Facebook:
This month, we saw the launch of “Wolverines of Ann Arbor”, inspired by the “Humans of New York” photoblog. This new feature has a lot of interest so far: within days of the introductory post, suggestions for Wolverines to profile started pouring in. WoAA offers an authentic look at the diversity and variety of the people of Michigan, and we hope it will serve as a unifying element for our community.
Read the introductory post for this campaign on our blog!
When it comes to U-M Facebook activity this month, there’s no ignoring the elephant in the room: On August 12., three of the University of Michigan’s most popular Facebook pages were hacked. Around 3:30 AM, a barrage of malicious and inappropriate posts found their way onto the Facebook pages for Michigan Football, Michigan Athletics, and Michigan Basketball. Many community members reached out to alert us about the attack by 6AM, and the story of our hacking found it’s way onto online news and media outlets. Through constant, multi-phased communications among Michigan social leadership and correspondence with connections at Facebook, we were able to successfully re-credential the page administrators and contain the situation within a few hours. However, a second wave of attacks occurred around noon. Investigations at Facebook determined that the hack was part of a sophisticated phishing scheme within Facebook Messenger, that affected many other brands.
By the end of the day on August 12, we contained the attacks for good. We monitored the reach of the conversation following the hack, and noted that our individual sport pages experienced only a small decrease in follower count.
This experience was certainly an educational one. There is a clear lesson: password security is not enough to protect social media accounts from cyber-attacks. The best way to ensure the integrity of our social media properties is to incorporate additional security meatures -including the implementation of a two-step authentication procedure- and evaluate third-party security applications. We hope that the preventative step we took will keep these attacks from happening in the future.
Read a full case study on the hack here.
Twitter:
On August 7, we hosted an influential #UMichChat on the topic of activism and racial education with Martha Jones, professor of history, Afro-American and African studies, and law; Angela Dillard, Associate dean of undergraduate education at LSA; Robert Mickey, associate professor of political science; Hakeem Jefferson, PHD candidate in political science; and Austin McCoy, PHD candidate in History. This chat, which generated 5,171,802 impressions, was centered around the book Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, which has been hailed as an essential read on the subject of black America. We believe that our #UMichChats bring new and important perspective to the UMich community and hope they continue to do so.
Read a full recap on Storify.
Our weekly #UMichTalks series covered several exciting events happening around campus, including the summer UROP symposium, a ceremony celebrating the 42nd anniversary of the LSA summer bridge program, a live chat with the director of Michigan Neurosport, and more..
This month, our Instagram ambassador was Emily Schiffer, a Stamps MFA student who shared compelling images of Northwood Family Housing, where she lives with her daughter. It was a privilege to have such a talented artist curating content for our feed, and we are very grateful for her time, expertise, and photos:
We decided to launch Wolverines of Ann Arbor as a cross-platform campaign, and post WoAA images on our Instagram feed every Monday, as well as every Wednesday on Facebook. Our first feature, an enthusiastic Wolverine’s love letter to a certain attractive Chipotle employee, received more than 100 comments and was featured in a write up on Tech Insider.
Snapchat
We began a weekly Snapchat feature in which we cover an arts/cultural event or space in our Snapchat story. Some of this month’s stories included: a tour of the brand-new Taubman health science library and the newly renovated West Quad dorm. This is a great way to give prominence to the amazing arts, culture and architecture at U-M.
We have many exciting Snapchat campaigns planned for the beginning of the school year. We will also be documenting many Welcome Week events on our Snapchat account, so be sure to add ‘uofmichigan’ and follow along!
This month marked a milestone for us on Pinterest: our account reached 19,000 followers! U-M is currently second in the nation in terms of follower count and we expect to see this number increase as we continue to fill our Pinterest boards with compelling U-M content.
This month, we launched our second annual Dormspiration Pinterest contest. During last year’s inaugural competition, students were encouraged to follow @uofmichigan on Pinterest, create a board titled ‘My UofMichigan #dormspiration’, and pin anything relating to dorm decor and residence hall life. Winners received custom prizes from collage.com and DIY Michigan decorations! We hope this contest gets our #Victors2019 (and all Wolverines) feeling inspired excited , and ready for dorm life!
Social Vending Machine
We’re thrilled to announce our Vending Maize and Blue campaign. Working with Innovative Vending Solutions, a company located in Deyton, OH, we designed and branded a machine that fits with the University’s aesthetic and social goals, and that allows our partners to benefit and publicize their products and services.
This special vending machine takes tweets as means of currency. Users will be asked to tweet a photo of themselves (along with a hashtag provided by the machine); as soon as the tweet is received, the vending machine dispenses a prize.
The machine will be on campus from August 19 to September 20 and you’ll see it in many different locations. The “vending Maize and Blue” campaign is an innovative and fun way to utilize new technology to spread awareness about our channels, increase engagement, and surprise and delight our students.
Click here for more details and locations.
Overview:
Here are some key analytics highlights from the past months:
