SquaredPegBrad J Ward’s Thoughts on Higher Education Recruitment

I ran across this interesting graph at ThoughtGadgets, which shows data from TubeMogul, news outlets and “YouTube stars”.  The lifecycle of a typical YouTube video.

The half-life of a viral YouTube video is now 6 days. Charlie bit me.  David after Dentist.  Evolution of Dance.  Videos have typically stuck around for awhile.  Now, with increasing saturation of content and decreasing attention span (are you still there?), the shelf life of your efforts is quickly diminishing.  75% of eyeballs on a video happen in the first 20 days.  Viral lasted twice as long in 2008.  What’s the future hold?  More of the same.  I’d expect the half-life of a viral video to be 3-4 days within 18 months.

In the future, viral trends will come and go so quickly that most won’t even know they existed. This is huge to understand.  As the web continues to evolve into many micro-communities that make up the whole, it’s possible for trends and memes to sweep through certain areas but not others.   This isn’t the Twittersphere of 2008 anymore.

How to stay relevant and successful? Think narrow, not broad.  Focus on your direct, relevant audience. And most of all, just hope that luck is on your side.

If you’re working with the web, I truly hope you enjoy learning.  A hunger for learning will not only help you with your web efforts, but also make them more productive and fruitful. Never stop learning.

This is just one (very simple) snippet I shared during my keynote presentation at the Penn State Web Conference on Tuesday. Learning is not just vital, it’s necessary for anyone who’s going to deal with the web.

A few quick examples of why I’ve seen the importance of learning this week:

1) On Monday, I presented a two hour workshop on Facebook at the Penn State Web Conference.  One thing we talked about was Facebook Insights.  Sure enough, as I was presenting, Facebook released, a new, more robust platform for Insights. (You can find it at http://facebook.com/insights).  These new Insights are now giving us valuable data on referrers, tab visits, what content is getting the most interaction, and much more.  It’s a huge step for measuring metrics on Facebook.

2) On Wednesday, I presented twice at EduComm (one with Scott Kilmer from ACU, and one with Diane McDonald from Texas A&M).  A question that came up (actually, it came up in Monday’s workshop as well as last Friday’s workshop with the Independent Colleges of Indiana!) was regarding Facebook Page Administrators.  It’s been a long issue that the original page creator/administrator was forever hooked to the Facebook Page. (The “known bug” is still listed in the FAQ.)  This is a question we hear a lot, and we’ve honestly never had a great answer for other than to put administrator rights as high up on the chain of command as possible.

After noticing this on our own BlueFuego Facebook Page, checked approximately 45 pages that I am an administrator on, and the option to remove any Administrator was consistent throughout.

Now, it appears that you can remove any administrator from a Page, regardless of who started it.  This solves huge problems for employee turnover in higher ed, as well as even shifting responsibility of Pages within the organizational structure.   The small changes really do make the difference, some days.

6 presentations in the last 6 days, and the things I’ve said and shared are correct now… but for how long?  Two of the things I shared are already outdated, and we’re not even to Friday yet!  Have a thirst for knowledge and you’ll go very, very far.

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Brad is the CEO at BlueFuego, Inc.  Be sure to subscribe via RSS or email for future posts, including some tips on how to never stop learning.