Digital Leadership Grew Up. Now What?

In July of 2014, I published my first list of higher education presidents to follow.

I had been studying campus leaders and social media for about a year. Almost no research existed yet. There were no best practices, no playbook, no one telling a chancellor it was okay to be authentic online. So I started paying attention to the ones who were doing it anyway.

I sorted them into categories like “Social Media Rockstars,” “Digital Influencers,” and “Rising Accounts.” I ranked them by follower counts, engagement, consistency, personality, and subject matter.

But if you asked me what I was actually watching for, it was never the numbers. It was the moment a president replied to a nervous incoming student. The chancellor who posted a selfie from the dining hall instead of a press release. The vice president who answered a parent’s worried question at 9 p.m.. I was watching for accessibility. For values. For leaders using these tools so the people who rarely got time in the chancellor’s office or the VP’s suite could reach them.

That is what I was really celebrating. Not reach, but reachability.

Following leaders through the years

I made list after list, then followed every person I added.

In 2014 it was presidents on Twitter. By 2017, I was watching presidents on Instagram too, as leaders learned a photo of move-in day did something a press release never could. By 2018, I started writing about vice presidents on both platforms, because some of the most human and consistent voices in higher education were not in the president’s chair at all. 

Then COVID hit, and everything I had been arguing for stopped being optional. I wrote about forty leaders in the summer of 2020. A president who worked shifts in the student commons handing out laptops and meals, then wrote about it so his community understood what care looked like. A dean who went live so often that a parent two states away mailed him cookies, because she felt like she knew the man looking after her son. A vice president who used a video recorded between meetings to tell graduating seniors she saw them.

I followed these leaders through promotions and moves and hard seasons. A vice president for student affairs I once featured became a community college president. Others transitioned to campus CEO, carrying their digital instincts with them. A few settled into long, steady tenures and deepened their impact. Some retired and kept up their online presence anyway. 

What changed about campus leaders online

The platforms moved first, soon followed by the shifting of people. Twitter, where my early lists lived, was sold and rebranded. Instagram became the place leaders actually showed up. Then Threads and Bluesky arrived, and the audience I had once mapped so carefully became scattered.

But the bigger change was slower and harder to watch. The leaders I had been cataloging started to turn over. When I began these lists, a president leaving early was something people really noticed. Somewhere in the last twelve years, it stopped being news. Departures, ousters, leaders cycling through two or three institutions in the time one used to stay for a full tenure — all of it became ordinary. Instability itself turned into the backdrop of the whole field.

The stakes of visibility grew too. I have been writing about the professional risks of showing up online for years, long before the current climate made them impossible to ignore. What is different now is not that the risk exists. It is that leadership turnover became an expected outcome, and visibility started to feel like exposure. Many leaders responded understandably: they went quiet.

What hit, what missed

Here is what I would not change: leaders showing up as actual people, using these tools to be accessible and human and close to their communities. That was never a gimmick. It was the actual work. I saw that in 2014 when very few people did, and I kept saying it when it was not fashionable to. I will take the credit for that.

What I missed at the time was everything that has to exist beneath the surface of executive presence to make it work. In the early days, a leader being visible at all felt like enough. It is not. A follower count told me who was posting. It told me nothing about whether that presence was measured, supported, or tied to anything the institution actually needed. For a while, I wrote as if a great feed might be evidence of great leadership. It is not, and it never was.

If I could tell my 2014 self one thing, it would be this: keep celebrating the humanity. That part was right, and it mattered more than the skeptics understood. But don’t treat presence as the finish line.

The real work was only getting started once leaders appeared online.

What growing up actually looks like

For years, the bar was simply showing up. A group photo at the football game. A warm caption on move-in day. That was the whole ask, and for a first step, it was alright. Then we learned just how much work social media takes, whether it’s a campus account or a campus leader’s. Accounts are free, but strategy is not. 

A mature digital presence for a campus leader demands three things the early lists never considered.

It is data-informed.

The best leaders online now are not guessing. They know which messages actually reached their community and which ones fell flat, which audiences they are connecting with and which they are missing entirely. They make decisions from evidence, not instinct or vanity metrics. A president’s platform is one of the most direct communication channels an institution has. It deserves to be measured like one.

It is supported.

A leader’s presence should not rest on the shoulders of one exhausted person posting between meetings, and it should not be handed to whoever happens to be free to copy-edit a caption. It needs experienced, trained, specialized professionals who understand digital strategy, not just people to ghostwrite a speech or clean up grammar. Supporting an executive’s voice is a discipline. It should be staffed like one.

It is genuinely strategic.

A leader’s platform is not a scrapbook. Used with intention, it is an instrument for the institution’s real priorities: enrollment, advancement, trust, belonging, the initiatives that actually matter. That requires a defined strategy, one rooted in the leader’s real personhood and voice and aligned to what the institution is trying to accomplish. Not personality for its own sake. Not campaigns that could belong to anyone. The leader’s authentic self, pointed at the work that counts.

That is what growing up means. Not louder. Not more polished. But data-informed, properly supported, and strategically aligned to both the person and the institution they serve.

Where we go from here

If you are a campus leader reading this, the question is no longer whether you need to show up. You already know the answer to that. The question is whether your presence is built to carry weight, or just look good in the feed. 

Look at your own data before you post anything else. 

Not to chase numbers, but to learn who you are actually reaching and who you are missing. Ask honestly whether the people supporting your presence are trained for it, or just available. And get clear on what your presence is for, which institutional priorities it serves, which parts of your real self belong in it, and where the two meet. If you cannot answer that, no amount of posting will fix it.

None of this means doing more. It often means doing less, more intentionally, with the right people and a real plan behind you. That is the version of digital leadership that survives a hard year instead of collapsing in one.

I started these lists twelve years ago by celebrating leaders who were willing to be human online. That part still matters, maybe more than ever.

Being human was always meant to be the foundation, not the finished house.

The work now is to build the rest of it: the data, the strategy, the right people in the room, and the alignment between who you genuinely are and what your institution truly needs.

That was always where this was headed. It just took twelve years to see the whole picture.