Learning from Verizon's Experience: 5 Lessons for School Leaders About Social Media

Verizon’s decision to not charge customers a $2 convenience fee is a lesson about power of social media, for all of us, including 21st century school leaders.(See MSNBC’s Article “Verizon Drops $2 Convenience Fee.”) As authors Randy Beal and Judy Strauss write in Radically Transparent: Managing and Monitoring Reputations Online, “The Internet provides a megaphone for the disgruntled---with no entry barrier, little legal accountability, instant commentary, full multimedia communication, and a free distribution channel to millions worldwide.” Verizon heard that megaphone and decided to let customers know they were listening.


When Verizon decided to announce a $2 fee, they ran right into thousands of consumers yelling loudly through the power of social media. As a Verizon customer, I even joined in a bit myself. Ultimately though, Verizon did what is probably the smartest thing they could do. They issued a statement that said, “At Verizon, we take great care to listen to our customers. Based on their input, we believe the best path forward is to encourage customers to take advantage of the best and most efficient options, eliminating the need to institute a fee at this time.” That is probably a textbook answer and response to a crowd empowered by social media. The company did not continue to try to defend the fee. They immediately acknowledged a change in course. That alone demonstrates one important principle described by authors Beal and Strauss, and that is: Your customers have to feel like you are listening to them. By announcing their plans to not charge a fee they clearly demonstrate their willingness to listen. Verizon should gain more positives from this response than any 2 dollar fee would ever give them.

The whole Verizon incident illustrates perfectly what Beal and Strauss say in Radically Transparent about the 21st century medium, “Social media are like word-of-mouth on steroids.” Businesses have known for a long time the power of plain word of mouth. Schools and their leaders would do well to pay attention to this power too.

Besides some great lessons for those studying the power of social media and marketing though, there are lessons for 21st century school leaders from the Verizon Incident too.

• There is a conversation online about you or your school/district and you may not know it is even happening. Beal and Strauss advocate for taking steps to listen to this conversation. In a previous post, (The Oft-Ignored 21st Century Leadership for School Leaders), I offered some suggestions on how to do that. Yet, too many school leaders, from the district level to the school level, are still ignoring social media and considering it a fad. They spend too much time finding ways to limit access to it and dismissing its impact, when they should embrace and accept it as a fact of life. The bottom line to this one is simple: ignore that online conversation to the peril of your school and perhaps yourself.
• Even though there is a conversation about you or your school/district online, you can’t control its direction. Too many school leaders and policymakers still think they can control the direction of this online conversation. They create all manner of rules and laws trying to keep the conversation at a minimum. They even try lawsuits when something is said that is objectionable. Ultimately, neither rules, policy, nor lawsuits are going to stop that conversation. Instead, 21st century school leaders need to learn how to respond effectively to social media. They need to fight fire with fire so to speak.
• You cannot control that conversation; the best you can hope for is to effectively respond to it. What does an effective response to a less-than-flattering social media posting look like? Well, those using social media don't like spin. They don't like attempts to hide behind the law or authority. The best way to respond is perhaps to open up and be what Beal and Strauss call "being radically transparent." That means being honest with people and not looking like you are still trying to hide something. That means being as honest as possible and avoiding "educationalese" or jargon. 
• Be careful of your response to that conversation. As Beal and Strauss point out, “The Internet community comes down hard on those who employ conversation spin, control, manipulation, or spam.” Should we find ourselves in a "Verizon-like-situation," a careful, well-thought-out response is a must. Social media has created a “no-spin zone” of sorts where spin is at your own risk. Taking time to plan a response is a must. There is no room for knee-jerk answers.
• As Beal and Strauss emphasize repeatedly in their book, “Be radically transparent or risk your reputation and top line.” This means using plain language, being sincere, and being candid. No generic marketing messages allowed. Welcome responses and feedback. As school leaders you have to work hard to build relationships with your community through social media, and that means being transparent.

Recently quite a few people and organizations have run headlong into the power of social media. Besides this event with Verizon, Bank of America found out firsthand the power of social media when it proposed additional fees on its customers. Then there was Lowes and its decision to pull ads from the Muslim American reality show. They also found out about the "steroid-effect" of online communication.Finally, ask Governor Brownback of Kansas, his staff,  and the poor principal who tried to force student Emma Sullivan to write that letter of apology. In every single one of these instances, an organizational or personal reputation was on the line.The one thing in common is how the organization or individual responded and resulting effect on their reputation. Social media is here to stay, and school leaders who learn to effectively use it will be more successful communicators to their stakeholders and they may perhaps head a reputation crisis too.

5 Common Sense Twitter Tips for School Leaders & Educators

Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach writes in her book, The Connected Educator: Learning and Leading in a Digital Age, "We can reach out to our network, harvest the collective wisdom found there, and then bring it back to the school."  Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach is right. There is a great deal of collective wisdom on the web, and those in a position to tap into that network of wisdom and expertise are those who know how to engage effectively in 21st century social networking tools. School leaders who continue to ignore or dismiss this powerful microblogging tool, are literally missing out on an excellent opportunity to join in the collective wisdom of thousands of educators who are already connected. Setting up a Twitter account is rather easy to do, but using it as a networking tool is a complicated process that takes time and effort.

To administrators who have added getting their Twitter account established to their 2012 Things to Get Done Resolution List, I offer these 5 Common Sense Tips to help in that endeavor.

Establish separate Twitter accounts for your personal-professional use and for your school or district.  I realize many administrators and educators establish Twitter accounts using their school name or district affiliation, and that is the only account they use. This practice is not an issue as long as the Tweets generated using this account represent the business and interests of the organization. I prefer having separate accounts for my school and for myself, and I try to make it clear that any Tweeting done with my personal-professional account is not as an agent of my school. I might refer to my school or colleagues occasionally, but my @21stprincipal account is not the official account for my school. My school has its own account, and all communication that issues from that account is official school business. For me, at least, it is an important distinction. Having separate accounts is a way for me use Twitter more effectively.

Establish very clear purposes for each of your Twitter accounts. Once your Twitter accounts are established, it is important to make sure each has its own clear purpose. To be honest, my personal-professional Twitter account, @21stprincipal, came about as I began experimenting with Twitter. I’ve had the account as far back as 2008, and my purpose in setting it up was not to serve as a way communicate in my school role. It was established, at least initially, as a way to experiment with the medium. Its purpose has evolved over the subsequent years to become a way to engage other educators in a professional learning network, and to engage individuals elsewhere in a discussion about education and other issues of interest. My school Twitter account has two main purposes. One is to share events and happenings at the school. It is a communication tool that allows me and my teachers to communicate quickly and easily with the community. Secondly, it is a promotional tool as well. It allows me to promote our school to an ever growing and wider community. My two Twitter accounts serve two entirely different purposes based on my role either as an agent of the school or as an interested educator and individual engaging with others outside of the school.

Engage in meaningful conversations through thought-provoking Tweets. Once you have establish a Twitter account, you have to use it. I would suggest posting more than your current location or what you’re eating for lunch though. Often, being thought-provoking just means posting an interesting quote from a book you’re reading, or a statement made by a public figure. These kinds of statements, or questions, often engage others who comment back. In a short time, it is easy to get caught in a two, three or many-way conversation with other Tweeters. Engaging, thoughtful tweets go a long way in getting you connected with others on Twitter.

Participate in Twitter chats such as #edchat or #leadershipchat. There are actually a large number of events called “Twitter Chats” happening throughout the week, and at different times. To participate in these events, you need only include that chat’s hashtag with your tweet and those in the chat can follow your contributions too. (Here’s a description of hashtags and how they work for those who’ve never used them.) Many Twitter chat events, like the weekly #edchat that occurs every Tuesday at 12 noon and 7 pm, engage a sometimes rather dizzying number of participants, but the fun is in engaging in the conversation, not to mention that once the chat is over, you can obtain a copy of the entire conversation to review later. Twitter chats are opportunities to engage others in conversations that matter to you.

Share your thoughts, resources, and reading with your followers. As I mentioned earlier, thought-provoking tweets are important. But engaging others using Twitter is rather simple. You can use it to share your thinking on the latest reform efforts. You can share some web resources you’ve found. You can share favorite quotes from a book you’re reading. You can even retweet (which means to resend) those tweets that you find useful or otherwise worth sharing. The truth is you have to share a bit of yourself with others to grow a professional learning network. That means sharing more than what you had for lunch.

3 New Year’s Resolutions for 21st Century School Leaders

As 21st century school leaders, the New Year gives us the opportunity to declare the direction we are going to move as 21st century educational leaders in our schools and districts. While there are certainly other areas to consider as we make New Year Resolutions as school leaders, here's three I consider imperative.

Social Media
In the coming year, it’s time to begin a genuine examination of the place social media has in your professional life and practice. Maybe it’s time to quit thinking narrowly of all the negatives that can happen when educators engage in social media use, and begin to look at potentials. Social media is here to stay in one form or another. It is time to move beyond trying to find ways to keep social media out, and engage in its use and encourage others to do the same. It’s time to quit wasting energy trying to keep social media out of our schools and embrace it as just another way to engage our students, parents, and community.

WiFi Access for Students
As bandwidth has become more available, it is time for us to look for ways to provide WiFi access for our students. As 21st century leaders, we need to provide an environment where our students and staff can remain plugged-in and powered-up rather than unplugged and powered-down. We need to make it a priority to find ways to give our students WiFi access within our school buildings and connectivity with their own devices. It takes a special, creative, 21st century leader to provide this access, keep our students safe, and teach students how to connect responsibly.

Explore and Move to the Cloud
One of our goals as 21st century leaders is take the limited resources we have, and provide the most with those resources. The cloud provides us the biggest opportunity to do that. The 21st century leader fearlessly explores cloud-based services and opportunities. Allowing Google to maintain email services or Microsoft maintain Office apps online is the future. We have a responsibility as 21st century leaders to deploy our resources in a manner that makes the most sense, and that gives us the biggest return for our investment. This school year, all 21st century school leaders need to commit to exploring the possibilities of cloud-based solutions and engage in their use whenever possible.

Being a school leader in 21st century schools is exciting. There are so many opportunities to for our own growth and exploration. As you make your New Year's resolutions, what areas would you add to this list for 21st leadership resolutions?

3 Alternatives for TweetDeck as Your Twitter App

Ever since Twitter updated TweetDeck into its current manifestation, there have been many, including me, who have been disappointed with the new product. I immediately began experimenting with several alternatives, yet none of them have completely replaced the ease with which I used TweetDeck. In my explorations for an alternative, I have used more than just the three below, but these three seem to be the ones I personally have continued to use. It seems, being able to modify Hootsuite so that it has the feel of being a desktop app, makes it my go-to Twitter app for the time being.

• Silver Bird (Twitter Extension for Chrome Browser): Silver Bird offers users access to Twitter by clicking a button on their browser extension toolbar. Users can do everything you can in the other apps. They can receive real time updates. They can choose between three themes for the app. There are even update notification options on the browser button and in the window when receiving a mention. This is a simple, but highly functional app for accessing and using Twitter. Check out Silver Bird in the Chrome Web Store (Silver Bird Page in Web Store).

Chrome Extension Silver Bird Interface

• Seesmic Desktop: Seesmic offers a fairly straighforward interface with this product. It is as easy to use as TweetDeck in my opinion. Users enjoy many of the same features such as realtime updates, adding custom columns, adjusting font size, and customizing backgrounds. There are even desktop notifications. The interface for this app is similar in layout to the old Tweetdeck in some ways, with the input bar at the top, with the columns arranged underneath. Adding a search column for chats such as #edchat is rather easy too. The only issue I’ve had with this product is an occasional unexplained app crash, so it suffers for me just a bit in the reliability department.

Seesmic Desktop Interface

• Hootsuite: When I was experiencing crashing difficulties with TweetDeck, several other Twitter users tweeted, “Use Hootsuite.” I’ve used Hootsuite on all of my devices before, but the one thing I did not like about the app was that it was a browser-based app, and there are times when I close my browser, I like to have the Twitter app running separately. I could have simply opened Hootsuite as a separate tab in its own browser Window, but it turns out you can make the browser-based Hootsuite look like a desktop app by following these simple instructions from Hootsuite. (Making Hootsuite Look Like a Desktop App)

Hootsuite Converted to a Desktop App Look

Out of the three options, I can easily see that by modifying Hootsuite into a desktop like app makes it the most attractive option for me right now.

New Kindle iPad App Just Got Better! Must for Every Educator

The new Kindle iPad app just became even better. After the latest Kindle iPad app update, Kindle owners and Kindle app users will be pleased with these two additional features.

• Read your magazines on your iPad in your Kindle. Before this update, I was unable to access my magazines on the iPad Kindle app. Now, users can access their Newsstand items too.
• Send documents to your Kindle and now read them on your iPad. Before the update, I was only able to do this on my Kindle. Now, users can access any documents they send to their Kindle account. Add the Chrome Extension, Send to Kindle, and you can easily send Web items to read later using your iPad. I now can easily read those PDF reports right in my iPad Kindle app.

New Kindle iPad App Document Interface

Those two added features add a great deal of functionality to the iPad app. Great job Amazon! Thanks for giving users more and more features in your Kindle App.

Twitter Releases More Stable TweetDeck Update: No More Crashes!

TweetDeck crashes seem to be fixed with Twitter’s update to version 1.1. Earlier this week I posted that TweetDeck fans might want to wait before downloading and installing the new TweetDeck native Windows app. It constantly crashed when I used it on my Windows 7 64-Bit laptop, and it crashed on the Windows XP computer I used at work as well. As of today, I have installed the updated version that came out today and have not had any crashes. Still, there are some features from the old Air version I miss. Hopefully, Twitter will find a way to include them in their new desktop app. Here’s just a few that I and others have stated they would like to see included.

• The input Windows at the top of the screen is gone and is replaced with a button, that when clicked, a pop-up window appears. I personally liked the input window at the top and would like to see it placed there again. There are times when I need to look back at a Tweet as I am posting one. I can’t do that now because the pop-up input screen is in the way.
• There is no right-click menu. I miss this one, especially when I want to paste a link in a post. I have to resort to using Ctrl-V for pasting, but I suppose I can get used to that.
• The size of the columns and window are fixed and can’t be adjusted. I often adjusted the column sizes to fit the screen when I had multiple windows open for multiple apps. That’s not possible with the new fixed TweetDeck window and columns.
• Some have complained about not being able to customize the colors of the new TweetDeck interface. Honestly, I rarely used this feature, but we all like to personalize things, so I could understand some missing this feature.

New TweetDeck Screen

Ultimately, I am happy I can now run TweetDeck without it crashing every five minutes or so, but Twitter, needs to realize that besides stability, there were other features that made TweetDeck a fan of so many.

The Oft-Ignored 21st Century Leadership Skill for School Leaders

There is one 21st century leadership skill very few have considered: managing and monitoring a school or school district’s online reputation. Most of the time, administrators are in “reactive” mode when it comes to sudden, unwanted attention to their schools brought about due to some online Web posting to a blog or social media. This often means the damage is  already done way before they were even aware that there was a problem. It is the 21st Century School Leader who uses technology to monitor their school or school district's online reputation.

Authors Andy Beal and Dr. Judy Strauss write in their book Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online, “There’s a conversation about you online right this minute and you are probably unaware of its contents.”  This truth extends to schools as well. We have constituents posting and talking about our schools online . In fact, because our constituent groups probably among the highest users of blogs, YouTube, and social media sites, we are perhaps even more likely to have people engaged in “conversations” about us online. That makes monitoring what our students, parents, teachers, community members are saying about us even more important.


While we can’t control what people say about us online, we can monitor it and perhaps proactively address it when it happens. In the book, What Every School Leader Needs to Know About Digital Technologies and Social Media, Will Richardson and Karl Fisch write, “Among the myriad duties most school administrators have is reputation management, keeping an ear to the ground to stay apprised of issues that concern their school community and intervening when necessary.” This task can be monumental considering the massive amount of information being published on the Web daily, but here’s 4 suggestions school leaders might use to keep at eye on what is being posted and published about their schools or districts online.

• Set Up Google Alert for Mentions of Your School or School District: Google Alerts is a simple, free tool from Google that allows you to monitor specific search words and have the results delivered to your email inbox or to your Google Reader. (Here’s help for those wanting to learn how to set up Google Alerts.) With Google Alerts you can monitor Web Content, News Items, Blogs, Video, and Groups at the same time. You simply enter the name of your school or district into the alert, and Google will deliver the results to your email inbox or to your Google Reader. In theory, if someone published an article or blog post that mentions your school or district, you will receive a link to that post and be able to review it yourself.
• Use Google Search to Capture Key Words Related to Your District and Subscribe to That Search as RSS Feed:  This strategy works in much the same way Google Alerts does, but the difference is you enter your school or school district name into Google Search and subscribe to the results in your RSS Feed reader. You only need to check your reader when new results are delivered. This allows school leaders to monitor using Google's powerful Web indexing to listen for specific mentions of their schools or districts.
• Conduct a Search in YouTube for Your School or District and Subscribe to That Search in Your RSS Feed Reader: Just like the other tools, this one delivers those search results to your RSS Feed Reader. It is important to be sure to subscribe to variations and other nicknames of your school.  When someone posts a video somehow tied to your school, you will be notified through your RSS Feed. When I used this search, I immediately found a couple of videos created by students at my school. Though they were harmless, and actually quite creative, I am glad to know they're there.
• Use the Search Tool IceRocket.com to search blogs, the public Twitter stream, Facebook, images, and the general buzz about your school or district. This one is new to me. It is basically a search engine that allows to search for words or phrases in blogs, Twitter, Facebook, images, or elsewhere. I searched for a local high school using this tool and got immediate returns in all these categories, including recent Tweets and Facebook posts. You can check out IceRocket for yourself at http://www.icerocket.com.

As our schools and districts move further into the 21st century, it is imperative that our school leaders develop the skills to manage and monitor their schools and school district’s reputation online.  There was a time when word-to-mouth talk about a school was limited to the local community. But as Beal and Strauss indicate in Radically Transparent, “Word-of-mouth was previously spread among friends and families, but now extends across continents to the masses with a click of a mouse.” Furthermore, “Social media are like word-of-mouth on steroids.” Today, what people are saying about our schools is not limited to local chatter, but extends globally. As 21st century school leaders we must listen to what our constituent groups are saying about us in our community, but also what they are saying about us online too.