“In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”

– Charles Darwin.

McGraw Hill Education publishing company is an international corporation that includes students, educators, administrators, and other professionals to deliver engaging, adaptive and personalized content to improve academic performance and results. Staying true its motto—“Creating a smarter, better world”—McGraw Hill Education (serving grades K-12 and higher education) uses research-based solutions to provide its audience with the latest in digital technologies. By 2016, McGraw Hill Education will completely transition into a purely-based digital company; that is, there will be no more print books and textbooks to buy. With this global economy and forthcoming digital shift, the time has come to also change old marketing techniques. Through Social Media technology, McGraw Hill now focuses on the end-user of all of its content—direct to student in consumer marketing. By the following formula, McGraw Hill has designed a marketing technological tool that helps spread product awareness and receive feedback simultaneously through Social Media using World Wide Web software: Spread product awareness; Listen to student feedback incorporating student ambassadors; Track metadata; Report back to authors.

Social Media is still at its growth stage (ranging one to two years old) with the help of Christine Ford, Director of McGraw Hill Consumer Marketing and Strategy. Ford began helping the company with marketing techniques in September 2012 when there was virtually no consumer interactivity. As the company products started becoming more hi-tech and adaptive to help students figure out what they know and don’t know in their textbooks—eg. LEARNSMART study tool (more about that later)—she found a need to be proactive about educational content with all of its marketing directed towards the end-user (students).

The intention of the McGraw Hill Education Social Network experience is to provide the primary audience (students of all ages) with the opportunity to follow the thought leaders, brands, and product updates to build a richer and more productive marketer/consumer relationship. However, according to Ford, “this takes time,” just like building any relationship in real life. And what it all boils down to is doing more “listening, not talking” on behalf of the marketer. It is essential to remember that McGraw Hill Publishing is a giant corporation with various different departments and divisions along with many different company Social Network pages on one website. McGraw Hill Education is one of them, featuring 10,000+ employees. So Social Media marketing tools like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Pinterest company pages all include a McGraw Hill Education link. Next are the numbers of each site’s following: 

v    Facebook page, approximately 760 likes and 30 people sharing - https://www.facebook.com/McGrawHillEducation

v    Twitter page, approximately 8500 followers/following and 6300 tweets - https://twitter.com/MHEducation

v    LinkedIn page, approximately 1600 members -  http://www.linkedin.com/company/mcgraw-hill-higher-education

v    YouTube page, approximately 300 subscribers and 10,700 views - http://www.youtube.com/user/MHEducation

v    Pinterest page, approximately 360 followers and 240 following, 15 boards, 190 pins - http://pinterest.com/mcgrawhilled/

v     Also available on Flickr & Tumblr

Marketing tool success rates are not measured by adoption, but by engagement. In February 2013, McGraw Hill Education hosted a panel discussion on the future of Social Media for High Education, and here’s two of the themes discussed cited from PR Newswire: 1. “Social media can help solve the student engagement crisis. Of the more than 20 million higher education learners, more than half will not earn a degree within 6 years. The reason most cited for this is lack of engagement. Social media has an opportunity to engage students in a manner that not only is compatible with the way students already communicate with their peers but can foster more open, collaborative conversations between students and instructors. 2. In order for both students and instructors to engage in social media, there needs to be a level of incentive. In terms of student incentives, McGraw Hill is experimenting with status, reviews and reward models, similar to those used by Amazon and eBay. McGraw Hill’s GradeGuru.com (a knowledge sharing network where college students can share their course notes, build academic reputations and get rewarded) is leading this charge with its Status Badges for top contributors to its site.”

Coming from an exclusive consumer marketing professional background, Ford saw “a need for McGraw Hill Ed to get more serious about consolidating with human behavior online.” In addition to Social Media Network company pages for the use of spreading awareness and collaboration, including blogs and webinars like the McGraw Hill Exchange (https://www.mheonline.com/MHExchange) and Virtual Cooler for talent acquisition (thevirtualcooler.com), Ford had another marketing Social Media plan—a Social E-Commerce Study.

In November 2012, Ford attended an Edusoft (web-based assessment platform company) trade show event in New York along with Director of Digital Product Marketing Brad Parkins. It is an event that takes place every year showcasing new computer system software. Ford would attend these events prior to this year but found that McGraw Hill would have no students present to represent their company like Google would, for example. According to Ford, Google would bring interns from their corporation to talk about their own personal experience with the showcased products. So she took on that form of consumer marketing mentality and decided to do the same.

What better way for marketing experimentation than to have the end-users/“A players” present for feedback at a tech social event? Ford and Parkins brought two unpaid “student ambassadors” to do the job. One was a reporter, recording the event with a video camera for the company YouTube page, and the other was making rounds making conversation with the guests. Both ambassadors wore a McGraw Hill Education T-shirt that said, “I’m a student. Ask me what you think.” This idea was a huge success and impressed many corporations at the networking event, including Google. Upon this Social E-Commerce Study, Ford, Parkins and other marketing managers encouraged more student ambassadors to tweet on and off campus and participate in the live chat events during elections with book authors of more than 600 titles. Students are seen as the real voice that will give honest reviews and report back to friends.

Several employees manage Social Media feedback internally using tools that help manage and track multiple accounts like Hoot Suite and Sprout Social. The tracking for data is also done manually at times from any computer or mobile device—PC, iPad, iPhone at work or at home. Marketing managers figure the analytics through manual monitoring of comments, likes and unlikes or through the metadata mentioned before with the Hoot Suite Facebook Insight feature, Twitter Profile Stats and Sprout Social’s Integrated Analytics. Hoot Suite offers monitoring of Facebook fans, likes, comments, and page activity as well as the fan’s demographic, region, and post source. For Twitter, it also tracks number of followers, lists, mentions, and even comparing of keywords overtime. With Sprout Social, McGraw Hill uses the Integrated Analytics service, which manages up to 10 profiles (in their case 5 for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Pinterest), providing unlimited presentation-ready PDF reports for the company with custom branding. Features used include deeper insights on published content, such as the Social Media messages that resonate and reach the most people in the audience and how it stacks up against the competition. It also features social CRM tools with complimentary training and support for the marketing team.

This information is then used to report back to the company’s main contributors—the authors. The authors use the feedback to make decisions for new content or to enhance content to better suit consumer needs. Thanks to this marketing technology, since August the new testing tool named LEARNSMART has already made changes and updates to help students figure out what they know and do not know in their textbook. It uses a series of adaptive questions to pinpoint each student’s knowledge gaps using instructor and student interaction.

Because this division’s Social Media technology use is still at its growth stage, challenges still remain. However, steps are being taken to overcome them with the help of student ambassadors, instructors, and marketing managers. Challenges consist of the time and effort needed to keep up with consumer feedback and application. To persuade participation with Social Media, McGraw Hill Education’s marketing team has been making a point of going to campuses and implementing grassroot initiatives to create in-person relationships with the consumer base and recruit more student ambassadors. Steadily and surely, the company is taking down the barriers of “approval” yet still holding true to company culture. The company policies and vocabulary are in place, but the rules of engagement for Social Media use have been described as “flexible.” The doors are wide open for the noted “fun and smart” consumer personalities the company finds online. As for the not-so Social Media savvy employees, Director of Consumer Marketing and Strategy Christine Ford says that they are still included in building this Social Media technology tool, because simply put: “Anyone who claims they are a Social Media expert is lying.” Ford claims that nobody is yet. She just encourages all the marketing team and any other company employee to jump right in and get social. That goes for all students, too, but most of all—the student ambassadors—who, although go unpaid monetarily, they get compensated by free company gifts and real marketing experience.

So the marketing cycle continues as such: Spread awareness, Receive feedback, Track data, Report back and repeat. Since the beginning of time, the best marketing tool has always been: “word of mouth.” And that is what McGraw Hill Education is trying to achieve through the Social Media technological tool. The young and technologically savvy student consumer audience that McGraw Hill Education mostly targets is the most suitable end-user for it. And as the publishing company evolves to become a solely digital provider, Social Media has been the most effective new marketing tool yet—benefiting the consumer first, then the authors, then certainly McGraw Hill Educational Publishing.

Works Cited

Hoot Suite. "Custom Social Analytics." 2013 Web. 14 Apr. 2013.

McGraw Hill Education. "McGraw-Hill Education ABOUT US. 2013 Web. 13 Apr. 2013. 

PR Newswire. "McGraw-Hill Brings Together Social Media and Education Experts to Discuss the Future of Social Media in Higher Education.” 11 Feb. 2013 Web. 13 Apr. 2013.

Sprout Social. "Comprehensive Features for Social Business." 2013. Web. 14 Apr. 2013.