photo of five hands connected

Managing social media is a team sport

Who should be responsible for social media? This has been a hot discussion topic on higher education listservs, community message boards, Twitter, and other forums. My answer? It depends. Institution size, strategy, community management, and monitoring are some of the factors higher education professionals should consider in determining where responsibility lies. The current debate Read more…

Stand Out! Customize Your Institution’s Social Media Presence

This morning I presented to a group of ~80 higher education colleagues who work in creative services offices for colleges and universities across the country. My session, Stand Out! Customize Your Institution’s Social Media Presence went beyond yesterdays Social Media 101 session and got under the hood with seven social networking sites to equip these designers with the specs and knowledge needed to customize their college’s presence.

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Don’t Link your Facebook Fan Page and Twitter Statuses

Last August Facebook gave Pages administrators the ability to publish their Facebook updates to their Twitter accounts automatically. Administrators can decide whether to share updates with their Twitter followers at all, and if so, which type of information to share, such as status updates, links, photos, notes, and events.

This, my friends, is what my friend Chris Brogan has coined “robot activity.” I agree and would go further and say you shouldn’t do it.

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Feeling Naked: A Tale of the Disappearing Facebook Fan Page

photo of the Facebook fortressOn the evening of Wednesday, September 30, the SUNY New Paltz Facebook Fan Page mysteriously disappeared. At first I thought it was a temporary glitch, but when it was still inaccessible on Thursday afternoon, I knew something was up.

The vanity URL (http://facebook.com/newpaltz) redirected to the Facebook home page. A search within Facebook for our university did not return a result with our page in it. Our fan’s profile pages no longer had our page listed as one they were a fan of. It was completely gone.

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Interview with CampusTweet.com

Last week one of my friends on Twitter tweeted, “Just added myself to http://campustweet.com  – Ithaca College and Georgetown University.

My immediate thought — is this another one of those sites that’s going to create buzz most of the day by our circle of common friends and then fade, or could this one actually stick? Lots of friends tweeted questions about it as more and more tweets “Just added myself to ….” came across the stream. The folks at campustweet.com (@campustweet on Twitter) were kind enough send me their e-mail address so I could ask them eight questions about their service. Here’s the interview.

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Trust Agents & Higher Ed

In the New York Times bestselling book Trust Agents, Chris Brogan and Julien Smith talk about the six principles of being a Trust Agent:

  1. Make your own game
  2. One of us
  3. The Archimedes Effect
  4. Agent Zero
  5. Human Artist
  6. Build an Army

These principles can be extended and used in the higher education space, specifically for community engagement, with prospective students, current students, and alumni, to name a few. (Notice, I didn’t use the term “community management.” Online communities don’t want to be managed. They manage themselves. If you follow principle #2, “One of Us,” you’ll get why. But, I digress.) Back to the principles and how this fits in with what you may be doing for your college/university, or what you may want to implement.

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Division III Releases Social Networking Rule Change for Communicating with Prospective Student-Athletes

The Division III Management Council just released their newly adopted “noncontroversial change to the Division III electronic transmissions limitations.” They’ve given it a retroactive effective date of August 1, 2008 to match when their original legislation went into effect. They’ve also released this article: “DIII Council opens up use of Read more…