A couple of weeks ago, my email box started getting filled with emails from colleagues asking if I’d heard about the new social media report, and was it worth purchasing for $375? I had heard of no such thing, but I quickly learned they were talking about the University Social Media Report 2011 issued by something called Web Strategy Research.

The 70-page PDF report (plus Excel spreadsheet with 13 tables), according to Web Strategy Research’s website, is for “Social media administrators at colleges and universities, including communications, public affairs, web, IT, admissions and news departments.” It ranks

university-maintained social media activity levels at over 270 colleges and universities in several key channels, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, iTunes U, Flickr, MySpace, LinkedIn and Foursquare. The study enables university social media decision-makers to compare their level of social media activity against peer institutions, both overall and for specific social media channels. Results are presented in detailed tables by student body size and conference membership, permitting a variety of comparisons. Includes a seven-page summary of Key Findings and Excel datasheets.

Of course, I was intrigued. Randy E. Miller, author of the study, was kind enough to provide a review copy of the report when I said I would be covering it here.

I’m willing to honor Web Strategy Research’s request that I not reveal too much about the study, though some others, like Auburn University’s Office of Communications and Marketing, have posted some of the content, and I’m sure someone is bound to post the entire thing sooner or later.

I interviewed Miller via email, and wanted to offer four reactions to the report:

1. All for one, one for all

Many schools (like the one that employs me) have multiple social media handles — some university-level official, some school- or institute- or center-wide and official, and some rogue. How did the report account for that, I wondered, after seeing that the report seemed to be just looking at the official university- or college-wide handles.

Miller confirmed that the report did just that, particularly when the university’s homepage linked icons to social media handles. I have grave concerns about the implications of a study that just cribs from university home pages. This necessarily avoids some of the most vibrant places where social media conversations occur — like, say, a university’s hash tag on Twitter — and will deflate the implications of social media on a campus that allows for a separation of powers, where the university-wide handles play curator to the stronger, and more conversational, handles on the more local levels. I’d even argue this is the best way for large institutions to use social media — empower the individuals and the smaller brands, and use the bigger, stuffier, brand to curate.

It is worth noting that Miller told me that the “trends and best practices section of the report quantifies a number of examples of … schools that have over 100 accounts,” but I did not receive a document with a trends and best practices section.

“As to our overall rankings,” Miller continued:

in this study we did not count multiple accounts because of the challenges in identifying all accounts for all universities. Instead, we identified the primary university account in each channel — the most general account with the largest audience. Our goal was to provide universities with benchmark data to assess their level of social media activity, and we felt this was a good place to start. Going forward, we plan to address the issue of multiple accounts.

I certainly do not want to discourage anyone from purchasing the report (and there is, in fact, a lot of useful information in it), but one might have hoped for more than just looking at the most-followed handles at universities and colleges, particularly when those handles are often the least conversational and function largely like RSS feeds of institutional announcements.

2. Analytics-obsessed methodology

After spending some time with the report, I asked Miller how the study differentiates between volume and quality of social media usage in higher education.

“The general philosophy behind our social media and web strategy research is that individual sectors (like universities or hospitals or city governments) need sector-specific analysis and data to help in making decisions,” Miller wrote. “We will produce different types of reports for different purposes, including benchmarking studies to define the lay-of-the-land; best practices studies to identify trends and effective strategies; and user studies to analyze how users react to different approaches.”

The study I received is evidently the first, and thus “a benchmarking study to help define the terrain as to the the volume of activity.” Miller elaborated:

Future studies will look at ways colleges are using these channels, the nature and frequency of their content on the channels, and perhaps quality. But we’re trying to avoid putting ourselves in a position of judging each school’s activity or making a school look bad. Our goal is to stay focused on facts, and let each school evaluate those facts as they see them. For example, we purposely aren’t releasing the overall “rankings” in a public way. The rankings are for the schools to use in considering their strategies. It’s not necessarily bad to have a low ranking in one of our data points if that isn’t an important strategy to the school. For example, MIT ranks first in the number of YouTube views, but doesn’t rank so highly with Facebook and Twitter. I would suspect that to some extent this reflects their interests and goals, not some deficiency in their Twitter effort.

The notion of letting schools decide what their social media (and other) priorities should be is fine, but regardless of how much an institution decides to weigh a priority, it still is possible to evaluate how effective that institution’s approach to that priority is.

3. Is higher education a social media leader or follower?

Since I’ve often heard and seen arguments made that higher education is either ahead of the social media game, or hopelessly lagging behind, I asked Miller to react to the question of where exactly universities are on the social media spectrum.

“I would guess that colleges and universities are leading the way in terms of motivation and willingness to experiment,” Miller wrote. “Few other sectors have as much at stake in communicating with the demographics using social media.”

Miller added:

It’s critical that they use these channels to engage with their communities. I would suspect that business sectors, like consumer products companies for example, are more sophisticated about measuring and fine-tuning their efforts, but schools are at the front of the pack. We currently are analyzing the level of social media activity among all sectors of the economy, which will help shed some light on this question.

4. Key findings

Asked what findings of the study were the most surprising, Miller cited the level of iTunesU adoption, the “relatively small number” of schools with mobile apps and the “wide range of strategies hidden behind the icons that almost everyone places on their home pages.”

Miller added:

Many schools who I would have guessed to be active in social media are in fact just getting started, and some lesser-known schools are leading the charge. That’s the main reason we did this study, to help schools get a sense of where they stand, at least in terms of level of activity. I think most of us would guess that Stanford, given its location and history, would be a leader (which it is), but I would not have predicted that Harvard would have the most Twitter followers or that Louisiana State would have the most Facebook likes.

I took some other things out of the study. It is surprising to me that the study seems to apply an incompatible template (analytics, comparing digital apples and oranges, etc.) to a field that is all about personality, authenticity and direct engagement. The efforts Miller and Web Strategy Research have made to collate some statistics are helpful, but a lot more numbers are needed, and there needs to be a lot more crunching.

Image: Widjaya Ivan/Flickr.