This week - not just on Wednesday, January 18th - I am choosing to stand with others against the SOPA / PIPA bills that are before the U.S. Congress that could have negative consequences for free speech and free exchange of ideas and information. Watch the video above and checkout the resources below.

Learn More

• Information on H.R.3261 - Stop Online Piracy Act at OpenCongress.org
• Information on S.968 PROTECT IP Act at OpenCongress.org
• /r/SOPA FAQ
• Problematic language in the bill pointed out by a redditor.
• Video examination of bill's language.

Get Involved

• /r/sopa
• List of companies that have expressed support for SOPA or PIPA.
• List of tech companies, and their contact info, that have expressed support for SOPA or PIPA.
• List of companies that have expressed concern with SOPA and PIPA.
• Take Action Checklist at Stop American Censorship.
• Contact Your Representative with info and a widget to find them by EFF and Wired for Change.
• Directory of Representatives
• Senators of the 112th Congress
• Helpful info on making phone calls to your Senator or Representative.
• SOPAOpera.org keeps track of where your Congressmembers stand on PROTECT-IP and SOPA.

Related articles

• Help Stop SOPA/PIPA (wordpress.org)
• Stay On Top of the Fight Against SOPA/PIPA with These Tools [Sopa] (lifehacker.com)
• Fight PIPA, SOPA's Senate cousin, with this Senate scorecard (boingboing.net)
• Find Out Where Your Legislators Stand On SOPA, PIPA (readwriteweb.com)
• The Problem with SOPA (And How to Stop It) (copyblogger.com)
• Meetup groups for visiting your Congresspeople and Senators at home and giving them an earful about SOPA and PIPA (boingboing.net)
• What You Need to Know About SOPA in 2012 (readwriteweb.com)
• As Congress Resumes Discussing SOPA And PIPA, Show Your Opposition With #BlackoutSOPA (techcrunch.com)
• Tech Company PACs Donate To SOPA/PIPA Sponsors (readwriteweb.com)
• PIPA Weakens as SOPA Gets Hypocritical (forbes.com)
• Reddit going dark for a day to protest SOPA online censorship bill (arstechnica.com)
• Even Without DNS Blocking, the Protect IP Act Could Still Stifle Innovation (readwriteweb.com)
• Wyden, Issa, CEA prepare for critical battles against SOPA and PIPA (arstechnica.com)

Twitter just released this beautiful visualization of "Happy New Year" being tweeted at midnight around the world -- tweets per second. View it in full screen mode for best effect. Epic!

Twitter said:

The video above visualizes New Year's Eve Tweet data across the world. The circles get bigger as more Tweets are being sent at that moment, which means it's probably midnight in that timezone. Notice that the circle over Tokyo gets so big it nearly swallows Japan.

iCupCake

A colleague, Jeramy Johnson of Academic Programs International (API) sent me the photo above. It's cupcakes topped by representations of iPhone / iPad applications presented to him on a special day.

Featured are (left to right, top to bottom): Calendar, Photos, Camera, YouTube, Clock, Tweetdeck, Facebook, iPod, email, Phone, Safari and Messages.

Sometimes you do these things just because you can...

Related articles

• iPhone icon cupcakes look touchable, tasty (tuaw.com)

Remember how I said people are talking about you? Here's yet more proof that they are and another entry to add to my "How not to..." series.

Recently, a student tweeted:

I sent an email to my school's study abroad program and they responded in all caps. Should I write back like that too? Is that the custom?

No. It's not. In fact, WRITING IN ALL CAPS IS LIKE SHOUTING!!!!!!!!!!!

This is why you should use all caps sparingly or you it only when you *really* want to emphasize something as being VERY important.

Just as it is difficult to understand somebody who shouts, upper case text is significantly more difficult to read than lower and mixed case text.

So for those of you who've been typing in ALL CAPS because you find it faster and more convenient, STOP IT!

Learn how to use your email application properly and answer with "normal" writing. You won't look like a "newbie", you'll garner respect and people will feel more comfortable about communicating with you. Which is what you wanted in the first place.

Related articles

• What's in a Story? Talking about Study Abroad at Interviews. (ceastudyabroadblog.com)
• How Study Abroad Changed my Career Path (wanderingeducators.com)

This past fall, I was at a number of NAFSA: Association of International Educator regional conferences. I attended some sessions about social media and engaged in lots of conversations about social media and its uses and implications for international education.

There were always questions about Twitter  -- the 140 character limit microblogging network -- but, more often than not, there was almost no interest in pursuing it as a method of communication.

It seems that  "conventional wisdom" says that students are not on Twitter. Some of this was backed up by studies that I think are either limited in their scope or are so old (even one year back!) that they're irrelevant.

There's no doubt that students are using Twitter and that their numbers are increasing. It's logical.

Are they using Twitter to find out information? Perhaps.

I monitor some keywords and phrases on Twitter to find students who twitter and here's some of my observations:

• Students may not be asking questions about international education -- but they are expressing interest and hopes and dreams.
• They are following and monitoring Twitter accounts that give them helpful and realistic information about international education
• They are passing on this information through retweets
• They are expressing complaints -- in very blunt language -- about their campus offices and advisors,  programs, recruitment agencies, etc. regularly. Sometimes it is easy to determine the target of their displeasure, sometimes not. (That's why it's a good idea to monitor mentions of your organization or office.)
• They are more likely to engage their peers in conversation on Twitter, but they are beginning to use it to communicate with companies and offices. This makes me wonder how many of you with an office or corporate Twitter account are monitoring it regularly in order to be able to answer the @ (Public) and DM (Private Direct Messages) that people may have been sending you.

I have also noticed particular groups of students who seem to be most active with international education. Geographically, students from Asia are active in using Twitter. Interestingly, they often used English to write phrases associated with international education, even when the rest of their tweet is in their native language!

I'm also seeing growing use of Twitter by students in the Middle East and some of the exchanges reflect the cultures. For example, I've seen questions about whether a father/brother should allow a female relative to study abroad without a chaperone.

In the United States, there is a noticeable use of Twitter by African-American students and I have been pleasantly surprised at the number of tweets I see from them about their hopes of going abroad.

If you're on Twitter, what trends with students have you noticed?

Related articles

• 2011 Student Diplomat Video Contest Launches Today! (nafsa.org)
• How Study Abroad Changed my Career Path (wanderingeducators.com)
• Profiles in International Education: Lisa Niver Rajna (wanderingeducators.com)
• Profiles in International Education: Karen Smith Rotabi (wanderingeducators.com)
• My USA Today Editorial Promoting Study Abroad (ricksteves.com)
• Ten education journos worth following on Twitter (b2bsocialmediaguide.com)

Image via CrunchBase

I've just spent hours filled with frustration trying to find appropriate videos (YouTube, Vimeo and others) to feature in some upcoming blog postings. Sigh...

Oh, it's not that they're not out there. I'm sure they are. It's just that I can't find them.

And when I do find them? I can't use them.

Why? Because most of them are not optimized and do not use keywords or key phrases. They have horrible video titles. They are missing crucial video description information that would otherwise help people find them, share them on Facebook and Twitter, blog about them, embed them and thereby exponentially increase the video's possible reach.

Are your videos not getting the attention you think they deserve?

Perhaps it's because you haven't done any video optimization! Here's some of my tips for how to prepare your videos and video descriptions so that they can be found -- and shared! While I'm using YouTube terminology, these tips work no matter what video-based social network you're using.

Of course, it all begins with the quality of your videos -- content, visual and audio. The better quality videos on your channel, the better "stickiness" your channel will have and the more likely it will be that people will share them. But after that...

FIRST AND FOREMOST

Imagine that you are the ideal viewer for your video and try to imagine what that person would type into a search engine. Who will view the video? Who is the video targeting? What type of people are going to find your video and how are they going to find it? Putting yourself in your viewer's shoes is the best way to start figuring out how to optimize your video. Remember that YouTube is owned by Google and their searches work in exactly the same way.

OPTIMIZE YOUR VIDEO TITLE AND THUMBNAIL

Your video title may be the most important part of your video (outside the video itself). Don't ever let your video sharing site use the default file name or include a file extension like .mov or .avi in the video title! Consider what your potential viewers will be seeking. The title is basically the headline that draws them into viewing. Give your video a descriptive, punchy, pleasant and brief title. Use the title to sell your video. Make it count. Here's some examples

• A Student's Day in Brisbane - English (short version)
• Study abroad for Engineering
• Nursing students practicum in Chennai, India
• The Rolling Stones - (I can't get no) Satisfaction

Avoid putting your organization or office name in the video title. That should already be on your office or organization's channel / account and is, therefore, not needed in the video title.

Be creative. Differentiate your videos from the others. For example, do you have any idea how many videos are simply titled "study abroad" -- including a music video from a South Korean boy band?? It has more hits than just about any "real" study abroad video...

The thumbnail is the small image from your video that will show up in search results. YouTube gives you three choices automatically picked by their upload software. Choose the one that is the most interesting. It's the first impression of your video. Choose the one you think will make people click on your choice and view your video.

OPTIMIZE YOUR VIDEO DESCRIPTION

First: If you have a website for your office or organization, put the URL of your website in the TOP line of the description so that people can easily find you. When you do that, don't forget the seven most important  characters that will make that URL work properly!

Descriptions are very important because they give the user information about your video. Google and YouTube use the description to help them categorize the video.

You need to write an accurate description about your video to maximize views. Be efficient! Don't try to recreate the wheel if you don't have to. If you or someone else will write or has written a blog post about the video, consider using that text. Don't go overboard or make it lengthy, but consider  including at least a paragraph or two containing sentences with keywords and alternative forms of the keywords. It also helps to keep the five W’s of communication in mind when creating your description: Who, What, When, Where, and Why.

Don't fill the description with unnecessary and irrelevant information, Just describe what  your video is about and helpful background information.

OPTIMIZE YOUR VIDEO TAGS

Tagging is an easy thing to do and it can be tricky to learn to do it well.

When choosing keywords and key phrases, don't get complicated. Stay simple. Be sure to use key phrases in addition to keywords (e.g., "study in Australia" and "study abroad"). Don't throw in extra keywords or key phrases for the sake of more traffic. Target them. Pick them carefully and stick with them. Optimize in and around them. An easy way to find the best keywords and key phrases is to use the YouTube and/or Google search box. Type in a main keyword or key phrase and see what else pops up.

Use keywords and key phrases to re-emphasize important terms and throw in some extra ones to help scoop relevant traffic. You do not need to re-emphasize your entire title. YouTube will pick up on your keywords and phrases from the title first, so you don't need to repeat them.

A major tip: Use keywords that are misspellings! You'll capture significant traffic from those who don't spell the best keywords correctly!

If your organization's name -- or a familiar version or abbreviation -- is not in your YouTube channel username, then by all means use it as a keyword or phrase. For example, Institute of International Education (IIE) has a YouTube channel called "IIEGlobal". They would be well served to put their name as a keyword (IIE) and keyphrase ("Institute of International Education") in the keyword section of all their videos.

I like Jonathan Mendez' 7 Ways to Optimize Your YouTube Tags

1. Make sure your tags are relevant to your content.
2. The more tags the merrier. I see no penalty for using all your available tag space.
3. Spread your tags out among your clips. Adding more tags can help snag some tail.
4. Use adjectives. Remember lots of folks are browsing and they’ll use adjectives to find what they are in the mood to view.
5. Have some category descriptor tags. It’s important to remember YouTube’s default search settings are Videos, Relevance and All Categories.
6. Match your title and description with your most important tags. Basic SEM and SEO practice applies here as well.
7. Don’t use natural language phrases or waste tag space on words like “and” or “to.”

SOME HINTS RE SUBSCRIPTIONS, SUBSCRIBERS AND FRIENDS

• Subscribe to channels that appeal to you and those with whom you have a relationship (such program partners, institutions).
• If you subscribe to others, they will be more likely to subscribe to you.
• "Friending" another user/channel on YouTube makes it easier for you to share videos with each other. Sometimes that's a good thing and sometimes it's not. I suggest that organizational or office channels friend only other channels that are clearly professional channels of organizations or offices.
• Be sure to include a link to or an indication of your YouTube channel on all Internet sites and in you marketing materials. You may also want to place the URL of your channel in your email signature and on printed marketing materials. You can also include the URL of your channel an annotated (and linked) text in your video to increase subscriptions!

Related Articles:

• YouTube Prescription of Video Descriptions (seopositive.co.uk)
• Mining YouTube for Keyword Research (seochat.com)
• How to rank highly in YouTube searches (econsultancy.com)
• YouTube Video Optimization from A to Z (searchenginejournal.com)
• YouTube Gets Way More Social With Facebook, Google+ Integration (hubspot.com)
• YouTube Redesign Calls for Video Search Engine Optimization Services (searchenginejournal.com)

I recently came across the following status message (which might have been on Facebook or Twitter or some other social network -- I'm not telling!)

My new venture: online courses. #WordPress for Noobs (newbies) begins Jan 10. Get it thru #YourThickSkull

Are you serious?? Do you really think that calling your potential clients "noobs" or "newbies" and then tagging them with "#YourThickSkull" is  going to encourage them to:

1. Take your course?
2. Hire you as a consultant?

I think not. If you're going to market your services to clients, my advice is:

"Don't make potential clients think that you think that your potential clients are idiots or  stupid..."

Unfortunately, this type of marketing only makes YOU look like an idiot. Just sayin'..

As part of the work I am doing for some of my clients, I daily monitor literally hundreds of Twitter accounts that deal with international education. I have the opportunity to see how many organizations are using Twitter. Most, unfortunately, are not using it to their best advantage.

But there are some that are. These are some of the Twitter accounts that are some of my favorites, that I think are doing it best and that international educators can look to as models. What makes them among the best, in my opinion?

• There is obviously a human being running the Twitter account and that human being has a personality.
• They post on a regular basis and share helpful information above and beyond simply marketing their organization/programs or using them for public relations.
• They respond and engage in conversation with their followers on a regular basis. In other words, their Twitterstream isn't only "outbound" social media.
• They pass on TwitterLove by retweeting valuable and fun information.

These are in alphabetical order:

• @APIStudyAbroad and @AspireAbroad (both part of the same organization)
• @BorenAwards
• @ConnectStateGov
• @DavidComp (although he's recently announced that he's cutting back on Twitter)
• @EdUSATips
• @ELIPrograms
• @Geovisions
• @PeaceCorps
• @TEFLIntl
• I'd like to be able to list a 10th, but I couldn't find any other international education Twitter accounts that met my criteria! Will yours be the 10th?

Of course, I also think that @GoAbroad and @rmsylte do a very good job -- but I'm involved personally with both of them, so didn't include them on the list.

Related articles

• Profiles in International Education: Lisa Niver Rajna (wanderingeducators.com)
• Profiles in International Education: Karen Smith Rotabi (wanderingeducators.com)
• Ten education journos worth following on Twitter (b2bsocialmediaguide.com)

I wonder how many of you really know what others are saying about you in public. I monitor a lot of social media streams -- and I can tell you that your students and participants (past, present and future) are talking about your office, your program, YOU. I see it every day. I've seen students complain online -- in blogs and Twitter, for example, about their study abroad office and study abroad advisors in blunt, unfiltered terms.

So how can you monitor what's going on? A very easy way is with Google Alerts - a simple and powerful tool Google Alerts is a free service offered by Google that provides automated search notification by email or web feed about the latest information appearing online that matches the queries (searches) you have set up.

APPLICATIONS

Google Alerts are useful for providing automated searches and notifications in a wide range of functions including:

• Monitoring online references to your office, organization, programs, individuals (you might want to track your own name!)
• Tracking new information about partners, competitors or areas of international education
• Following a news story
• Tracking specific personal or professional topics of interest
• Following a political/policy issue

KEYWORDS

You can search on all types of keywords and phrases -- but be aware that how you set them up will affect the amount and quality of the alerts you receive. For example, setting up an alert for
international education
will get you every single notification of "international" AND "education". You'll be buried in the avalanche of notifications.! However, setting up an alert for
"international education" (notice the use of quotes)
will notify you only of those sites, etc. that use the phrase "international education". Much more targeted. You may need to play around with your alerts to get them just right. Don't worry, they are all editable at any time!

TYPES OF ALERTS

Your Google Alerts queries can consist of keywords or phrases or variations of a phrase. Google alerts allows users to configure one of 6 variations of alerts – Blogs, Groups, News, Video, Web, and Comprehensive. The latter includes all of the other five alert types -- and that's the one I recommend.

FREQUENCY OF ALERTS

With Google Alerts users can also configure the frequency of your automated search notifications – from "as it happens" to "once a day"  to "once a week". I recommend that you set your alerts to, at the miminum "Once A Day". If you're in crisis mode, you may need to use "As It Happens".

SMS ALERTS

If you have a text message capable cell phone and a Gmail account, you can even set up the most crucial alerts to send you SMS message on your phone. This can also be handy in a crisis situation.

While you won't catch everything with Google Alerts, you may be surprised at what you get -- and it may enable you to respond to problems before they get out of hand!

Related articles

• Google Alerts and SEO (marketing.yell.com)
• Use Google Alerts as an Identity Theft Personal Watchdog [Security] (lifehacker.com)
• How To Use Google Alerts For Quick and Easy Domain Alerts (seomoz.org)
• Why Should I Set Up Google Alerts? (theworkathomewife.com)
• Google Public Alerts launches to provide information in crisis situations (tnooz.com)

National Geographic has released a video that emphasizes that each of us will be one of seven (7) billion people on earth by the end of 2011. The magazine is promoting a year-long series of articles throughout 2011.

I've been a fan of National Geographic since I was a child. It was a major influence in encouraging me to go abroad.

I'm planning on reading the series. I hope you will, too.

SMC Lounge - 2011 trends IV
Uploaded by techtoctv. - Videos of the latest science discoveries and tech.

Check out this video of a discussion of social media trends for 2011 for  Social Media Club France Lounge which took place near the French web conference, LeWeb in France. Jeremiah Owyang (Altimeter Group), Paul Papadimitriou (Twitter), and Fabrice Epelboin (Twitter - and who writes for Read Write Web) discuss "Is Facebook American imperialism?"

Owyang uploaded the video and commented:

In this discussion we discuss social media from a global perspective (not just an American one) and we discuss and debate why many of the popular social networking sites are coming from United States, and adoption across the globe (see my collection of stats).

Gradually, the discussion turns to the most interesting part -- and they touch on some of the cultural and legal issues involved in social media around the world. B2B and B2C. A must see for international educators interested in using social media.

Related articles

• How to Take Control Over Your Social Media Proliferation (readwriteweb.com)
• Can Social Media Pros Have Their Cake and Eat it Too? (searchenginejournal.com)
• Friday Talk: Jeremiah Owyang About Social Media And Big Business (stateofsearch.com)
• The Next Giant Leap for Social Media Marketing (mpdailyfix.com)
• Jeremiah Owyang: Lead the Dynamic Customer Journey [SLIDES] (dreamgrow.com)

A festive video called "The Digital Story of the Nativity" tells the tale of the first Christmas as it might be told today--through the eyes of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Foursquare, as well as through popular websites like Google, Wikipedia and Amazon. It has become a viral sensation on the Internet this holiday season.

The video's creators, Portuguese digital marketing company Excentric, were inspired by the narrative of the birth of the Baby Jesus and the visitation by the three Magi and have visualized the story's major plot points using forms of digital communication that many of us use on a daily basis.

Despite the video's religious overtones, Excentric president Miguel Figueiredo told CNN that his company chose the popular Nativity story to teach viewers about social media. CNN reports, "[A] number of American churches have called [Figueiredo] to ask if they can show the video in their services."

Check out the "The Digital Story of the Nativity" (below) and notice gems like Mary looking up "Holy Spirit" on Wikipedia and plotting the route to Bethlehem using Google Maps, Joseph buying a cow and a donkey on Farmville and writing a post announcing the baby's birth on his Facebook wall, the three wise men checking in to the manger via Foursquare, and more.

Christmas is our tradition. So we at Manitou Heights wish you all a Blessed Christmas -- and happy holidays to all those celebrating special days at this time of year!

Anyone who really knows me knows how much I enjoy choral music. Here's a version of Handel's Hallelujah Chorus from a village of Alaskan Inuits. It's gone viral. No surprise.

Google RSS Feed Screenshot

I like the Google Chrome browser. Really, I do. It's quick, easy to use for searches. I use Chrome more than any other browser. (And I regularly use four different ones almost every day.)

But I was surprised... no, shocked, to discover that it has no built-in RSS feed reader!

So here's a tip to those of you using Google Chrome. Download and install the RSS Subscription Extension (feed reader extension) so that you can use Chrome to read those all important feeds.

Frankly, I can't believe that Google didn't build this in to Chrome. It's just plain stupid to leave it out...

[shaking my head]

I was happy to see that one of the US State Department twitterstreams, @ConnectStateGov, tweeted about my post, "The Most Important Way that International Education Can Use Facebook", today. It's one of the most read posts on this blog and I'm pleased that people find it useful.

There's a saying in the USA:

“If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck...it must be a duck”

and the University of Oregon is creatively using ducks and social media to recruit students -- including international students.

A University of Oregon student music group, On the Rocks, has become known to millions of YouTube users and to USA television viewers through a popular NBC reality series called "The Sing-Off". The group was selected to compete on the second season of the show and competed agains nine other a cappella groups for a $100,000 prize and a Sony Music recording contract.

The 15 members of On the Rocks auditioned for the program in Los Angeles last June, learned they had been selected in July, and went back to LA in August to tape the episodes. The group was picked to appear on the show for its musical talent and, in part, because of the popularity of their videos, most notably a performance of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” that has been viewed nearly 7 million times on YouTube since last spring. The video exploded in popularity after actor Ashton Kutcher recommended the video to his 6 million followers on Twitter, and then again when pop idol Joe Jonas retweeted Kutcher, group member Alex Horwith reported.  “It was a very inspiring experience,” he said.

The video’s popularity has boosted sales of the group’s fifth CD, called “A Fifth,” available on iTunes. The single "Call Me a Duck" (featured above) is the first track On the Rocks has recorded exclusively for the University of Oregon.You can download "Call Me a Duck" by On the Rocks, free of charge, on the University of Oregon admissions website.

I'm a big fan of a cappella music and saw On the Rocks perform on television. They totally rocked!

Related articles

• Admissions Group Hears Competing Thoughts on Use of Paid Recruiting Agents (chronicle.com)
• Are you a brainiac? Take the YouTube EDU Pop Quiz (youtube-global.blogspot.com)
• College Affirmative Action Faces Tougher Scrutiny in New Review (chronicle.com)

Using the connections between friends on Facebook, Paul Butler, an intern Facebook has created a remarkable map of the world.

This one began with profile data from a scant 10 million people -- or about 2% of Facebook's users. Butler first tabulated the number of friends between each city, and what latitude and longitude each friend was at. Then, he created a color code: The more connections between two places, the lighter the line is; the fewer, the darker. What emerged, of course, is a map of the world unlike any other. That is, it's not a map of roads or internet connections or airplane routes -- but a map of human relationships. Our physical geography is simply an emergent quality.

As Butler writes:

What really struck me, though, was knowing that the lines didn't represent coasts or rivers or political borders, but real human relationships. Each line might represent a friendship made while traveling, a family member abroad, or an old college friend pulled away by the various forces of life... When I shared the image with others within Facebook, it resonated with many people. It's not just a pretty picture, it's a reaffirmation of the impact we have in connecting people, even across oceans and borders.

I'm really intrigued by the huge "dark spots" in the map. No Russia. No China.

What do you think this graph tells us?

I'm fascinated by how different nations and cultures interpret worldwide stories.

Here we have the Christmas story interpreted by the children of  Saint Paul's Church in Auckland, New Zealand. Precious.

It was only a matter of time... it's an iBand. And it's a viral sensation.

The geeks at North Point church play Christmas carols on their iPads, iTouches and iPhones.

• Carol of the Bells
• Rocking Around the Christmas Tree
• Feliz Navidad

Amazing!