The following video is an argument for embracing social media early and to start getting up to speed now. The video has excited me about using social media by giving me a better picture of how the number of ‘likes’ or ‘friends’ will be used in communicating the college’s message. I have a new understanding of how the statistics of ‘likes,’ ‘followers,’ and ‘friends’ directly work with the college’s goals.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAdBAzaXVf4
Content Audit: Who’s Talking
MiddBlog’s Audrey Tolbert (she, at least is admin, for http://go.middlebury.edu/twitter) has a self-maintained google form that creates a spreadsheet of various twitter accounts and their owners.
https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=rEbnQbr0RamvJkXSunGuu8Q
search.twitter.com
They have improved the search tool on the site and it returns some nice results.
Facebook insights
Insights gives us a demographic breakdown for the people who are active on our page. The could be useful for CA to plan events in cities where there is an active community.
Google Alerts
Icerocket
See conversations and mentions of keywords. The display is in a tabbed fashion and shows foursquare, Linked-In, Facebook, and Twitter.
These sites display the influence you have in social marketing.
Kred
peoplebrowsr.com
Klout
Set-up listening stations
- Admissions
- Arts
- Athletics
- College Advancement
- Communications
- Crisis Management (PR?)
Construct Ambassador Program
Admissions uses similar group for walking tours
Ambassador Examples Blogs and Students
Saint Michael’s College
College of William & Mary
SUNY Oswego
Glendon campus of York University
Rochester Institute of Technology
Managing an Ambassador program:lessons Learned
http://roc.highedweb.org/schedule/media-four/
Create a Contract of expectations, responsibilities and rewards.
Have team maintain a formspring account or Blog for a month to try them out
http://twitter.com/pheak (brand believer)
Control the megaphone
Add hash-tags to events to help users find each-other. #middcommencement could be used for Flickr streams as well as Tweets. Setting up hash-tags establishes an intersection for the content creators and the audience. The vehicle for the media eases dialog and sharing with little effort on our part.
MiddStart is a good example of us providing a space for connections. This can be improved by opening up the conversation on Facebook, YouTube and Flickr. Start a MiddStart Account and create pages for each of the Projects. Archive closed projects. Use middStart.midd to aggregate the content
Tools for Monitoring
Monitor Conversations with HootSuite. It allows one to view live updates of multiple profiles and social media channels, including Facebook, Linked-In, Twitter, Four Square, and blogs.
HootSuite Pro allows multiple administrators to maintain accounts and make assignments for responses or flag content for sharing or deletion.
Need to respond? Here is a response flowchart from Depaul University:
EMM_Post_Response_Flowchart
Things we can do to improve our use of the Social Graph
We have done a good job at embracing link sharing, but we are not doing a good enough job at sharing the conversation.
Class List for @middlebury FB only goes to 2010
Establish a class of 2015?
Set-up hash-tags for topics/events/programs that have gravity. The power of social graphs are that we only need one highly connected active member to make a shared event successful.
Make a wordpress plug-in for middmag to enable other Bloggers embed our content and reach a broader audience
Publish hashtags that will unify Flickr, ustream, facebook, youTube and Twitter posts for events. This will allow those who are geographically challenged to attend.
We could stream a live video of the next commencement, allow attendees to upload images to flickr, and accept live tweets and Facebook posts. This crowd sourced content will be available after the event to be searched or shared.
To test the water of this sort of live event broadcast, we could use a popular small venue event—perhaps an Art event. Promote a Hash-tag for sharing media and tweets. As an alternative to streaming video the event could stream audio and use crowd sourced snapshots from cellphones or a professional photographer using a wireless data-card like an Eye-fi. The images will be uploaded to a Flickr Account sporting the promoted tags. A webpage could aggregate the content and present live tweets that use the same tag.
We should set up a place where those who blog, tweet, or facebook about Middlebury can be cataloged. That information should be made publicly available as MiddBlog had done.
Our Facebook page can use some further customization. Amherst uses their page to present their YouTube Videos and Flickr Stream.
Google+. Slow-starter but one to be aware of
Google+ in the classroom. An article showing the possible future use of google+ in our classrooms. Innovative Social Media Use at Colleges: Will Education Pioneer Google+?
Google+ added places and will compete more fully with Facebook.