So anyway no reason to really to rehash a lot of this, but I do want to share the updated slides here.  Remember it doesn’t matter what you call it, an inquiry is a lead.

Inbound School Marketing V2

Related posts:

1. Inbound School Marketing Slides: Whipple Hill User Conference ‘09
2. Book Review: Inbound Marketing the Book
3. Hello, Is Anyone Out There – HighEdWeb 2008 Presentation

Once it’s all there, that person is your knowledge base, your Karamari forever (excuse the bad joke, folks).  He or she attends all the key meetings.  Every person or process involves at least one part where this person is consulted for how “we” do things.  And new hires must spend a significant portion of their time volleying back and forth between attempting to to something semi-productive and tracking this person down.

What can you do ensure that all that internal knowledge gets transferred out of a person and into something that can be shared?  Here are a few strategies I have used:

Your knowledge base should have a granular permissions structure.

Information may need to be opened or restricted based on group membership. At the topmost level, make it public. It is much easier to take something public and lock it down than vice versa.  (People are very nervous about sharing; don’t create additional barriers to doing so.)

Give the masses of subject matter experts authoring access.

Having content vetted by a small group of people creates bottlenecks.  A knowledge base is different from a formal Web presence.  If you feel tempted to restrict authorship to an elite group, instead consider having this group review and edit the published contributions of everyone else.  You will get much more done, and you can still have quality content.

Delegate the documentation of internal knowledge to new hires.

Every time a new hire tracks this person down for an answer, the new hire should be told to document it.  (Hooray for newbie-hazing!)  But seriously, this tactic does serve several purposes:

• The person who actually possess all the internal knowledge is going to be too busy to actually sit down and do the documentation himself/herself.
• Having to relay that information to each new hire one-on-one costs the billable time of two employees: the new hire and the expert. If the new hire, documents this information, it will become available for all future hires so that the cost of relaying the information is only one new hire each time.
• The expert is able to check how well the new hire understood the information given to him/her by reviewing what was documented and making additional changes or comments.

Lead people to the knowledge base.

When getting people to adopt a new knowledge base, you may have to get them to accept change by leading them there gradually:

• When they ask you a question that is not in there, add it.  If/when it is in there, send them the link.  It is a subtle way of showing them that the answers can be found in the new knowledge base.
• When they get used to going there, you can try answering questions by explaining to them how you looked up the answers in the knowledge based in addition to giving the URLs.  Teach them your search strategies along with giving them the answers.
• Eventually, like training wheels on a bicycle, you can take away the URLs and let them navigate the knowledge base on their own.

Photo Credit: Little Prince and Katamari by bdjsb7

Related posts:

1. University Intranets: Let’s Secure Our Internal Knowledge Base from Ourselves #Fail
2. The Virtues of Delegation
3. Software Review: Flimp – Flash Development Tool without the Programming Knowledge

You can make a well branded and copy written ad and spend hours on your landing page. Making sure to catch every user possible and track all your conversions but it can all be destroyed by the context you ad is placed in. An example of this was brought to my attention last night.

An Example

The twitter account @420revolution posted this status:

Oakland University Supports Marijuana Use http://bit.ly/4joFGJ

Which leads you to a Digg.com article with the same title and description:

Self Explanatory

You finally end up at a YouTube video of a screen cast which shows an Oakland University commercial with the words “The following clip is brought to you by Oakland University”. What follows is a video by HowCast explaining “How to legally obtain medical marijuana.” Here is the video:

The tweet was eventually re-tweeted a few times and dugg a handful of times. Luckily this example was not a PR nightmare for the institution and it was on a site like Hulu which does have a good grasp on the content they push out. But as site start to push out more user generated content be prepared for the sorts of things an ad could endorse.

The Lesson

Obviously Oakland University did not place this ad on this particular video but the more online ads are being dispersed on sites with wide ranges of content it becomes impossible to control what context your message is being displayed in.

I am not sure the advertising policy or options Hulu gives to its advertisers as far as targeting. But this would apply to any site your university advertises on that could have questionable content or user generated content. Where does the line get drawn between promoting yourself and endorsing a product/service/opinion you have no control over?

Your Thoughts

Have you come across other examples of university advertising #contextfail? Or have policies/guidelines at your institution that only allow you to promote in approved spaces?

Related posts:

1. Taking the idea of a cohesive Web template in a slightly different direction
2. Reining in the outliers for a university-wide cohesive social media presence
3. Reining in the outliers for a university-wide cohesive Web presence

The key problem is that the original screen resolution filter described in the first article operates on a now false premise: mobile devices are sub-VGA in resolution.  By now I’m sure you’ve heard of Droid, the new Android 2.0 based smartphone from Motorola.  Now, that is just one example, but it’s hitting a whopping resolution of 854 x 480.  The HTC Touch Pro2 runs 480 x 800, and even it’s older sibling was 480 x 640.  By comparison, the iPhone and iPod Touch’s resolution is 320×480.  Higher res. screens on mobile devices are the new trend, one that I’m not entirely convinced that they won’t possibly rival netbook resolutions soon.  Sure, we could just add some of these resolutions to our initial filter (which I did), but that doesn’t entirely solve the problem.  This is especially true since once you break the barrier of VGA resolutions, you run the risk of sniffing out normal computers.

My solution is now a two pass system in our Google Analytics mobile traffic profile.  I’ve kept the resolution filter in place as the starting include filter since that’s still the best and most reliable place to start, and modified it to account for the higher resolutions.  I took a simple approach and just added in the main increments that we’ve seen on the upper end of the spectrum: 480, 640, 800, and 854.  You could just as easily simplify the entire thing to grab everything 854 and down (you’ll see why this works in step two) as that seems to be the current top mark for phone resolution at the moment.  My resulting regex for the new include filter based on the old one is:

^([1-2]?[0-9]?[0-9]|3[0-6][0-9]|480|640|800|854)x([1-3]?[0-9]?[0-9]|4[0-8][0-9]|800)$

A simpler approach (which matches anything 899×899 or less) could just be:

^([0-8]?[0-9]{1,2})x([0-8]?[0-9]{1,2})$

That’s step one.  The issue is that you are guaranteed to catch normal Windows users with either one of those filters (Apple machines almost always have higher resolution than that, even older machines, but I’ve learned there are no absolutes in analytics).  That’s where the second pass comes in to play.  After the first filter, which tells the profile what to include, set up a custom exclude filter on the field “Visitor Operating System Version.”  For the pattern, have it exclude matches for:

(95|98|ME|XP|Vista|NT|10\.[4-6])

This will get rid of all relevant versions of normal desktop Windows (Windows 7 reports as NT currently, as far as I can tell) and OS X, and leave you with a nice pool of mobile users to paw through.  This should even allow you to scale up the resolution filter as smartphone screens improve and maintain your reporting accuracy, though you might want to add Linux to the exclude filter then too.

If anyone has come up with what they feel is a better solution, I’d love to hear about it in the comments so we can discuss ways to improve upon the method I’ve offered here.  So far, I’m very happy with the results this is producing for us, but we also have a pretty small mobile device user base, so it’s not easy for me to tell how well this might work in a larger environment where more variables might come in to play.

Related posts:

1. Mobile Analytics: The Neglected Mutant Step Child
2. Prediction 2008 The year of the Mobile phone
3. 7 Google Analytics Filters To Help Understand Your Visitors

Software Example

So let me start this review by sharing a little Flash piece that I developed and was able to easily embed in this blog post.  You might know my dog Skip?  Well here’s a chance to get to know him a little better.

Impressions of the Software

Flimp Text Editor (Click for Larger)

It was fairly intuitive and straightforward to put together a template.  Dropping pictures, text, and video onto the template was as simple as drag and drop, and then you are given lots of control into the nit picky details of your work.  There were times that it felt like the interface required extra clicks to accomplish things that could be handled in fewer.  An example of this is when you go back to edit an existing “flimp” you have to do an extra click to edit instead of being able to click on the preview and get right into the application.  Of course being able to constantly develop and update the service is one of the great things about software as a service application!

As I went through the tool to build this demo application I was quite frankly impressed with the feature set.  There wasn’t anything that I wanted to build and design that I didn’t easily have the ability to.  One negative was that for videos you have to upload a file in the .flv format.  Of course with the abundance of converters this isn’t a make or break, but with the rich feature set it was something that stood out as a disappointment.

A Customer Testimonial

Flimp does have quite a few education clients, and after reading through some of their higher education case studies I reached out to a friend who works at Suffolk University, Jessica Krywosa, for a testimonial.  Many of you will recognize Jessica from her Integrated Marketing and Communication blog.  I knew all I was spending was a few hours on the weekend to get in here and toy around with the software without an actual campaign to test the service, so I wanted a more in-depth assessment.  Here is what Jessica had to say about the Flimp service.

What makes Flimp so great is more than the product – its the people. They have been very responsive and collaborative in our work with video email campaigns. If you’re having an issue you can call, email or tweet them and receive a rapid, accurate and friendly response. As they continue to grow, they are very open to product enhancements that we bring up – be it in interface or analytics.

What I’ve worked most with is the analytics. Seeing click throughs by individual emails has been invaluable when determining campaigns – the placement of information, our web traffic and content, even time of day for segmented audiences. All in all, its been a great learning experience as we move forward in creating interactive and dynamic content for all areas of the university.

Flimp wasn’t aware that I reached out to a customer, so feedback like this really says a lot about a company.  I know at HubSpot there is a superior level of service and transparency that we strive hard to establish.  When a friend asks a friend for their honest assessment and they tell about the passion of the people at the company, it says a lot about that company.

Final Impressions

Although I was impressed with the feature set, I didn’t really get to dig into the email marketing and analytics to truly assess those functions.  Being someone who has a lot of experience in both email marketing and web analytics I’m a little upset I can’t truly give my expert’s take on those features.

I do still have to warn that just because Flimp takes the programming out of flash doesn’t mean that someone without design skills is going to be able to create masterpieces!  I think the people who will really find value in this tool are traditional marketers who are experts in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop or Microsoft Publisher and just can’t wrap their head around Flash. With a little education I strongly believe those individuals will feel right at home in this application and be able to create vibrant web applications as they have created for print.  I think that is the true highlight of the software because I know there are a lot of individuals who fit into that mold in colleges and universities around the nation.

Related posts:

1. Review: MobileEducator iPhone Application and CMS
2. HootSuite: Twitter Tool with actual Business Value
3. Tracking Flash Interaction with Google Analytics

Looking at the example above, (I am not picking on Duke, I just choose them at random) most higher ed sites end up this way. Not accounting for the print style the spacing is all off, unnecessary items get printed and paper is wasted, usually the user get confused. There is a simple way to prevent this, setup a print style sheet.

How to make a separate print style

In HTML:

<link href="print.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print" />

or in CSS:

@media print { ... }

What is important to keep on a printed page

• Wordmark/Name
• Department name
• Page heading
• Central content
• Footer/URL
• Department contact information

What is not as important to keep

• Navigation
• Images (other than content specific)
• Colors
• Keeping the same pixel perfect layout

Some basics about print style

Make the content 100% – Since you don’t know what size paper or how your users will be printing you pages it’s best to change everything to 100% width. This will us the maximum area possible and not leave blank sections on the paper.

Use a print friendly wordmark – Most university Web sites have their wordmark in the top left of every page. Sometimes the web version may not be appropriate for print so using an image replacement technique will yield the best results for the end user.

Get rid of anything unnecessary – display:none is your friend, use it for anything that isn’t directly related to the content of the page. Navigation, background images, promotion images

Include the URL and date – This one is not necessary but could be helpful especially for news items or anything that changes frequently. Although it is enabled by default having the URL, date and any other important information on the page may be helpful.

Compare the above example to the one at the top of this article. UNL has a completely different feel when printing. They take everything in account and tailor everything to the print medium. 100% width, friendly wordmark, removing the menu and focusing on the content.

Additional Resources

Although it is just starting I stumbled across a site dedicated to the print versions of Web pages. http://printfancy.com/ – “showcases and honors websites and companies that take the extra step to maintain their brand across all areas”

• Print Different – Eric Meyer
• CSS Design: Going to Print
• Printing the Web: Solutions and Techniques

Related posts:

1. Speaking for the Trees…
2. Need a Link Building Strategy? Create Content!
3. A Primer for Effective Email Marketing

Dr. Nikki & Nurse MK

Nikki Massaro Kauffman might not quite have the split personality of the original Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but on this day you should still watch out.

Ricky Bobby James

Kyle “Ricky Bobby” James might not go as fast as the original… but you can bet if you don’t chew Big Red you will still get the same advice.

KarlynV

We are sorry you were ALL wrong.  Karlyn’s last name is NOT Morissette.  The truth will free you.

Fienster the Clown

Michael Fienen is “scary” on target and never afraid to be a fiend when telling the truth.

The Web Rock Star

Yes Nick DeNardis does tell us all how we can be “web rock stars” on EDU Checkup, but seriously you didn’t know he was a true closet Web God of Rock?!

Other Halloween Costumes

• Our friend Andrew Careaga appears to be having a whale of a time in his failure.
• Maybe you know Joe Gaylor?  Well here is Todd Sanders being Joe!

Got a picture to share?  Leave a comment or send us a list and we’ll add it to the post!

Related posts:

1. Happy Halloween – Comics Time
2. Happy birthday to our founder, Kyle James
3. Pictures from the first HighEd Tweetup

In my Cross-site scripting presentation at #heweb09, I mentioned that a North Carolina State University report from September 2008 showed that users clicked the “ok” button on message alerts 61% of the time, regardless of whether the message alert was legitimate or not.  From that I concluded that we could be reasonably certain that, as an attacker, we would have a 1 in 2 shot of tricking a victim into clicking an exploited link via email, IM, twitter, etc. A recent study from the Intrepidus Group (the company behind PhishMe.com) now confirms my hypothesis: the report concludes that 60% of people click the link contained in a phishing email within the first hour of receiving it.

In addition, a 2005 study (pdf) at Indian University concluded “…that Internet users may be over four times as likely to become victims if they are solicited by someone appearing to be a known acquaintance.” So what does this mean to us in Higher Education? Given that users are even more likely to be fooled by phishing attempts from “known acquaintances” on social networking sites, it means that we need to be very diligent in protecting our university accounts on those sites.  Don’t allow your admins to use frivolous applications on Facebook (see Hacked Facebook applications below), remove admins who are no longer active, and change your Facebook password frequently.

(via BBC.co.uk)

WordPress inadvertent disclosure bug

Turns out this one is actually a problem with Tiny MCE that Wordpress uses as its WYSIWYG editor.  If you paste content into the Visual editor, Tiny MCE will create a second hidden (style=”overflow: hidden; position: absolute; left: -10000px;”) copy of your pasted contents.  The problem is that in some situations, Tiny MCE does not remove this hidden div when you publish.  This means that the ORIGINAL contents of what you pasted will be published as a hidden div on your published post.  Again, not the worst security issue, but could definitely cause issues if you pasted some content that you really didn’t want published.

(via Something Better to Do)

Hacked Facebook applications in the wild

Many have been saying it was only a matter of time, and it looks like that time is finally here.  Several facebook applications have been hacked and are directing users to download a fake update to an out-of-date version of the Adobe Reader from a Russian site.  Affected facebook applications (so far) include:

• CityFireDepartment
• MyGirlySpace
• Ferrarifone
• Mashpro
• Mynameis
• Pass-it-on
• Fillinthe
• Aquariumlife

Until the developers are able to correct the issues, stay clear of any of the above apps.  Also, it’s a good idea to not use ANY frivolous facebook applications if you are the admin of a university-owned page or group.

(via avg.com)

Google Wave Security Issues

The recent release of Google Wave invites over the last couple of weeks has spurred significant of interest in the Higher Ed community.  Those of us who were lucky to receive an invite have rushed out and started “waves” with others in the community.  As we being to utilize this tool more and more, many of us will begin to research and utilize the various plugins that are available.  In fact, if you were in on the “Google Wave in Higher Education” wave, you saw a gadget in action: the “Are You Coming?” gadget was used to poll who was planning on attending the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference. I bring this up because it appears that Google has been fairly lax, security-wise, in the way it currently allows gadgets to be created and used.

@theharmonyguy has been busy testing Google Wave and Wave Gadgets (WG) and has discovered some interesting (read: scary) things. Gadgets work by loading an iframe inside the Wave.  In their current form, Gadgets are allowed to not only load in an invisible state, but also launch javascript.  Scripts inside the gadget are not allowed to access the DOM of Google Wave, however, as he discovered, all gadget container iframes are loaded from the same domain and therefore, scripts from one gadget are able to access the DOM in another gadget.  Combine this with the fact that gadgets automatically load as soon as you open a wave AND you can be added to a wave as long as someone knows your wave account or gmail address.  What you now have is a perfect platform for phishing.

We all love new technology, especially those that allow us to communicate in new, more efficient ways.  But we need to remember that the attacks we are familiar with in “old” technologies follow along with us.  Hopefully Google will have all of this worked out before the official launch of Wave.  Until then, be leary of opening Waves from people you don’t know.

photo credit: catatronic

Related posts:

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2. Easy ROI on Facebook Ads
3. Feeling Naked: A Tale of the Disappearing Facebook Fan Page

The inbound marketing process outlined in this book is absolutely nothing new to me as I do teach it daily to small to medium businesses across the US and beyond.  As the book specifically tells us, “it’s not what you say – it’s what other say about you.”  The whole process is about being “remarkable” so others will remark about you.  As I’ve said before, the trick to getting traction and recognition on the web is to build it and they will come.

The inbound marketing process is broken up into three fundamental parts in the book: get found, convert, and analyze & repeat.  It really can be that simple to leverage the web.  A lot of time is spent on the conversion process, which is something so many websites simply do not spend enough time.  If you are a business website then you need to have lots of compelling calls to action, not just a “contact us” or, in the case of a college, an “apply” form.    There are also important sections convincing that the rules of the game have changed and how you can better measure and analyze not only your website but your competition.  Finally, and most interesting, is a whole chapter on finding and hiring the right sort of employees who are native digital citizens and simply feel comfortable on the web.

Deep down I resonate with everything this book is about.  After all, I “drink the kool-aid” so I am very biased.  Although I’ve been preaching here on this blog about seo, web analytics, social media and more, there are still many people who prefer a written text to sit down and consume.  This is that introduction that puts the whole process together.  This is the book for CEOs to understand what the web really means for their business.

Much like the web classic book “Don’t Make Me Think” this book is one to keep on your bookshelf as a rit of passage saying that you “get it.”  At just over two hundred large print pages with many great pictures and quite a few comics,  it can be consumed in one long plane flight or a few short sittings.

Related posts:

1. Book Review: Web Analytics An Hour A Day by Avinash Kaushik
2. Inbound School Marketing Slides: Whipple Hill User Conference ‘09
3. Book Review: Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug

High School Sophomores

High School Juniors

High School Seniors

What This Means

Well, clearly this data means that admissions offices shouldn’t be spending resources on social media.

Just kidding

I’ve shared this data with a few people at conferences and their first reaction has been something to the effect of “well it all depends on how they asked the question” or “what was the methodology?!?!” – in other words, absolute disbelief that these numbers could be valid.

I only know what the report tells me – that the research was conducted in the spring/summer of 2009 and was synthesized by data from more than 900 high school students in 47 states. But I’d suggest that if you immediately dismiss the research as invalid, stop and think for a moment:

1. Hobsons has been around for a while and clearly dedicated resources to producing a quality report. I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt that they know what they’re doing.
2. Even if you don’t think they know what they’re doing, how do you explain that social networking sites lag the most credible tool by 65-70 percentage points? That’s a pretty giant gap by any standard.

These results don’t surprise me at all. Here’s why:

• Teenagers have always made a really clear distinction between things they use for their social lives and things they use for “business”. Friends are for social media. Colleges are “business.”
• You’ll see lots of opinion leaders listed as more credible than social media – friends, family, high school counselors. Do you think they’re directing these kids to look at a school’s Facebook page as their primary source of information? Of course not. It’s a generational thing – there’s still a lot of skepticism out there.
• I don’t think there are many colleges out there who do social media really well. Until there’s a higher level of execution across the board, it is what it is.
• Did you really think that Facebook was going to be considered more credible than a campus visit? Or friends and family? Or college rankings?

I suspect that social media can be a huge influence at the bottom of the admissions funnel, but this data pretty clearly shows that it’s not a credible source of information for students at the top of the funnel. In the long run, I think that social media will probably gain some ground. But much to a web geek’s dismay, I don’t believe it will ever make it in the top five most credible sources for prospects at the top of the funnel.

Don’t misinterpret this data as proof that social media doesn’t work – it has its place in the process. Schools need to be in this arena, but they also need to have realistic expectations about what they will achieve through sites like Facebook and Twitter. By the way, this is not that much different than other elements – the campus visit is important for sophomores, but it’s critical for seniors.

This has sort of become my mantra lately, but you can’t get so enamored of the tools that you lose site of the big picture. Admissions is a huge game and there are so many different touchpoints on these kids during their search process. Just because you personally like social media, does not mean it’s the number one tool an admissions office can use to recruit students. Look at things objectively and then consider how you can best integrate it into your overall marketing mix in a way that plays to its strengths.

Related posts:

1. Show Me The Conversions
2. Ridiculously Backward Rules for Limiting Your Social Network
3. Social Network Failure: What Happened to MySpace? #fail

Armed with the list of vulnerable facebook applications, and FBConTroller, an attacker can potentially harvest a huge number of facebook cookies. From there s/he could spam the accounts users/friends, sending them links to other compromised sites or to download malware.  If you are an admin of your University’s facebook page/group, be very paranoid about which facebook applications you use, or simply don’t use any at all.

Photo by Aaron Landry

Related posts:

1. Imposter Twitter Accounts could be Making Money off your University
2. Social Survey: Facebook
3. Simple status & engagement on Facebook

New Guru Writer Paul Gilzow

Everyone help me welcome Paul Gilzow to the .eduGuru team!  Paul is a Programmer and resident Analyst Expert at the University of Missouri.  You can connect with Paul on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.  Paul has a lovely wife, Noelle.  He also has two girls,  Annika and Natasha, and one son, Mattias.

I personally remember sitting in Paul’s Cross Site Scripting presentation at HighEdWeb 2008 and being blown away by his knowledge.  This same presentation went on to win not only a red stapler but ultimately best of the conference.  Just a few weeks ago an updated version of this session won Paul a second red stapler.  So yeah…  we are adding someone who we, as well as the rest of the community, have recognized as a guru.

Welcome Paul!  The .eduGuru team is happy to have you on board, and we’re ready to soak up more of your expert knowledge.

Related posts:

1. Happy birthday to our founder, Kyle James
2. Reflections on HighEdWeb Conference 2008
3. Guru Interviews: Shelby Thayer, Penn State University

Chris Brogan and Julien Smith talk about the process I’m sharing here briefly in their book Trust Agents.  It is very sound advice (as well as an excellent book), and my intent is to simply expand on the concept brought up in the book.  By seeing what and where people are discussing you, it allows you to determine what areas that you might not exist in adequately enough, and you might discover problems that you can fix that you may not have seen previously.  The process is propped up by using Google Alerts tied to several queries and Google Reader (or your choice of RSS digestion).  This process educates you, and as a result allows you to educate others.  Sometimes others don’t realize how important something is until they see it coming out of someone else’s mouth.  This is part of the problem that universities have a habit of hiring experts, but not expertise.  Even though commenters and bloggers on the internet aren’t highly paid consultants, their voices will carry weight, especially if their views are critical.

First thing’s first, identifying the best places to go hunt yourself out at.  I’ll generally come up with a set queries I want to watch for, for instance “Pittsburg State University” and “Pitt State.”  These are both common ways of referring to our college in the media, and generally “PSU” is too generic and tends to return results frequently from the *other* Pittsburgh (you know, the one with the evil goatee).  Go take a spin by Technorati’s advanced search page and run exact phrase searches for each of the ways you want to watch for you school.  Each result set will reward you with an RSS feed you can subscribe to.  Copy those addresses down for later.

Next up I’ll make a swing past YouTube and do a similar search.  YouTube is nice though, as like some other sites (like Twitter), they support a little logic in their search, so I can do a search for “Pittsburg State University” OR “Pitt State” all at once, which makes things much easier.  You might notice though that the RSS feed provided by search results comes in by relevance rather than date.  I use the method of http://www.youtube.com/rss/search/[YOUR_SEARCH_PHRASE].rss which will provide results based on date.  You can still use the logic too.  What I’ll normally do is run my previous query through something like a URL encoder to give me a URL safe string to stick into the path.  In this case, my query that I put in becomes %22Pittsburg+State+University%22+OR+%22Pitt+State%22, which I can then stick into the RSS address just mentioned.

Marching on, Twitter is pretty straightforward.  Just hit up http://search.twitter.com/ with your same (non-URL encoded) query you used for YouTube, and grab the result RSS feed that it throws your way.  Lastly, go make the Google rounds: Blogsearch, News, and Alerts.  By the time you’ve hit up each of these, you’re very likely to get some double coverage (especially if you do it right).  That’s how you’ll know you’ve really cast a good, wide net, and you can start taking out sources that result in duplicates.  Remember, you’d rather have to make the nets smaller than not have them big enough, otherwise you’ll possibly miss things and never know it.  Theoretically, a comprehensive Google Alert will catch everything you find with Blogsearch and News, but I prefer to confirm that first, and then cut out what isn’t needed rather than assume that the comprehensive feed really will be.

Now, to put a nice little bow on all this, you just need to manage the feeds.  I’m going to go through bringing them into Google Reader, but you could just as easily use some other reader, like NetVibes, Thunderbird, or whatever you like, after all, it’s just a bunch of RSS.  In Google Reader I create a new folder called “University Listening Post” to keep everything relevant in one area.  Then I take all the feed links and add them to the subscriptions under that folder.  Really hard, right?  In the end, this is all just about finding a great combination of relevant RSS feeds, and putting them all in one place where you can easily follow them.

Oh, and we can’t forget the last most important thing.  All of this doesn’t mean anything if you don’t do something with it.  In many cases, this information is cool, but we have to make it actionable, and that process is going to be different for everybody.  You could make this information available to different groups, or pass it on as needed.  Do monthly or weekly digests for PR or Marketing.  Direct student ambassadors to different locations to engage people.  There are a lot of options if you can’t directly act on this information.  Just remember, it’s about the conversation, and it’s not usually a conversation you start.  Don’t try to control it, don’t try to take it over.  It will be rare that the conversation takes place on your “territory,” so any attempt to deal with it heavy handedly is absolutely destined to backfire.  That’s why I like the idea of getting students to go out and engage, it sort of lets you cheat a little and get positive messages out without it looking like the university itself (assuming you need to put positive spin on something).  Just don’t forget to celebrate success too.  It’s not all about damage control.  If it is, well, I’d say you have much bigger problems to deal with.

So there you have it.  Go set up your own listening post, and see what people are saying about your school.  Find neat ways to engage those authors and communities.  Try out other tools like Addict-o-matic for monitoring searches for your name and see if it reveals better results.  If you have any other favorite tools or techniques, be sure to share them in the comments.  We’d love to hear your success stories with sniffing out conversations on the web.

photo credit: Richard Pluck

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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.

Well, it’s happening again. Tim Nekritz noticed some suspicious trends in newly created Class of 2014 groups, with striking similarities in members, groups names, and descriptions. While the company or person behind these groups is not yet known, colleges can still take action.  My school, Emerson College, followed these simple steps and we got a rapid response from Facebook, resulting in the fake 2014 group being removed in less than two days.

Step 1: Know your trademark

Your college’s brand and logo are incredibly important and they’re probably trademarked. Get in touch with your legal department and find out exactly what your college holds as trademarks. Also, if you’ve developed new logos specifically for social media or web marketing strategies, get those under wraps with legal.  The fake 2014 group used Emerson College’s logo and name (both trademarked) so we had a basis to contact Facebook about infringement.

Step 2: Find your college’s trademark owner or authorized agent

In order to submit a report of “intellectual property infringement” to Facebook, you must be either your college’s trademark owner or authorized agent. Our legal department helped us with the specifics on this and Facebook has a helpful section as well.

Step 3: Report the claim of infringement to Facebook

Facebook has online forms for claiming infringement, outlined in their copyright claims section. In Emerson’s case, we submitted this form detailing the fake 2014 group’s infringing content. Within one day, we received the following response from Facebook:

“Thank you for bringing this matter to our attention. We have removed or disabled access to the third-party or user-generated content you have reported to us for violating our Statement of Rights & Responsibilities. Please let us know if we can be of any further assistance.”

We checked the fake 2014 group, and sure enough, the Emerson College logo for the group was removed. We replied with gratitude but requested, “While you have removed the logo, which we appreciate – it does not address the fact that the group purports to be official and is in no way associated with Emerson College…” The next response from Facebook came by the end of the day:

“We have removed or disabled access to the offending third-party or user-generated content you have reported. Please let us know if we can be of any further assistance.”

By the following day, the fake 2014 group was deleted. Mission accomplished – but is it?

This single case may be a good outline for capturing the attention of Facebook and protecting your legal rights as a trademark owner, but it brings up a bigger issue for most colleges – what are the limits of “official” use of the college’s logo and brand? It is important to develop web or social media policies for staff, faculty, alumni and student use of your college’s trademarked items.  It is no longer enough to just create an official group first as some have suggested. When accepted students search in Facebook for “Your College Class of 2014” and see your familiar college logo, group membership, and activity, they don’t immediately know the creator. Make sure you are protecting your brand image – you’re working hard every day to promote it.

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In all the discussions I realized how similar but yet very different all the web offices are. They range from large and centralized to small 1-2 person teams. I summed it up in this tweet:

“Major theme from #heweb09: There are a lot of great people underfunded, understaffed and underappreciated doing some great stuff!“

I wanted to try and get an understanding of the landscape of higher education web environments to see what works, what doesn’t and how we can all improve. I created a survey for anyone who’s primary job is working on any part of an institution’s Web site. It should not take more than 5 minutes to complete.

The survey will be open until October 25th so spread the word to any higher ed web professionals. The more responses the better the results and analysis.

Survey closed. Stay tuned for results.

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