ESM is proud to be a sponsor of this great event. You can find everything on the home page along with speakers and registration.

We look forward to seeing you in New Jersey on Saturday the 2nd!

A Hands-on Social Media Workshop for School Administrators

Join us on September 21, 2010 at Walnut Hill School for the Arts, Natick, MA for a social media bootcamp experience.

Learn how social media can help you strengthen relationships with the constituents that matter most- your students, parents, faculty & alumni.

Who should attend: K-12 or higher-ed administrators and staff in Admissions, Marketing, Communications, External-affairs, Advancement, or Alumni/Development.

This full day workshop provides an in-depth, hands-on introduction to social media technology. Participants spend the day creating content in order to learn how to apply these tools to their own outreach.

Listen to recent Bootcamp participants talk about their experiences:

Cannon School Director of Admission Talks About the Value of the edSocialMedia Bootcamp

Texas Lutheran University Director of Admission, Dale Gaubatz, discusses his impressions and experience from the edSocialMedia San Antonio Bootcamp

Time/Location

Date: September 21, 2010

Registration: 8:30 AM to 9:00 AM

Bootcamp: 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM – (Lunch is provided)

Walnut Hill School for the Arts
12 Highland Street
Natick, MA 01760-2199

Workshop Format

The hour long introductory keynote focuses on foundational social media ideas and case studies leaving the rest of the day to put what you’ve learned into practice.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it:

Working with your team:

• generate a minimum of 8 tweets spread out over two hours posted to #edsocialmedia.
• write two, well crafted articles for the blog (between 450 – 750 words)
• create a photoset in Flickr of 10 photos
• post a brief (around 2 minutes) video for YouTube

Take a look at the great content that folks from our last Bootcamp produced in just four hours!

What to bring

You are strongly encouraged to bring a laptop with wireless network connectivity, and a digital camera or digital-camcorder if you have them.

Cost

Our sponsor WhippleHill is underwriting a portion of the registration fee for this event, bringing it down from $349 to $249.

Registration : $249 ($215 per person for groups of 2 or more)

Contact Info

Please kindly direct all inquiries to info@edsocialmedia.com or call (617) 855-5106.

Our Sponsors

This event is made possible in part by Walnut Hill School for the Arts, an international leader in the education of young artists. The school combines renowned training in five core disciplines – ballet, music, theater, visual art and writing & publishing – with an innovative and rigorous college preparatory curriculum.

This event is also made possible by the generous support of our sponsors:

edSocialMedia Trainers

Jesse Bardo is the Director of edSocialMedia. He leads ESM’s expanded strategy and consulting services, working directly with schools on creating social media plans.

Prior to ESM, Jesse served as an Admission Counselor & Communications Coordinator at Northfield Mount Hermon School where he worked with NMH’s communication team to weave facebook, blogging, twitter, Youtube & flickr into NMHBook- a cutting edge social media & communications aggregator site that greatly enhanced the school’s admission outreach and has contributed to record admission yields.

Steve Ritchie is the Chairman and co-founder of The Proof Group and edSocialMedia. Steve has spent more than eight years working and consulting with schools on administrative technology and prior to that was a teacher, coach and dorm parent at two New England independent schools. He brings an independent school alum perspective to social media strategy as a graduate of St. Paul’s School. Steve blogs at ProofGroup.com and edSocialMedia.com.

Peter Baron is the founder and president of AdmissionsQuest, an online resource for families who are working through the independent school admission process. Peter attended Brewster Academy in Wolfeboro, NH. He earned his BA from Skidmore College and MAT from Tufts University. Peter’s teaching experiences include Fenway Middle College High School, Pine Ridge School and Wolfeboro, The Summer Boarding School. Peter blogs at AQ’s onBoardingSchools and edSocialMedia.com, and hosts the regular podcast series, Boarding School Podcast.

Refund policy

ESM will be unable to issue refunds to registered participants who do not attend, however attendees who have to cancel due to illness or other unavoidable conflict may receive credit towards future edSocialMedia events.

Please direct all cancellation related inquiries to info@edsocialmedia.com

Photo credit:  timsackton via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution.

Although I work in the education industry and that’s my niche, I’m a communications and marketing professional who loves social media and online communications. I find that when it comes to professional development, it’s the online/social media conferences and workshops that provide the most value to me in my work.

A week ago, I attended the Blog Indiana conference, and it was the most valuable professional learning experience I’ve ever had. Finally, I was gaining some advanced knowledge about the blogosphere, social media engagement and search engine optimization! I learned all kinds of new tools; we had discussions about online reputation; I heard case study after case study about how to successfully implement guest blogging, integrate social media with your website and improve Google rankings.

I don’t mean to dish on education conferences or edu-specific learning opportunities; if you can find events and blogs that cater specifically to your niche (edSocialMedia for example), absolutely take every bit of value that you can get from it. I’m just saying that you shouldn’t limit your professional development to the edu industry. If you work in marketing, look for PR workshops. If you work in technology, look for IT seminars. If you teach social studies, join a group of history buffs.

Another thing I do when I’m looking for workshops is I look in my local community. I’m pretty lucky to live in Indianapolis because we have a thriving community of social media marketing aficionados. It’s a huge benefit to meet people right there in your community with a related interest but different backgrounds. I had the chance of a lifetime earlier this month because I network with PR professionals in the local PRSA chapter. If you start to interact with the people in your community, you can all share ideas and adapt them to work with your institution.

Do you get out of the edu arena and venture into other professional development opportunities?

Photo credit: Kevin Mullett on Flickr

However, after dealing with clients in the financial services, retail, non-profit, government/military, healthcare and professional services industries, I have noticed a common theme among the first question I am asked when I propose a social media plan to a client (even if they don’t always verbalize it the same way): “What do I do when someone says something negative about me?”

Often, the client’s first reaction is to respond quickly trying to “correct” the negative impression and disputing statements made by the offending poster. Other clients want to immediately delete the post, concerned that it will effect sales or give people the wrong impression about the brand. Still others encourage staff members to comment on the negative post using their personal accounts (or worse, fake names/accounts) to make it look like a non-partisan person is in support of whatever decision the complainer is posting about.

One of the scariest things I can say to a client is also usually one of the most effective: “Don’t do anything.”

Don’t post and blast the person with the complaint, telling them all the ways they’re wrong.

Don’t delete the comment, because it not only infuriates the poster (usually encouraging them to post even more outrageous things in other places you may not have access to change), but it also looks bad to those who saw it before it was deleted. In the end, you often end up looking more guilty – like you’re hiding something.

And definitely don’t try to counteract the negativity by having employees pretend to be members of the community who think your organization is perfect.

Very often, if you just sit back and wait, your fans will come to your aid. They will correct the misinterpretation of the new uniform policy. They will explain the benefits of the new after-school practice schedule. They will help others see the good side of putting all the student/parent directories online instead of in print. All without you having to look defensive or contrary in nature.

Of course, if this doesn’t happen, BY ALL MEANS, respond. But very often the tone of your response is even more important than what you say. Starting out with “Thank you so much for calling to our attention that there may be some misunderstanding with the new athletics transportation policy.” is a much better tactic than “Please check the letter from the athletic director, posted on the school’s athletic Web site, for the facts about the new policy.”

There is also nothing wrong with admitting you’ve messed up. “It was brought to our attention that many of you were concerned about the new lunch schedule and whether or not your student was eating too late in the school day. We have reviewed the schedule and posted below a revised lunch period more in line with some of the suggestions we received.”

In all my time working in social media, I have removed comments from a client’s page only twice. Once when the language was so foul that it was beyond appropriate for the page. And once when a poster repeatedly posted details of her new business, trying to get fans of the page to click a link. I don’t allow the criticism of an individual teacher’s or administrator’s decision or personal attacks on students, faculty or parents. I don’t allow profanity. Otherwise, I pretty much let people have free reign. In doing this, I have received a lot of great feedback on potential improvements and learned where communication plans I thought were watertight actually had some leaks.

I understand this method isn’t for everyone, but the next time you’re tempted to jump on a comment or delete it, just take a deep breath. More often than not, you’ll be surprised what you can learn from the dialogue that unfolds!

It has been truly exciting to watch the growth of edSocialMedia, and we have the tremendous privilege and honor of hosting contributed stories from some of the brightest thinkers and practitioners of social media in education.

One of the best things about working with such great professionals is that they challenge you. Recently, a number of our contributors and readers called us out on our copyright and licensing terms.

While most of our video and photos are already released under  a Creative Commons license, we have been somewhat more stingy about text and have been using a standard copyright. To be clear, we have always been supportive of the “fair-use” principle of our content which is implicit in any copyright; but until now going Creative Commons for text seemed like an unnecessary complication.

Our concern was that a CC license for text might encourage wholesale duplication of our articles and stories. edSocialMedia.com is a business that relies heavily on a successful internet presence and visibility, and having duplicate content on the internet might potentially drag down edSocialMedia’s page rank, which is neither good for us nor our contributors.

However, after some soul-searching, research and some thoughtful debates between @peterdbaron, @steveritchie, @ernestkoe and @jessebardo, we’ve come to the conclusion that benefits of releasing all content under a Creative Commons license outweighs the potential risks.

Here’s part of our reasoning:

1. We think the ‘remix and share’ philosophy at the core of Creative Commons licenses is fundamental to our education mission. We should practice what we preach.
2. The CC license grants us all the rights we need to operate a successful business and it lets us better serve our constituents. Win-win.
3. “Fair use” still applies but by explicitly granting certain reuse rights we are explicitly supporting our core constituents (educators and parents) in their mission.
4. Less friction = more sharing; more sharing = more mindshare.
5. We believe in “less control” and we are going to model that behavior fully.
6. The problem of duplicated content exists but we think that risk of someone else maliciously duplicating our content is probably low; and if someone is really going to go through the trouble to duplicate our stuff (for evil) a standard copyright isn’t likely to stop them anyway.
7. This is an opportunity to share our ideas on the best practices on how to reuse and remix content.

Many thanks to our contributors and readers for the nudge, and tell us what you think by leaving a comment below.

the edSocialMedia team

This list is not exhaustive and I encourage you to add any additional people to follow in the comments below. Also, if you are new to Twitter please send me a tweet at @SchneiderB.

Educators

@arvind
@TheOneTruePax
@nandikerri
@SpecialKRB
@edtechtalk
@chrislehmann
@IrishStudies
@pesmith
@lthumann
@pjhiggins
@sammorra
@agrill
@raventech
@pbsteachers
@APStylebook
@education_com
@rww
@hmundahl
@bkolani
@JustinMalvin
@SarahSmith
@antonioviva
@cuevash
@lizbdavis
@ernestkoe
@tuckerkimball
@TMcDonough1973
@marisacp51
@jessebardo
@steveritchie
@NMHS_Principal
@alexragone
@chuckbwill
@JonathanEMartin
@JosieHolford
@dcinc66
@mtredenick
@LRAmes
@rachelgraveline
@sarahhanawald
@burma999
@kassissieh
@plennig
@clewellyn
@calamityjen
@portelance
@wstites
@cassdull

@problogger
@janeforshort
@andrea_r
@wpmuguru
@williamsba
@shaynesanderson
@karenrubin
@mashable
@chrisbrogan
@wpbeginner

@cytochromec
@moodleman
@moodle

@fredbartels
@BillCamp
@TechRelated

@kimhurlbutt
@jfwp
@pgow
@jaygoulart
@drewmillikin
@AdmissionsQuest

@marrathon
@jeffjarvis
@willrich45
@edsocialmedia
@traviswarren
@lorriej
@whipplehill
@finalsite
@peterdbaron
@jonmoser
@robdimartino
@rbowse
@isenet
@web20classroom
@silverpoint
@NAISNetwork
@edudemic

@SB0SM
@atimarketing
@tweetsmarter
@mStonerblog
@JasonFalls
@michelfortin
@kikolani
@socialmouths
@hubspot
@ducttape
@stamats
@Turnaroundmkt
@tamar
@cmntweets

Part 1: It’s Institutional

“Social media, I gave you the best years of my life, but never again. I know where I am wanted. Screw you [insert social media service here]. You broke my heart.”

I’ve been trying to write a blog reaction to Leo Laporte’s condemnation of social media but struggled to pin down exactly why I’m so bothered by it. I think that it boils down to the fact that someone with a netcast network with 175,000 regular viewers essentially felt shunned when “no one noticed” that a piece of his social media puzzle (the recently cancelled Google Buzz in this case, which I don’t even really consider social media as much as an extension of Gmail, but that’s a different story) wasn’t working as expected and then decided to bail on social media in general. Even worse was that he eventually took it all back when the bug was fixed and everything started working again.

With his core message spread with his netcast and then extended by his social media outreach, I don’t see much of a difference from what a lot of our schools look to do with websites and social media. We have our core audiences, the ones we know will find us wherever we put our news, and the extended audience, the extra eyes, that social media brings us. But imagine if some of our schools weren’t getting quite the eyeballs on our social media outlets that we expected and so we just gave up on the whole endeavor. It would be a ridiculous overreaction to a lack of engagement — rather than redouble efforts or fine-tune strategy, why not just give up?

The core reason why schools and organizations embrace social media is to build and extend communities. We’re in it for the engagement, potential and realized, and not the ego. We’re in it for the sharing and the give-and-take, even when it might seem like more give and less take — and that’s ok. We should look at social media missteps as room to improve and fine-tune our strategy.

I’ve come up with a lot of one-liners that I thought would get a little more traction than they did (in person, in writing, and in 140-character bursts). Sometimes you hit, sometimes you don’t. But you don’t give up. It’s not your ball to take home when you get frustrated and ruin the game. Remember what we teach our kids: if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

Part 2: It’s Personal

We’ve been making a steady push in our middle and high school grades to get students to blog regularly — not just for assignments or projects, but to take advantage of the amazing personal publishing platform. I’ll admit that we’ve had mixed success, but we’re getting better every year and slowly it’s becoming a part of what our students do. Our blogs are open to the world, though we do have a healthy bit of comment moderation and haven’t yet done much to focus attention on them. I’ve been happy with how we’re progressing.

So I was surprised a couple of weeks ago when a parent met with me and expressed extreme dissatisfaction with the fact that her middle school student was blogging in plain sight of any eyeballs that found the blog on the internet. Even though we had the site open to regular visitors but blocked by search engines, one posting was drawing heaps of spam comments — none of the comments were posted online thanks to comment moderation, but each blocked comment landed in the student’s inbox.

The parent and I had a good discussion about privacy, though we fundamentally disagreed on what should be done. Spam comments aside, I pushed the parent to see the value of publishing on the web and the benefits of a healthy portfolio of student work on the internet. The parent was understandably concerned about the student reading the garbage comments in her email, but also a little less understandably (to me, anyway) concerned about the potential impact of an errant typo or blog post on the student’s future endeavors; she would have been more comfortable if the student was blogging on an internal platform that could only be seen by other students and teachers, which to me completely misses the point of web publishing and teaching students to use real tools on the real web for real engagement.

What I think I’ve come to realize is that we can’t necessarily consider student blogging in the same light as we do our institutional social media outreach. We have to take a more considered approach that makes sense for our schools — and it’s different with our students because it’s an inherently more personal endeavor. The ground rules that we play by in the classroom have to make sense in the bigger picture of our school communities, their expectations, and their norms. We have to bring everyone along together while celebrating successes, spotlighting leaders, and learning from the lumps that we take.

Image credit: Kristina B

Does the success of our social media strategy depend on how many or which tools we use?  Or is our point of view about media, message and conversation more important?

A little while ago I set out to break some copy right law to find out the answer to this question.

Allow me to explain.  I’m a big fan of the Banff Mountain Film Festival and I greedily consume their remarkable trailers like candy as I look forward to the annual stop of their world tour in my area.  The movies they select are visually breathtaking, thoughtful, and deeply respectful of mountains and mountain culture.  So naturally I was drawn to make fun of them.

What, I found myself asking, would a bad mountain film festival look like?  And so in a couple of hours, using free browser plug-ins and iMovie I had the answer.

Here is their official trailer:

And here is my creation:

Now on the face of it I’m breaking all kinds of laws here.  I’m making a brand look silly, using content without permission and republishing all this for everyone to see.  Isn’t this a marketing nightmare?

Lucky for me the people at the film festival watched the video and thought it was hilarious.

Within a few weeks of the video going up they got in touch with me to let me know how much they liked it and even asked the composer if it was okay to use his music.  They then asked me if it would be okay to post to their blog!

When the good folks in Canada didn’t send me a take down notice they gained three things:

• One die hard fan who hasn’t stopped talking about how great their organization is since this happened
• 9,000+ targeted views from a video that cost them nothing to produce
• Further exposure on 25+ web sites from video embeds

These outcomes didn’t happen because the Banff Center chose YouTube as a distribution tool.  Instead it seems clear that this organization truly embraces the point of view of social media as it acknowledges:

• Engagement (rather than page views or click-through rates) is a true measure of success
• Organizations don’t control their messages, they manage them
• You can’t join in a conversation if you aren’t present in the space
• Two way conversation, in a human voice is the best form of marketing

So before you sign up for another social media service ask yourself why you are considering the tool.  Are you joining up for the home page button, or because of your point of view?

Where are you at with your social media strategy?  Are you concerned that well meaning but hapless video editors will hijack, remix and re-post your fine tuned marketing materials?  Let us know in the comments!

THINK Global School is an independent secondary school whose students live and learn in a different international city every trimester. In short, we’re a global, mobile high school. We’re also brand new: TGS welcomes the very first class of 9th graders this September in Sweden.

TGS staffers are all around the world, too – and technology and social tools play an integral role in the way we work, collaborate and communicate daily. On any given day, members of the TGS team are calling internationally via Skype, live-editing curriculum planning wikis, writing blog posts and connecting with status updates.

Once school begins, we’ll be even more reliant on technology. Students have iPhones, iPads and MacBooks in their arsenal of educational tools, and will be capturing their experiences live and on the fly. We’ll encourage them to express themselves through several different media, documenting their thoughts, feelings, interpretations and observations on what’s happening around them. One of the most exciting elements of my role as executive director of communications is working with that student-generated content: showcasing the photos, videos and blog posts students create as they explore the world.

First, students participate in classroom discussions, go on iExplore excursions, and participate in location-specific activities (noodle making in Beijing, for example, or swimming the Great Barrier Reef in Australia). Then students upload the content they create from their adventures to our internal website, Spot. Spot is the private hub for all TGS content and collaboration – blog posts, homework assignments, wikis, photos, videos and so on. Spot is the backbone for coordinating activity among faculty, students and staff. All student materials will go into Spot before they are disseminated via other official channels.

One of my jobs is to assess the materials the students post to Spot, then determine 1) which pieces of student generated content I can share with a wider, more general public audience and then 2) determine which social media platforms (YouTube, Facebook, etc) are the best for showcasing these materials.

Because we’re working with students, there are several additional factors to consider. An important one is educating students on social media tools, and using flexible guidelines to help them make the most of the tools available. We’ll have a special orientation course during the first week of school to educate our kids about online privacy, their digital reputation, and how their online behavior affects their real-word relationships. In addition, the safety of our students is very important. We won’t disclose personal details about the students, and we won’t broadcast our specific daily schedules or locations.

I’ve developed a flexible strategy and guidelines for this effort. Flexibility is necessary, because so much of what we’re trying is brand new. We need to be willing to try new things, assess, and adjust accordingly. Much of what will happen in the next few months will be a learning experience for the students and for the TGS staff. The keys to success will be active listening, willingness to make changes on the fly, and nimbleness as we navigate an entirely new frontier.

In a series of posts on edSocialMedia this school year, I will shed some light on the ways we’re using social media at TGS, how we’re using student-generated content, the lessons we’ve learned and the pitfalls we’ve encountered. Follow along as we make our way around the world.

ESM’s Peter Baron and Jesse Bardo will be traveling up to this great event this Friday 8/20. edSocialMedia blogger Tucker Kimball will be presenting among others.

ESM sponsor's social media breakfast

It should be a great event, we look forward to meeting everyone from the Maine and New Hampshire groups.

Come joins us!