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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Questions & Answers from eRecruiting Web Forum

Whew. Nearly 500 people tuned in to my session, eRecruiting with Social Media and a Purpose this afternoon as part of the CollegeWeekLive/Chronicle of Higher Education eRecruitment Web Forum. There were a ton of questions I didn’t have time to get to during the live presentation (120!!), so I’ve answered the ones I didn’t get to below. Did you miss the live presentation? The folks at CollegeWeekLive have made it available to watch on-demand.

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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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Dutchess County Regional Chamber of Commerce Social Media Workshops

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.

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Sharpening my saw

“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” (Closing Time, Semisonic.)

I started graduate school with the hope that I could bring greater value to my current position, and someday advance my career in the field of marketing and communication in higher ed. After three and a half years, I earned my MBA in marketing and management in December.

In November 2008, I met some amazing people at the Stamats SIM Tech Conference, and those connections have been instrumental in much of what I’ve been able to accomplish since. I joined the .eduGuru blogging staff in December 2008, which gave me the opportunity to start blogging for the first time, make some wonderful connections, and became one of the primary forces thrusting me into a whirlwind of conference presentations in 2009.

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Reach More Students Without Leaving Your Office

Looking for something new to try this spring for your recruiting efforts? I recently saw a demo for CollegeWeekLive and was quite impressed with its features and the possibilities it creates for recruiters across the country.

Side note: This may seem like a sales pitch, but it’s not. I don’t work for CollegeWeekLive, nor am I a current client. I’m just an impressed individual who works in marketing and communication at a university, and wanted to share this with you, as I hadn’t heard much about them before seeing this demo.

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Protecting your College’s Intellectual Property on Facebook: Learning from the Class of 2014 Groups

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.

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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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