Viral Dreams and Digital Schemes: Social Media Strategy with Jon-Stephen Stansel 

Gil Rogers sits down with a social media manager who says it louder for the people in the back, Jon-Stephen Stansel.

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Who is Jon-Stephen Stansel?

JS is a well respected expert on social media strategy and content development. He has experience in and out of higher education.

In this Episode

Jon-Stephen Stansel, social media strategist in both academia and entertainment industries, joins FYI host Gil Rogers to talk about crafting effective social media strategies. In an industry where platforms can vanish without a moment’s notice, they discuss the resilience needed and the importance of having a pulse on the crowd’s chatter – the art of social listening that shapes marketing far before a product sees the light of day.

From demystifying the complexity of ‘simple’ posting to clarifying the blurred lines between managers and creators, this episode underscores the necessity for internal advocacy to ensure that some voices are not just heard but heeded. JS shares key recommendations for effective social media management and self-advocacy, emphasizing the importance of obtaining visibility, engaging with industry conferences, and leveraging one’s work for career advancement.

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Episode Transcript

Viral Dreams and Digital Schemes: Social Media Strategy with Jon-Stephen Stansel 

Publishing Date: March 19, 2024

[00:00:00] Gil: Welcome back to FYI, the For Your Institution podcast, presented by Mongoose. I’m your host, Gil Rogers. And today, we are talking with social media strategist, speaker, and consultant, Jon-Stephen Stansel. Jon-Stephen got his start in social media management working in higher ed but has brought his expertise into the entertainment industry and more.

Today, we’re going to talk a lot about how social media managers can better self-advocate for themselves, as well as for their work, by taking on things, like, speaking engagements, as well as internal communication and resources to help them do their jobs. Let’s listen in. JS, welcome to FYI. How are you?

[00:00:51] Jon-Stephen: Doing great. Glad to be here.

[00:00:53] Gil: Awesome. Thanks for hopping in. I reached out few weeks ago. I’m excited to have you on. I think one of the things that we’re most excited to talk about is the world of social media. The timing is interesting because as we’re recording this podcast yesterday, Facebook and Instagram had a big giant outage.

And the internet had a sigh of relief for a few hours, I guess, is the best way to put it. But before we hop into the topic of the day, for those who might not follow you on all of the popular social media channels, we’d love for you to share your background, how you got to where you are, what you do now, and then we can go from there.

[00:01:27] Jon-Stephen: Yeah. So, long story short, I’ve been doing social media marketing for as long as it has been a career. My original intention was to teach literature, but I ended up tweeting instead. I got my start doing social media for the International Office at the University of Central Arkansas, and little by little, doing bigger and bigger accounts, submissions, advising, and wanted to do work for a whole university.

At the time, that did not exist at the university I was at. So, went and found a university that did, and was the first full-time social media manager at Texas State University, did a stint in government with the Texas Department of Transportation, and then, finally, the university I had been at created that position. And I went and did that at the University of Central Arkansas for a while, and spent a lot of time in higher ed.

And during COVID, like, a lot of people had just, kind of, a time to re-evaluate things, and ended up doing social media in the entertainment industry, freelancing for the Amazon Prime video series, Invincible, which led to more jobs in the entertainment industry.

I’ve worked on Rings of Power, for Amazon. I worked with an agency and worked on the Avatar franchise, the James Cameron, not the Airbenders, and several other properties, currently working on Hazbin Hotel, doing some community management on the Shōgun remake, and several other things. So, it’s been an exciting turn of events to get to work on a lot of different fun projects.

[00:02:48] Gil: Got it. Yeah. Sounds like there’s a pretty big difference between working for the Avatar franchise and working for, like, an admissions department at…

[00:02:54] Jon-Stephen: You’d be surprised how much they have in common. So, you know.

[00:02:58] Gil: So, let’s talk about that, right? Like, I think, you know, before we started recording, we were talking about how, in higher ed specifically, it seems like we’re always a little behind the world on things related to technology, social media is one. I, I made the joke before.

And I’ve made it many times on this podcast that, in many respects, we’re still trying to figure out Facebook. And Facebook is now “dead,” to the audiences, many of the audiences we’re trying to reach. So, I’d love to, kind of, hear your 10,000-foot view of the cross-section of the entertainment industry and higher ed and, you know, how institutions might be thinking differently about social media.

[00:03:37] Jon-Stephen: Well, there’s a, a few things they have in common, few things that are very different. Budget is the first one, you know. There’s a lot more budget in entertainment than there is higher ed. But I will say a few things that, that are similar. Some of the struggles just are everywhere. Silos exist no matter what job you’re in. We think of that, kind of, as an exclusive higher ed thing because it seems so obvious.

Like, you have an admissions department. You have athletics. You have advising. You have all these little different constituencies all across campus vying for things, but the same thing exists in other industries. In, in entertainment, you’ve got the marketing, but you have a, sort of, franchise needs. That was one thing that I have worked on past is, sort of, franchise management via social of being sure every single thing has its time in the sun.

You have a big franchise, like the Avatar series, where you don’t just have the films. You have merch tie-ins. Even with that, there’s, you know, you’ve got a tie-in with Lego. You’ve got a tie in with McFarlane Toys. All of these things. And you want to be sure everybody’s getting their moment on social media. And a lot of these constituencies aren’t talking to each other.

So, you’re playing air traffic controller to be sure everybody’s needs get met, which is very similar to higher ed, being a social media manager, where it’s like, “Okay. What are we doing for admissions? What are we doing for advancement?” all of those things and being sure everybody gets moment to shine on the social channels.

One thing that is different, though, I will say, you do still have the struggle of trying to explain the value of social media to higher ups. There’s a lot of folks that still don’t get it. Even here we are in 2024, people still think, “Oh, okay. Well, social, second place. We want to be on TV commercials, and billboards, and all of those things,” but I will say executives do pay attention to social and the value of social listening.

And not just how social listening can inform your marketing efforts, but every single thing around your brand. It starts from the beginning. Sometimes, social listening in the entertainment industry for smart studios begins before the films even get made. You have a studio who purchases the rights to a shiny new IP. There’s a book series that is really popular. And they’ve purchased the film rights to it.

Well, that’s when the social listening begins because they hire companies. I’ve worked with one that does the social listening and finds out, “Okay. You’ve got this new IP. Here’s all the conversation around that book series that’s going to get adapted. Here’s how many mentions that one specific character has and rankings. Okay. This is what you have to include when you write the script to keep fans happy.” Those, sort of, things happen on a regular basis.

And I think that’s something that higher ed can definitely learn from the entertainment industry of, like, what are your students saying about your university? And don’t limit that to just what photos you’re putting in the view book. Think about, like, what our course offerings are, all the way down to, like, what foods are the most popular in the cafeteria?

[00:06:38] Gil: Yeah.

[00:06:38] Jon-Stephen: What do we need to deal away with? Of course, you’re going to hear a lot of complaints about parking, and there’s nothing you can do about that, but there are, like, tangible things that you can change to make your university a better place and better serve your students. You just have to be able sit down and listen to that. And studio execs listen to that, pay attention to those social listening reports, from the very beginning of the process of making a film.

[00:07:00] Gil: Yeah. And I think that’s a great point. You have studio execs. What are they looking at? At the end of the day, they’re looking at the performance of that property, right, and revenue that’s being generated, and how is it performing against budget for promotion and production of whatever it is, right? If it’s a Marvel movie, what’s the production budget plus the marketing budget? We need to be exceeding that by 20, 000%, right?

Institutions, it seems like, should be looking at social media in a very similar way where it’s just translating it to a college and university mindset of, well, impact on enrollment, impact on alumni giving, impact on community engagement, right? And those are the areas that, I think, college and universities can, colleges and universities rather, can potentially improve. I will say one thing I did not hear you say was just make it go viral, right?

And so, we have this, kind of, mindset around just, like, posting flyers to the internet, right, is a, a, a mindset that still permeates in a lot of respects. I, I cringe every time I’m on Instagram and I see one of, like, my neighboring towns just post something. Oh, that’s just a flyer on the internet.

So, what do you say to people who are working in social media roles that are tasked with doing everything you were just talking about, but then the, the, the knock on the door happens or the Slack message comes up, and it’s, “Hey, here’s a flyer. Make it go viral.”?

[00:08:29] Jon-Stephen: You have to pick your battles carefully. In my younger, more vulnerable years, I would fight tooth and nail not to put that flyer up. And there are times when like, okay, yeah, you have to be the guardian because if you open the floodgates, the one flyer, you’re going to have just tons. But also, there are times when it’s just like, hey, one, I don’t have the energy to fight it today.

Two, I don’t want to start a fight with this dean or, or whoever is making this request. So, one post is not going to make or break your social strategy. That said, education, I think, is the most important, explaining to those constituencies why this is a bad idea, but also offering something that would work better. A lot of them, they don’t know.

One thing during my time in higher ed is at least once a semester, I would have a lunch-and-learn training session of just anybody who wants to come, I’m going to explain, you know, our social strategy at the university, and how you can help, and what you can do on your social channels to make it work. The problem is a lot of those times, you’re just preaching to the choir. The people that actually need to be there aren’t the people that are going.

But after a while, word gets out. People on campus talk and go, “Hey, I went to this lunch-and-learn. I learned this. Maybe don’t send them that flyer. Let’s do something different.” They, kind of, advocate for you there. But also, just remember, sometimes, people are just trying to check off boxes. And that happens everywhere. Like, okay. We’ve got this flyer. We’ve got this event. Did you contact marketing to put it on social media yet?

Whether or not they really care about it, they’re just trying to get their box ticked. And that happens all over. I mean, at the entertainment industry, you see it all the time. Next time, you check entertainment properties feed, and you see the posts, the countdown, five days to release, or they all have these same, sort of, beats they feel like they have to hit.

And sometimes, it’s because those beats actually work. And they do something. And other times, it’s okay, well, this is the box we check off. So, try and know the difference. Like, is this something that you actually need posted, or is this something that you’re just going down your checklist and, and making sure it happens?

[00:10:33] Gil: Yeah. And I think, from my purview, I’ve worked in higher ed my whole career, and I’ve worked in, specifically, in marketing, right? And the challenge that heads of marketing and, and CMOs have is evangelizing internally for their overall strategy, right? And you spend so much time learning about students or alumni, whatever, name the audience, right?

You, you spend so much time focused on your audience that sometimes, you forget that your internal audience needs to buy into your strategy, too. And if you don’t do that, then your days are numbered. Even if you have the best strategy in the world, if people don’t believe in it, it’s, it’s not going to matter. And I think at that level of social media management, it’s a mirror of that, right, if, if you’re not communicating internally what you’re doing and why. And when you push back the why, that’s a challenge that everybody faces.

[00:11:22] Jon-Stephen: Yeah. And I think, and this is not a struggle that’s exclusive to social media marketing or marketing anyway, it’s that the things that seem obvious to us are not obvious to everyone, right? We assume everybody knows. Yeah, links don’t work in Instagram captions. But no, that is not common knowledge.

Those, sort of, things we have to educate people about, that you don’t post flyers on social media, that a QR code on an image that’s posted on Twitter is not going to generate anything for you. Most people don’t know that. And those things that we get a little too inside baseball. And we assume, especially, maybe it is worse for social media managers because I think we even fall victim to the, it’s social media. Yeah. Everybody knows how to do this-

[00:12:10] Gil: Yeah.

[00:12:10] Jon-Stephen: … trap, which we get upset. Like, oh, no, there’s more to it than that. But then we, as social media marketers, assume, “Well, duh, how do you not know this?”

[00:12:19] Gil: Yeah.

[00:12:20] Jon-Stephen: Well, it’s not obvious to everybody. So, I think doing a better job of explaining the basics of what we do is really important.

[00:12:29] Gil: Yeah, I’m with you. And I think one of the things I’d love to dive deeper on is the mindset of social media managers and how we best have to understand, kind of, the, the challenges that they’re facing and continue to give them advice on managing up internally for sure.

I know one of the things you put on your LinkedIn is you say things louder for the people in the back. And so, I think what we’ll do is we’ll take a quick break. And when we come back, we’ll say some things louder for the people in the back on behalf of social media managers everywhere. So, we’ll take a break. And we’ll be right back.

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[00:13:52] Gil: All right. We are back. And before the break, I mentioned that one of the things on your LinkedIn profile right across the top is, “I say things louder for the people in the back.” And I think that’s a very great jumping off point to talk about the challenges that social media managers face in this space. So, I’ll give you a good example here.

One of the things you posted recently about how the jobs of a social media manager and a content creator are two different things, right? And that should be two different roles. Clearly, you’ve worked in the higher ed space. There are resourcing challenges. There are time commitment challenges. I’d love for you to, kind of, share some of your thoughts on that and apply it to colleges and universities and how they might be able to stretch their resources or focus their efforts to be most impactful.

[00:14:43] Jon-Stephen: Yeah. I think it’s interesting. We talk about social media managers. And I think if you ask 10 different people what a social media manager does, you’d get 10 different answers. And I think that’s valid because the role of a social media manager is going to be very different depending on the industry, the size of the company, so many factors, what the talents of the social media manager themselves are.

But I do think we are getting to this point where we expect social media managers to do a lot more than one person is capable of. There are so many networks now that have so many different features. The strategy and being good at writing a tweet versus creating a TikTok video is very different.

The community management side of jumping in and, like, doing the customer service and replying people, doing the social listening and building strategies, a completely different skill set. There’s all these different things. And granted, universities can’t hire full teams to do all of these. So, you have to, kind of, to use the cliche, find somebody to wear many hats.

But I think we need to start rethinking the role of social media manager, and frame it more like a creative director. A social media manager is the person who understands your social channels, understands the strategy, how everything works, what sort of content will perform well on your channels and meet the needs of your audience, and should probably be more in that directorial role of saying working with your graphic designers that are doing your view book and doing all of those other things for print and website and all of that, but working with them to create content for social media, working with your videographer and photographers to create social media-specific content.

And that means giving them that time and those resources and some of the bandwidth of your creative team to build social content, which is a struggle, right? Yeah. That view book is super important. It might be, like, the bulk of your graphic designers’ time, but so is that social. Maybe your social media manager doesn’t need to just be taking scraps all the time, right?

Maybe we need to have some focus on social content from that creative team. So, yeah, rethinking that and re-evaluating. And also, like, not one person can be a great photographer, graphic designer, videographer, and copywriter all in one, right? So, your social media manager probably needs a hand to, to help build that content. They can’t be building strategy and content all at once.

Yeah. And I think one of the things that, to read between the lines a little bit, it’s how do we repurpose content most effectively? Because you don’t need to reinvent the wheel, but there’s that balance of you can’t just copy and paste what you say on Twitter onto Facebook, onto Instagram, because that doesn’t work either, right?

[00:17:29] Gil: Right.

[00:17:29] Jon-Stephen: And so, how do you, you know, if we talk about repurposing the best thought process and mindset around stretching that content to go as far as you can so you’re not bugging the graphic designer for 16 different things, but you’re also making it authentic for the channel? And some of that comes down to just including the social media manager in meetings.

And, and nobody wants more meetings, but sometimes, the social media manager needs to know things. Sometimes, you never know, like, where that content is going to come from that can be repurposed. I’ve been in those meetings where it’s like, “Oh, you’re doing that. Hey, can I grab that graphic? I can repurpose that for social.”

A, a good example is for homecoming every year, the university I was at would create, you know, a logo for homecoming, a series of logos for it. I’m like, “Hey, can I get those logos? And I can animate those to turn them into, to Instagram sticker gifts.” And, man, more bang for your buck for that. And to find those ways.

And, and social media managers, especially in higher ed, have learned ways to be creative because so often, what happens is, like, we get left with the scraps. I, I keep harping on view book, but in my head, like, view book always would take priority of the creative team. And it’s like, okay, well, what are you making for the view book that I can use? And also, that unifies your marketing, right? If your social content looks like your view book, beautiful, right?

You don’t have that disconnect. You don’t have that student who gets that shiny view book in the mail and then goes and sees your social channels, and it looks completely different. Like, find those ways to connect. But as much as I’d love to harp social first, that’s not always the case in higher ed. So, we do have to learn, like, how can we find the scraps?

One university I was at, every year, the, the president would send out a, a holiday card. And she would want three different options to pick from. So, our design team would make three different ones. One would get picked. And two would just end up on the cutting room floor. And I learned very quickly every year. It’s like, whatever she doesn’t pick, she gets three choices, I get two.

[00:19:32] Gil: Right.

[00:19:33] Jon-Stephen: So, she’d pick one, and then I’d have two to choose from for a holiday social media post. And generally, I would get the best one because my taste is better.

[00:19:44] Gil: There you go.

[00:19:45] Jon-Stephen: So, yeah, you can go with that. So, there’s so many ways. You just have to be in the know. Like-

[00:19:51] Gil: Yeah.

[00:19:52] Jon-Stephen: … I hate to say it, but part of being a social media manager is just being up in people’s business and, like, “Hey, what are you making? Like, can I have some of that?” Right? And I think that’s the point is, like you said, it’s never going to be social first because, I, I mean, at the end of the day, social media is a component of the overall marketing plan. You’re not going to plan your whole marketing plan around social media.

It should be the other way around. But that means that social needs a seat at the table, right? And being a part of those conversations just gives you that window into what’s available to use as a resource. I think it’s one of the things you see is like, you know, when, when a marketing plan comes up, it’s like, “Okay. Well, here’s what we have for print. Here’s our TV spot. Here’s all the stuff.”

And then social is like, “Well, what, what do we have?” And it’s like, “Well, here’s some photos I took on my phone. Post them and see how they do. Go viral.” And I think social needs to be up at that forefront. I think it’s every bit as important, if not more, than most of our traditional marketing efforts.

[00:20:54] Gil: Absolutely, absolutely. Awesome. Well, that’s, I think, that’s a good, segue into what will be the final part of our conversation. And when we come back from a break, we will hop into advice for social media managers for how to best self-advocate and best be a part of… how to best get up in people’s business, we’ll say. So, we’ll take a break. And we’ll be right back. 

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[00:22:01] Gil:  All right. We are back. And I think, you know, one of the things that most people are probably tuning in for is really tactical advice for social media managers to self-advocate, right? And I think we can’t cover this topic enough because I feel like we, especially in the higher ed community, have been harping on this for decades now at this point.

I’ll give you a great example, personal example of mine. When I was running social media for an institution that I was working at, we got an e-mail from the president’s office because the president had gotten an e-mail from a board member saying, “Why is this universe? Why are you not on Facebook? My kids are…”

And this was years ago, so kids were actually still on Facebook, but you know, “My grandkids are on Facebook. Everyone’s talking about Facebook. Why are you not on Facebook?” And lo and behold, we were. We had a Facebook page. And we paid a company to benchmark us against our peer institutions to put together a report to send back to the office to demonstrate to them that we actually are. We’re on this, right?

And so, I think there’s a certain level of, like, taking it for granted that we have to be on all these channels, but then there’s that not paying attention to it, but then the moment you have to care about it, you have to care about it, right? And so, what are some of the things you tell people when it’s really about that self-advocacy and that, kind of, defending your work, because there is that certain level of, kind of, taking it for granted and lack of respect for the work that a social media manager has to do?

[00:23:26] Jon-Stephen: No one is going to advocate for you, so you have to advocate for yourself. You have to. You have to get over this. Like, we don’t brag about ourselves. We’re taught to be humble and all that. Like, that goes out the window. And especially at higher ed, because most of your admin, the people that are in higher levels, university presidents, they’re coming from an academic background where it is publish or perish.

Like, you are judged by how often you publish and where you are published and how your name is known. So, this may not be for everybody, but this was what worked for me. It was, like, my intention was to, to become a, a literature professor. So, I, I had that publish or perish drilled into me.

So, when I moved over to staff and started doing marketing, I was like, “You know what? I’m going to go to conferences. And I’m not just going to attend the conference. I’m going to present. And when I present, I’m going to write up a press release and send it to the media office, like, to put on the website that university social media manager presents at National Conference,” because that happened to me. I, I was working in the marketing office.

And, and it was marketing media relations. You know, you’re all tied together. And I noticed on the website one day, it’s like, there was an article, like, you know, you’ve got your local news section here at the bottom, “Professor appears on podcast.” And I was just thinking like, “I was on five podcasts this year talking about our social media. We didn’t do this,” you know, like.

And I went into, to the media relations for some, like, “Why don’t we talk about what we do here, there?” Because the only people that read that are, you know, employees of the university, but they’re the ones that matter. Like, we need to be bragging on what we do. And she’s like, “Well, if you want to write the press release, have at it.” I’m like, “All right.”

[00:25:01] Gil: Yeah.

[00:25:02] Jon-Stephen: I wrote a press release about me going on podcast. But that’s the thing you’ve got to do because when you’re in those meetings, your provost reads that news. Your president reads that news. Your director of admissions reads those university news items. Get your name in there. Talk about what you’re doing on social media. Find those avenues to do it.

And go out and, and speak at, at, at conferences, and, and then write about it because academics respect that. When they read about that, when you go into that meeting to, like, advocate that, you know, show off your new marketing strategy, your social media strategy, if they’ve seen that and they know it, it validates that you know your stuff, and you’re not just, you know, somebody fresh out of college that just is running the social. You are a professional. And you constantly have to remind people of that. But like, doing that help.

[00:25:53] Gil: And I, I think that makes a ton of sense. And I think one of the challenges that a lot of people in these roles have is I feel like, and it’s gotten better, but there’s still the challenge that for many institutions, who is the social media manager? The social media manager is the young person that just recently graduated that is responsible for their own admissions, their own recruitment territory, and they have to run the Instagram, right?

And they’ve gotten better about using student ambassadors and crowdsourcing content and being… you know. We haven’t even talked about social listening. I think we should have a whole separate podcast about that piece. But I know I’ve been asked many times, because I’ve been on the speaking circuit at conferences all over the place for years, and it’s like, “I just don’t know how to get started.”

It’s like, just start, right? Like, go on the conference website, click call for proposals, fill in the blocks, and click submit, because if you don’t, someone else is going to, right? And there’s, I think, there’s this hesitancy to put yourself forward, but the reality is, is the barriers to entry at a lot of these conferences are not super-duper high. You just need to submit the damn application.

[00:26:58] Jon-Stephen: And these conferences, I’ve been on conference committees before, right, they want a myriad of different levels of presentations, right? So, you could be that fresh-out-of-college social media manager, your first job. And you think, “Oh, I don’t have anything to share,” but no, your experience is valuable. Tell us about that day-one experience.

Tell us those things, because we need the basics and the, the higher level stuff as well for a successful conference. So, you may not know it, and coming back to what we were saying earlier, about stating the things that we think are obvious to us. Like, go in and share, right? I want to hear from younger social media managers who are new to the field because they’re familiar with things I’m not, right?

There are TikTok trends and things like that that I’m just like, I don’t have the time to get on that. I don’t have the, I don’t have the rhythm to do TikTok videos. I know how important TikTok is and how effective. I actually have, like, written in my schedule, like, I, I have to tell myself, like, go spend 30 minutes on TikTok, because, one, I, I’m 43 years old. I have a full-time job and a kid and a dog and all of those things. Like, I just don’t have the time to, to really immerse myself in that. I can’t be on every single platform all the time.

[00:28:20] Gil: Yeah.

[00:28:21] Jon-Stephen: So, we want to learn from the people that can and are, are familiar with that. Give us the shorthand. What have you learned?

[00:28:28] Gil: And, and I think in the higher ed space specifically, I think, for a first-year, second-year social media manager, like, the types of conferences that you’re going to get approval for travel for and whatnot are a lot of the times the closer regional ones, where, again, the barriers to entry are not as high for your type of content. And tactical from-the-ground presentations actually perform really well there from a just conference engagement perspective.

I know I’ve presented both levels of content at those types of conferences. And I will say that the more higher level strategic you get, the lower your performance is as far as evaluations and engagement because people are actually there because they want ideas to copy, right? And they want to see what other people are actually doing, not research trends, right?

Research trends are more, like, the national conferences and the faculty and working high-level administrators and that sort of stuff. So, there is that balance, like, find the places where you’re going to be able to break through the clutter. And that’s going to be a great spot for some, especially in their first or second year, to get their foot in the door, get their face out there. And then the opportunities just start to come to you.

[00:29:34] Jon-Stephen: And you actually get discounts to be able to attend those conferences. Like, that was part of one of the main reasons I started doing it was like, I’d be like, “I, I want to go to this conference.” And it’s like, “Well, we don’t have the funding for that.” Like, “Well, what if I tell you that I’m presenting and they pay the conference fee, the school just has to pay travel?” “All right.” Yep. That way, not only do I speak, I get to learn.

[00:29:57] Gil: I, I will say that one of the reasons why, the first reason why, I submitted a proposal to present at a conference was because the VP of Enrollment walked into the admissions office one day and said to everyone, “Hey, just so you all know, travel is limited for things. Resources are limited. However, if you submit to speak at a conference, we will always, always, always support you if you get accepted,” because, like you said before, faculty and administrators really respect that, sort of, stuff.

And so, for the VP to be able to say, “So and so on my staff is presenting at a national conference on this stuff,” is really important. That is going to increase your pull on campus when you want to get more resourcing, or you want to get a seat at the table. You don’t want to just get table scraps, but you want to be a part of the processes. And that’s the self-advocacy. And again, you mentioned it, right? You got to grow your ego a little bit. I think so many people are, you know, “My work will speak for itself.” Your work will not speak for itself.

[00:30:55] Jon-Stephen: No, it won’t. And not only that, like, grow your career if you want to move up. Having that name recognition of, of being somebody that goes out and presents and has, as well, shares their work, it helps you so much. In fact, like, part of the reason I got the job working on Invincible was from my Twitter feed because I was daily would tweet about social media marketing and my takes on that, but I would also, like, spice it in with, like, comic book stuff and, like, my own personality.

And one day, somebody from Amazon Prime Video messaged me and was like, “Hey, you know your social. You’re clearly a comic book nerd. We’ve got this new series. Would you be interested in coming to freelance on it?” And yes.

[00:31:37] Gil: Yes. Sure. Awesome. Well, this is all great advice. And I hope that everyone is able to take pieces of this and advance their career, advance their work, advance the field of social media management, and continue to advocate and make it a more integral part of the marketing and communication plans at our institutions. For folks that want to get in touch with you, pick your brain, stay in contact, what are some of the best ways to do that?

[00:32:06] Jon-Stephen: Yeah. I’m at JS Stansel on all the socials. I’m most active on Twitter and LinkedIn, but you can find me on TikTok. You can find me on, on Threads. You can find me just about everywhere, but just at JS Stansel.[00:32:19] Gil: Awesome. Well, thank you so much again for taking the time to, to join us. And for our listeners, all of the resources we talked about will be in the episode notes. And we will see you next time on FYI. Bye.

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