After going through the SAS websites it became apparent that there was a large quantity of social-media being used by both the central School, and the connected Institutes. However, the usage level, and the traffic created by these social-media outlets, differed massively from one to another.
Many of the blogs, groups and feeds that I found overlapped one another, often leading to stagnation or abandonment. It became clear that those accounts with regularly updated content, especially content which was news-worthy, were the most successful.
One key issue I stumbled-upon during the benchmarking, was how separate projects or centres that are based in an Institute, but are distinct, can be promoted. Institutes seemed to try two opposing ways to deal with this issue
Some Institutes have chosen to have lots of smaller websites and blogs but as I was looking for these it became pretty confusing what was what. There were so many websites and each had lots of different connection to other groups or institutes that it became difficult to determine what the key resource was. It also meant that content would sometimes be sparse as each smaller project would try to fill a whole new website or blog.
Other Institutions seemed to try to combine projects and centres into their own website. This also had its own problems; distinguishing the project from the institute became very difficult and results/reports/information often got lost in other parts of the website.
The benchmarking has helped highlight this issue and it will be an important thing that must be overcome in this project if we are to increase the SAS online experience.