To tweet or not to tweet

Life in the hinterland is different. While my colleagues in the Twitterverse bandy about this metric and that strategy on their blogs, the issues I contemplate and deal with day to day are far less complicated than that. 

As I contemplate the merits of social media tools, the first question always ends up with “should we bother with that?” Understanding your audience is a critical component of this and if I know that few students are tweeting, is there a rush to get on Twitter?

Twitter is the big example because it’s an otherwise relatively large part of my social media existence. Our conversations are always about more, pushing the envelope and helping people use more of what’s out there to supposedly make things easier. But what if investing time, energy and money isn’t worth it at all? So much of our business is vendor driven and so, it makes sense that no one is out writing longform blog posts about austerity or that one time when they said “no, we’re not going to cut a check on a particular project because we can’t.”

I like these situations, though. As much as I enjoy being in the room discussing big ideas and implementing them as I have in the past, it’s here in the trenches that you really earn your money. People in rural communities, at small colleges where innovators often fear to tread don’t get the same attention that bigger places get. There are lots of reasons for this and I don’t need to explore them here. 

It’s just a different environment. Years ago, it was just something to be online at all. Now? We watch the world around us go at breakneck speed and wonder what it all means. I feel wedged between the realities of the landscape and a need to push forward in spite of the various challenges. So much so, that it’s often strange to blog about it until many of the decisions are made. Then we can discuss how we got there.

So no, we don’t tweet yet. But I did create a Twitter placeholder on my 2nd day almost two months ago for the day when we’re able to. Our Facebook presence will undergo a bit of a facelift in the coming months and so will our various web sites. It’s an exciting time to be part of laying a foundation that sorely needs to be laid down. This type of role is a sweet spot for me, in part because I’ve done it so many times before in recent history and because it’s sorely needed.

There’s more where this came from.

Creating homemade #highered solutions in a fast-food world.

I was having a conversation the other day with another friend who works in higher ed communications. She was telling me how she didn’t really think much of what was targeted at higher ed folks was really related to her being at a small, rural serving school.

It went something like this, “At what point do you just say the hell with all of it? I mean, I don’t have a big budget or lots of people at my disposal. I can only do so much in a day/week/year. When is enough just enough?”

Well, I think it’s important to consider just what cutting edge is. I remember this Air Force instructor once telling me that “we don’t measure everyone’s success here on the same scale. We understand that some people start from way back and for them to reach a higher standard takes a lot more than some other people.”

As you consider your own higher education challenges, this seems like relevant advice. Not every school has to take every idea they watch on #higheredlive or read in eduguru and immediately try to implement it. It’s no different than watching a cooking show. Work with me and I’ll try to illustrate.

Celebrity chefs make it look easy. They show the right way to do it and whip it up real nice. When you do it at home, it probably doesn’t look as good and the reactions from those in your house might not match those on the TV screen. (For instance, if your kids or significant others are fussy eaters, expect grimaces…) It’s no different than trying to sell something new to your own constituencies. You’ll get some grumbling and some grimaces. Working in the kitchen will get hot at times.

What I told her is that the key to evaluating the cutting edge doesn’t have to reach some sort of bleeding edge. You don’t have to measure your award-winning project against one that cost six times what yours did at a school far away from where you are. It’s about assessing your own institutional realities, challenges and goals to craft solutions that are relevant.

This conversation prompted an email where I wrote something worth sharing here:

1. Do your homework: If you know the institution, you’ll be able to really assess what’s wrong and how to fix it in a responsive way rather than a reactionary one. Your awesome project might be great for your resume and make a great topic, but the ones that resonate actually fix problems and give us a reason to listen.

2. Find Allies: This should be whoever you work for and/or with, but the whole adage of more heads together rings true here.

3. Plan: Here’s a four-letter word that you need to learn to love. It can be easy to want to shoot from the hip and just start doing things. But you can’t know your direction or communicate it, without knowing where you want to go and why.

We can learn from experts and let their insights guide us. But when it comes down to it, you have to run your own kitchen. Small steps are often better than no steps at all, but you have to plot where you want to go if you want to get there.

The bottom line is recognizing that you can’t make someone else’s wins necessarily fit you. It doesn’t mean we can’t learn from them; pick and carve what work.