Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category

I have now been tracking the Butler Class of 2012 Facebook Group for 6 months. For more background, check these posts:

• Here come the Fall 08 kids… (January 10, 2008)
• Tracking the Facebook Group (February 6, 2008)
• Facebook Class of 2012: 3 Months Later (March 26, 2008)

I have also set up a new page that will dynamically refresh as the weeks continue, and include more in-depth charts by month. You can find the Class of 2012 Research page here.

Here’s the chart after 6 months, which is tracking Members, Wall Posts, and Discussion Posts:

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With all of the tools readily available at your fingertips, how could you afford to not use them?

Yesterday I had a meeting with BUMegan about some communication for incoming freshman. Previously, the ‘welcome week newsletter’ has been a word document around 5 pages long. Gross. So we started brainstorming about what to do this year. Email? eNewsletter? Welcome Week Blog? Post the info to the Facebook Class of 2012 group and the BUForums?

So I went to my network of higher ed professionals on Twitter for advice.

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The Innovative Educators Conference, which wraps up tomorrow with a presentation by Brian Niles of TargetX fame, has been a great one. Val, Erin and Pam from IE did a great job putting the conference together and keeping everything rolling. The food was the best conference food I’ve had. A night out to the Reds/Dodgers game with all you can eat food and drinks was a nice touch too.

Here are the links I went through for those of you that were in my 2 presentations on Wednesday. Again, if you have any questions, please email me at bradjward(at)gmail(dot)com.

I Can Do THAT With Google?: http://linkbun.ch/gnq

Blogging 201: Taking It To The Next Level: http://linkbun.ch/gnk and http://linkbun.ch/gno

Also, here is the image used during the Social Media Roundtable with Brad and Matt:

(Click Image to Enlarge)

It’s always great to connect with new people. I also got to catch up with Mark, Matt, and Brian and we had several really great conversations about a huge range of topics. I’ve always been big on the value of face time, and this event has not disappointed. I was also able to line up a webinar on this coming Tuesday night with an MBA class at Morehead State University, so it’s time to start on that slide deck.

One month until eduWeb! Who all is going to be there? I’d love to meet more of you.

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It’s Conference Time! Jesse and I both leave the office for the week tomorrow to attend higher ed conferences. Jesse is giving two presentations at the Recruitment Plus User Group Conference in Portland, Maine:

• Going Paperless (Releasing Your Office’s Inner Tree-Hugger) - [Document Imaging]
• Can’t We All Just Get Along? - [RP Interface]

I am giving 2 presentations and co-hosting a roundtable discussion with Matt at the Innovative Educators Conference in Cincinnati, OH:

• I Can Do THAT with Google? - [A Look at Google's many free tools]
• Bloggers 201: Taking It To The Next Level - [Extending the reach/touch of student bloggers]
• Social Media Roundtable with Brad and Matt - [1 hr Q&A session. Can you stump us?]

I am looking forward to meeting up everyone I already know (or feel like I’ve known forever thanks to social media) and meet many new people at the conference. I wish that Matt, Mark, and I weren’t presenting in the same time slot, but look forward to co-speaking with Mark at eduWeb in July and presenting at Stamats in November with Matt, Karlyn, Kyle and several others.

I absolutely love conferences. Yes, they are a great time out of the office, but they are also a time to reconnect and re-energize. A time to hash out new ideas over cocktails, network with others, and share ideas. An opportunity to learn and grow. And isn’t that what higher education is all about?

See you in Cincinnati!
Brad

PS - I haven’t decided if I am going to SlideShare since presentations go so much deeper than a few slides. What are your thoughts? Save it for the conference? I am probably going to uStream the Blogger talk to use as an example of what lifecasting might be like. Maybe Matt and I could uStream our roundtable and take questions from the chat room?!?

Just had a Google Alert come across that Hobsons has acquired CollegeConfidential.com, which has thought to have been a fairly reliable and unbiased source for high school students and parents everywhere. How will the community change as a result of this acquistion?

I’d expect to see collegeconfidential.com turn into a paid forum registration for ‘premium content’ soon. Either that or Hobsons just wants to do a little datamining and pimp their products. They will figure out some sort of revenue stream though, and I’d guess that it’ll put the user experience at risk.

I am trying to get out of their ‘Chat’ solution right now, and looking at a few options that I have heard many good things about. Chat University is an absolute joke. Look at this. Or any ChatU site really. Appealing? Not a bit.

I’ll be keeping an eye on this thread to see how the community reacts.

Free is here to stay? I guess I’ll hold on to that thought. Economics and a little $$ can do some crazy things.

[Press Release: Hobsons Acquires College Confidential]

Let’s talk a little bit about expectations of an admission website, and the evolving nature of it. I’m going to speak in terms of the Whole Product Concept, which some of you might be familiar with. It looks like this:

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about uses for Twitter in Higher Ed. I’ve said before (here):

[...] having the kids sign up for Twitter is just another barrier to communication. While I am typically an advocate for universities using services rather than reinventing the wheel, Twitter has yet to prove its stability to me.

There has also been a lot of talk about Twitter, how to use it in Higher Ed, what might be effective, what might not be, etc. I’ve sort of sat back and soaked this all in, watching developments at other universities and trying to think of how I can use Twitter to enhance a student’s experience on our site.

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It’s no secret that I love Flickr. It’s a perfect blend of community and functionality in the web 2.0 world, and it’s an extremely powerful tool.

Could it also be your solution for an electronic photo database management system?

Let’s take a walk at what Flickr has to offer you, and how it can help you organize your campus photos and provide some additional value to your workflow. We’re going to get pretty in-depth here, so buckle up and refer back often.

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It seems that as each month passes we have more and more access to metrics/stats/analytics on social media sites, which is great.  This will help us continue to dig deep and learn more about our viewers, etc.  YouTube recently announced that you can get stats on your videos by clicking Account > Videos, Favorites, & Playlists > then clicking “About this video” to get stats for that video.

Here’s an example from one a Blue2 video; he’s learning how to skateboard in this one:

(click to enlarge)

[WebWare: YouTube Stats Revealed]

It’s really hard to believe that nearly 3 months since I first posted about the Class of 2012 group on Facebook, and 2 months since I went public with the data tracking. I mentioned on that post that I would post occasional updates, and I thought the 3 month mark would be a good one.

Here’s the chart after 3 months, which is tracking Members, Wall Posts, and Discussion Posts:
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