Episode 68: The COPE Method For Social Media With Perri Collins

"Stop dreaming and start doing." When it comes to using social media to explode your business, that's Perri Collins' mantra. But, it's hard to stop dreaming until you actually know WHAT you need to be doing. That's where Perri comes in. Listen in as Bella & Perri discuss: What Perri loves most about social media Perri Collins Similarities & differences between doing social media for a university versus small businesses The benefits and struggles of working with millenials What is the COPE method? How can you save time and resources in social media marketing? Perri Collins designed her first website in 1999 and hasn't stopped playing in the digital world since then. Perri started her digital career working in the media industry, so she has firsthand experience in how to maximize digital content to reach people. She has a degree in journalism and is currently a social media specialist at Arizona State University. Subscribe To The Show: Transcript: This is episode 68 of Bella in Your Business. Welcome to Bella in Your Business, where Bella will discuss anything and everything about your pet sitting business to help you land on target. So get ready, Bella's got your chute. Let's jump. Welcome to Bella in Your Business. My name is Bella Vasta with Jump Consulting, and today I have Perri Collins here. Perri Collins had designed her first website in 1999 and hasn't stopped playing in the digital world since. Perri started her digital career working in the media industry, so she has firsthand experience in how to maximize digital content to reach people. But most excitingly, and where she is today, I think, Perri is working with Arizona State, my alumni, and I've known Perri online forever, but it wasn't until recently I saw her face to face. And you guys are in for a real treat today, because Perri is an excitable, funny, bubbly, awesome person, and prepare to be excited. Perri, welcome to the show. Thanks so much, Bella. Thank you for the kind words. For sure. You're like one of my favorite people. You always make me smile. And like, I know that our listeners are going to hear your smile in everything that you say. You're just the happiest person. I adore you. Thank you. So why don't you fill in the gaps there for us? Tell us what that website was for in 1999 and kind of how did you go from that to running the social media, I mean the social media specialist at ASU. Well, like most teenagers, I had a lot of angst. And when I discovered that you can start up a website on the internet and start posting things, I got excited. So I would see all my favorite poets and writers and musicians. And I said, well, if they can do it, I can do it. So I learned how to make a website and I posted like all this terrible teenage poetry and things about how horrible life is as an 18 year old. So pretty typical. I'm also an alum of Arizona State University. I have a degree in journalism and when they had an opening, I thought, hey, why not apply and see where this goes? And I have to say, it's definitely one of the best decisions I've ever made. It is super fun working with young people. Arizona State University, for those that don't know, is the largest four-year public university in the United States. We have over 88,000 students. Yes, it's insane, it's massive, but it's so lively. It's its own little city and it's just full of amazing people, whether it's students or researchers or professors or people in the community. There's a lot of ties in and there's a lot of really great things going on. And it's so easy to share that on social media. I love it. And I'm sure content abound, endless amounts of content. Too much sometimes. So before we dive deep into ASU and what you're currently doing, you were once telling me a story about growing up on a ranch and how that kind of helped shape you or whatnot. Do you want to tell us more about that? Sure. So I grew up in the smack dab middle of Texas in a little town called Abilene and not even in Abilene. It was out in the countryside. Abilene was just the nearest town and our first few weeks there we didn't have running water. We didn't have electricity. My mom is a native New Yorker, but she always wanted like land and space and air to raise her children. So she moved us out to the middle of nowhere in Texas right before I started high school and I just learned to adapt to country living and learn how to milk cows and garden and farm and can vegetables and all those great things. We didn't have internet out there until like 1999 or 2000 and it was dial up. So that was kind of crazy. But of course, you know, I took to it instantaneously. I've always loved technology ever since I was young. So it's been unique. It's been very diverse learning about these two different dichotomies, how people in the country with limited access to technology use it as opposed to city dwellers and in places where there are a lot more businesses who use like social media and the internet to find business. All right. So you're working at this university now, and I know that you've worked with small businesses too. Tell me about the differences between doing social media at a university versus helping small businesses. Well, I would say that working at a university, your audience is pretty much set. Like people understand the value that you're providing. They have grown up understanding the value of education. So getting that point across to them, especially on social media, is a lot easier than working with a small business who might not really have their value proposition defined yet. You don't have to convince people that the social media aspect of it is important because they're already living it. They're already millennials, right? They've been brought up around it. Right, exactly. And surprisingly, parents are super tech savvy as well. So we get a lot of those. My favorite is when we post things about scholarships and awards coming up that parents will tag their students and their high schoolers and college students in those posts. So that's always amazing to see. Whereas in small businesses, you might have somebody who's been running the same business for like 20 years and they're not as adaptable to learning a new method of reaching out to people. Wow. I've never even considered that. It's like two different worlds of people almost that you're dealing with. Now there's a lot of chatter in our groups as pet sitters and dog walkers. Millennials will get a bad rep, man, bad rep. And what would you say to a business owner who's looking to hire a millennial or bring a millennial on? What are the advantages and like the benefits of working with that demographic? I think the advantages and benefits are pretty easy to see. First of all, they have grown up with the internet, so they are tech savvy, but also they innately understand the consumer relationship with businesses because they are following celebrities. They are following their favorite brands. So they can take that information and understand how to use it for your business. And also, I just love their energy. They have such big dreams and big hopes. To me, that's a very attractive thing. Like, I want to work with somebody who is open to learning, who has these great ideas, who can really think outside the box, because they've never been constrained by the box. Whereas with some of your older workers, again, you fall into that mindset of this is the way it's always been done. This is the way we're going to continue to do it. And that doesn't work for every business. Yeah, that's such a good point. I love the whole fact that they haven't had the constraint of the box. That's really good. Who are the people that make up your team? Because I imagine you can't do the social media yourself for the entire campus. So what does that department even look like? I mean, that department didn't even exist 10 years ago when I, or 15 years ago when I was there. What does the social media department or specialists do? Like, what does your job consist of? My job consists of really just creating fans, creating raving fans. I want to help the students have and then tell everybody how great it is and all the great things about coming to school here. So it's kind of like grassroots marketing, word of mouth. We just want to create an amazing experience. We want to let the students know that they are valued and then when they graduate, they can tell everybody what they can expect when they get here. So as for our team, as you can imagine, it's pretty big. I want to say we're bordering on 24 people right now and that includes everybody from graphic designers. We have content people. We have people who write content strictly for undergrads, content for research, content for graduate students. We have people who manage our digital advertising, our website, and our PR with other local and national publications and broadcast media. So it's pretty big. There's a lot of people, but luckily ASU really values culture and so everyone is a really great culture fit and we all work really well together. We're all very enthusiastic about the work so it makes it pretty simple. That's exciting. So what platforms are you actually engaging on every day for ASU? Oh my god, so many. Well, we're really building our Snapchat right now and of course Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. We do some stuff with Pinterest, not as much as we'd like. And of course YouTube. We host our professional videos on Vimeo, but in order to engage the community, we do a lot of YouTube videos as well. Okay, so you have all of these different platforms and I can feel like our listeners as business owners might also kind of feel like overwhelmed. They're like, wow, there's so many different platforms. Which one do I post on? When do I post on it? So Perri, enlighten us. When you are at work, is it really like you get a piece of content and you're like, okay,