Chi Thukral, Marketing Manager, Xos Trucks, formerly Head of Content Marketing, Yanko Designs, Forbes India 30 under 30
Let's dive deep into our creative processes, how to keep the spark alive, and walk through some strategic best practices. We'll learn about social literacy, creating with purpose, and the importance of building communities organically.
From the lens of both a marketer and a creator, Chi will share her highs, lows and lessons learned from her 7 years of experience working in social media to inspire and empower CASE attendees with the tools that help them thrive, not just survive on the internet.
2:00 – 2:45
Featured Session
How Purdue University Created Community and Increased Engagement
Abby Eddy, Assistant Director of Digital Engagement, Purdue University
Ashlee Shroyer, Social Media Manager, Purdue University
What does it take to truly build a community and increase digital engagement? Over the past three years, the Purdue University Marketing and Communications team took many small steps to broaden its reach across the campus community, developing content that reflected the breadth of the university.
By expanding its YouTube presence, creating new storytelling opportunities with its podcast “This is Purdue” and focusing on interaction with its social media audience, the team’s carefully tuned strategy resulted in an expanded online community of over 1M followers and a 24% increase in engagement.
What good is it to have 1M followers if only 1,000 truly engage with your brand? This session will focus on how universities of all sizes can take their community engagement to the next level and truly listen to their audience.
2:45 – 3:00
Refreshment Break
3:00 – 3:45
Featured Session
Accessible Social: How to Create Inclusive Content
Alexa Heinrich, Social Media Manager, St. Petersburg College
Accessibility is a common priority when building websites and web pages. But have you considered how individuals with disabilities are engaging with your brand on social media? Are they experiencing accessibility barriers in your content? Are there things you could be doing to make your social media more inclusive? This session will outline the easy practices you can implement to ensure the content you produce and the way you deliver it on social media is accessible for everyone, including disabled users.
3:45 – 4:00
Stretch Break
4:00 – 5:00
Featured Session
Competitors on the Court, Collaborators in the World
Chelsey Holts, Director of Social Media, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Morgan Trachtman, Social Media Manager, Duke University
Few sports rivalries are as storied as the UNC-Duke rivalry, especially in the world of college basketball. But did you know these two institutions, less than 10 miles away, collaborate on impactful global research and initiatives to better the world each day? Leading up to a historic NCAA Final Four men’s basketball match-up on April 2, the social media teams at each university teamed up to capitalize on the national attention by highlighting several ways the two schools collaborate through partnership in research and innovation.
5:00 – 6:30
Networking - Notworking Reception
8:00 – 9:00 AM
Breakfast - Round Table Discussions
9:00 – 9:45
Featured Session
Tea Time with Austin and Alexis
Austin Braun, Co-Founder, Social Media Tea, Ascend Engineering, formerly Digital Media Strategist, University of Colorado - Boulder College of Engineering & Applied Science
Alexa Heinrich, Founder, Social Media Tea, Media Manager, St. Petersburg College
Social Media Tea is an outlet where individuals working in social media and digital communications anonymously spill their secrets, their frustrations, and their experiences about their profession. What started on Instagram in June 2020 has quickly turned into an industry favorite, and Social Media Tea has attracted thousands of followers across social media platforms in its first year of existence. This session will feature Alexa Heinrich and Austin Braun who will share the origin story of Social Media Tea, what they have learned, and how a simple idea evolved into a business looking to make a positive impact for professionals in social media.
9:45 – 9:55
Stretch Break
9:55 – 10:40
Elective Sessions
How to Not Be Boring on University Social Media Channels
Tess Stevens, Social Media Specialist, San Francisco State University
This session is exactly how it sounds. Make your university stand out, create engaging content, connect with students, and make your profiles stand out with authenticity. This interactive workshop will enhance your storytelling skills and leave you with innovative, easy ways to create quality content in academia.
Winning Gen Z Over on TikTok and YouTube
Ashley Schroeder, Social Specialist, Colorado State University
Who is Gen Z and why do they love TikTok and YouTube? Over the pandemic, TikTok became the breakout social media platform, and since 2020, more and more universities are launching their own TikTok accounts and rethinking the way they use YouTube. As universities look at new ways to reach Gen Z, TikTok is proving it needs to be part of the discussion, and YouTube is begging to be more than a video repository. Learn how to use TikTok and YouTube to engage Gen Z in this introductory session.
10:40 – 10:50
Stretch Break
10:50 – 11:35
Featured Session
Creating an Equitable and Inclusive Student Ambassador Program
Anice Barbosa, Digital Marketing Director, Wheaton College Massachusetts
Student ambassadors are often the face and voice of higher education institutions online. Does your institution’s ambassadorship program reflect your student population? How are you integrating your institution's diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging goals into your social media efforts? The digital marketing at Wheaton College Massachusetts team delved into its social media ambassador program to understand how to better align it with the institutional DEIB goals. In this session, you will learn how Wheaton revamped its social media ambassador program to attract and retain underrepresented students.
11:35 AM – 12:50 PM
Lunch on your own
12:50 – 1:35
Featured Session
Unlock HESM on Instagram
Jonathan Allen, Social Media Manager, University of San Francisco
Cameron MacNiven, CEO, Dunroe
In a few short years, the HESM community has lit up Instagram. From promoting vaccinations to drawing attention to movements like Pride or events like International Women’s Day, HESM has emerged on Instagram as a responsive source of advocacy for schools, students, alumni, and underrepresented communities. Aliyah and Jonathan will present tactics they use to source topical HESM content that’s resonating. They will also introduce comparative metrics and reporting tools to identify HESM accounts that are outperforming and how to demonstrate this outperformance to university leadership and boards.
1:35 – 1:45
Stretch Break
1:45 – 2:30
Elective Sessions
Tick Tick Boom | Embracing Tik Tok
Yasin Id-Deen, Senior Social Media Strategist, University of California, Berkeley
Are you scared to join the space? Are you on the platform and not sure why? Are you Tik Toking, right? In this session, learn about the research and the strategy that UC Berkeley implemented to create its Tik Tok channel and how it breathes life and separates itself from its other social media channels.
Sowing Homegrown Collaboration
Lori Bachand, Associate Vice President for University Communications and Marketing, California State University, East Bay
Adelina Elo, Marketing Communications Manager - Public Affairs at California State University - East Bay
Organizational social media is like a farmer’s market: there is a collection of disparate offerings, on-the-ground folks who know their trade, but not necessarily the storefront, and the best-laid plans might get rained out. On top of that, you really want organic but have a limited budget. This session offers insight into how to grow your garden by cultivating partnerships across your institution, propagating ideas for larger adoption, and cross pollinating with other teams to increase your social media footprint.
2:30 – 2:40
Refreshment Break
2:40 – 3:25
Elective Sessions
Lessons in Leadership
Acacia O’Connor, Executive Director of Social Media, University of Pittsburgh
Nikki Sunstrum, Director of Social Media and Public Engagement, University of Michicgan
From building teams to onboarding presidents, and navigating crises to creating content to address societal concerns, Acacia and Nikki have spent nearly two decades representing some of the most recognized brands in higher education and bearing the brunt of brand backlash. In this session, you will have the opportunity to engage with Acacia and Nikki, and hear how they have navigated the industry and pioneered some of the most prominent campaigns in their institutional histories. Breaking down barriers and advocating for authenticity, transparency, accountability, and inclusion.
Affinity + Usability = Engagement
Page Murray, Chief Marketing Officer, Stanford Alumni Association
Keith Hannon, Senior Account Manager, BrightCrowd
Far too often institutions offer content and engagement opportunities that are useful to the school, but not meaningful to the students/alumni. Much of this can be attributed to large software solutions that offer to solve all of your advancement problems while neglecting the user's experience. Most of these solutions fail to generate high participation because it's too hard to join the platform and/or the audience is too broad.
As much of social media struggles in the court of public opinion, we'll demonstrate the advantages of user-friendly, affinity-based engagement via private online communities (not through a 3rd party platform) and how they can generate both high participation (30% of alumni on the low end) and crucial data.
Stanford will demonstrate how they deployed BrightCrowd books for alumni and student populations ranging from reunion classes, graduating classes, and incoming classes, to supporting DEI initiatives by creating books for specific alumni affinity groups such as Black alumni, Latino alumni, and LGBTQ alumni, and women organizations. They'll also share specific participation rates and data on how the books have proved to be a vibrant digital resource for all members of these communities.
3:25 – 3:35
Refreshment Break
3:35 – 4:05
Featured Session
Jeff Hunt, Founding Partner, Legend Labs, Author, ‘Brand Under Fire: A New Playbook for Crisis Management in the Digital Age.’
Jeff will share foundational crisis management principles coupled with advanced digital and social media strategies informed by direct experience with some of the most challenging crises in recent years.
4:05 – 4:15
Stretch Break
4:15 – 5:05
Featured Session
How to Stay Human on Social Media
Acacia O’Connor, Executive Director of Social Media, University of Pittsburgh
How can we, as content creators and strategists who use social media for brand work and for our personal/professional lives, best protect our humanity and the humanity of the users consuming our posts? In this talk, I will discuss:
The Human Behind the Brand: How we work to make brands feel “real” while balancing the fact that an institution or organization isn’t a human being. How to convey to your readers that human beings are behind the accounts, while not being laden with the sole responsibility for difficult issues.
The Human Off the Clock: How should you use your own social media? What if you don’t want to have personal social media? How to assess your individual goals, needs, and desires, balance that with self-care and prioritize your humanity when using social media as yourself.
We’re All Human – Collective responsibility and leadership in advancing more humanity-centric messaging, and behaviors, everywhere on social. We will touch on LGBTQ and other Inclusion issues, and how these contrast with other types of “positioning.”
8:00 – 9:00 AM
Breakfast - Round Table Discussion
9:00 – 9:45
Ask the Experts
All Faculty
10:00 – 10:30
Featured Session
Increasing Understanding of Higher Educations Value Add
Robert Moore, Special Advisor to the CEO, CASE
Recent surveys by Pew and Gallup show a worrying trend: Americans are losing confidence in higher education. In the last year alone, belief in the positive effect of higher education has dropped 11 percentage points. While there are distinct partisan differences in the cause of this disaffection, it is driven in part by negative noise on social media about the role and focus of colleges and universities. CASE, working with ACE and AGB, is launching an initiative to generate, disseminate, and promote stories about the positive impacts of the sector on key issues: individual opportunity, scientific advances, economic progress, and community engagement. CASE can and will build the framework, but the stories are yours—as are the relationships you foster and enhance every day. This session will give you a preview of this new initiative, and provide you with reasons why and steps for how your institution can participate.
10:30 – 10:45
Stretch Break
10:45 – 11:30
Closing Keynote and Special Guest
“Lasso Lessons”
Drew Sykes, Director, Community Management and Content Production, Ignite Social Media, formerly Director of Social Media at North Carolina State University
Any Ted Lasso fans out there? If you haven’t tuned in yet, it’s a delightful show about an American football coach who’s hired by an English soccer (football!) team to inspire the players and lead them to new heights. It’s full of positivity, hope and life lessons — all of which are appreciated by its fans, especially as we continue to navigate the waters of all of the uncertainty the world throws our way these days.
These “Lasso Lessons” can be applied not only to our lives, but our work habits as well, and can be extra real for those of us on the front lines of brand communications in social media marketing. Come for the quotes and the clips and take these lessons with you through the summer and into the new academic year.
