Rachel Reuben Consulting, LLC

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.

continue reading »

This morning I presented a couple of workshops for the Dutchess County Regional Chamber of Commerce (NY) on Facebook and Twitter, and how they can be effectively used by small businesses. Both sessions were packed with very interesting people, representing health care organizations, personal training, sports marketing, tourism, and so many more. I was particularly excited to meet Megan Ogulnick, who recently moved to this area from Chicago, to fill the roll as Manager of New Media for the Hudson Valley Renegades, and look forward to collaborating on some local networking opportunities.

continue reading »

The following is a guest post by Mike Petroff, Web Manager for Enrollment at Emerson College. Mike leads Web marketing and recruitment efforts for undergraduate and graduate admission. He also chairs the Social Media Group at Emerson, working with several departments to develop strategies and policies for the college’s social media presence. You can connect with him on Twitter or LinkedIn.

If you are a staff member involved in your college’s Facebook presence, you are probably well aware of the “FacebookGate” fiasco with many Class of 2013 groups. As a result of Facebook’s sweeping approach to delete groups in question, colleges lost established communities even after some gained control of their Class of 2013 groups by becoming administrators and removing non-applicants.

continue reading »

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.

continue reading »

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?