Analytics at Live Oak Communications

By: Anna Cave 
​
Live Oak Communications is one of the most prominent organizations for analytics at Elon University.

Let's begin by clarifying what Live Oak actually is: a student-run communications agency. They use communication strategies to create useful campaigns for local clients in the Elon area that are then measured by Live Oak's media analytics team. 

Live Oak has a few different departments that work together to create and measure campaigns for the clients. There is an account team for each client that is in direct contact with their client through an account supervisor. The account team discusses expectations and develops a strategic plan for the semester with the client before they begin working on the requested deliverables. The creative team takes information about the client's needs from the account team and creates work based on their requests. Once the creative and account teams have created deliverables for the client (anything from writing social media to designing a new logo), the analytics team comes in to make sure all that hard work is actually effective. Despite all the separate teams, Live Oak still communicates as a whole using the project management tool, Slack. This keeps the entire agency in the loop, and especially useful during COVID-19 where we can't fully meet in person.

At Live Oak, the media analytics executives are a part of an individual account team, as well as the larger media analytics team and meet with both in weekly meetings. It's one of the most diverse positions in the agency because you get to see everything within the account while still having analytics specific projects to work on.

Live Oak Communications Office

​Media analytics executives are crucial to the account team's strategic plan. It's great to develop expectations and ideas for campaigns at the beginning of the semester, but they can't be meaningful if they aren't performing well.

Most of what analytics executives do is measure social media growth. Many platforms make it easy to extract data from posts and figure out what gets the most engagement and reach. By looking at past data and continuing to analyze new posts throughout the semester, analytics executives can report patterns of growth to their account team using Tableau, who can then go in and adjust their semester plan according to new findings. 

A big part of being on the analytics team is research based. Account teams meet with their clients at the beginning of the year for a kick-off meeting to discuss goals and expectations. If the goals are analytics or audience related, the media analytics executive will research them to give the account team recommendations for the semester. It's easy to learn a lot by looking at past data from the client's social pages, but bringing in external research can enhance the strategic plan. Presenting research to the client also benefits the relationship they will have with Live Oak. It takes a lot of faith for real businesses to put their trust in a group of (though highly qualified) college students, and presenting research and reasoning for why the account team is doing what they're doing can help them feel confident in all the amazing work Live Oak is able to do for them.

Though media analytics executives work hard the whole year, their labor really comes into fruition in the final meeting and presentation with the client. At the end of the semester, account teams meet with their clients to summarize all the work and accomplishments from the semester. Everyone on the account team benefits from reflecting on the past few months, but the media analytics executive really has a moment where they can shine. In this meeting, analytics data is summarized to highlight areas of growth, as well as some opportunities for improvement that can be implemented in the next semesters with Live Oak. 

Working for Live Oak's media analytics is definitely challenging, but it's a great place to see what analytics can look like in the real world. Media analytics is a very new major, and it can be hard to define what it looks like after graduation, but Live Oak offers one of many examples of what life could look like after 4 years.