Marketing, Communications and Technology

I was asked to write a very concise intro to blogging and social media for our executive leadership, to act as a preamble for a new blog project. I would love to hear your thoughts as this is a very real challenge as marketers in this new media world.

What is Social Media? (reference: wikipedia)

Social media can take many different forms, including Internet forums, message boards, blogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures and video. It defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio on the internet.

What is Blogging?

Blogs are frequently updated web pages on which authors post short comments about news items, interesting websites, their thoughts and more. Blogs are part of a revolution that allows individuals to express themselves to the world. Blogs are easy to create, easy to maintain and fun to read.

How can a university or company enter this new media space successfully?

It’s important to note that even prominent ad agencies do not understand how to fully leverage social media. (An article published in ADWEEK early this year reports on a survey which yielded essentially that “agencies don’t get it“)

This new media is about conversations. They are happening about your institution every day, online. We can either be part of the conversation or ignore it. If we chose to be a part of it then paramount to our success are the following:

• change in voice: authoritative => community based, personal
• change in speed: approval process => empowerment of individuals
• change in tolerance: strict censored content => loose content management

Without embracing these concepts any attempt at entering the social media space would fail because the audiences/participants would immediately sense the lack of authenticity and ignore the blog, comment, website, etc.

What drives these conversations are real people. Canned responses and marketing speak will do more harm than good in the realm of social media.

I am listening the WordPress Podcast right now and they are talking about Woopra, it sounds like a very interesting product to keep an eye on.

This software will allow you to see google style analytics but in realtime.  The idea is that instead of looking for trends and making recommendations on future updates, you can see what is happnening at any given moment and react to it immediately.  Imagine you just launched your new web redesign that cost you  $100,000.  It may take a few weeks of data to see whats working and whats not on your site.  This will give you the opportunity to actually watch the launch in real time.  Pretty cool.

Seems like a great tool for web marketers and I can’t wait to test it out.  I look forward to hearing some impressions from our higher ed marketing folks.

I signed up but I do not have an invite code so I’m not sure how long it will take.  We just launched a green blog and I am going to test it out on that site if they approve my registration.

Credit to collegewebeditor.com for bringing this to my attention. It appears US News has stepped into the Facebook application space. Their gradzilla app seems to be a search engine for their best grad schools data. Once you find a school, you can check a box to say how you feel about it or what you have experienced. If this becomes a highly used app on facebook, it will be yet another reason to make sure your data is accurate and up to date with US News.

I received an email yesterday concerning this product. Here is a copy of it:

HEP has announced the release of a new product called Social Network Analysis (SNA), a complete package that allows non-profits and colleges and universities to develop an intelligent strategy for the social networks a.k.a. Web 2.0.

How to respond to the explosive growth of the social networks and the ways the next generation of donors and alums communicate can be daunting for a non-profit.

Social Network Analysis answers a lot of questions for non-profits including, what sites are most popular with our donors and alums. What donors or alums have the most “friends” who are possible fundraisers for our non-profit? SNA provides the constituent profiles as well which often include employer information.

According to Steve Hafner, President of HEP Development, “Social Network Analysis takes a lot of the guesswork out of coming up with a WEB 2.0 strategy. When the board asks what is your strategy, SNA provides you with answers.” For several examples of the reports provided visit http://www.hepdata.com/socialnet.cfm

The sample charts seem to be useful. It appears they are pulling data from social networks on your specific constituents. (I guess maybe by email address and/or keywords).

Seems to be a tool or service for monitoring alumni and donors on social networks and helping you come up with a web 2.0 strategy based on where they are and what they are using. I would love to hear from anyone using something like this. I will post again if I find out any more.

We are currently using issuu.com to host our university magazine. I wanted to write a bit about our experience, the pitfalls and my crude work around.

Challenge: Get our printed publication online as soon as it’s approved and at the printer.

We have specific obstacles at FIU since we do not have a dedicated central web team. In the past our magazine has been produced as an individual html website like this. Problem is, it takes a few weeks (or months sometimes) and requires a lengthly proof/approval process.

Solution: Enter issuu.com. I discovered it by accident while searching for PDF to flash options. It has a beautiful full screen viewer. You can even subscribe to an rss feed for receiving future issues. They features one of our issues on the home page and we received 1500 views in a few days.  Tip: make sure you pick your username as you will not be able to change it.

Technical issues: We use In-Design for our magazine and there were weird boxes appearing around certain graphic images in the magazine. You will not see the errors until it is converted and posted online, so you will need to review the publication carefully once its up.

Our low tech solution: We opened the pages from the PDF file with the problem in photoshop and recreated PDFs from photoshop for just pages that had the problem. We only had 2-3 per issue so this was not too difficult.

Conclusion: There may be many ways to do this but this is just so simple and fast that it trumps most any other I have seen. The logo and link to issuu.com is very small and the full screen viewer is very slick looking. We are still wrestling with whether we need to post the articles as web pages or maybe using blog software. The reason being, of course, that search engines will not necessary find an article and it is difficult to link to particular story. However, the search engine on issuu.com does a great job of searching the flash, even pulling up specific pages in the publication.

I will post a follow-up with our new site for hosting these flash viewers once we finalize it.