Kudos to us!
Pardon us while we take a moment to toot our own horn.
Our weekly project, “Our Favorite Tweets of the Week” has been recognized in the Council for Advancement and Support of Education’s (CASE) district competition (along with some of our outstanding colleagues in Public Affairs). “Tweets” was recognized in the social media strategy and execution category.
Each project receives a Merit, Excellence or Grand Award – but we won’t find out who has won what exactly until Feb. 19 during the CASE conference in Atlanta.
The very same “Tweets” project was also recently recognized by the Strategic Public Relations blog for – and I’m quoting here – “crushing it on Storify.” Vanderbilt is singled out along with General Electric and the Smashing Pumpkins as brands that pwn Storify. Good company!
So what’s all the fuss about?
It’s all about the content curation.
We were looking for a way to up our interaction with our Twitter followers, and attract a few new ones at the same time, so we decided to start a new feature – “Our Favorite Tweets of the Week.” Every Friday, we go through alllll the Tweets related to Vanderbilt and pick a few favorites – school spirit, wit and charm will get our attention – then we load those into Storify, publish, notify the people quoted, cross-promote on our Twitter feed, the VU News site and VU homepage, and voila – increased engagement and attention to our Tweets.
The folks we single out – mostly students and alumni – seem to get a real kick out of it and re-Tweet us. It’s become so popular, we decided to add Instagram to the mix too. So it’s now “Our Favorite Tweets and Instagrams of the Week.” Who knows where it will go next?
This is one of our more fun projects, so it’s especially nice to be recognized for something we really love doing!