One of the emerging trends you are seeing – whether it is the Red Cross or even the Super Bowl events – everyone has appeared to have established their own social media command centers. Other brands are jumping on this new initiative to set up a station within their organization so they can listen, engage, and monitor the conversations emerging virtually and determine when and how to respond to inquiries and comments coming from their various audiences.
These command centers are not only established inside organizations, but also set up for specific events. Look at the Storify highlighting the command center for the PGA Tournament. Amazing to see how command centers are becoming a must have for social media and public relations professionals and strategists. Universities are also jumping on this trend as well such as the University of Oregon called “QuackCave” for their athletics team.
Last week, I actually had the chance to visit Edelman Digital’s Social Intelligence Command Center. It was pretty extraordinary – we got a chance to see what they were doing for their monitoring practices and what tools they were using in their social media command center. Special thanks for Aniz Ruda for taking the time to share his insights with all of us from the PR Division at AEJMC. Thanks again to the Edelman Digital Chicago team for the wonderful tour! 🙂
So, for professionals who are interested in giving students the experience of a social media command center – there are many options and exercises that would create this type of environment. Here are some ideas to think about:
- Set up your class in a computer lab: Basically, this is what social media command centers are – make sure that they are aligned and have one screen for the student to look at,but another one where you can show the students some additional resources and information so they can be looking at multiple screens at a time.
- Assign each student a different social media monitoring program: There are going to be some paid services for social media monitoring, but there are some good ones out there that are free. Topsy, Bottlenose, Samepoint, Socialmention, Hashtags, and WhosTalkin are just a few you may want to assign each of your students to use so they are familiar with all of these. Here are some others you may want to check out as well and test in your classes.
- Follow a hashtag: This is one of the things I really like about Bottlenose in particular – have the students follow a hashtag or topic related to a client or brand you are discussing in class for the week and look at the dashboard. Have the students look at the main links coming across, what are some associated topics related to the brand as well as what people are saying both in their comments /tweets as well as in multimedia.
- Determine the influencers: In the sonar feature of Bottlenose, you not only get to see associated hashtags and topics, but you also get to see the main influencers for the topic. Have your students monitor and analyze these individuals and determine what their social media capital is for the brand and come up with some messages on how to engage with these users via social media.
In summary, our students – both undergraduate and graduate – need to be aware of the growing changes and expectations happening in the workplace and the growing need to know how to measure analytics coming from social media, but also know how to apply these findings into public relations practices and research.
Hope you all are having a great day!
Best Wishes,
Karen
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