Act Quickly Or Perish – Good Advice For Schools

Yesterday I released my highly anticipated Social Media Schools Education & Technology Manifesto. In preparation for the manifesto’s launch I wrote about the report here on SocialMediaSchools.com, sent a blast out to my email subscribers using Aweber and notified my followers on Twitter and Facebook. 

About fifteen minutes after the report was released I got a message from Bill, one of my email newsletter subscribers, telling me there was a mistake with the link at the end of the report. 

“Oh no!” I thought. “I just sent that report out to EVERYONE!!! What am I going to do?” 

I bet you’ve been in this situation before. Maybe you published a newspaper ad for your school and you listed the wrong phone number? Maybe you approved a Yellow Pages listing with an incorrect address? Or maybe you mailed out thousands of flyers to parents and community members with the name of your principal spelled incorrectly? Even if you’ve never done such a thing, I’m sure you can understand how embarrassing and nerve-wracking a mistake such as this can be (especially when big money is involved). 

Of course, after you’re aware of the problem, you’ve got to ask yourself, “What, if anything, can I do to fix the situation?” 

In many cases, there simply isn’t anything you can do. If you publish a newspaper advertisement, for example, and it gets printed with false information, there’s nothing you can do. If you mail out a flyer and you’ve spelled a dozen words incorrectly throughout the document, there’s nothing you can do. 

But in my case, when I found out that there was an error involving the link at the end of my Social Media Schools Manifesto, THERE WAS SOMETHING I COULD DO!… and I jumped in there to fix the problem as quickly as I possibly could. 

The moment I was notified about the mistake, I opened the original document, fixed the link, saved the file as a new PDF and uploaded the new and improved manifesto to my Aweber account – thus ensuring that anyone who might ask for the report in the future would get the corrected version. 

Less than three minutes later I was done… and a huge calamity had been averted!

After handling the situation, I assessed the damage. Only 46 people had downloaded the report with the error in it. The rest would receive the corrected version.

“Whew!” I thought to myself. “I sure do love the Internet.” 

You see, if this had been a paper flyer or book that I had distributed in a more traditional manner, my mistake would have cost thousands of dollars and could have potentially ruined the launch of my Social Media Schools report. But because of the digital nature of the Internet and my ability to react so incredibly fast, I was able to quickly and easily salvage the launch of my manifesto. 

In the Social Media Schools Education & Technology Manifesto I talk about how the world is changing and how everything is so much faster nowadays. I talk about how schools, more often times than not, move too slowly for the new generation of information consumers… and I think this is a good example of what I was discussing in the report. 

If I had been a traditional school and had sent out a document such as my Social Media Schools Manifesto, only 15 minutes later discovering that there was a major mistake in it, I doubt that I would have been able to react so quickly.

In a similar situation, many schools would have spent an hour tracking down the person who made the mistake. Then they’d have to put a team together to decide if there was any way to fix the problem. Then they’d assign people to perform certain tasks to correct the situation… and after a day or two had gone by, the mistake would eventually be fixed. But in that amount of time, a Manifesto such as mine, distributed over the Internet, will have gone out to hundreds, if not thousands of people, and the damage after a day or two would certainly be substantial.  

But thanks to the Internet, a keen and forgiving reader who was willing to quickly notify me of the problem, and my ability to move so incredibly fast, I was able to fix the situation and assess the damage in less than three minutes flat. 

What does all this mean for you and your school?

It means that for schools looking to succeed online, the ability to move quickly is of utmost importance. If it takes you a day or two to decide what content you want to post online or what message you want to send to your community, you’re moving much to slowly. 

Social media and the Internet move at incredible speeds. As a school, you need to realize this and use it to your advantage.

When situations come up that can be quickly addressed through online press releases, Twitter blasts or shout-outs to your Facebook community, you need to react quickly and nip these things in the bud before they have a chance of become bigger than they already are. 

If you haven’t already done so, be sure to grab a free copy of my Social Media Schools Education & Technology Manifesto and read more about the ever changing nature of technology and education.  

Photo by Rob React

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