Managing Risk Using Social Intelligence

How can risk managers in higher education get a better understanding of how real-time perceptions of their institution by students, faculty, staff, and the public at large can inform their work? In this episode, we’ll hear from Liz Gross, CEO of Campus Sonar and Rebecca Rapp, General Counsel and Chief Privacy Officer of Ascendium talk about three areas of risk where the concept of social intelligence can be another source of information when making assessments: workforce and employer reputation; overall institutional reputation or brand health; and high-publicity crises.

Campus Sonar
Liz Gross
Rebecca Rapp
Rebuilding Public Trust in Higher Education

Connect with URMIA & URMIA with your network
-Share /Tag in Social Media @urmianetwork
-Not a member? Join ->www.urmia.org/join
-Email | contactus@urmia.org

Give URMIA Matters a boost:
-Give the podcast a 5 star rating
-Share the podcast - click that button!
-Follow on your podcast platform - don't miss an episode!

Thanks for listening to URMIA Matters!

Transcript

Show Notes

• Campus Sonar
• Ascendium
• Campus Sonar- Case Studies
• Rebuilding Public Trust in Higher Education- A Social Intelligence Report

Guests
Liz Gross, Founder & CEO- Campus Sonar
Rebecca Rapp, General Counsel & Chief Privacy Officer- Ascendium
Host
Julie Groves, Director of Risk Services- Wake Forest University

Transcript
Julie Groves: Hi everyone. I'm Julie Groves, the Director of Risk Services at Wake Forest University and I'll be your host for this episode of URMIA Matters. Today I'm chatting with Liz Gross, CEO of Campus Sonar, which is a part of the Ascendium family, and Rebecca Rapp, General Counsel and Chief Privacy Officer at Ascendium. We're going to talk about 3 areas of risk where social listening and social intelligence can aid risk managers in making assessments. And for those of you who are taking notes at home and you like bullet points, the three areas we're going to discuss are workforce and employer reputation, overall institutional reputation or brand health, and high publicity crises. So welcome to the podcast, ladies. I'm looking forward to our conversation.

Liz Gross: Thanks, Julie. My name is Liz Gross, born and raised in the state of Wisconsin, where I have spent about 20 years working in higher education. I started on a couple of University of Wisconsin campuses where I worked largely in marketing and communication roles for about 7 1/2 years. And then I moved over to a student loan servicer that used to be a part of the Ascendium family for about 5 years, which led to the creation of Campus Sonar, so I have been listening to what is said about higher education at scale now both in my roles on campus and off campus, for close to 15 years. When I think social listening and social media was like paper clips and duct tape compared to what we have now.

Julie Groves: Great. Well, welcome to the podcast. And Rebecca, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Rebecca Rapp: Yeah. My name's Rebecca Rapp. I've lived in Wisconsin for about 20 years and been at Ascendium for about 10 years. The legal team that I oversee does a range of things at Ascendium, from litigation to contracts to getting our insurance portfolio. I'm also part of the compliance committee and the incident response team, so a lot of different risk management hats. Before coming to Ascendium, I did a range of things from working at a law firm and a nonprofit in DC to working at our State Department of Justice to being a Circuit Court judge here in Madison. So, a range of things. And I just want to say as we're getting started, how excited I am to be here today. As we'll discuss more Liz's social intelligence work really fosters the type of holistic wisdom that I think is imperative for general counsel or anyone in the risk management space to have any time. For, particularly in today's volatile risk environment.

Julie Groves: Well, that's great. Well, I think this is going to be a really interesting discussion. So why don't we just start with the basics, and I'll admit I am kind of, I am new to all of this social listening, social intelligence lingo. And so why don't you tell us, you know, give us a little bit, in a nutshell sort of tell us what that means.

Liz Gross: Sure. I'd be happy to start with that, Julie. So, social listening is the concept of thinking about everything that's happening online as an always on focus group that can be transcribed, categorized, and analyzed to determine what is being said about an organization, what is happening within an audience within a market to really honess that- or to really harness that word of mouth online conversation that we know has just exploded over the last 20 years and is incredibly impactful and influential on how people make their decisions or form their perceptions. 

And then I’ll talk about social intelligence just a bit further. It's using that sort of data to answer key business questions just as you would with any other market research data set. Thinking about the Internet as an always on focus group that allows you to better understand markets, audiences, or brands, or organizations. And I do that work largely in higher education, but it's something that's been informing tourism, hospitality, financial services, entertainment, you name it, for well over a decade now and excited that higher education can finally tap into.

Julie Groves: And just out of curiosity, so do you have certain sites that you focus on, or do you have a way to just monitor a lot of you know, the Internet for certain topics or certain key names like a name of an institution or something? I mean, you'd have to go into a lot of details, but I just think it's fascinating. How do you harness some of that information?

Liz Gross: Yeah. So, the software that we use takes a very large approach to data collection and that anything that is publicly available and legally accessible is included in that data set. So, some of the biggest sources in that data set are Reddit, X, Instagram, and parts of Facebook. And we're also thinking about online news articles, the comments on those articles, blogs, et cetera. So, you know Joe's blog that has five readers and the New York Times blog that has millions of readers. They're all included in that data set. But some areas that are not accessible, whether because of terms of service or the way the platform is designed, are not in that data set. Particularly for the way that we approach it. 

Sometimes, however, we'll have a research question that we're looking to answer that makes us want to really narrow that upfront. So, if we're looking, for example, for what do students think about a very particular thing, we might limit our data set to Reddit, X, and Instagram because that's where we know they're going to be having the first-person conversations about that particular topic. So, sometimes there's an analytical choice in there.

Julie Groves: Wow, it's amazing that you guys can do that. So, you already alluded to the fact that you're doing this in higher ed, so it sounds like there's already instances where campuses are using this type of social listening and social intelligence. So how are some campuses utilizing this?

Liz Gross: So, at a really high level, I like to think of the three buckets of audiences, markets, and brands like how, how can they understand those and more specifically in terms of what are the strategies that they're informing or the risks that they're mitigating. Reputation management was the 1st and still one of the largest use cases for social intelligence and higher education. Along with that goes crisis assessment and response, which is why we'll talk about both of those today. 

But we're also starting to see institutions use it as part of the environmental scanning process of strategic planning, since that online word of mouth matters so much, market research to inform program development or marketing strategy, and then specifically have the human audience focused aspect of it, enrollment and alumni engagement strategy to really understand how the people and the places that they interact with and what they have to say about higher education and particular programs or particular brands are changing and can inform the way institutions want to work with them.

Julie Groves: Wow, that is just so fascinating. So, everyone who is working anywhere today, you know, especially at higher ed institutions knows that recruiting and retaining employees is really hard to do, especially since the pandemic, right, that sort of changed the way a lot of just standard standards were before the pandemic. So, do you think that reputation of a college or university is really important when you're thinking about either hiring prospective employees or the employees that are currently at an institute?

Liz Gross: Yeah, I think it's important on both sides, but I think the prospective employees themselves are more proactive in this space right now. I actually had the opportunity to to have a really focused conversation on that with Eddie Francis on his “I Wanna Work There” podcasts. And we dove really deep into particularly how people from historically marginalized communities are looking at places where they will feel safe and accepted and involved in the type of employment that they're searching for. So, in addition, they're going to review sites like Glassdoor, which are also included in social intelligence, they will go and look at, you know, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, to see what it is like for somebody like them to work at that institution. And we've seen and heard more of a proactive approach from perspective employees looking for that information than for colleges and universities as employers being aware of what is out there, what is being said about them.

One of the things that Eddie and I talked about that I hadn't thought of before that conversation was we've worked with over a hundred colleges and universities at Campus Sonar so far, and not a single one of them has ever asked us a question about perception with prospective or current employees. There's other things about the workforce they'll ask about, and I'm sure we could talk about those. But in terms of how are we showing up to recruit a workforce that has not been something that's on their mind, but it's something that I know is only becoming more and more important as generation shift out of out of and into the workplace.

Julie Groves: And do you think when you think about student employees, I mean obviously if the university is hiring students from their campus to work somewhere, the students are going to know what it's like to be a student. But do student employees tend to be interested in, you know, what it's like to be an employee at the university that they attend as a student.

Liz Gross: So, this is my personal opinion based on anecdotal evidence, and whenever that is the case, I want to make sure I say so. I see and believe that student employees are getting more of that information like on the ground, if you will or in spaces that social intelligence isn't listening. So, whether that's in real life spaces 1 to 1, or in some of the more like walled garden social media, like a private group, or a geographically based network. I think that's where that information is being shared. So, it's absolutely something people will care about, but not something we are seeing in the publicly available conversation.

Julie Groves: Are you hearing anything in particular from faculty members or staff members about what they've learned about their institutions through, you know, social listening and intelligence?

Liz Gross: Yeah. So fun fact, when we look at a year of conversation about generally any college or university, staff or faculty like as individuals are usually within the top 10 most frequent contributors to the conversation. So, when we say like, who's out there talking about you as an institution, the most, it's people in the staff, faculty roles, regardless of the type of institution or the size of institution, and they're usually talking about like their day-to-day work, there's a lot of athletics celebrations, highlighting their community engagement opportunities, or promoting themselves professionally as they try to work up the professional ladder or throughout their career journey. But we will also sometimes see them in a not so positive light. 

So, they might be commenting on the work environment, whether that's positive or negative, we absolutely have started to see more commentary related to labor issues or union organizing in the last couple of years, layoffs or other institutional business changes that are prompting more conversation from faculty, staff. And some of those that are large, like national level changes that are being reported on, it's important for institutions to know nothing, the surveillance perspective. But again, from that reputation perspective, how much of the conversation from our faculty is about this? Who is it reaching? Is it three people? Is it 300 people? All of that is is important stuff for us to help folks see, but this is one of those areas where I this I get, I dragged Rebecca to this conversation because I knew she had some really great Insights, and I'm really curious for her thoughts on like workforce employee wise or other reputational risks from social intelligence that an institution can use to manage because she's had the the visibility and the opportunity to work with this sort of data in practice, for the last, quite a few years.

Julie Groves: So, yeah, it's Rebecca. Tell us what you can add.

Rebecca Rapp: Yeah, and 1st off a point of clarification. Liz did not have to drag me. I think what she does is so incredible and so interesting and there's so much symbiosis with what I do that I always love to have conversations. And I'm like an eager puppy dog trying to help more. So very glad to be here and part of the discussion. You know, I'd like to reframe the question a bit. I don't think it's just a matter of what we are hearing or what we're learning, but it's what we're not hearing and what we don't know and that's one of the reasons I think what Liz does and the wisdom that can be gleaned from the social intelligence work that she and her team do is so critically important. Times have changed and social media presents new risks and opportunities and and we just have to keep up. We can't use the same tools that we've used year after year and century after century to be navigating and managing risk in today's volatile risk environment.

And I think first up, we need to understand how social media can exponentially amplify and even create reputational or other risk. There may be 10 or 20 or 100 different things kind of bubbling up at any time. How do you know which one's gonna pop? Which one's gonna not? I don't know that we can take any sort of risk calculus or linear analysis and just know that. Particularly if we're sitting in our little fiefdoms with other risk managers in a room. You kind of look and are like us and not skeptical of the higher education value proposition. So, I think that's number one. And #2 I think we need to figure out how to take advantage of the opportunities presented by social media to really glean that wisdom that's there to be had. And I think there's a couple ways we can do that. One is can we avoid or mitigate risk on the front end in a couple of ways. Number one, identifying what is true risk and what's just noise or what's the squeaky wheel out there that are just really loud, but may may not be speaking to the actual movement of the time. And the 2nd is really identifying when and how risks. Are changing over time. I imagine the risks that are really popping on college campuses today are very different than when I went a couple decades ago to college. So, really seeing that shift and if you have people working in risk management positions that have been there a long time, they need some way to get out of their conventional thinking or their group think and really think about the moment at the time. 

And then I think the next point is really if there is an incident, what are you going to do about it? I know as a lawyer if I know what the judges care about. If I'm going to write a brief or an argument, I would try to tailor it towards them. Well, here, if you're trying to tailor something towards your campus audience, whatever audience that is, or prospective students understanding what they're thinking and what is resonating with them is pretty critical information if you want to accurately and effectively create a message for them. Secondly, even with that knowledge, you may get it wrong at some point and being able to get real-time feedback and pivot quickly and know what's working and not, I think at the front end is really critical. So, I think thinking about faculty and what we can learn with them, I think there's a couple reasons on that. It's really critical to hear from one. Yeah. Number one, I think they're the biggest asset of a university or a a college campus, which is supposed to be really focused on knowledge and sharing knowledge and teaching students and research. 

So, we want to know what our most valuable assets are saying about the school and the environment. Number two, as Liz noted, they're incredibly active on social media. Number three, I think they're very attuned to reputational and other issues going on on campuses. And four, they really have a front row seat to what's going on on campus and this could be other everything from TA's thinking about organizing to thinking about mental health challenges, facing students, to a whole host and array of issues. And then I guess the final point, I'll just know why I'm talking, and I think you know, we talk a lot about crisis management. I certainly think a lot about that and my role and ascending and certainly if you have a crisis, I think it would be great to bring in social intelligence at that point. But it's really a longer play if you really want to garner all the wisdom that's available from it. I think you want to understand the context. You want to have some baselines you want to kind of know what's just a quick pop from somebody who's always a Twitter frequent Twitter to what something that's really a movement. And I think that's really key. So having a partnership and a relationship that's a long-term game, not just a reactive position, I think it is, is really where people need to be today in the risk management space.

Julie Groves: So, you may not be able to answer this question, but you were talking about you know, how you really are seeing that you're hearing from faculty, or you know, that's who you think you're hearing from a lot. And do you find that faculty members feel more freedom, to be honest in sharing their thoughts and everything because a lot of them have tenure because I know as a staff person, their staff people may not feel the freedom to share things that a faculty member with tenure may feel free to do. So, do you see that to be true, or can you even make, you know, a guess at that?

Liz Gross: I don't know that I can make a, again, a data informed statement on that. Anecdotally, I have seen, feel like it's more individual based than role based these days because in so many places, Wisconsin being one of them tenure isn't what it used to be. So, you know, tenured faculty are still be able to be dismissed for a variety of reasons. I see it more as the individual’s personal comfort in sharing information online versus what role they're in, and then that can play out differently in different places. So, most people on Twitter, or X, for example, have their professional folks have their real names included in something that they're doing, whereas on Reddit they might be very willing to be very honest because it's a completely anonymous platform and they've been very careful not to reveal themselves there. So we can get the insights without the individual attribution, which is often just valuable.

Julie Groves: So, Rebecca mentioned trying to figure out what a true institutional risk is as you're looking at all these different things that are, you know, popping up and how do you know when to raise an issue as a true institutional risk? I mean, how for the risk managers listening, what advice can you give them about that?

Liz Gross: Well, a lot of it is making sure we know the client specifically who on that campus hired us, what they're most interested in. But we're looking at anything where there is a significant increase in negative sentiment on something that is not just a drop in the dark issue. That could result in negative media coverage, that could result in, you know, unwanted attention from legislators or other funders, those sorts of things. I can't believe I haven't used this word yet. Bouillon is how we write our queries to figure out where everything is coming from, and we'll do nested Bouillon queries to pull out other ports of information. And we have like a a crisis risk set of Bouillon that looks at physical threats, mental health, those sorts of issues that will raise something to the top. So, it might be mainly an individual risk that could become an institutional risk over time. But those definitely get pulled up and then other times it's really knowing what's important to the person that has hired us. 

So, for example, this year there was a lot of concerns on campuses about the conversation related to the Middle East conflict from and about specific donors for some institutions that we worked with. And normally we might not be diving deep into donor conversation, but because of the confluence with the national negative sentiment, that was something that we needed to make sure it was seen and elevated, and in some instances, we were seeing conversations and spaces that were not visible to other folks on campus. So again, showed how that social intelligence approach can make sure you're taking a broader assessment of where that risk may be.

Julie Groves: So it's not really a one size fits all approach as much as, I mean some of it is, but obviously you know risk managers need to understand what's important at their respective institutions and sort of you know the hot button issues and try to, you know, help elevate those things to make sure. So, those would be the true institutional risks that would be for those with their specific institution. Yeah, go ahead, Rebecca.

Rebecca Rapp: I'm sorry if I could just piggyback on that a second. I think there's three ways I could think about concrete ways that I would use the social intelligence to really analyze risk and a I think a really effective way. One would be, I think frequently we talk about the magnitude of a risk times the probability that's going to happen. I think social media is sort of an X Factor and it can exponentially increase that. So, to do that sort of basic math equation, we've done for a long time, you need to really understand that. 

Two, I think there's mental health challenges or other things that you may be hearing from students or sort of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging sort of issues that could arise that may not be sort of a legal issue or like concrete quote unquote “risk” what we think about in sort of traditional legal sense at that time, but it can certainly manifest into a risk. And third, you could have something happen that would present sort of a concrete legal or other risk, but sometimes it's how you respond to it that really create turn something into a serious risk or magnifies or multiplies it. So being able to tight, you know, sort of respond and adjust your response based on what you're hearing from your audience, kind of as I was mentioning before. I think all of those are critical ways that risk managers can use social intelligence to really enhance their efforts.

Julie Groves: That's very helpful. So just to go in a little bit of a different direction. So, Campus Sonar recently published a social intelligence report called “Rebuilding Public Trust in Higher Education,” and I had a chance to read it. It was very interesting, and we're going to link that report in the show notes for those of you who are interested. So, can you tell us what you're learning about higher ed's reputation today?

Liz Gross: Absolutely. In this study, we wanted to move beyond the polls and like quick percentage points, we've been seeing in the news for over five years now about the declining public trust and really understand from the student and alumni perspective, what are they saying about the value worth ROI in higher education like really get to the why? The why and the what behind that percentage. So, what we've learned so far that individuals trust is the conversation about higher education's reputation today, is driven by personal, political, and media narratives, and the latter, the political and the media, are often drowning out the former. So, for in our study we only wanted to look at first person narratives, not what was in the media. And that was really important. And we saw that students are absolutely talking about value and outcomes in terms of what they're looking for higher education and they're looking for really clear outcomes. 

They're looking for financial stability, improved quality of life, and the acquisition of personal skills and knowledge. And this is a phrase that is in the report, “the ability to contribute to society in a way that aligns with their passions and purpose.” And I think it's important to say it that way because students say they want a lot of things that we in higher ed would traditionally call a liberal arts education, but they are not calling it that. They are seeing it through a different lens and looking at different things. So, we're not necessarily so off base with what we're offering, what they're looking for. But the students are also hearing a lot of narratives that they're on their own to make higher education work for them. There's all these caveats in the online conversation, especially on Reddit, when people are looking for advice that apply to whether or not pursuing a degree or credential will get them what they want, because, well, you might pick the wrong major, or you might not have the best career advising, or all of these, you're on your own type narratives that really make it challenging them for them to see the path to the outcomes that they want. And then we ultimately in the report have 4 summarized suggestions for what we believe leaders can do to help rebuild the public's trust. 

And I think, you know, two of them are pretty focused with this audience, and we might get to those in a little bit, but they all come back to trust higher education, individuals, students need to see people who look, live and learn like them. They want to see the path to success for someone who looks like who they believe they are in some sort of outcome-focused, individualized storytelling. Yet what I see colleges and universities doing in this, Oh my gosh, public trust is declining moment is defending higher education, jumping up and and pulling out a defense with economic data or aggregate statistics that are true, but they don't win hearts and minds of students or the alumni who might give back. And that's really what we're seeing in this research is the gap between, you know, what students think they want, but also like the path to get them there. And I think higher Ed needs to do more work on talking about how they pave that path to get there versus doubling down on it's worth it at the end. It's the path that the students are most concerned about.

Julie Groves: So, it's the journey and not where you end up. Is that what you're saying for students?

Liz Gross: Yeah, I think like students want to believe in the outcome, but they're hesitant and don't trust their ability to take the journey to get there.

Julie Groves: So I mean, this is obviously a really broad subject and it's not just specific to one higher institution or campus. So, what can risk managers do with this information?

Liz Gross: Yeah. So, the two of the four recommendations in the report that I think are most relevant to your audience. The first is the need to lead with transparency, which can feel very risky all the time, but we believe that the data is telling us that, whenever possible, actively addressing pain points, weaknesses, and barriers alongside the value that a college or university provides is going to be the way, one of the ways to regain that trust, like the public knows in general that higher ed needs better PR right now, but what they're craving is honesty, and that's a really close cousin to transparency. I'm thinking about the schools that are announcing closures less than 30 days in advance, right? Like that is a severe breach of trust that stems from a lack of transparency that then ends up impacting the entire sector because then they wonder, well, what about this one? And what about the? 

So, figuring out where are we comfortable with the transparency and where will it ultimately serve us better in the long run to share some things that aren’t our best foot forward, but our reality and will help build that trust. And then the other, the other thing that I think is most relevant for list managers and we've been talking about this whole time is the need to really listen to audiences. And make sure that we are serving their unique needs and doing that in an environment where anything that represents diversity might be on the chopping block and it's hard to do, can be the most challenging, but we know that historically marginalized populations have higher levels of distrust due to poor past experience in higher education. So, we need to make sure that there are structures and frameworks to listen to all students, including those students, and other key stakeholders and social intelligence can be one of those structures and I found this fascinating statistic that aligns with this. 

So, focusing on individuals and listening is goes along with the concept of humanity is one of the four factors of trust. And Deloitte did a trust ID research project that found that consumers who believe a brand that is high in humanity are two and 1/2 times more likely to stick with that brand through a mistake. And I think that's something that risk managers will want to remember, that there will be mistakes made, but if they're made in a transparent way to listen to the needs of students and serve them, that ultimately the students and those who are supporting them are going to be more likely to stick with us than if we are not being transparent. And if we are only focused on, you know, one particular subgroup.

Julie Groves: Few minutes ago, Rebecca mentioned her involvement in crisis management, and for those of us who have had anything to do with crisis management as and I think you alluded to this, Rebecca, sometimes the response to a crisis can be worse than the actual crisis itself. You know how you respond to something is really what dictates how the public, you know, views a crisis that you have. And so you know, as we've seen, especially lately, as I just said, the way a campus responds to something, you know, is of great interest to all the constituents and in some cases even the US government. And so how do you suggest we use social intelligence to help manage a crisis?

Liz Gross: So, I think about five key questions that need to be answered in this situation and then you can align your social intelligence structures and procedures and data gathering and reporting and answer them. And actually number zero, question zero is there an issue so it could be identifying an issue before everyone else is about it, but once we know we're looking at an issue, how many people are talking about it and how are they talking about it in terms of positive, or negative, or neutral? It's a double barrel question, but that's one. Second one is how many media sources are covering the issue. Understanding the difference between individuals and media, and if one is outweighing the other can really inform how and when someone responds. 

The third is what are people saying about the issue? What is the actual, you know, qualitative nature of that conversation? Are they asking questions? Are they angry? Is there misinformation? What's there? The fourth is, is this conversation growing or fading? And looking back quite a few years, I've seen some institutions make their response after the conversation has already faded, which then prompts the growth of the conversation again. So, being aware of where that is at on the kind of the conversation timeline, and then lastly, who's influencing the conversation, are you really looking to in a statement to influence your stakeholders or are there one or two key outside influencers that are really kind of driving where this narrative goes and knowing that is really key as you figure out when, if, and how to respond.

Julie Groves: Well, and obviously you know, you have to be living under a rock to not to know that there's been a lot going on with the pro Palestinian demonstrations. You know, a lot of things have been happening at, you know, commencements have been cancelled and things like that. Have you all done any assessment on the responses to the these pro Palestinian demonstrations? That are going on campus?

Liz Gross: A little bit right away when the conflict started in the week following October 7th, we looked at the data set that had all of the flagship social media accounts of all of the US colleges and universities. And at that point in time in that first week we could see that more than half of the posts that tagged those accounts were about the conflict. Between Israel and Hamas, but in the months sense it has shown up differently on nearly every campus that we work with one-on-one. Even to the fact that on some it it really hasn't been an issue. So, it has varied a lot. And we haven't done an industry wide look yet. But we absolutely have seen, you know, now that we're in the summer, there's an opportunity to breathe a little bit and make sure there's a plan to educate campuses on demonstration policies and if they need to be redone a little bit of thoughtful time over the summer could be good. 

We've seen some really good examples with our clients and others that listening can go a long way to de-escalation. So, literally a leader showing up and listening and speaking with students, but also showing that they're aware of what they have been saying online in other places. We talked about faculty early on on this and and a lot of the conversation about this particular issue has been about student protests. But as we know, faculty have been involved too, and we have to think about what tension does that create with governance structures and what our response looks like. So, another thing to to keep in mind and then as we head into the fall like it's it's not going to be going away. When we look at what's coming up with the election, you know, the ongoing crisis. And combining that with all the other social issues that are happening, we expect this fall to be even more tumultuous on campus. So having strategies in place to understand, assess, and respond are going to be even more important than I think we'll have folks politically that are going to make this very unpredictable. And we'll see where that goes.

Julie Groves: Yes, with an election coming up, we just cannot even predict what's going to happen, so. You know, do you all have any case studies that you could share with us about the social listening, social intelligence, anything we can link in our show notes for the listeners?

Liz Gross: Absolutely. In your show notes, if you go to campussonar.com and click on Our Work at the top, there are 8 published case studies right now. The one most relevant to your audiences is Duquesne University, there is a line in that case study about how we support data informed decision making for the team that I can expand on in like 45 seconds here and that is very much about the the crisis issues that we've been talking about a lot today. So, Duquesne had a variety of different crises happening in the fall of 2021, and there was one that was very much a major issue on social media and not in the news, and one that was the opposite, it got a ton of news coverage, but no one talked about it on social media. 

The one that had no news coverage but was all over social was actually the one that persisted and had the longest impact on the institution and presented the largest amount of ongoing risk and through using social intelligence, both after the fact and now on an ongoing basis, the folks at Duquesne and their board have regular discussions, questions, and sentiment metrics, and what that conversation is looking like and what is driving short term or long term changes and it's now the sort of thing that the president is asking, what's the sentiment on this thing? They're expecting a real-time analysis, but they're using it to make decisions and that is one bullet point in the case study that also includes a lot of other marketing and communication support. But we often can prove our value of social intelligence in one or two of those instances a year, and then everything else is a wonderful also ran, but not necessarily as high profile as what others would see.

Julie Groves: Well, that's great. And of course, we'll have your contact info there as well. So, if people have any questions, they can certainly reach out to you all with those. So, this has just been very helpful. It makes me feel like I should go and update my myspace page to make sure that I don't have anything bad on there cause I'm sure that's at the top of your list of the social media sites that you. So, before we wrap up anything else you all want to add for our listeners? Well, this has been a great conversation. I will just say, do you think we're always going to have to say X, formerly known as Twitter, or do you think we're going to ever get to the point where we can just call it X because you know, that seems to be the the whole name for that now?

Liz Gross: Between you and me, Julie, I hope there's another change of ownership that brings another change of name and then we'll be on to something else.

Julie Groves: We'll all hope that for you as well. So, I really do appreciate you all being here today. I enjoy the conversation, and there's, I'm sure there's a lot to unpack here. And so, we will try to have you back another time to maybe talk about some more, because I'm sure we could talk about this for a while. So, thank you so much. And this wraps another episode of URMIA Matters.