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.

I did quite a bit of research on these sites, and also had some help from a current and previous co-worker. I know these specs work for us, but I also know there are a variety of specs others use, as many of these sites don’t well document (or bury!) what we can actually do with these tools! Here’s the slide deck:

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.

This post is not focused on personal profile status updates and their link to Twitter. Though my opinion about that application doesn’t vary all that much, the focus on this post is for Fan Pages for organizations/colleges/celebrities (wouldn’t that be neat if celebs were reading my blog?).

Need some convincing? Let’s start here. (Note: Protecting the names of the not-so-innocent)

This shows up as a tweet on Twitter. Makes perfect sense to the Twitter audience, no? (Please note the sarcasm.)

The folks at Facebook seem to think they’ve built a tool that will “make life easier.” I’ve spoken with several small business professionals and higher education colleagues in recent months about this topic, and most don’t see anything wrong with it given how overwhelmed many are in the social media space. Using this feature would indeed make their lives a bit easier.

But-

Think about your audience. How would someone you’re trying to reach feel if they read that tweet above on Twitter, especially if they’re not connected to you on Facebook? Different people, different tools (usually). I think this makes the company/organization/college look amateurish. Let’s think about the reverse. Your Facebook Fans see your status on Facebook now as: [RT @username something rather random and unrelated to what's going on on your Facebook Page]. People on Facebook don’t necessarily understand what Twitter is, let alone the “RT” and “@” monikers.

Need more convincing? How about volume.

• The average Twitter user is used to seeing a higher quantity of tweets in a given day.
• Effective Facebook statuses usually aren’t updated more than once a day, sometimes not even more than a couple times a week, therefore not expecting the higher volume typically seen on Twitter. (Your mileage may vary.)

By linking the two together, you overwhelm, and can come across as spamming, your Facebook fans.

Looking to make your life simpler? You can SMS (text) your status updates to your Facebook Page (as well as Twitter) and you can also use a desktop tool such as TweetDeck to update your Facebook Page status separately from your Twitter status, but in the same program without having to open multiple windows. There’s also a Facebook application called Selective Twitter Status, which will enable you to link only those tweets that end with the hashtag “#fb.”

Still need more convincing? How about duplication.

• How many of your Facebook fans are also following you on Twitter? Gets a bit overwhelming for them to see the same updates in multiple locations, potentially making them less interested in what you’re saying. They may end up auto-filtering you out.

And the icing on the cake?

Let’s say you update your Facebook Fan Page status, which then gets pushed to your Twitter account. People reply to you on Twitter — but you’re not necessarily there. Or, vice versa.

If I’ve managed to convince you to remove the link between your Facebook Fan Page status and your Twitter status and you’re dying to know where to go to make that change, then head on over to http://facebook.com/twitter. They hide it well once you’ve linked them together.

Sound off in the comments. Am I missing some key points? Do you have a compelling argument for linking your Facebook Fan Page status with your Twitter status? I’m very open to being convinced otherwise, as long as you’re not a robot.

On 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.

Since I built our Facebook Fan Page in November 2007 it has become a very active, vibrant space for us to connect with prospective students, current students and alumni. We have just under 5,000 fans. In the two years we’ve had the page, we’ve used the “message all fans” feature twice. We post status updates regularly, we share photos and links, and we quickly respond to all wall posts. I’m feel pretty confident in assuming there was no chance of a terms of service (TOS) violation, which is what many people immediately suspected.

So, what’s one helpless admin to do when their Facebook Page goes missing? Here’s all the avenues I tried:

• After tweeting about it, I received a bunch of DMs with secret/cryptic inside e-mail addresses within Facebook, and I sent e-mails to all of them.
• I e-mailed info@facebook.com, help@facebook.com, appeals@facebook.com
• Brad J. Ward of BlueFuego called me to offer his help by reaching out to his contact within Facebook.
• I reached out to a couple of other well connected individuals, all said they didn’t have a single contact on the inside. One friend said he knew people inside, but they’re are generally unhelpful.
• I tweeted more.
• One contact suggested I go through Ad Sales. I followed the ‘advertising’ link on the Facebook site and pretended I had an ad budget of $50-100k and filled out a custom contact form saying I was interested in advertising, but my page seems to have disappeared. (Oops, don’t tell anyone I don’t have an ad budget at all.)
• I discussed this situation with virtually everyone I interacted with at the HighEdWeb Conference this week, including Mark Greenfield’s first session, desperate for any contacts. Lane Joplin even started a RT campaign on Twitter to save the page.

I didn’t get a response or have success from any of these attempts, except Brad J. Ward. On Monday, October 5 while out to dinner, Nick Denardis was checking the Twitter stream and saw BlueFuego’s tweet that our page was back. When I called to thank him, he told me Facebook reactivated our page, that the same thing previously happened to the University of Florida, who had over 20,000 fans, and Facebook never explained what really happened. The reason for the disappearance remains a mystery, the number of fans are still buggy, and I have to re-add in my admins behind the scenes, but thankfully the content is all there. Thank you so much, Brad.

During this five day disappearance, I gave a lot of thought to the importance of our Facebook Page, the over reliance on third party vendors for services we do not pay or contract for, and what we’d do if it didn’t get restored. I also thought a lot about the fortress that is Facebook, what awful customer service they have, and how one of the biggest players in the social media space clearly isn’t using social media as a listening tool like many other intelligent organizations are.

Why are so many of us investing such a great deal of time and resources in a company that is so unresponsive? Is this the best strategy? I don’t have the answers, these are just issues I’m grappling with right now, as I felt pretty panicked and helpless during the five day outage. This situation gave me pause to figure out which tools are the most effective — and reliable.

What do you think? Are we putting too many marbles in Facebook’s basket? Is it worth the risk?

Photo by lassi.kurkijarvi

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.

How do you define your purpose? What are your goals with CampusTweet?

Our purpose is to be a place primarily for college students to find other students, alumni, and faculty from their campus who are on Twitter. We kinda like to think of ourselves as Facebook (back when it was just for students or alumni) for Twitter. Since we’re relatively new, our current goal is to make it simple and easy for students to interact with other students who are also using Twitter.

Why do you require a username/password?

We don’t require a new set of username/password for campustweet.We simply use your name and password and Twitter’s oauth login as a way for us to organize the student’s tweets into conversations.

Editors note: She did not address the question/concern that many of my friends expressed.

I see you plan to add a faculty/staff option in addition to student & alum. How does that change your focus?

We did in fact plan to add a faculty option and just released it earlier today. :)

With our new version of campustweet we are contemplating releasing a “staff” feature but seeing as our aim is towards college students we want to implement features that are advantageous to them.

Canadians are ticked it’s for U.S. only. Do you plan to expand across the border?

We hope our neighbor up north isn’t too upset. We hadn’t planned on taking off so fast!

Right now we’re trying to find a better way to add more Canadian schools and later on down the road, we’d like to add schools globally.

Several schools noted are not being listed on your site. How do they get added?

If a student attempts to join their school and notes that it isn’t listed, we have a ‘My school isn’t here” option for students to add their school. In order to add a school on campustweet, we ask that the students enter their school’s URL. This step ensures that we only have legitimate schools with .edu addresses.

How are you advertising or spreading the word about this site?

Since we are utilizing twitter as our platform for campustweet we’ve found twitter is helpfully in spreading the word, getting, and providing constructive feedback. However we’re not currently thinking about advertising…college students are pretty savvy and know how to tune out advertising. Our approach is a bit more “grassroots” if you can call it that, through twitter we can answer questions and just overall be their support should they need it. And that’s what we like to think students value the most.

Do you see value in campuses adding their accounts? I believe there’s another site for that….

Yes, we do see a lot of value in campuses adding their accounts on twitter. We’re working on a new feature to help schools interact and engage with their students and alumni who are on campustweet. Yet as of right now, few schools actually have a main school twitter account. Some schools main accounts have been added to our site, hopefully, in the future there will be more if not all. (We like to think big) :)

Are you related to alumtweet.com? How is your service different from that site?

No, we’re not related to alumtweet.com. Alumtweet is a great site to find people from your graduating class from high school. Our focus in on current college students, not connecting alumni with alumni….though you could do that through campustweet.

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.

1. Make your own game: Facing some odds at your institution? Having a hard time convincing others around you that social media is worth the investment of human and financial resources. What did you do to break free of these fears and concerns? What new efforts have you implemented? When we created Café New Paltz last year, I heard from many peers “been there, done that – back to Facebook.” We implemented this online community for accepted students in a pretty unique way, I think — and the feedback we received from the community members was fantastic. Many comments included sentiments such as, “no other college I applied to is doing anything like this – this is awesome!” Don’t just assume others have done it. Do it your way. Make your own game.

2. One of us: In Café New Paltz, we had two students serve as the Baristas, which was far more effective than having a staff member from my department or admissions there to engage these students. The Baristas were “one of them” – not an administrator trying to remember back to their college search days to relate. Have you implemented something like this in any of your communities?

3. The Archimedes Effect: How you leverage knowledge, people, technology and time. Collaboration across units is imperative to effective social media efforts. (See also, #6 below.) I have folks from Undergraduate Admissions, the Graduate School, the Welcome Center, Public Affairs, Student Development, and more helping us manage our Facebook Fan Page. We make use of social media to upload once – and reuse/syndicate wherever possible. For example – upload photos to flickr, embed them in pages on your site and blog, use involver to include on your Facebook Fan pages.

4. Agent Zero: How are you building relationships before transactions take place? Transactions may include applying, paying pre-enrollment deposits, asking for donations, etc.

5. Human Artist: How have you built relationships in your online communities? Have you dealt with any issues where you had to learn step away from a situation, or had to decide whether to remove questionable content? How did you handle this? We’ve been challenged with a few questionable posts on our Facebook Fan Page in recent months, but in most cases the community has jumped in and “self-corrected,” and I think it’s in large part because of the relationships and community we’ve built there.

6. Build an Army: Just as Chris and Julien say, “you can’t do it all alone.” How are you collaborating with others at your university? Are you working with others outside of your unit?

Now it’s your turn. Chris was kind enough to sign a copy of his book for us to give to one of our faithful readers.

How can you win this autographed copy of Trust Agents?

Option A: Show us your inner guru. Submit a blog post about a project you’re working on that uses two or more of these principles (bonus points if you use all six!).

Option B: Praise someone else. Tell us about a project you think is a best practice that someone else is doing, again that uses two or more of these principles outlined in the book.

How to submit:

Option A: If you have your own site you want to post this to, just e-mail us the URL (staff at doteduguru dot com). Link back to us for inclusion in this contest.

Option B: If you don’t have have your blog, submit it to us for consideration as a guest post on doteduguru.com (staff at doteduguru dot com).

We’ll tweet about your submissions and share them with our readers.

Who gets the book?

Here’s where it gets really fun. Best practices articles tend to generate great conversations in the comments and on Twitter. The top two that receive the most buzz will be shared with Chris Brogan, who will work with the six of us on staff at .eduGuru to select a post/project that most closely builds on principles in the book. Chris will write a guest blog post summarizing his input on the top two posts and ultimately chose who gets the book. A huge thanks to Chris for working with this on his project.

It’s your turn! Enter by 5 p.m. ET Thursday, October 1.

Last week I updated our university’s Facebook Fan Page status to say:

I thought it might get a comment, or like, or two, but was absolutely floored to find this volume of response, most of which came within the same hour I posted.

And then it happened two more times within the same week.

Here’s an expanded view of some of these comments:

Sometimes, keeping it simple just works. SUNY Plattsburgh is also having a great deal of interaction over on their page as is SUNY Oswego. Never before have we seen alumni comment on our wall. This spirit and sense of community is a gold mine for alumni relations. One of the comments was actually an alum asking if we have a separate Facebook Fan Page just for alumni. (We don’t. Yet.)

I didn’t have a strong strategy behind the scenes. We didn’t hold committee meetings to decide what to say.  I just hoped for some new students to share their excitement, to feel welcomed, and to breath a little life into our page, instead of the “business as usual” answers to the same questions over and over again.

Something as simple as a status update that ties to an emotional time in new, current, and former students lives seems to resonate. This has expanded my thinking on how we’ll use this feature going forward. Maybe your campus has certain traditions (i.e. Slope Day at Cornell University, Foundation Day at the University of Albany, etc.) – highlight or countdown to some of them, give them behind the scenes updates and snapshots.

How are you using your university’s status? Are you seeing this kind of interaction?

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 social-networking media”

• “Division III institutions now are free to use such media as Facebook and Twitter to publicize game results and other athletics news without worrying whether prospective student-athletes are receiving those “electronically transmitted” messages, provided the communication meets some new objective guidelines established by the Division III Management Council.”

The original bylaw said:

“Electronically transmitted correspondence that may be sent to a prospective student-athlete by, or on behalf of, a member of the institition’s athletics department staff is limited to electronic mail and facsimiles. All other forms of electronically transmitted correspondence (e.g. instant messaging, text messaging and social networking Web sites) are prohibited.”

They’ve now added to this — “except as specified in this section.”

• “Any member of the general public may become a member of the group to which the electronic transmission is sent.”
  • In other words, no closed/gated online communities
• “A prospective student-athlete who chooses to receive electronic transmissions through the electronic service must retain the ability to decline receipt of the communications at any time or may unsubscribe from all electronic service at any time.”
  • In other words, use common sense and always have unsubscribe options with all forms of communication.
• “The content of any electronic transmission that is sent to a public group that may include prospective student-athletes must be the same for all members of the group (e.g. news alerts, admissions and alumni information, scores) and of a general nature.”
  • We can’t send custom content to recruits.
• “The proposal does not allow direct person-to-person electronic communication with an individual prospective student-athlete sent by a member of the athletics department staff, or on their behalf, (e.g., instant messaging, comments via MySpace, Wall-to-Wall via Facebook, direct messaging via Twitter) except via electronic mail or facsimile. Further, the proposal ensures the communications are being sent from the athletics department or the institution, and not from the individual members of the athletics department acting on their own.”

This last paragraph is most crucial, and makes it even more important for collaborative efforts on your campus. Your athletic director likely received this communication (it was e-mailed at 9 a.m. ET this morning, July 22), but it may be a bit confusing for those that don’t have a great understanding of the various tools.  From that e-mail, they offer this example:

• “If your coach uses Twitter or Facebook on their own for communication of athletics related information, and that information is delivered to prospective student-athletes, you will need to report that violation.”

Am I the only one thinking they’ve contradicted themselves here? On one hand they’re saying if it’s generic information and publicly available to anyone, then why would a coach disseminating that same public information in a public space be in violation?

Here is the complete PDF that was attached to the e-mail communication this morning. I’d love to hear your take on it.

Are you a resource on your campus for all things social media?

Yes? Let’s brainstorm about how we can best react to and assist people on campus who come to us to ask for guidance with some ideas they have.

No? Let’s pretend. Play along with us here — the more collaborative minds we put together, the better.

The primary purpose of this post is to flesh out  the best response to this type of question:

“I want to create a Facebook Page for my [department/program/event/service] and thought I should probably coordinate that with you. Where should I start?”

I understand this may not be as likely to happen on larger campuses as it is in small to mid-size campuses. The point of posing this question is to talk through the best ways we can help educate and partner with people on campus who want to embrace social media.

I usually start with this first question:  Who is your audience?

Then I move to:  What are your department’s/program’s/event’s/service’s goals? Let’s start with the end result and work backwards.

Next, I tell them social media may or may not be the best tool for them to use. This usually stumps them. Yes, I present at a bunch of conferences on social media. Yes, I did a research paper on the use of social media in higher education. Yes, I’m an active user of many social networking sites. However, as I say in just about every presentation I give — social media is not the be all end all. It is just one spoke in our marketing wheel. It may or may not be the right tool to use for a particular department/program/event/service — it all depends on your audience and your goal(s). It can be a very powerful medium that can reach very targeted audiences, but may not be the right tool for every audience and strategy.

“But I want my event to go viral.”

Just because you want something to go viral doesn’t mean it will. It takes a dose of effort and a pinch of luck, along with a powerful strategy and commitment, to really make this work.

Let’s keep exploring. Next steps:

• Educate them about the art of listening. Chris Brogan has a great post I regularly point people to — “Grow Bigger Ears in 10 Minutes.” In addition, Kyle James wrote a post about monitoring your online identity that provides additional ideas and details. Listening first gives you a sense of what is being said about your department/program/event/service. It may also give you further ideas for content generation (see next step), and gives you an opportunity to join in existing conversations.
• Content issues: Where will the content come from? Who will be responsible for maintaining your content and your presence? How will you engage your audience? Having a presence is not nearly enough – you must commit to fresh content that would be of interest to your audience.
• Integration: How will you integrate this effort through the other mediums in your marketing wheel? Things to consider — mentioning in e-mail newsletters, e-mail signatures, print publications, ads, Web sites, blogs, admission tours, etc.
• Measurement: How will you measure if your effort is successful? Were goals achieved? Is having a dollar value ROI important? (If so, see Karlyn’s presentation on Eye On the Prize.) While there is great value in calculating ROI, I also like to focus on the “I” as “influence” — looking at the long tail effect. For example, in our Café New Paltz community for fall 2009 accepted students, I’m interested in tracking the different impacts on student service offices from their typical routine and schedule over the summer and early fall. Students in this community were figuring out as early as January who they wanted to room with, instead of waiting and scrambling during Orientation in July, taking a load off Residence Life and Student Development staff from what they’re normally used to that time of the year. Students are asking questions earlier about paying bills, setting up meal plans, and how to accept financial aid packages. There likely won’t be as big of a rush in these offices at the end of August, as we’ve been answering their questions months earlier. How else can you measure your success? I posted some other ideas in “Café New Paltz: A Yielding Success” that might give you some additional ideas. 

What steps did I miss? Do you have other strategies you employ when faced with a similar question? Do you make an concerted effort to coordinate all of the individual social media outposts on your campus, or just concern yourself with the big picture presence?

Since my last update a few months ago about Café New Paltz, our online Ning community for fall 2009 accepted students, we’ve completed this year’s traditional recruitment cycle. We’re extremely pleased with the results and continued growth of this community.

The community continued to grow from February through the mid-April, as our undergraduate admissions office sent email invitations every couple of weeks to the latest batch of students accepted to our university.

At the end of April we had a slight mishap that we ended up turning into a great opportunity. During one of our routine exports from Banner, our student record system where we pull email addresses for the latest batch of accepted students, we accidentally included “all” accepted students, not just first-year students. This resulted in inviting 400 recently accepted transfer students. A large majority ended up accepting our invitation and started forming their own groups organically. While we initially panicked, we realized this was a good thing. They have many of the same concerns as first year students – meeting new people, starting classes at a brand new campus, figuring out the maze of offices to contact for various questions/concerns, etc. The only major difference is that we don’t provide on-campus housing to transfer students — and this turned into an excellent opportunity they seized by starting groups related to finding off-campus housing and roommates.

We continued to provide video updates by our two baristas throughout the semester. According to Ning’s usage stats, their viewership was not significantly high enough for us to want to put a great deal of resources (time, human and money) into this effort in the future, should we do this again.

My love letter to Ning

Ning makes it very hard for us to measure our success in a quantitative way. We have tied in our Google Analytics account for basic Web stats. Within Ning, I’ve been able to grab oodles of qualitative tid-bits I’ve been able to grab from various forum posts, live chats and direct messages, but I want more. Here is my kind request to Ning:

Dear Ning,

It would mean the world to me if you would give us access to member usage data. My wish list includes the ability to track the most active member(s), the least active member(s), percentages showing how often people log in (x daily, x weekly, x monthly), and how many times they’ve logged in overall.

We love you dearly and are grateful for all you’ve helped us accomplish, but we need more.

With much love and respect,
Rachel & her colleagues

May 1st was the national deposit deadline, which we also use. I was interested to see how the membership data correlated with the statistics of those students who paid their pre-enrollment deposit (PED).

Since Ning does not connect directly with our student records system, I was still determined to find a way to get some data out of the email address export I can get from Ning. I worked with my colleague in undergraduate admissions and our Web Programmer, and developed a list of areas I wanted to be able to report on by matching email addresses exported from Ning with email addresses in Banner. Here’s what we were able to get from the list of 690 members we exported from Ning on May 4:

• Paid PED: 357 – 52%
• Did not pay PED: 283 – 41%

70 % of the members of our Ning community who paid their PED were from our highest admission selectivity group. The yield of our highest selectivity group took a significant jump from 30% last year to 37% this year. The Ning community was one our largest efforts to increase the yield of this highly selective group and based on the participation in the Ning and our significant increase in yield for this group we would consider it a great success.

I was also able to get three separate e-mail lists: first-year students (742) and transfer students (526) who paid their PED but did not become a member of Café New Paltz, so we can send them a special re-invite; and those accepted students who joined Café New Paltz but opted not to pay their PED or attend SUNY New Paltz (283). We will use that final list to purge members from the Café. Unfortunately, this is another limitation of Ning – we have to do this manually, one-by-one. To give these numbers a bit of context, we have roughly 15,000 freshmen applications, accept around 5,000, and our first year class for fall 2009 will be around 1,100 students. We received about 3,200 transfer applications, accepted about 1,100 and just over 600 will be joining us this fall.

Next Steps

We started a forum in mid-March asking the members to tell us if they wanted Café New Paltz to continue to be available, and we received about 30 responses strongly encouraging us to keep it open at least through summer orientation, and some requested to continue through their entire first year. Undergraduate Admissions is turning over their role to the Student Affairs division, whose efforts will be largely led by their Coordinator of First Year Programs. Café New Paltz will continue to exist at least through the end of this calendar year at this point. We’re going to re-evaluate its use and effectiveness in October/November to determine whether it is worth continuing for the spring 2010 semester.

Our two current baristas are moving on — one graduated from graduate school with his MBA, and the other will continue his active membership in many student organizations and being a student ambassador. He’s also going to be a blogger for us next year on http://npbloggers.newpaltz.edu. The Coordinator of First Year Programs will take the lead on the occasion that responses will be helpful from staff at the college, and she will be joined by a few other students later in the summer that will fill in the barista role. One student is an international student from China who will cater specifically to international students in the Café. The other two are this summer’s senior orientation leaders that all first-year students will meet throughout the summer.

Will we do this again?

Good question! Café New Paltz has exceeded our wildest expectations. We have no regrets and could absolutely forsee doing this again. However, we won’t decide until October/November. January 1, 2010 is too far ahead to plan in this social media space, in my opinion. Who knows what the next best thing will be then…

Earlier this week we talked about a cohesive university-wide Web presence. Today we’re going to take that same theory, but explore it in the social media space.

The ease of access of social media tools, including blogs, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, etc. have enabled people with little to no Web development or marketing experience to create an online presence for your institution. Most do this with the best intentions in mind, but many don’t have the skills or knowledge needed to make them truly useful and successful.

I believe the central Web and/or marketing units of a university should also be the campus experts to create and maintain a strong and effective social media presence. They should coordinate campus-wide efforts and serve as consultants to individual departments to help them with their efforts.

In recent months I’ve led social media workshops for our athletics department, which included just about every coach and administrator, and for faculty and professional staff who attended a full day of technology-related workshops.

The goals of these workshops were to:

1. educate them about the tools available
2. show them examples and best practices of these tools in use related to their specific interests
3. have brainstorming sessions to determine which tools would help them better connect with their constituencies 
4. develop 1-3 short term goals and implementation schedules

Secretly (or not so, since I’m saying it here in such a public forum), I also lead these workshops to establish my office as the a resourceful unit that others will come to for assistance in learning more about social media, and to help in determining how and if they can best leverage it. Others on campus have heard about these workshops, and I am now in the process of scheduling them with other units.

Whether you reach out to the first unit that you think could utilize social media, or whether they approach you – the ultimate goal is to not have competing efforts on various social networking sites. In addition, not every department/program/unit needs to be using social media. Take a step back, listen to what their goals are, and help them find the right mix of tools that will implement them. This may or may not include social media.

For most small- to mid-size universities, I think a tool like Facebook can be seen structurally as the university Web site. There is one main home page, otherwise known as a Fan Page on Facebook, for the university. That hub should provide easy access in a box on the Page with links to other university outposts on Facebook. Most of these are best done as groups, but there is becoming more and more value for other units establishing Pages, such as being able to view Insights (statistics) and target messages (updates).

Be a partner. Assist other units in setting up their outposts. Encourage them not to duplicate existing efforts. Help them think of ways to be unique. Social media is not a space to treat like Times Square or the bulletin boards scattering your campus. It’s not for the “hey look at my program,” or “hey, look at this awesome event we have coming up.” It’s for building relationships around them. Alumni who have graduated from the program and feel a strong allegiance to it are likely to talk about their experiences, and look to network with others that have previously gone through the program to assist in future career opportunities. If the event is a reunion, they may be more likely to rally around it to catch up with classmates in advance of the actual event. A one-time concert may not have that kind of pull into social media.

Regardless of the tool used and the way it is implemented, it needs to be done in a cohesive way that doesn’t create multiple outlets for very similar purposes and further disjoints the community using these tools. We have a discussion related to this going on the cuweb.ning.com site, as well.

Is it a wild, wild west show when your prospective students search for your university on Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, etc.? Is it easy to tell which is the official university presence vs. individual units within the campus, or other user-generated content? Or, do you think having a central presence is not even necessary? Let’s talk.