Vanderbilt's innovative use of social media is opening the campus to a larger audience

by Kara Furlong
photo illustration by Daniel Dubois

Just a few years ago, if you wanted to sit in on a Vanderbilt class, you’d be required to enroll as a student. To hear a first-rate speaker or concert from a Vanderbilt stage, you’d have to make a trip to campus. To see the cutting-edge research done in Vanderbilt labs, you’d need to be a fellow scholar.

But no longer.

Thanks to the university’s innovative use of social media – podcasts, video, blogs, social networking sites and more – audiences on campus and off are getting an unprecedented look at the work and learning that takes place at Vanderbilt every day.

Joining the Conversation
The widespread availability of broadband Internet access over the last few years has made it possible for more and more people to participate in social media, changing the way the world communicates.

“The theme running through a lot of social media is the idea of a conversation,” said Melanie Moran, associate director of the Vanderbilt News Service and director of Web communications at Vanderbilt. “Professional communication no longer exists in the form of an organization putting out news and just expecting people to eat it up. It is now two-way; audiences expect to be able to share their thoughts.”

This presents some challenges. The idea that an organization such as Vanderbilt can control what’s being said about it is over, according to Moran. “Every student, faculty member, staff and neighbor of the university now can report about what we’re doing. Conversations about Vanderbilt are taking place all the time online, which is different from the past because these conversations are viewable, searchable, dynamic and ongoing.”

But social media also presents great opportunity. “Engaging these communities lets people who are interested in Vanderbilt speak for the university. Those with a vested interest become our communicators,” she said.

And instead of the old model – serving up news via press releases and waiting for outside media entities to “bite” – Vanderbilt now can tell its stories on its own terms. By providing compelling content in a variety of ways, Vanderbilt is opening a virtual window on itself and inviting the world to peer in.

Something to Offer
At a major research university, hours and hours of content are being created each day. Vanderbilt’s Web communicators had this in mind when they began building the university’s online menu.

“Our approach was to present a good sampling of what’s going on at Vanderbilt every day across the campus – classroom lectures, guest speakers, concerts, research, athletics, student events – to really give an in-depth picture of what was happening here,” Moran said.

The initial method for sharing this content was podcasts, free downloadable audio files. These were first available through the Vanderbilt Web site, then through the iTunes Store. In fact, Vanderbilt was among the first universities to be featured in iTunes U, the space within the store dedicated to higher education content.

Vanderbilt’s Web and technology professionals took it a step further, developing technology that allows faculty and students to integrate Blackboard, a course management system, with iTunes.

“We were finding that an increasing number of faculty wanted to use multimedia in their classrooms – everything from capturing their lectures, to multimedia presentations that they’ve put together for their students,” said Cindy Franco, OAK manager at Vanderbilt. “But we didn’t have an easy way to upload that content, nor did we have an easy way for students to get it.”

Franco and Jim Parker, senior Web project strategist, worked with Vanderbilt’s Institute for Software Integrated Systems to create a building block that would pass authentication and course roll from Blackboard to iTunes U.

“When we pass it over, iTunes only knows if the person who’s viewing that content is a student or an instructor,” Franco said. “We do this to preserve individual identity. Within a course, faculty have a way to say if it’s public or private, and students can access it from a direct link within Blackboard.”

Vanderbilt was quick to share this technology with others in the iTunes U community, and it since has been adopted by more than 30 universities. Vanderbilt is featured in a video on the Apple Web site for its innovative use of iTunes (www.apple.com/education/profiles/vanderbiltvideo), and was invited to Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference this summer to speak about the technology.

An Unlimited Reach
Podcasts remain popular, but with the advent of broadband, which allows content to load quickly, video is now king.

“The Internet is the new frontier for video. There are no rules or limitations to whom you can reach with it,” said Emily Pearce, the News Service’s associate director for video and a former longtime television news producer. Under Pearce’s guidance, the News Service has manned a television studio, called VUStar, for nearly a decade. Located in the Wyatt Center, VUStar is used when Vanderbilt professors are tapped to serve as on-air experts via satellite for national and cable news networks.

Two years ago, the university hired Pat Slattery, a 20-year veteran of local NBC affiliate WSMV, to film and help produce video content for Vanderbilt. Now, instead of just waiting for the networks to call, Vanderbilt is also proactively filming its own stories and making them available on the Vanderbilt Web site, through iTunes U and on streaming video sites such as YouTube.

“YouTube has been really fantastic for getting our content out to a broad audience,” Moran said. “Contrary to what many may think – that people are sitting alone at their computers, watching video by themselves – it’s actually a very social medium. People share what they find with friends and colleagues.”

Vanderbilt was one of the first universities in the nation to launch its own branded YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/user/VanderbiltUniversity), which compiles Vanderbilt video in one spot.

“YouTube is easy to use, free, and it enables us to be creative in producing videos about things that are happening on campus – telling stories that might not otherwise be told,” Moran said.

One of the most popular Vanderbilt-produced videos on YouTube is a story about Professor of Mechanical Engineering Michael Goldfarb’s research to develop a highly functioning bionic arm. Shortly after it was posted, the technical gadget Web site Gizmodo.com linked to the video, garnering it an onslaught of traffic. To date, the video has received nearly 36,000 hits on YouTube, and segments of the footage are set to appear in the upcoming Bruce Willis science fiction movie The Surrogates.

Vanderbilt also is using video to tell its stories with great care. When the university brought together students and veteran civil rights leaders in early 2007 to recreate the historic Freedom Rides of 1961 through Alabama, Pearce and Slattery went along to capture the recollections of the original Freedom Riders, as well as their unique interaction with the students.

The resulting video serves not only as a permanent record of the event, but also as an educational resource with reach far beyond Vanderbilt’s campus. Pearce said she has heard from a student as nearby as Nashville’s Martin Luther King Academic Magnet School, who wanted to use the video in a class project, to as far away as a corrections officer in Connecticut, who wanted to show the video to inmates to initiate a discussion on race. Vanderbilt’s efforts, including the Freedom Ride video, earned it five Midsouth Regional Emmy awards in 2008.

Complementary Efforts
To give Web users a regular dose of Vanderbilt news, Pearce, Slattery and Amy Wolf, a senior public affairs officer who also has a background in television news production, teamed up last year to create VUCast, a weekly video roundup of campus news, research and events.

“We wanted to do something innovative that would promote the work of our professors, as well as events taking place at the university,” Wolf said. “We came up with the idea of doing not necessarily a traditional newscast, but a brief Web cast where viewers could get a fast-paced, visual taste of what’s happening on campus.”

Wolf writes and serves as the on-air personality, and Slattery shoots and edits each VUCast, which can be watched from the Vanderbilt home page, downloaded from iTunes U or streamed from YouTube. The team is always looking for interesting stories to tell and encourages members of the Vanderbilt community to contact them with suggestions.

“My view is that we act as Vanderbilt’s window to the rest of the world,” Slattery said. “Video has the benefit of conveying emotion better, perhaps, than other media sources. We’re telling Vanderbilt’s stories not only to faculty and staff, but also to students, alumni and anyone out there who has an interest in the university.”

“The nice thing about VUCast is that it’s designed to complement other communications efforts,” Wolf said. “We don’t ever want to be the only information source. But someone can watch VUCast from the homepage, read a longer story on the Web site, listen to audio of an interview or lecture, or see photos from a campus event. We’re giving them lots of options.”

A Receptive Audience
If anyone is receptive to new media, it’s those about to enter college, for whom the Internet has been a fact of life since grade school.

“I think of all the audiences that are learning about Vanderbilt, prospective students are probably the most comfortable with this medium,” said Thom Golden, associate director of undergraduate admissions, whose office is using social media to help prospective students assess their potential fit with the university.

This can be a delicate endeavor. “Prospective students have a way of smelling when they are being advertised to. They are very used to that with social media, and it can backfire,” Golden said.

For instance, Vanderbilt has an active page on the popular message board College Confidential. If a user posts a question such as “What is the average SAT score of Vanderbilt’s incoming class?” Admissions officials will respond with factual information. But if someone posts “I’ve heard Nashville is a cool city – what do you think?”

“We don’t touch that,” Golden said. “We let the Web, and other users, sort that out.”

Similarly, Admissions does not actively engage prospective students through the social networking sites MySpace or Facebook, because those are widely considered “personal space” by online users. Instead, Vanderbilt prefers the sites Zinch.com and Cappex.com, which are tailored specifically to the college search. Prospective students can build detailed profiles of their backgrounds and achievements on Zinch and Cappex and select which universities will see them.

“Today’s students are very interested in connecting to the university in unique ways – ways that traditionally in admissions we haven’t seen before,” Golden said. “So Vanderbilt is trying to engage students on their terms.”

Golden also maintains a blog designed to demystify the admissions process (www.vanderbilt.edu/Admissions/vandybloggers), and enlists current students to blog about their own experiences on campus.

“The blog really allows us to provide some transparency, as much as we can, to a process that we feel is very human-centric,” he said. “We hear time and again from students and parents their frustration with how distant some selective colleges can be, and that’s just not how we operate here. That might sound a little hokey, but we really believe in a highly personable admissions process. We want our admissions officers to be resources for prospective students.”

In that vein, Admissions teamed with the News Service last year to produce the video “Getting Into College: An Insider’s Guide,” a Q-and-A with Vanderbilt Dean of Admissions Douglas Christiansen. The video gives viewers tips on how to gain admittance not necessarily to Vanderbilt, but any university. To date, it boasts more than 14,000 hits – and a five-star rating – on YouTube. Another video explaining college affordability and financial aid is in the works.

Practical Applications
Young people may be old hands at new media, but they still have a few things to learn.

“Even though these students are ‘born digital,’ many of them are not very savvy in terms of knowing how to produce a podcast, how to work with a blog or how to work with a wiki,” said Parker, who teaches a Vanderbilt class on virtual communities. “But they are very receptive, and they get excited when they learn about it.”

As a learning exercise, Parker is having his class this semester create a wiki on – well, the class itself. (Wikis are Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses them to contribute or modify their content; Wikipedia is a well-known example.)

Each student must take notes every class session, then one student is assigned to input those notes on the class wiki (http://virtual-community.pbwiki.com). All of the students are then responsible for reading and modifying the notes, adding URLs and including personal examples or anecdotes to supplement the material. “What you end up with is a very enhanced set of notes,” Parker said.

“It’s a way of teaching them to use the media to their advantage. It may take the person who’s initially posting the notes an hour to do so, but if the other 20 people in the class each spent just 15 minutes going in and cleaning something up, that’s another five hours that have been spent making those notes more usable,” he said.

Parker found success in another class exercise in collaborative media. He had his students go online and look at different corporations’ blogging policies. Each student then created a blog post consisting of their written summary of a particular policy and a link to that corporation’s policy in full.

“One student came in amazed that someone from the company for which he had posted put a comment on the blog. As a class, we did a Google blogs search of the company’s name, and the student’s post came up as the No. 1 hit.”

The student was elated, Parker said. “One of the conclusions I drew from that exercise was that maybe the students didn’t believe a whole lot in the assignment up to that point, but they sure believe in Google.

“The goal is making students aware that all of this new media – what we discuss in class, use on the Internet and produce as digital media – is not the same as the old media. We have to think about it and produce it differently for it to be effective.”

Endless Potential
Moran echoed that sentiment.

“Our mission is to educate, and these tools are another, very powerful way of accomplishing that mission,” she said. “We need to be thoughtful with our online content. We don’t want to produce content just to say we’ve done it. We need to ask, ‘What makes sense? What’s our goal, and how do these tools support our goal?’”

“I think the most important thing that new media brings to Vanderbilt is choice,” said Matthew Hall, associate vice chancellor for information technology services. “Our network provides the means by which our students, faculty and staff can access the things they want in ways that they want – and at the time in which they want them, which is generally now.

“We’ve moved past the point where internal IT organizations stood in the way of people making low-time latency decisions about the ways in which our community members entertain themselves, express their ideas, enhance their business processes or apply unique methods of learning and dissemination to scholarship and the classroom,” he said.

Social media is raising expectations among Internet users, and raising the bar for how organizations communicate their messages. But the medium has endless potential.

“The exciting thing is we can try new and innovative things and engage more people than ever before,” Moran said. “The sky’s the limit.”

October is Digital Media Month at Vanderbilt. Visit http://calendar.vanderbilt.edu and search “DigitalVU” for related events.

Additional photography by John Russell

Posted 10/01/08