Interface: Andrew Lough
To better serve customers online, watch who and what they're watching, advises the University of Missouri's dining-services marketing manager.
By Christine LaFave Grace, Associate Editor -- Restaurants & Institutions, September 1, 2009
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This summer, the University of Missouri, Columbia, (Ivy ’05) surveyed students about their online habits and interests. Among the findings: E-mail is ancient (students prefer the real-time interaction of social-networking sites, and a majority of them immediately delete a weekly e-mail sent by the university); cooking demos are big; peer reviews don’t necessarily hold sway; and everybody wants to be a star. For Campus Dining Services marketing manager Andrew Lough, the research yielded both predicted and surprising results. The overall lesson, he says, is that although the profile of individual social-media Web sites can rise and fall, knowing what students want in their online experience is the key to remaining relevant with a hyperconnected young audience.
Q. With all of the day-to-day challenges that college and university dining-services operators face, why do you think it should be a priority to get involved in social networking?
A. I think the example of how e-mails don’t work much anymore is really telling. [You have to be] always finding what the next relevant use of technology is to communicate. The challenge is twofold: It’s finding a medium that’s efficient and effective in getting your message out, and then it’s using it in a very relevant way so you don’t get blocked. Because even if you do catch the next wave, and you get a lot of students following you, whether it’s on Twitter or (video-sharing site) Ustream or something else like that, as soon as you become either irrelevant or too invasive into their space, they’re going to cut you out. And they can do it really quickly.
Q. Given how quickly social networking has changed in the past several years, how can operators keep up? How can you figure out not just what students are drawn to now, but also what’s likely to capture their interest going forward?
A. Follow the celebrities and the personalities that students follow. They tend to be opinion-setters for college students. Think back a year ago when very few people knew what Twitter was, and it was your Terrell Owenses and Ashton Kutchers who were Tweeting things, and then everybody had to know what those celebrities were doing, so they got an account. Following [celebrities] can be a good way to see how these sites are developing and what the uses will be.
The other thing that’s really big for us is [talking to] our student staff. On our campus, we’ll have anywhere from 400 to 500 students working for us. Just getting to know them and what they’re doing, that’s a really good source of information for us.
Q. You said at the annual conference for the National Association of College and University Food Services in July that operators who haven’t already developed a Facebook presence may have missed the boat on that site. Twitter has far fewer users than Facebook, though (around 10 million versus 250 million as of June)—why are you concentrating your efforts there?
A. When I think about social networks, I try to think about them as virtual cultures and societies, because that’s how young people treat them. On our campus, so many students are using Facebook; there’s already an existing Facebook culture. So for us to get into that, we’ve got a lot of uphill climbing to do. It doesn’t mean that we’re not going to try it; it just means that it’s going to be a climb for us. What we’re looking at with Twitter is it’s pretty quickly growing. We’re looking at it as a prime opportunity because that culture hasn’t really solidified. So if we can be a part of that as it’s forming on our campus, then we have the ability to be much more relevant within it.
What we found in asking students about Twitter is that while not a lot of students have an account yet, among the ones who do, most of them check it daily. And their primary interest [in connecting with us through the site] is in the categories of special events and discounts.
Q. Beyond social-networking sites, how are you looking to connect with students online?
A. We’re experimenting with some multimedia content. Rather than doing kind of polished published videos, we want to do something a little more home-grown, something where it’s just a student and a Webcam—very rough, very basic, but the idea is that it has much more of an authentic feel to college customers. And then the goal will be to encourage students to submit their own videos so they can talk in their own words about how dining plans work or which dining location is their favorite.
On a college campus we have the luxury of having a very specific demographic that’s very excited about new things, and they’re also very forgiving. We were pretty hesitant to just throw out, “Hey, anybody post a video of a product review,” because we thought, you know, if one person doesn’t like something and they put a scathing video up, would students then shy away from [the product]?
But in our survey, 45% said it wouldn’t affect them at all; they would still try the product. And 37% said they would try it but they would be a little hesitant. Only about 18% said they would avoid the product based on a peer review. So this year, we’ll dedicate a space on our Web site to more open, two-way communication, and then people will have access to post videos.
One of the other things we found is that students were very interested in cooking demonstrations. That’s something we’ll look at as probably one of the first places we’ll grow into. It’s something where we’re in a unique position to provide this information that they’re interested in.
Q. What else surprised you in the student survey?
A. You look at generational differences—it’s really interesting. Gen X and older, our view of the Internet is where we go to find information. [With] people younger than that, it’s a mixture of where they go to get information and where they go to express themselves and put content out there. So creating some multimedia channels where the students can express themselves about your department, on your space, to their peers, I think has a high value.
One of the questions we asked was how interested students would be in leading [online] reviews about dining locations and items. And overwhelmingly, students were pretty interested in leading those. And then we flipped it and asked how interested they would be in reading or viewing those reviews from their peers, and they weren’t very interested at all. But they really like the idea of being able to go out and express themselves, whether anyone’s listening or not.
Contact writer at christine.lafave@reedbusiness.com
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