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Takeaways for Higher Ed from VidCon 2018

VidCon is not always the type of conference you’d think of for a higher ed professional. It’s all about online video, and a lot of it is about screaming pre-teens running after their favorite YouTube stars. This year, though, my boss and I got ourselves some industry track passes and dove in. Here’s what we learned!

Sonja & Laura in the emoji photo booth at VidCon

YouTube!

You can use YouTube for more than just hosting your videos. Use all the functionality of YouTube to really take full advantage of the platform!

  • Use the community tab to interact with users: Ask questions, deploy polls, etc.
  • “Stories” tab is coming for channels with >10,000 subscribers this year!

What should your branding and subject matter be on YouTube?

  • Find and study 5 channels that you want to be like.
  • Optimize for the “suggested video” function in YouTube by changing your thumbnails to ones that match current videos, and updating old titles to match current trends.
  • Personalities do well on YouTube.
  • Check out #YouTubeTaughtMe for some really fun stories about what people have learned from YouTube.

Facebook!

Facebook has some interesting video formats to play with.

  • Facebook Watch:
    • Check out George Takei Presents. It’s growing by 20k subscribers/day!
    • Facebook Watch is better for programs rather than personalities (as opposed to YouTube, where personalities rule).
  • Facebook Live:
    • Create a consistent live video programming schedule.
    • The key for live video is interaction.
  • Facebook Stories:
    • You can save some work by importing these from Instagram Stories if you’re already doing them.

LinkedIn!

  • LinkedIn is a pretty un-crowded (is that a word?) space for video creators right now. That’s why a lot of video creators are jumping in!
  • Max length for a LinkedIn video is 10 minutes.
  • Here are some LinkedIn personalities to check out: Bill Gates, Emirates, Gary Vee

Snapchat!

  • Is Snapchat dead or dying? Maybe. In the Snapchat vs. Instagram Stories battle, it looks like Instagram Stories is winning.
  • But Snapchat is different from Instagram in that authentic content is the key. Snapchat doesn’t depend on the likes, comments or “score” of your posts. It’s all about the relationships.

Content!

We talked a lot about educational content at VidCon.

  • Answer questions people didn’t know they had.
  • Establish friendliness and familiarity. (ex. Crash Course on YouTube)
  • For teens & tweens, let them participate in some way and focus on how things affect them now.

How can you stay on top of trends?

  • Use Google Trends to monitor trending terms.
  • Track your overall channel performance year over year to account for seasonal changes, and then adjust as necessary!

Our Favorite Instagram Stories of the Year

2016 saw the advent of Instagram Stories (see our early take on it here) and it’s been full steam ahead for the feature ever since. Instagram Stories turn 2 years old today and show no sign of slowing down as a major media asset for the social platform. They have been especially powerful for brands and influencers, Duke included, as a driver of traffic to our content. In fact, Instagram Stories is our second most powerful referrer for content, behind Facebook.

We’ve experimented with creative storytelling from research stories to crowd-sourced content on our Stories this year. Here are a few of our favorites:

Trajan Forum

Working with the Stories features has really pushed us in terms of creativity and discovering new tools and skills. This piece we produced on how historians and archeologists use 3-D scanning to document and archive pieces of long-gone ancient structures really pushed us in terms of how to get the content in the format that we needed. I ended up taking screen recordings on my iPhone of the 3-D scans, moving them around with my finger using the functionality on the webpage they were stored on. Then I manually edited the clips within the iPhoto album to shave off the front bumper that would show me navigating to the proper screen. After that, I exported and emailed them to Sonja to fine tune in Final Cut Pro X for proper formatting for the vertical Stories layout. (This was prior to the resize feature introduction.) It was really great to highlight such a cool story and bring it to our broader audience in an interactive and tangible way via Stories.

American Ballet Theater Partnership

This was one of our first attempts at strategic storytelling using a Call to Action on Instagram Stories. It worked well because of the stunning visuals our colleagues provided, and it paired really well with a conveniently-timed beta-testing of animated video/GIF capabilities on Canva, our go-to tool for quick, easy, polished graphics.

Snow Day 2018

I love this one because it is the perfect example of crowdsourcing content at its finest. ICYMI, Durham had a few major snow days back in January and campus got a good bit of snow. The photographic results were stunning. The best part? Sonja and I compiled this content from users from the comfort of our couches in our PJs as everyone was snowed in for a couple days. Thankfully, our students didn’t let us miss out on content showcasing Duke as a winter wonderland. There was no call to action here, just a great opportunity to engage with our community by featuring their content on our feed. You can see the full feature on the highlight on our Instagram page.

Moving into the upcoming school year, we’re excited to continue experimenting with content and storytelling on this platform.

Working with Students

If you were to ask me what the most rewarding part of my job is, one of my top 3 answers would easily be getting to work with students. It’s also one of the most common questions my colleagues and I are asked about our social strategy at conferences–“How do we use our students’ voices so strategically?” During my three years at Duke, I’ve been ridiculously fortunate to work with and get to know some pretty exceptional students.

Can they be a handful at times? Does it take a lot of time and effort to manage our student team? Is it an absolute NIGHTMARE wrangling student schedules to nail down a meeting time for the semester? Absolutely. But allow me to make the case for working with students–plenty of them, and often.

While working with student teams can be a bit like herding a bunch of overachieving and hilarious kittens at times, they also have some of the best ideas when it comes to content or how to reach their peers. Their opinions on how we market to prospective and current students are invaluable. Plus, they advise us on what platforms their peers are using, how to speak to them in an authentic way, and when and where to reach them. Essentially, they keep us cool and up to speed on what The Kids are doing. So working with them is a mix of:

But also,

At Duke, our @DukeStudents handles are absolutely flourishing and it is 100% due to the efforts of the students who have total ownership over each platform. They’re currently on Instagram (by far their strongest presence), Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.  There are the formal Duke University institutional accounts that I manage and the more informal, student-voiced @DukeStudents channels that allow current students to interact with one another as well as prospective students. We keep these DukeStudents and Duke University branded social accounts completely separate. Our student team is composed of 8 editors–one for each platform and a managing editor who acts as team leader and analytics expert.

While we certainly give them guidelines on things to avoid and advise them in certain situations, the students have ownership of their channels and the content they post there. We’ve found that properly training and then empowering them to own their channels is a great way to foster the dedication and level of professionalism and enthusiasm needed to see their audiences grow. Ownership = Attachment = Dedication.

 

We even take this one step further when it comes time to replace our graduating seniors. — MOMENT OF SILENCE–

We task each editor with identifying stars from a larger pool of their peers in a volunteer capacity to be promoted to the paid editor positions. The team is structured with 8 paid student editors who mentor a larger pool of mostly-first-year student volunteers (usually around 20). These student volunteers help to curate and create content for the DukeStudents channels and as our platform editors graduate, they select their successors largely from this broader volunteer pool. Our editors get experience with managing and mentoring a team and our student volunteers get to feel like they are a part of a structured effort on behalf of their university with opportunities to play a significant future role in the DukeStudents social presence.

P.S. Paying them helps too. Managing an institutional social channel is a job and should be treated as such.

We also offer them other perks, like exclusivity on information that will be relevant to the broader student body. For example, one of our student editors was actually featured in our top secret project with Apple earlier this year. We tapped him because we had the working relationship from his time on the @DukeStudents team. We also let the broader team of editors know what was coming about 20 minutes before the video formally dropped. Additionally, we tap them for special projects related to recruitment and yield.  We want them to feel important and valued as a member of the communications team for their university.

We also want to help our students build up their professional skills and resumes. We get them access to our colleagues who may be experts in areas that they are interested in pursuing or who can teach them particular skills that they want to learn. We make sure to give their creativity and work a large platform. For example, this past fall one of our student interns produced a beautiful video to welcome Duke 2022 to the incoming class when decisions were announced.

 

Join the Blue, #Duke2022!!! 🔵😈🎉🎊

A post shared by Duke University (@dukeuniversity) on

She created, filmed, produced and edited this project from start to finish. We amplified on our channels, but she now has a solid piece of work to add to her portfolio.

Did I also mention they’re just fun to hang out with? So there’s our approach to working with students. It’s not for everyone but I highly encourage you to make the effort to find a few good ones and see what sort of magic you can make together!

How Duke Covers Commencement

One of the most common questions the social media team gets each year as we head into commencement is “What is your shot list and how will you cover the event?” To many of our colleagues’ frustration, our answer is almost always, “We will see what we get on the day of.” Basically, at this point our plan about consists of a whole lot of this:

And a little bit of this:

 

Now, let me explain. This is not simply due to a lack of planning or to purposefully drive our commencement committee insane with unknowns. It’s because, truly, coverage of a live event is all about what I see once I get there. Sure, we can make educated guesses about what sort of content we will be looking for at the ceremony (students in robes, a timelapse of some sort, cute parents being excited), but the best part about these things are the unexpected content opportunities.

For example, these fashionable dudes simply could NOT be anticipated. I just happened to notice them in the procession and was lucky to grab a moment of video footage for our Instagram stories.

Another example is the content we posted that morning prior to the ceremony. I had no idea that I would be inspired to get a lovely campus shot of the quiet at 7:30 am before our ceremony. It just sort of happened as I was making my way through campus to the stadium.

Now, this is not to say that you shouldn’t have some sort of idea about content before going into an event. We knew we would have student shots, behind-the-scenes coverage of Wallace Wade Stadium before the ceremony began, etc. We knew our hashtags and that we’d want coverage of Tim Cook as this year’s commencement speaker. Sonja planned for and manned the live stream on our Facebook channel while I covered real-time content on the field on Instagram stories and Snapchat. But the real fun begins once the students arrive and you see the wacky fashion choices, hat decor, excited parents, etc. None of that content can be planned for.

This year, we also held off on posting photo content to our Instagram feed until post-ceremony, which gave us enough time to get shots from our amazing photo team AND see what the graduates and other schools/units around campus had shared from the event. We really had our pick of content using this method instead of rushing to get something up in real-time. This is just another great bonus of the Stories feature on the app! We were active on Instagram before the ceremony even started, but with stories, we were able to share content without rushing to post something we didn’t absolutely love right away. This really gave us a greater variety of content to share in the afternoon and in the following couple of days.

Forever, forever and #ForeverDuke! 😈🎓

A post shared by Duke University (@dukeuniversity) on


So there you have it! It’s never an exact science, but our biggest bit of advice is to keep your eyes peeled for a variety of shots and behind-the-scenes content that can only be captured while the event is happening.

How Duke Welcomed the Class of 2022

Welcome, welcome, welcome!

When the early decision deadline was approaching, Duke’s communications team asked me to come up with an idea to welcome the class in a friendly, fun way. I spent hours on Youtube watching other admissions videos, figuring out if there was a perfect recipe to get people excited for a school I already loved so much. It seemed impossible to nail down a video – there were so many different videos online, I had no idea how to replicate.

I realized, though, that I shouldn’t be replicating – that different videos reflected schools’ personalities. The engineering schools boasted crazy tech videos. At arts schools, dancers leaped across the screen in perfect pirouettes.

 

But, Duke has a little bit of everything. So what makes us different?

 

I thought back to why I came to Duke in the first place. And it clicked – it was the people.

It was this beautiful sense of community that drew me into Duke in the first place, that embraced me with open arms, that made my first moments on campus feel like I was sliding into a warm, comfy sweater that I had owned my whole life. And it’s this sense of community that makes Duke different than any other school out there.

I wanted to capture that in a video. A video that screamed at new students, “Hello!  This is what you get at Duke. You get these people, this family. And you’re going to love it!”

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bcs7ZngDahk/?taken-by=dukeuniversity

There started my week of walking around campus with my camera. I’d see my friends, and before they could even say hello to me, I’d ask, “Hey, could I borrow you for a second? Could you just say ‘Welcome to Duke’ on camera for me?”’ Their eyebrows would initially furrow, but the look of confusion would be replaced in seconds by a look of genuine happiness, often excitement. “Of course,” almost every person would echo back to me as they got ready for their closeup.

And that’s the beauty of media, especially social media. Sure, social media lets us connect with old friends and new friends, share spring break pictures and tweet funny jokes for friends, but at the crux of it all, it’s about people connecting with people. This video not only gave me an opportunity to connect with the incoming students but also created a bridge for new students to connect with each other and their future home.

 

Challenges

Getting people to participate was, like I said, easy – everyone wanted to welcome new students. The editing, however, proved time-consuming, and I worked on the video over the course of two weeks. My two major challenges:  

  1. Music. For making videos, sometimes half the battle is finding the right music for the background. The music has to match the mood, or else, one risks ruining a video. Finding music that encompassed this “Welcome” vibe was harder than I thought – I spent an hour listening to different instrumentals on Youtube before I found something that worked. Everything else was too cheesy, too intense, too fast, too slow, etc.                                    
  2. Multiple shots in a frame: there were so many shots of people that I could put in the video, I was left wondering, how do I put in as many as possible? This led to me shrinking and stretching the video shots to different sizes, in order to fit more than one shot in a frame. I ended up doing this multiple times in the video because it really emphasized the idea of Duke community. I use Final Cut Pro, and to adjust these shapes I used the Transform tool (circled in yellow). This allowed me to size and move clips accordingly (yellow arrow).

Overall, this video was a blast to make. While some hurdles cost me more time than I expected, the reward was worth it. Getting to play a role in welcoming new students to campus put a smile on my face, as it did with every single person I filmed.

Welcome, class of 2022 – see you soon.

Using Canva Animator to Make Even More Awesome Content

One of our social media secret weapons is the online tool Canva, especially since the advent of Instagram Stories last year. Our office relies pretty heavily upon the tool for stylized, easy to build graphics, and now, animated video content as well.

I recently had the opportunity to demo the new Canva beta animations tool on Duke’s Instagram Stories to highlight a very exciting partnership between the university and the American Ballet Theatre.

Canva is a great tool if you’ve got really visual content to accompany any text about your story or research that you want to highlight. In this case, we were fortunate to have some incredible dance photos at our disposal. I knew I wanted to highlight these images and push people to the story via Instagram Stories.

Enter, Canva. The great thing about this tool is its user-friendliness. I was able to login to our office account and design slides using photos and text, just as I would ordinarily. The difference comes in when it is time to export your slides. You’ll notice that there is a new option under “Download” in the top, right navigation bar. Select this new option, “Animated GIF/Movie,” then click “Preview Animation.”

 

This will open the Animator tool:

From here, you can select from any of the six options or “styles” on the right for your animations, which will be demoed on the slides you have created. Once you are satisfied with your selected animation form, you have the option to download them as either a GIF or .mp4 file. For example, @DukeUEnergy recently used the tool to create a GIF that they rolled out on Twitter:

 

For the purpose of our Instagram Stories, I selected “Download as Movie.”  Then the file will be downloaded to your computer. Here is our final product:

 

We’re not quite done yet. Because all four slides were created in one Canva document and not individually downloaded, they exported into one, 28-second long video. Instagram Stories will only allow 10-second long clips for each part of the story. So I had to do a bit of tedious editing on my end. First, I emailed the .mp4 file to my iPhone. Then, I went into my camera roll and edited the whole video down into separate clips featuring each slide. I saved each edited segment as a new video file, so as not to lose the original 28-second video. The end result was 4, 7-10 second long videos featuring only one of each of the animated slides. I was then able to upload these, in order, to our Instagram Stories.

The result when it played back was one seamless “video” on our Stories. With the video broken into 4 separate parts, I was also able to attach a link on to each segment of our Story that sent viewers directly to the Duke Today article about the partnership. The end result can be viewed on Instagram’s mobile interface as a feature on @DukeUniversity‘s account.

This whole process took me less than an hour. With a little creativity to work around the Stories time limit function, Canva Animator is a really great tool to easily make videos with a highly produced feel with (very little, at least on my part) video skill.

Even the Trees Are Fall-ing for Duke

Inspiration

There is no place like Duke during the autumn months. Fall is already one of my favorite seasons, but something about fall on Duke’s campus is just breathtaking. Every year, Duke’s social media pages launch a #DukeFall campaign where Dukies everywhere are flooded with vibrant photos of the seasonal changes happening on campus, on their timelines and Instagram feeds. During my first two years at Duke, I never really paid much attention to the fall leaves changing. It always seemed to happen in the blink of an eye. Yes, Duke University is a gorgeous campus, but leaf watching was not on my radar. However, this year I wanted to capture this beautiful and colorful time of the year in a unique way. So I decided to create a time lapse of the leaves changing colors on a single tree on West Campus.

The Process

When I envisioned this project in its final form, I knew I wanted it to look like the tree was changing colors over the course of one day.  So I first found my subject, a sprawling oak tree that stands in the shadow of the magnificent Duke Chapel.  When it was time to film, I set up my camera in roughly the same spot, at about the same time each day.  For this particular time lapse, I positioned my camera at the center of Abele Quad.  In that spot, my tree takes center stage with the chapel in the background.  Then the waiting game began for this beautiful oak to turn vibrant orange.  In the beginning, the process was kind of like watching paint dry. It was slow and not very eventful.  But by week three, a glimmer of hope, as a tiny patch of orange peeked through the green canopy.  Signs of fall at last!

For 8 weeks, this tree project really captured my attention. For the first two, I relied on calendar alerts to remind me that it was time to go out and film.  Every Friday at noon, I would set up my tripod and record for about 30 minutes, to ensure that I collected enough footage of people passing by once the film was sped up. Then by the third week, it became part of my routine.  Eventually my whole family was consumed by the changing of the tree.  At one point during this process, my parents would call to check up on me and the changing tree!  I will say, this project was quite the conversation starter. I met a lot of wonderful people while standing on the quad waiting for the leaves to change color.  People would come up  and ask “What are you filming?”  I replied, “I’m filming that tree as the leaves change colors.”  The spectators were a little bit surprised but also very intrigued.  After weeks of waiting, my coveted tree was finally filled with beautiful orange leaves in all its fall splendor.

When I started the project, I must admit I was a little nervous about how the video would turn out.  Prior to this video, I hadn’t made a time lapse of this magnitude. After I gathered all the footage I needed, I found myself becoming a bit emotional and enlightened.  After 8 weeks of filming, I came to realize some very important things:  First, I’m so lucky to attend a university like Duke. Secondly, patience really is a virtue. And finally, there’s beauty in everything if you just take the time to find it!  Recording this tree was an eye-opening experience for me.  It allowed me to take a step back and observe. As students, we tend to forget that there’s more to campus life than just classes, parties, and grades. Watching this simple oak tree assume it’s fall glory, revealed to me that every moment of our college experience is precious and shouldn’t be taken for granted.

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.

Instagram Stories vs. Snapchat

Communicators, particularly those in higher ed, were perplexed to say the least when Instagram Stories launched in August 2016 as a direct challenge to Snapchat. We were even more surprised when the app reported in 2017 that after one year, Instagram Stories had more than 250 million daily users.

In the premiere episode of Extra Credit, we break down the pros and cons of both tools and try to help our fellow #HESM professionals make wise choices about how to spend their time and energy on both:

Duke Plays 2048

2048 challengeFew things hold a captive audience for more than a few minutes in our busy media environment. That’s why the viral “2048” game stood out to me. After seeing a few hilarious examples using the 2048 game template around the web, our digital team brainstormed how we could make a Duke version.

We decided to reward those who played our version by offering prizes to whomever reached the coveted “2048” tile. We used photos from our @dukeuniversity Instagram account so when they reached the “2048” tile they could find the corresponding Instagram photo and comment on it to win. This also gave us the opportunity to show off beautiful parts of campus and the student experience to players.

The game was a big success! Not only did we have our two winners within minutes, but community members continued to play and post comments on the winning photo for days.

We knew the game was especially popular with younger audiences so we then made another customized version for admitted #Duke2018 students. We shared a link to this version via email communication from Duke’s undergraduate admissions office and saw immediate success again. Dozens of admitted students commented on the winning Instagram photo and even followed our account as a result. During Blue Devil Days (our recruiting events for admitted students) students and parents commented again and again how much fun they had playing Duke’s 2048 game. One parent even told us how her daughter saw a beautiful red bridge in on one of the game tiles that led her to search for the real bridge in the Sarah P. Duke Gardens when she visited campus! It was great to see our digital efforts pay off in real life.

We tracked over 2,400 clicks to both of the games over the course of our campaign. This was more than just a high click-through rate. It represented hours spent playing the games and getting glimpses of the Duke experience through our Instagram photos. We learned that it pays off to keep your finger on the pulse in order to latch on to larger cultural moments. By adding a Duke flavor to this one, we were able to connect to key audiences in an unexpected way.