For some educators, students, and alumni, academic and social lives routinely collide online as the lines between educational and recreational technology blur. We are beginning to see some examples of Orwellian education technologies entering our homes and mobile devices to monitor our social media conversations, keyboard strokes, mouse movements, and even our facial expressions. As the general public becomes more aware of the capabilities of this technology and how prevalent it has become within education, stories like these will become commonplace:
vs
). Both solutions can integrate with your institution’s CRM to hand off specific mentions for follow up by the appropriate departments with targeted content. As covered previously, companies like EverTrue can then tell you more about the alumni who are talking about your institution, link their social sentiment score to comprehensive alumni profiles, and forecast the likelihood of their willingness to give to your institution.
Alternatively, vendors like Sprinklr allow institutions to manage real-time responses to inquiries received through social channels by employing a case-management approach. Using Sprinklr, school staff tag mentions of their institution. They can use those tags to triage inquiries, channel them to the appropriate department and staff member, and provide responses through social or other channels. Sprinklr provides robust dashboards to track service-level agreements and response times. By combining this with social sentiment monitoring after responses are made, institutions can measure whether they are doing a good job of responding to inquiries from student prospects in a timely fashion and with the right information.
If your institution pays attention to the national rankings game and is always trying to assess its standing relative to peer institutions or those with similar programs of study, then consider the competitive intelligence features of Simply Measured. The biggest draw of their platform is the ability for an institution to see how its social sentiment scores rank against those of other institutions. You can compare institutions by name or define a cluster of similar institutions and track your school’s progress against the group. Simply Measured’s top-of-the-line reporting output options include a presentation mode that combines top-line facts with charts and graphs in a single file for sharing with team members and university management. This automated reporting is so good that you should consider reassigning your social media “interns” to interacting with students directly in response to social chatter about your institution.
- Pearson’s monitoring of social media for violations of standardized testing agreements
- Orange County, FL school district monitoring students’ social media posts to prevent incidents of crime and bullying