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

Do you have more questions? Ask me over on formspring.

Slides:

Questions I couldn’t get to during the live session – with my answers!

Tari Blaney: Do we still have to ask permission from students before sending them text messages?
Me: Depends on your college’s policy. We switched to an “opt-out” policy this year, meaning, we sign up all our students by default (and tell them), but it’s up to them to opt-out if they don’t want to receive emergency text messages from us.

Michael Large: What’s Mike’s TwitterID who is tweeting all your links?
Me: Mike Petroff’s Twitter ID is: @mikepetroff

Claire Olson: For Ning social networks, what’s your advice about letting current students join? Once prospectives become current students would you let them continue to be members… if it was meant to be a recruiting tool originally?
Me: I have seen this approached both ways. If your Student Affairs folks are committed and understand the value and potential, I think transitioning from Undergraduate Admissions to the Student Affairs area after the deposit deadline is a good idea to keep it going. Some find this community becomes a ghost town as students are more likely to use Facebook regularly after they’re on campus in the fall, but I’ve known others who have built social tools into their portal and have had great success. It all depends on what you’re trying to achieve, what strategy you use, and what resources you have to commit to this effort.

Javier Garcia: How are some schools tracking the enrollment and matriculation?
Me: I’m not sure if you meant specifically related to the online communities? At New Paltz, we used Ning last year and took the e-mail addresses of the members of the community and matched them with our student records system to run a report that told us how many paid their deposit and enrolled.

Jane Fu: What’s your Web site address? http://rachaelrubin.com?
Me: http://rachelreuben.com

Patrick Booth: What tools do you use to track specific database?
I’m not sure what database you’re referring to? Can you post a follow-up?

Heather Morba: How do you suggest staffing the social media team that will create, manage, and maintain the sites? (In reference to earlier comment about students being used to run social media.)
Me: It really depends (I know! I hate that term!) on which sites and how they’re going to be used. For our university’s Facebook Fan Page, we have two people from Undergraduate Admissions, one from The Graduate School, one from Student Affairs, my intern and me behind the scenes. For monitoring using our “listening post” I talked about, we have three of us that tackle various aspects. I think it’s critical that the social media love is spread — not dumped on one person or one office, and definitely not on one student.

Jane Fu: Are there taboos for using social media as an organization that you have learned from your experience that weren’t immediately obvious?
Me: Using it just to promote events is a big no-no and turn off.

Cliff Jenkins: fan pages vs groups … which do you prefer or is new paltz using both
Me: It depends (there’s that word again!). What are you planning to do with them? How do you want to communicate with them and them with you and others? Groups are for more affinity-based presences. Groups are for “class of 20xx,” and actual student activity-type groups. Fan pages are for the official university presence, and maybe some other key functions within the university. Again – depends on the purpose for setting these up. See the Social Media Brief I talked about in my presentation for for framing the purpose.

Stephanie Null: Can we get your powerpoint?
Me: You betcha! See above.

Merrissa Uchimura: How do I convince my university to move/merge to our one main fan page for the university? Our recruit team decided to have own separate admissions fan page? Do you have research that I can share?
Me: Share the story I told during the session about the interaction between alumni, parents, current students and prospective students on the one main fan page. Alumni, parents and current students won’t hang out on the admissions fan page. I don’t have research, but the research gods over at BlueFuego might? :)

Billy Springer: Being that you can’t communication as a fan page admin when browsing news feed on FB, how do you go about engaging as the university to those current or prospective people? Do you pay students to blog & do you review the content before deploying?
Me: Yikes, that’s a tricky question. I don’t think counselors should engage prospective students on Facebook. There are others that strongly disagree with me, however. No, we do not pay our student bloggers, and we do not moderate their posts. They go through quite the selection process before they are “hired,” and sign a contract.

Gina: If you have campus location worldwide, should you have a blog for each campus or one consolidated one on the home website?
Me: I’d recommend having one blog that has representatives from all of the different locations.

Heather Shaner: To clarify, are you against “Class of” pages on FB?
Me: Not at all. I’m very much for them. I just don’t think we (marketing/communication/admissions folks) should be heavily involved with it.

Ronna Johnston: We are considering using just YouTube for all our videos rather than duplicating on both YouTube & our streaming server. Is there a disadvantage to using just YT? Credibility?
Me: I can’t think of any disadvantage. YouTube is a household name and comes with credibility these days – especially if videos are posted by an official university account.

Moamer Qazafi: Why should admissions be separate on Twitter but not on Facebook?
Me: By having one main Facebook Fan Page for the university, prospective students will benefit from reading comments posted by alumni, parents of current and prospective students, and current students. If the university has a separate Fan Page for admissions, only prospective students will be there, so you miss the opportunity for unsolicited comments and feedback by alumni, parents, current students, etc. Twitter, on the other hand, can have a separate purpose. The admissions Twitter account will have a revolving follower base in theory, as the prospect pool changes annually. Check out this tweet from @NPAdmissions. This is a great way to use a separate account that is more focused. The main university account may want to RT (re-tweet) some things the admissions account says, and vice versa, but can keep their stream very focused on prospective students. Other people won’t see who is tweeting to the accounts unless they’re following each other, so that is the primary difference.

Leslie: why do you feel admissions should have a separate twitter account? is it bad to group with other school offices?
Me: See the question right before this for my complete answer. I don’t think it’s always bad to group with other offices, but depends on which ones, who their audience is, and what their purpose is.

Becca: If I am the only one maintaining my Twitter account, should the profile photo be of ME or a school logo/important building?
Me: I’d vote for a combo of your photo with a university symbol of some kind on it. Makes it far more personal, yet official/professional.

Kristina Velarde: What is EyeFi?
Me: See Eye.fi

Nav: re flickr live stream/uploading – how do you deal with privacy issues at a campus event & uploading images of guests & the events?
Me: Our photographers make general announcements that the photos they’re taking will be used in a variety of ways, so they should not pose for photos if they don’t want to be used in publicity materials.

Allison Hudson: How did your school decide which social media tools to use?
Me: Listening and trial and error, basically. I wanted to see where our audiences were first, then determine how we could best use each tool, and then focused of our efforts on the results.

Jordan Stevenson: Do you see LinkedIn as being viable for undergraduate admissions?
Me: No, I don’t. LinkedIn is intended and used as a networking tool, and most don’t have accounts until they’re well into their undergraduate years in school. It’s great for alumni groups for colleges, though.

Stephanie Graham: Does your university heavily control branding and how does this work with YouTube, Facebook, etc.?
Me: Stay tuned after we launch our new brand identity system at the end of April! The answer will be, yes, we will follow all branding guidelines in all of our outposts, and enforce those that are done outside of our office as well. It’s extremely important for a consistent, cohesive message and image.

Bob Moinar: What are the differences between using social media for undergraduate admissions and graduate admissions?
Me: Depends on your goals, and the tools you use may be different – but that also depends on what type of students you attract for each.

Brad Jones: Do you know where I can find an example of a good blog done by a student for an admission office?
Me: I’m not sure what you mean “for an admission office.” Do you mean for recruiting purposes? See slide 15 of my presentation above for some of the examples I discussed, and I think Brad J. Ward had more examples in his blog-focused session after mine.

Sarah: How do you get your contacts into your campus database for recruitment from flickr, Facebook, etc.
Me: There are third party tools that will make that possible/easier for Facebook, but otherwise, there’s really no way for those two particular tools. For Ning, you can export member data (names, e-mail addresses, etc.) and import them in to your student records system and/or CRM.

Melissa Evans: What is your education background?
Me: I have a Bachelor of Science degree in Organizational Communication with a minor in marketing, and just received my MBA in marketing and management in December.

Stephanie: Do we need media release signatures from prospective students to post their photo online?
Me: It’s best to check with your college’s legal counsel for a call on that. We tend to only get releases for people under the age of 13, otherwise posing for a photo is considered consent. But, I’m not a lawyer and am not offering official legal advice here. :)

Michelle Smits: How do you handle/monitor risk management factors on Facebook?
Me: I’m not sure exactly what you mean by “risk management factors.” Can you follow-up with me?

[null] hi– Can we borrow from your Facebook content plan? :)
Me: Sure, as long as you’re not in our direct competitor set. ;)

Anne Marie Guthrie: What are the themes for Thursdays and Fridays
Me: Thoughtful Thursday (we’ll ask them “thoughtful” questions), Photo Friday. Now, you also might wonder why we’re not doing the weekends, especially since I preach social media is not a Monday-Friday 9-5 job… it’s 365/24/7. My answer? We’ll get there. It’s a resource issue at this point, and I’ve also seen this Monday-Friday model done and work well for other companies with Facebook Fan Pages, so we’re giving it a shot. We may have other things to share that doesn’t fit into this neat little content plan, and that’s ok with me.

Kristi Garcia: What site did you use to create Cafe New Paltz?
Me:

Corie Martin: What incentives did you give the students to join your Ning group? What differentiated it from your Facebook groups?
Me:

Chad: Was your social community on Ning? Or private other network?
Me:

Theron: Do you work for SUNY or are you a consultant?
Me: Both! I’ve worked for SUNY New Paltz for 12 years and officially started a part-time consulting business on the side last month.

Kerry Salerno: Are these proprietary communities (i.e. not Facebook groups/pages)?
Me: Since this was one of the last questions, I’m pretty sure this question was in reference to the two examples I was talking about, Café New Paltz and Lounge on Lex — am I right? If so, yes, these are private communities, not in Facebook. Café New Paltz was in Ning last year, and this year uses SocialEngine. Lounge on Lex is using Ning.

Khyati: Which site was that – the one you got good testimonials for?
Me: Café New Paltz, our online community for accepted students at SUNY New Paltz.

Whew!

Last August Facebook gave Pages administrators the ability to publish their Facebook updates to their Twitter accounts automatically. Administrators can decide whether to share updates with their Twitter followers at all, and if so, which type of information to share, such as status updates, links, photos, notes, and events.

This, my friends, is what my friend Chris Brogan has coined “robot activity.” I agree and would go further and say you shouldn’t do it.

This post is not focused on personal profile status updates and their link to Twitter. Though my opinion about that application doesn’t vary all that much, the focus on this post is for Fan Pages for organizations/colleges/celebrities (wouldn’t that be neat if celebs were reading my blog?).

Need some convincing? Let’s start here. (Note: Protecting the names of the not-so-innocent)

This shows up as a tweet on Twitter. Makes perfect sense to the Twitter audience, no? (Please note the sarcasm.)

The folks at Facebook seem to think they’ve built a tool that will “make life easier.” I’ve spoken with several small business professionals and higher education colleagues in recent months about this topic, and most don’t see anything wrong with it given how overwhelmed many are in the social media space. Using this feature would indeed make their lives a bit easier.

But-

Think about your audience. How would someone you’re trying to reach feel if they read that tweet above on Twitter, especially if they’re not connected to you on Facebook? Different people, different tools (usually). I think this makes the company/organization/college look amateurish. Let’s think about the reverse. Your Facebook Fans see your status on Facebook now as: [RT @username something rather random and unrelated to what's going on on your Facebook Page]. People on Facebook don’t necessarily understand what Twitter is, let alone the “RT” and “@” monikers.

Need more convincing? How about volume.

• The average Twitter user is used to seeing a higher quantity of tweets in a given day.
• Effective Facebook statuses usually aren’t updated more than once a day, sometimes not even more than a couple times a week, therefore not expecting the higher volume typically seen on Twitter. (Your mileage may vary.)

By linking the two together, you overwhelm, and can come across as spamming, your Facebook fans.

Looking to make your life simpler? You can SMS (text) your status updates to your Facebook Page (as well as Twitter) and you can also use a desktop tool such as TweetDeck to update your Facebook Page status separately from your Twitter status, but in the same program without having to open multiple windows. There’s also a Facebook application called Selective Twitter Status, which will enable you to link only those tweets that end with the hashtag “#fb.”

Still need more convincing? How about duplication.

• How many of your Facebook fans are also following you on Twitter? Gets a bit overwhelming for them to see the same updates in multiple locations, potentially making them less interested in what you’re saying. They may end up auto-filtering you out.

And the icing on the cake?

Let’s say you update your Facebook Fan Page status, which then gets pushed to your Twitter account. People reply to you on Twitter — but you’re not necessarily there. Or, vice versa.

If I’ve managed to convince you to remove the link between your Facebook Fan Page status and your Twitter status and you’re dying to know where to go to make that change, then head on over to http://facebook.com/twitter. They hide it well once you’ve linked them together.

Sound off in the comments. Am I missing some key points? Do you have a compelling argument for linking your Facebook Fan Page status with your Twitter status? I’m very open to being convinced otherwise, as long as you’re not a robot.

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

I mentioned several articles and case studies available on MarketingProfs.com, and highly recommend their “Pro Membership.” Side note: I’ve been a premium member for five years and have benefited a great deal from this membership. Here’s one of their many benefits:

Here’s another great article I found from a fellow MarketingProfs.com member: 16 Tips for Gaining More Fans on Facebook

Below is my slide deck from the presentation. Some slides won’t make much sense without the context of what I was saying around them, but that’s usually how it goes.
:)

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

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

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

As is customary for a big life event, such as earning an MBA, I’ve done a lot of thinking about what comes next. While I have lots of ideas, the first decision I’ve made is to focus on starting my own consulting business on the side, including my outpost here at RachelReuben.com. While I’ve greatly enjoyed and appreciated the outlet of doteduguru.com, I don’t believe in doing anything less than my best at anything (you can ask my friends on Twitter who read about my many travails with my final class last semester). The .eduGuru team are a great group of colleagues and friends who I have a great deal of respect for, and wish nothing but the best to.

I hope you’re not thinking, “oh gosh, not another blog to follow.” I don’t think you should expect much volume from me. I plan to spend the majority of my nights and weekends on my clients and our projects. I want to sharpen my saw and make sure my posts deliver value to the community, and it is important to me that each of them continue to build your trust and confidence.

I welcome your input and feedback and hope you’ll continue to stick around to see what unfolds. This is not goodbye, it’s see you around. The Web makes the world a smaller place, so I’ll still be in contact with so many fascinating minds and ideas … but can do so in a way that fits better with my new direction in life.

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

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

Although their service is called “CollegeWeekLive,” their service is much more than one week of live events. They have two major events each year, one in early November and the other in March. In addition, they provide a number of other specialized events for guidance counselors and other targeted groups, and you can have your own Virtual Open House just for your university on any day of your choice.

When students login during CollegeWeekLive, they first see a virtual reality-type view of what it would be like if they walked in the door of an auditorium at an in-person traditional college fair.

This lobby gives them an overview of their choices, a list of colleges participating, and other live features. When a student chooses to browse through the booths, they see this:

When they select a booth, they’re greeted by that university.

While in the college’s booth, they can chat live when counselors and other representatives are available, add documents to their “my stuff” section to come back to later

similar to picking up printed materials at a traditional college fair booth.

CollegeWeekLive attracts students that many of us are seeking in our recruiting efforts. The average attendee has a 3.42 GPA, averages 575 on the Math SAT, 556 on the Reading section, and 557 in the Writing, all which are well above the national average, according to collegeboard.com. According to CollegeWeekLive, 60% of their attendees classify themselves as minority students. Their biggest pull was recently from California (20.4%), followed by Texas, Florida, New York and Georgia.

Admissions offices who are seeking these kinds of students, and especially those that are dealing with smaller budgets and less travel, should absolutely try this service. I was floored at how affordable this is considering the vast reach, customization and personalization capabilities universities have.

I’ve had the pleasure of meeting one of the guys from CollegeWeekLive, and can tell they are the type of vendor I’d want to work with. They are very hands on, provide you with many ideas and opportunities, as well as suggest next steps for effective follow-up after your events.

I personally know at least two colleagues at other universities who are current clients and rave about this service. I’d love to hear more success stories, and hear about other unique ways university’s are customizing their booths, how they’re structuring their virtual open houses, and how their follow-up is going after these events. I think CollegeWeekLive has the potential to be a major player in the higher education recruitment space, especially in tighter economic times and a smaller number of eligible students to recruit in certain areas of the country.

Let us know if you are a client and how it’s going for you.

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

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

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.

On the evening of Wednesday, September 30, the SUNY New Paltz Facebook Fan Page mysteriously disappeared. At first I thought it was a temporary glitch, but when it was still inaccessible on Thursday afternoon, I knew something was up.

The vanity URL (http://facebook.com/newpaltz) redirected to the Facebook home page. A search within Facebook for our university did not return a result with our page in it. Our fan’s profile pages no longer had our page listed as one they were a fan of. It was completely gone.

Since I built our Facebook Fan Page in November 2007 it has become a very active, vibrant space for us to connect with prospective students, current students and alumni. We have just under 5,000 fans. In the two years we’ve had the page, we’ve used the “message all fans” feature twice. We post status updates regularly, we share photos and links, and we quickly respond to all wall posts. I’m feel pretty confident in assuming there was no chance of a terms of service (TOS) violation, which is what many people immediately suspected.

So, what’s one helpless admin to do when their Facebook Page goes missing? Here’s all the avenues I tried:

• After tweeting about it, I received a bunch of DMs with secret/cryptic inside e-mail addresses within Facebook, and I sent e-mails to all of them.
• I e-mailed info@facebook.com, help@facebook.com, appeals@facebook.com
• Brad J. Ward of BlueFuego called me to offer his help by reaching out to his contact within Facebook.
• I reached out to a couple of other well connected individuals, all said they didn’t have a single contact on the inside. One friend said he knew people inside, but they’re are generally unhelpful.
• I tweeted more.
• One contact suggested I go through Ad Sales. I followed the ‘advertising’ link on the Facebook site and pretended I had an ad budget of $50-100k and filled out a custom contact form saying I was interested in advertising, but my page seems to have disappeared. (Oops, don’t tell anyone I don’t have an ad budget at all.)
• I discussed this situation with virtually everyone I interacted with at the HighEdWeb Conference this week, including Mark Greenfield’s first session, desperate for any contacts. Lane Joplin even started a RT campaign on Twitter to save the page.

I didn’t get a response or have success from any of these attempts, except Brad J. Ward. On Monday, October 5 while out to dinner, Nick Denardis was checking the Twitter stream and saw BlueFuego’s tweet that our page was back. When I called to thank him, he told me Facebook reactivated our page, that the same thing previously happened to the University of Florida, who had over 20,000 fans, and Facebook never explained what really happened. The reason for the disappearance remains a mystery, the number of fans are still buggy, and I have to re-add in my admins behind the scenes, but thankfully the content is all there. Thank you so much, Brad.

During this five day disappearance, I gave a lot of thought to the importance of our Facebook Page, the over reliance on third party vendors for services we do not pay or contract for, and what we’d do if it didn’t get restored. I also thought a lot about the fortress that is Facebook, what awful customer service they have, and how one of the biggest players in the social media space clearly isn’t using social media as a listening tool like many other intelligent organizations are.

Why are so many of us investing such a great deal of time and resources in a company that is so unresponsive? Is this the best strategy? I don’t have the answers, these are just issues I’m grappling with right now, as I felt pretty panicked and helpless during the five day outage. This situation gave me pause to figure out which tools are the most effective — and reliable.

What do you think? Are we putting too many marbles in Facebook’s basket? Is it worth the risk?

Photo by lassi.kurkijarvi

Last week one of my friends on Twitter tweeted, “Just added myself to http://campustweet.com  - Ithaca College and Georgetown University.”

My immediate thought — is this another one of those sites that’s going to create buzz most of the day by our circle of common friends and then fade, or could this one actually stick? Lots of friends tweeted questions about it as more and more tweets “Just added myself to ….” came across the stream. The folks at campustweet.com (@campustweet on Twitter) were kind enough send me their e-mail address so I could ask them eight questions about their service. Here’s the interview.

How do you define your purpose? What are your goals with CampusTweet?

Our purpose is to be a place primarily for college students to find other students, alumni, and faculty from their campus who are on Twitter. We kinda like to think of ourselves as Facebook (back when it was just for students or alumni) for Twitter. Since we’re relatively new, our current goal is to make it simple and easy for students to interact with other students who are also using Twitter.

Why do you require a username/password?

We don’t require a new set of username/password for campustweet.We simply use your name and password and Twitter’s oauth login as a way for us to organize the student’s tweets into conversations.

Editors note: She did not address the question/concern that many of my friends expressed.

I see you plan to add a faculty/staff option in addition to student & alum. How does that change your focus?

We did in fact plan to add a faculty option and just released it earlier today. :)

With our new version of campustweet we are contemplating releasing a “staff” feature but seeing as our aim is towards college students we want to implement features that are advantageous to them.

Canadians are ticked it’s for U.S. only. Do you plan to expand across the border?

We hope our neighbor up north isn’t too upset. We hadn’t planned on taking off so fast!

Right now we’re trying to find a better way to add more Canadian schools and later on down the road, we’d like to add schools globally.

Several schools noted are not being listed on your site. How do they get added?

If a student attempts to join their school and notes that it isn’t listed, we have a ‘My school isn’t here” option for students to add their school. In order to add a school on campustweet, we ask that the students enter their school’s URL. This step ensures that we only have legitimate schools with .edu addresses.

How are you advertising or spreading the word about this site?

Since we are utilizing twitter as our platform for campustweet we’ve found twitter is helpfully in spreading the word, getting, and providing constructive feedback. However we’re not currently thinking about advertising…college students are pretty savvy and know how to tune out advertising. Our approach is a bit more “grassroots” if you can call it that, through twitter we can answer questions and just overall be their support should they need it. And that’s what we like to think students value the most.

Do you see value in campuses adding their accounts? I believe there’s another site for that….

Yes, we do see a lot of value in campuses adding their accounts on twitter. We’re working on a new feature to help schools interact and engage with their students and alumni who are on campustweet. Yet as of right now, few schools actually have a main school twitter account. Some schools main accounts have been added to our site, hopefully, in the future there will be more if not all. (We like to think big) :)

Are you related to alumtweet.com? How is your service different from that site?

No, we’re not related to alumtweet.com. Alumtweet is a great site to find people from your graduating class from high school. Our focus in on current college students, not connecting alumni with alumni….though you could do that through campustweet.

In the New York Times bestselling book Trust Agents, Chris Brogan and Julien Smith talk about the six principles of being a Trust Agent:

1. Make your own game
2. One of us
3. The Archimedes Effect
4. Agent Zero
5. Human Artist
6. Build an Army

These principles can be extended and used in the higher education space, specifically for community engagement, with prospective students, current students, and alumni, to name a few. (Notice, I didn’t use the term “community management.” Online communities don’t want to be managed. They manage themselves. If you follow principle #2, “One of Us,” you’ll get why. But, I digress.) Back to the principles and how this fits in with what you may be doing for your college/university, or what you may want to implement.

1. Make your own game: Facing some odds at your institution? Having a hard time convincing others around you that social media is worth the investment of human and financial resources. What did you do to break free of these fears and concerns? What new efforts have you implemented? When we created Café New Paltz last year, I heard from many peers “been there, done that – back to Facebook.” We implemented this online community for accepted students in a pretty unique way, I think — and the feedback we received from the community members was fantastic. Many comments included sentiments such as, “no other college I applied to is doing anything like this – this is awesome!” Don’t just assume others have done it. Do it your way. Make your own game.

2. One of us: In Café New Paltz, we had two students serve as the Baristas, which was far more effective than having a staff member from my department or admissions there to engage these students. The Baristas were “one of them” – not an administrator trying to remember back to their college search days to relate. Have you implemented something like this in any of your communities?

3. The Archimedes Effect: How you leverage knowledge, people, technology and time. Collaboration across units is imperative to effective social media efforts. (See also, #6 below.) I have folks from Undergraduate Admissions, the Graduate School, the Welcome Center, Public Affairs, Student Development, and more helping us manage our Facebook Fan Page. We make use of social media to upload once – and reuse/syndicate wherever possible. For example – upload photos to flickr, embed them in pages on your site and blog, use involver to include on your Facebook Fan pages.

4. Agent Zero: How are you building relationships before transactions take place? Transactions may include applying, paying pre-enrollment deposits, asking for donations, etc.

5. Human Artist: How have you built relationships in your online communities? Have you dealt with any issues where you had to learn step away from a situation, or had to decide whether to remove questionable content? How did you handle this? We’ve been challenged with a few questionable posts on our Facebook Fan Page in recent months, but in most cases the community has jumped in and “self-corrected,” and I think it’s in large part because of the relationships and community we’ve built there.

6. Build an Army: Just as Chris and Julien say, “you can’t do it all alone.” How are you collaborating with others at your university? Are you working with others outside of your unit?

Now it’s your turn. Chris was kind enough to sign a copy of his book for us to give to one of our faithful readers.

How can you win this autographed copy of Trust Agents?

Option A: Show us your inner guru. Submit a blog post about a project you’re working on that uses two or more of these principles (bonus points if you use all six!).

Option B: Praise someone else. Tell us about a project you think is a best practice that someone else is doing, again that uses two or more of these principles outlined in the book.

How to submit:

Option A: If you have your own site you want to post this to, just e-mail us the URL (staff at doteduguru dot com). Link back to us for inclusion in this contest.

Option B: If you don’t have have your blog, submit it to us for consideration as a guest post on doteduguru.com (staff at doteduguru dot com).

We’ll tweet about your submissions and share them with our readers.

Who gets the book?

Here’s where it gets really fun. Best practices articles tend to generate great conversations in the comments and on Twitter. The top two that receive the most buzz will be shared with Chris Brogan, who will work with the six of us on staff at .eduGuru to select a post/project that most closely builds on principles in the book. Chris will write a guest blog post summarizing his input on the top two posts and ultimately chose who gets the book. A huge thanks to Chris for working with this on his project.

It’s your turn! Enter by 5 p.m. ET Thursday, October 1.