could do this with any number of platforms. YouTube Live works well for us because it’s easy to have our students “call in” from anywhere they happen to be.
Work with your admissions team to let your admitted students know. We send an invitation to the live chat to each admitted student so that they can watch at the appointed time and ask their questions. Send your admitted students the link to the YouTube video, not the link to join the Google Hangouts On Air. They’ll be able to watch the video on YouTube and ask questions in the chat box, but they won’t show up on the video screen with your student hosts.
Coordinate your student hosts. Make sure they know what time you’re starting, and send lots of reminders! Ask them to be in a quiet place with good wifi and headphones with a microphone. (Their Apple earbuds will work.) Let them know where you’ll be sharing the link for them to join the chat on the big day and ask them to join the chat a few minutes early to trouble-shoot any tech issues. (Trouble-shooting for us usually involves having them try a different browser or re-start their computer if something isn’t working. Super high-tech, I know.)

Getting Ready on the Big Day

Sign in to YouTube and get your event going. It won’t broadcast immediately, so you have time to do your set-up before you hit go.
Invite your student hosts to the chat using the link that your Google Hangouts On Air will provide. (We’ve tried it lots of other ways, but texting the link to the student hosts on the day-of is the most reliable method for us.)
Send this link to your student hosts, not to your admitted students. Your admitted students should get the YouTube link where they can watch and participate by asking questions in the chat box.
Get all your student hosts signed in.
Test their sound and lay down your ground rules. (We don’t have many besides our long-standing “grandma rule:” Don’t say it if it would offend your grandma.) One of our ground rules is also that the student hosts mute themselves when they’re not speaking. This keeps the video from automatically flipping to them if a noise happens in the background or they sneeze or something.

During the Chat

Once you start broadcasting, turn off your own video and sound so that it’s just your student hosts who are showing up on the screen. You may also want to change your cameraman settings so that you’re only broadcasting the large video that you see to your audience, and hiding the other thumbnail video feeds. (If your student hosts are goofing around when they’re not the ones talking, this keeps them off the screen!)
I keep open my Google Hangouts On Air window and also open the YouTube window with the chat in it. This is where your admitted students will be asking questions. If you don’t have a question right away, don’t panic! It’s best to have a few frequently asked questions to start with, just in case the chat starts slow.
As the questions come in, I paste them into the Google Hangouts On Air chat for the student hosts. This keeps the student hosts from having to flip back and forth to the YouTube window, and since I’m not talking on the chat, I can field questions and put them in a good order for them to answer. I’m basically the silent question moderator.
Set an end time or stop when the questions stop. We can usually go for a solid hour before the student hosts get tired, so we say we’ll go for an hour unless we run out of questions. We often have more questions than we can answer in an hour!

Extra Tips

Vet your student hosts before-hand. I pick students I already know are enthusiastic, good on camera, friendly and reliable.
Practice! Run a test YouTube Live if you haven’t done it before, preferably on your personal channel or on a test channel somewhere.
Don’t panic. It’s live and sometimes stuff happens live. Someone’s wifi will cut out or there will be some weird background noise or a host of other weird issues. Roll with it. Your audience knows it’s live and they’ll understand some hiccups.
Re-use it when you’re done! We caption our student chats and re-share them for admitted students who may have missed out on the live chat. In fact, most of our views come from people re-watching the chats on YouTube.
Have fun! It’s a cool, great way to connect with your admitted students and share your enthusiasm with them.

Our latest student chat is below, and if you’d like to see one live, our next one will be April 18 at 8 pm EST.

Channel Strategy at Duke: Audiences, Platforms and How We Decide What to Post Where

When we started really thinking about how we wanted to share our content at Duke, we realized we needed to think about both audience and platform. As it turns out, it was harder than we thought to answer the questions, “Who is our audience?” and, “What are our platforms?”

We started with the question of audience. It’s a question that bears a little more thought than it would if we were selling widgets, since we’re trying to reach a lot of different audiences at once and there’s not one single, measurable goal we’re shooting for.

We came up with something that looked like this:

If that’s not enough to make your head spin, then we had to think about all of the platforms that we have available for our use, and which audiences use which platforms. Can we reach all of our students with a newsletter? Are a large percentage of our alumni fans on our Facebook page? What about prospective students in China, where many of our social channels are not accessible?

We ended up with a really, really complicated grid. Don’t look at this for too long. Your brain will melt.

Ok, so the chart above isn’t super helpful. When I shared it with my colleagues, most of them kind of just got glassy-eyed and uninterested. I get it. It’s too much.

But, what this chart allowed me to do was come up with a channel strategy: a way to say what each Duke channel can be used for, based on where our audiences interact.

Each slide looks something like this:

It’s a living document that everyone on the social media team can reference, and it changes as our policies change, which means we can pivot if Facebook changes their algorithm (again) or if Instagram adds a shiny new feature.

Your mileage will vary, of course. Each institution will have unique audiences and demographics for each platform.

We’ve found, though, that as a social media and content team at Duke, having everything spelled out like this means we can strategize together, create with the same goal in mind, and fill in for each other a lot easier than we could before.

Want to hear more about this? I’ll be speaking on this topic at the Social Fresh conference in December. Other speakers include folks from IBM, Starbucks and Facebook. Hope you’ll join me there to hear about lots of actionable and practical tips, tricks and case studies.

3 Things We’re Doing Wrong in Higher Ed Social Media

1. Calling Snapchat “dead.”

Yeah, the redesign makes your life harder. Are you going to friend all of your students so that your story shows up in their friend feed, or are you going to be content with showing up in the “Discover” tab? You decide, but know that incoming students aren’t giving up Snapchat anytime soon. We’re just going to have to figure out a way to engage. And speaking of engagement…

2. Failing to engage.

We’re really used to broadcasting. We broadcast all the time. We tweet and share links to our sites. We tell people what we want them to know. Increasingly, though, our incoming students and our other community members are looking for engagement. So, yeah, we’re going to have to do some one-on-one stuff, which takes some man/woman-power. And looking ahead, we’re going to have to engage both in the messaging apps we already use (have you checked your Facebook Page inbox recently?) and in the apps we’re going to have to learn to use, like WeChat and WhatsApp.

3. Using YouTube as a video bucket.

Your YouTube channel isn’t just a place where you can chuck all your video content so that you can embed it elsewhere. YouTube is a social platform. Yep, and it’s getting to be even more social with the addition of the community tab and a coming-soon Stories-like feature. You’re going to have to roll your YouTube strategy into your general social media strategy, so start laying the groundwork now to get control of YouTube on your team.

Inexpensive Equipment For Social Media Photo & Video

We know that some of you are operating as one-man/woman shops and doing what you can with social media photography and videography based on your available resources. We’ve pulled together a quick shopping list of inexpensive items for your photo and video kit to raise your game without busting your budget.

iRig Microphone

If you’re shooting video on your phone for live Periscope shots or even for produced videos (Hey, why not? Your phone records in high-def.), you’re going to want better sound than the microphone in your smartphone will give you. This is the single easiest way to make your smartphone video way more professional. Sound quality is key!

Price: $59.99

Benefit: Better-than-bad sound from smartphone video recordings

Smartphone Lens Kit

If you’re using your phone for photography, you might want to get a little fancier than what the built in lens will let you get. This kit includes a macro lens for your arty close-ups, a wide angle lens for your big group shots and cityscapes, and a fish-eye lens because why the hell not.

Price: $14.99

Benefit: The option to shoot fish-eye stuff, because sometimes you just wanna

Smartphone Tripod Mount

If you’re shooting a video on your smartphone, the easiest way to make it look more professional is to put it on a tripod so you don’t get the handheld shake. Luckily, if you have a regular old tripod, you can buy a smartphone holder that works with what you already have.

Price: $12.95

Benefit: Look like you know what you’re doing

Light Kit

If you’re going to be shooting photos or videos indoors or at night, you might consider investing in a light kit. Luckily, LED panels aren’t super expensive and you can do a lot with a couple of them. The kit we’ve linked here includes everything you need: 2 light panels and 2 tripods. You can run the lights off of a couple different kinds of batteries or a power cord, and they’ll also fit in the hot-shoe of your DSLR camera if you’d rather use them that way.

Price: $64.99

Benefit: Get your subjects lit (literally)

Of course there’s lots of other equipment you could spend your budget on, but these are the ones we’ve gotten a lot of use out of.

For more options on equipment, check out some of what The Link has available. It’s a great place to try-before-you-buy, or even use for all your projects (if you don’t have too many of them).

Vidcon Recap

I just flew back from VidCon in California… (And boy are my arms tired. No? Ok, moving on.)

For those who haven’t heard of VidCon, it’s sort of the premiere YouTube-and-other-online-video conference. It’s run by Hank and John Green (the VlogBrothers), who pretty much invented modern vlogging.

There are several different tracks. The Community track is the one meant for 12-year-old girls to meet all their favorite YouTube stars. (If you ever want to hear high-pitched screaming—possibly including crying and/or wailing—just get Danisnotonfire to walk into a room full of preteens.) The Creator track is the next tier up, meant for video creators. That’s the one I signed up for. One tier up from the Creator track is the Industry track, meant for big brands and networks. (I wish I’d signed up for that one because it looked like they had some great content. Hindsight.)

I went to a whole bunch of workshops and panels and wanted to share some highlights and tips with you all.

Online Video News

There was a whole panel about news shows on YouTube, featuring panelists from The Young Turks and SourceFed. If you’re not familiar, The Young Turks is a live news show featuring way left-leaning opinionated commentary. SourceFed is a comedy news channel. The discussion centered on what works well on YouTube as opposed to in a traditional journalism setting.

The Young Turks channel in particular relies heavily on the opinions of the anchors. They made the comparison to Jon Stewart (of The Daily Show). He’s the most trusted news media figure out there, according to surveys, and the theory is that it’s because he’s relatable and you know his opinion.

Further discussion centered on making the news format digestible, and working to keep things snappy and fairly short.

SourceFed’s main goal is to walk the line between appropriate and inappropriate humor in news stories that aren’t always funny.

And here’s a tip for scripted shows that I thought was interesting: Sometimes reading off a teleprompter gives you “teleprompter face,” and you’re not as animated. The shortcut is to make sure that your eyebrows are still moving if you’re reading off a teleprompter. It keeps your face animated and engaged.

Video Formats

For news videos, lots of channels are doing round-up style videos, meaning they’ll include 3 or 4 different news stories in one video. When headlining these round-ups, though, they’re still using the catchiest news headline to get the click.

Another interesting item I heard about while I was there was the “elevation” of the daily vlog into more of a filmmaking style. I’m not sure how that would apply to Duke channels, but it’s cool anyway. In particular, check out Emily Diana Ruth’s “Letters to July” to see some examples.

Platforms

There was some mention of Facebook directly uploaded video as opposed to linking to YouTube videos on Facebook. You can see our ONC test results on that here. SourceFed mentioned that they’re exploring 1-minute, 1-take videos specifically for Facebook that are “extra” content beyond their YouTube content. Some were also experimenting with preview cuts for Facebook with direction to watch the full video on YouTube. (This redirection to YouTube is more important for those people who are monetizing YouTube views, and not so much to us in the business of getting as many eyeballs as possible without worrying about monetization.)

There was an entire panel on the different platforms available for online video. Represented were YouTube, Vimeo, Vine and Tumblr. The consensus was that YouTube is great for experimenting with new formats and getting feedback on your videos, and Vimeo is great for premium content, especially with their Vimeo On Demand setup, which allows you to charge people to get your video. The Vine and Tumblr reps didn’t have too much to add to the conversation. The Tumblr guy reiterated that GIFs work great on Tumblr, and if you want people to share your stuff on Tumblr, it probably wouldn’t hurt to make some shareable GIFs of whatever video you’re promoting. And, um, the Vine guy just sort of said, “Yeah man, Vine is cool,” over and over. So do with that what you will.

Music and the Content ID System

I will preface this by saying that everyone who talked about YouTube’s Content ID system at the conference began with, “I am not a lawyer, but…” so I’ll make that same claim. I am not a lawyer, but I learned some things about YouTube’s Content ID system in a panel on music. The panel was specifically about covers, parodies and remixes, but could also apply if you have a music bed in your videos.

Fairly recently, YouTube brokered some deals with the biggest labels in the music industry. Here’s how it works: YouTube’s Content ID system will pick up that you are using someone else’s song in your video and will give you a notice that says it’s someone else’s song. That’s not a bad thing because when you click to acknowledge that, yes, you are using someone else’s song, YouTube automatically begins to skim a percentage off of the ad revenue from that video and funnel it to the record label. The record label wins because they get money, and you win because YouTube lets you leave your video up and no one sues you. Yay.

The caveat here for us as Duke channels is that we’re most likely not monetizing in the first place, so this doesn’t really help us. I would still strongly recommend that everyone use music beds that you have licensed. (You can find lists of sites where you can get licensed tracks in the StyleGuide.) Still, if you’re conferring with students, this information could be helpful.

I went to some other panels, too, about storytelling and camera equipment and filmmaking and YouTube in general and got to meet with a a bunch of Internet-famous people, so if you want to hear more dirt or just chat about YouTube (or Disneyland), drop me a note or give me a call.

YouTube Tips and Resources

“Unlisted” Status in Youtube

I wanted to let you know about a YouTube pro tip (which also makes my job a lot easier!): If you’re putting up a video that’s not ready for prime-time, meaning you’re not ready to have it promoted or it’s a draft video or a video meant for internal circulation only, you can upload that video with a status of “unlisted.” The unlisted status means that you can share the link and anyone will be able to view it from that link, but it won’t show up on your channel page or in subscription feeds (including mine). Then, if you decide you want to make the video public later when it’s all approved and ready to go, you can reset it to “public” and it will show up on your channel page and in the subscription feeds.

Uploading your videos this way helps me to know when your video is ready to be promoted and keeps me from picking up a link to a video that’s still a draft or still in the approval process.

Descriptions and Titles

Also, once your video is ready to be promoted, please be sure you’re putting in a descriptive title and a compelling summary description. This helps your viewing audience (including me!) to know what your video is about, but it also helps your video to come up in YouTube’s search results. For more on descriptions, titles, and tags, you can check out our YouTube upload checklist here: http://styleguide.duke.edu/toolkit/video/youtube-publishing-checklist/

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