Dedicated platforms provide the solution to building tribes. One example is that they enable education institutions to overcome the financial pressures being felt as students start to question the costs of education when they can't go to class, meet their lecturers and simply take online classes. The answer lies in community marketing.
In this episode, I look at Hivebrite ,Tribe.so and in cursory fashion at Honeycommb which offer organizations platforms to facilitate community building. I raise this as part of public relations because in my view there are 3 audiences for PR; internal, partners, external. At this time internal audiences need an entirely different approach to communications and community building.
SPEAK|Pr is for business leaders to unlock the value in their organization using effective communications and is hosted by entrepreneur Jim James.
In return, I will continue to bring massive value with two weekly shows, up to 3 hours per month of brilliant conversations and insights.
Monthly subscriptions start at $3 per month. At $1 per hour, that's much less than the minimum wage, but we'll take what we can at this stage of the business.
Of course, this is still free, but as an entrepreneur, the actual test of anything is if people are willing to pay for it.
If I'm adding value to you, please support me by clicking the link now.
Dedicated platforms provide the solution to building tribes. One example is that they enable education institutions to overcome the financial pressures being felt as students start to question the costs of education when they can't go to class, meet their lecturers and simply take online classes. The answer lies in community marketing.
In this episode, I look at Hivebrite ,Tribe.so and in cursory fashion at Honeycommb which offer organizations platforms to facilitate community building. I raise this as part of public relations because in my view there are 3 audiences for PR; internal, partners, external. At this time internal audiences need an entirely different approach to communications and community building.
SPEAK|Pr is for business leaders to unlock the value in their organization using effective communications and is hosted by entrepreneur Jim James.
In return, I will continue to bring massive value with two weekly shows, up to 3 hours per month of brilliant conversations and insights.
Monthly subscriptions start at $3 per month. At $1 per hour, that's much less than the minimum wage, but we'll take what we can at this stage of the business.
Of course, this is still free, but as an entrepreneur, the actual test of anything is if people are willing to pay for it.
If I'm adding value to you, please support me by clicking the link now.
Today, I'm going to talk about the problem of higher education and the need for universities and organizations to provide information which they can't deliver now due to social distancing. The solution can be engagement and retention through social media platforms and dedicated ones at that, so we're going to look at the desire of organizations to retain a proposition of access to high quality learning or experiences and to high quality information as well as creating networks in the case of higher education to alumnus. I'm looking at that, because I do some work with a number of universities in China, including Queen's University Belfast. I have also worked for York and Kent. At the moment, universities in the UK and all over the world are really suffering, because they can't have their students back. Social distancing guidelines is impacting universities and institutions that relied on people being together to create value. This problem can be solved by platforms that are built and dedicated to taking people away from Facebook, LinkedIn, and the "generic" social media platforms. The key to long-term engagement with students or with staff is to connect with them on their first week in the campus or in the company. When students or members of a team join a new company, there's already a network there. There are the other people that have been hired or the other students or faculty that are there. But often, the job then of the company owner or the administrator at the university is to connect those people and provide a platform and an ability for these people across the organization to tap into that platform and to gain value from it by taking part. Social media in the form of, for example, Facebook company pages can be a good place to have existing customers or students build a community, but the platform itself is too generic. There are also these issues of distraction, the lack of confidentiality, and perhaps, above all, the complete inability to brand it. As we all know, on any business that we build on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, or Google, we are simply tenants. We're only renting the space. We don't own it, so it's much more prudent to build out a community on one of these software platforms that I'm going to talk about today where the conversations, experiences, and the content all reside within the control of the brand owner. Universities are big businesses and they are so, because they underwrite the well-being of societies. Many views about Silicon Valley are that it's the center of innovation, not so much for the companies, but due to the universities that create all these great learning opportunities and connections for people. Now, university fees are coming under pressure, because in countries like America, where some universities are being mandated to not hold classes in person, if all the training is going online, then one of the essential elements of the value proposition for the university is gone. My niece was just accepted into Cambridge University here in the UK, and we're very proud of her. She's worked very, very hard, and she's looking forward to Cambridge, and she still is. But now, they may be taking all of their courses online and not meeting their classmates and professors, which may be a bit sad, as the next three to four years of studying together will form bonds. Those of us who have been to university keep in touch with people we met during our time there, because those become our social and our professional networks. Universities now have a challenge, and the question will be how to continue to add value when the infrastructure that was the value as much as the content is no longer available. The answer could be a couple of platforms that I've been looking at as a prelude to a conversation with a former client who is hopefully going to come back and talk to us about helping them market their university. One solution I found is called Hivebrite. It has an alumni management portal, and their their proposition is that they can release the potential of the community. It was founded in Paris in 2015 and also has a New York office now. It's funded, and it has a number of features which I thought really make a lot of sense, because what people are looking to do with an alumnus is to create a distinct entity. We don't want really just to be a general group on Facebook. If you think about how proud universities are and how proud people like my niece will be when they finish the University of Cambridge, some degree of exclusivity is part of the value of the network and the alumnus. One of Hivebrite's features is the ability to build a full database to reach out to all the students and to get them connected at the outset and make them all part of the database. Whilst people are at university, they're able to connect with people that have been to the university before and find alumnus not only from the college, but also narrow it down by course and by location. They are creating connectivity to existing staff and existing students, but also to those students that are looking for work and those alumnus that have got jobs to offer through their Jobs Board. They have a Business and Projects area, so that people looking at starting businesses can find fellow entrepreneurs and collaborators, and people looking to start projects can find other people with common interests no matter where they are around the world. It even has a full content management system and an RSS feed for third party content. Another interesting thing is that it allows direct marketing from administrator to members, and it also allows alumnus to create their own alumnus groups which could be by geography or by course. They're creating an extension of what would happen in the offline world, but all within the community that is governed and hosted by the university. So, instead of randomly finding people on social media, everybody that has been to that college can be part of the system and remain part of the system throughout their student life. It offers ticketing too, so that people can arrange events and take payments. It allows people to send invitations, to use the mobile app, and to have social network integration to promote those events through the broader channels like Facebook and The reason I'm interested in this idea of communication as a LinkedIn. higher education establishment is because public relations for a university has to try and identify how a university can be special. How does it differentiate in a world where everybody is looking at online learning from companies with courses like Coursera and Udemy? We're looking at joining tribes when we're going to universities more, and platforms like Hivebrite that can create a community throughout the lifetime of students fulfills part of that brief. They also have membership and alumnus programs, which is great. I went to Manchester University, and they're now reaching out more aggressively as well. Hivebrite even encourages alumnus to donate funds. One statistic I found via a group called Blackboard shows that 83% of millennials gave a gift to a university in 2012, up from 75% in 2011. In other words, millennials are a generous group. They're donating back to their alma mater. So, companies and platforms like Hivebrite create not only communities but revenue streams for the university to engage with people for a lifetime. Another service is one called Tribe which, according to its website, is a good alternative to Hivebrite but it's not as good at the alumni management as Hivebrite is, possibly due to some of the custom modules, like the student-led modules or the memberships. Tribe says it'll give your brand a social dimension, and it includes features like gamification, so that people that take part are rewarded for their contribution. In terms of pricing, Tribe claims to offer a free plan for 500 members, and then it has a premium membership plan for $249 for up to 500 members on that. Hivebrite pricing, which isn't on the website, but I found is about $500 per month for a basic plan. Capterra ranks Hivebrite 4.6 while Tribe is 4.7, and this frankly, for me, is close enough to be just differences of opinion. There are other tools that can be used with different levels of sophistication integration. If you're looking at creating product or a community, there are other platforms like Mighty Networks, which I've used. There's another one called Honeycomb, which has a launch fee and then a price of about$300 per month depending on the number of users. The key point really is that communications now can be managed within communities or tribes, as Gladwell coined this term of marketing to tribes, and a university alumnus really is a tribe. It's a group of people who decided to attend a particular institution in the same way that people decided to join a particular company. I know that people that have joined IBM, Microsoft, or some of these big brands have a real affinity and a real loyalty to that company. So, one way to start to ensure that the company has a community is to work with a dedicated platform, which is not a platform for workflow. It's not Slack or Asana. It's not a tool for productivity, but it is one for community. We go back to what I mention in the SPEAK|pr program about our
three audience groups:
the internal, the partners, and the external. Obviously, communities are part of our internal audience, and the reason it's important to have a platform is because they will have very specific and sometimes private communication needs. But also, a key part of a community is to foster communication within the community, not top-down, but from person to person, and a platform like Hivebrite allows that to happen. In the case of students, for instance, as we know, the best ambassador for a university is a former student, so getting existing students to sign up to a platform like Hivebrite or Tribe at the beginning of their experience is key, because it's hard to catch them once they've left and started looking for work. From a public relations point of view, if a university is starting to create a platform which enables the community to exist regardless of whether the students are going in and out of the building, regardless of where they're meeting their cohort, directly or not, or seeing the lecturer in person, the community bonds that can be created through social can also be very powerful. As we know, people are doing that through conventional mass generic white label platforms like Facebook, but they can also now do them through these dedicated community marketing portals as well. One mistake, however, is not identifying the institution's need. Let's look at that the other way. The first tip is to identify your institution's needs before deciding which platform to use, because as we've seen, the difference between Hivebrite and Tribe is going to be in some of the modules and the functionality. Setting measurements is the second point. How are you going to measure the performance and the activity of this community and its individual members within it? The third is to ensure that you understand the value that there is within this community and this network for the people within it. How do you take them away from traditional Facebook and LinkedIn and get them to play a part in this particular closed community and ensure there is still a human touch? Although some of these platforms are using AI to drive connectivity and amplification of content, it still needs to be like any community, one that has rules, guidance, and facilitation by people. The next tip is that a "one size fits all approach" to content is not going to work. Different personas will have different needs. A first year student and a final year student will have different requirements. A new member of staff in one facility will have different requirements to an established member of staff in another facility. Finally, the key is to make sure that the platform is user-friendly. These platforms that I've mentioned today already do everything that you might want them to do and more, so building a platform is no longer required. Specifying, engaging, and then using that platform to put in relevant content and make it engaging is going to be the job at hand. That's why I mentioned it as a public relations function, because public relations talks to internal, partners, and external audiences. The internal audience really can be seen as a community. It has a certain kind of message that it needs. That message needs to be dynamic, and it needs to then be aligned with what the external audience are hearing, because the best possible ambassadors for your university or your business will be your current community and the people within that community.