Colleges generate a vast body of knowledge and research every year, yet they often find it difficult to share their discoveries with the everyday citizens who pay the taxes or tuition that help keep them open. It can be tough to engage people with an esoteric mathematics solution, or basic biological research. And researchers themselves are sometimes best suited to the lab rather than to self-promotion.
THE PROBLEM: Seeing the value.
University researchers develop breakthroughs that can transform disciplines, but unless they win a Nobel Prize, their work may remain all but unknown to laypeople. Even at a renowned research hub like the University of California, with $4 billion in research funding, administrators worried that the system’s contributions to science were going unsung.
Surveys of Californians indicated that “intellectually, they got it, in terms of the university’s contributions to the economy, and the value of having a premier public research university in the state,” says Katherine A. Edwards, executive director of marketing communications for the system. But it was also clear that many Californians didn’t get the impact that the system had on their daily lives. “Do they understand UC’s connection to the strawberries that are on their breakfast table, or the arthroscopic knee surgery that they might have had?” Ms. Edwards asks.
The university began a campaign in 2012 to improve understanding of that connection, featuring statewide advertising and public events. The system office also did what many organizations have done in recent years: It hired multimedia producers to create videos to try to help tell its story. But the videos, based on research at the university, were shot like television news spots, fact-dense and straightforward. They were hosted on a system website, which made them difficult to share on social media. They didn’t garner many hits.
THE APPROACH: Get social.
The University of California Research feed, on the social-media platform Tumblr, began as an experiment. Zak Long and Jessica Wheelock, senior multimedia producers, both personally enjoyed the platform’s flexible interface and its emphasis on visuals over text. They were looking for ways to share content, and Tumblr boasted “a big science, research, and discovery community that was really engaged,” Ms. Wheelock says.
They worked to make their content as engaging as possible in Tumblr terms. One of their first posts to UC Research in 2013 featured a Graphics Interchange Format, or GIF, file of a horseman in the Grand Canyon in 1903. Animating the two frames of the vintage stereoscopic image from the UC archives into a GIF brought the image to jerky life for the web.
Using an institutional voice can ‘make amazing content incredibly boring.’
GIFs and other vivid visuals define UC Research posts because they grab attention and encourage sharing. Mr. Long and Ms. Wheelock also take care to tailor their posts to make the research relatable. “How would we get interested in this story, or why is this relevant to someone who’s not a chemist?” Ms. Wheelock explains. After a pair of mathematicians at the University of California at Los Angeles cracked the complex equations governing how the bubbles in a foam form and dissipate, the producers created a post that sketches the reasons the math is so complex and that mentions the practical applications for consumer goods like bicycle helmets.
As they tinkered to make their posts more popular, the producers liked and shared content from other research-related Tumblr feeds — including media sites like The Washington Post and the Verge. Those feeds sometimes returned the favor, spreading UC posts across the platform and building its follower base.
THE CHALLENGES: “Get out of the way.”
Starting the UC Research Tumblr required no additional budgetary support and no committee meetings. Once the experiment proved successful, it was up to the producers to craft as much as a post a day. The feed now takes up about a quarter of their working hours. With 10 universities producing research, and vast archives to draw from, there’s no shortage of material.
But the university can draw only limited information regarding what benefits the Tumblr feed provides. The producers can count followers and how many likes and shares each post gets, but there’s no way to connect such information to potential student applicants or other tangible measures.
That’s not the only way that Tumblr’s GIF-driven appeal subverts college-marketing ideals. Colleges usually want their public face to reflect prestige and gravitas, according to Vanessa Correa, creative director for the system’s marketing communications office. Universities — including California, sometimes — tend to hide behind a staid, institutional voice, she says, which can “make their amazing content incredibly boring, and it ends up being forgettable.” UC Research posts are designed to portray the university’s work as pioneering and important, but also “playful, in a very California way,” Ms. Correa adds.
Colleges also tend to want to stay on message, hyping the institution and its greatness at every opportunity. But successful marketing often comes down to “a question of being willing to get out of the way and just tell a good story or share something that’s interesting,” Ms. Edwards says.
THE RESULTS: Gone viral.
The University of California Research feed now has about 159,000 followers, more than double the number of followers of the UC Facebook page (about 64,000) and Twitter feed (about 5,400) combined. Followers such as public radio’s Science Friday, the Huffington Post, and the actress Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls at the Party blog have reposted items from the UC feed.
Many posts have received thousands, or tens of thousands, of “notes,” as Tumblr calls likes and reposts, and a handful of posts have gone viral. The producers created a post in August about an “augmented reality sandbox,” a topographical model that can be manipulated by hand in real time. It earned more than 16,000 notes, and its spread led to news stories and social-media pickups. The UC Tumblr had a key role in drawing attention to the device, says its creator, Gary B. Glesener, director of the modeling and educational demonstrations laboratory in the department of earth, planetary, and space sciences at UCLA.
The success of the UC Research Tumblr has reinvigorated the rest of the system’s outreach efforts, Ms. Edwards says, leading to improvements in other social-media efforts. “For us, it was a proving ground for content marketing, and figuring out how we could connect with people,” she says. “The value of that alone, in getting us to stretch and reach, is worth every minute of effort.”
Correction (11/2/2015, 12:50 p.m.): This article originally misquoted Katherine A. Edwards, executive director of marketing communications for the University of California system. When asking whether Californians understand the impact of the university system on their daily lives, she was talking about arthroscopic knee surgery, not laparoscopic surgery. The article has been updated to reflect that.
Lee Gardner writes about the management of colleges and universities, higher-education marketing, and assorted other topics. Follow him on Twitter @_lee_g, or email him at lee.gardner@chronicle.com.
