UPDATE: I’ve decided to postpone the initial registration deadline to this Friday - July 3rd, 2009 - to allow you to use your 2009-2010 professional development budget if you’re interested in this series.

To register, visit www.higheredexperts.com/stopthepresses

Just a quick reminder about the next 3-webinar series (an updated version of the series that was given last year) I put together for Higher Ed Experts:

Stop the Presses: How to go digital with your magazine or newsletter.
July 7, 8 & 9, 2009 - Registration closes on June 29 (next Monday)
www.higheredexperts.com/stopthepresses

This series should interest you if you’re in charge of news-oriented print publications (alum magazine,
internal newsletter, parents newsletter, etc.) at your institution.

Here’s a detailed description:

“Stop the Presses” is a 3-webinar series that will show you why more and more higher ed institutions have gone digital with their news-oriented publications. It will also help you get ready for an eventual switch from print to electronic or to better integrate both media at your institution by sharing winning strategies, lessons learned and practical advice from editors of higher ed digital magazines.

July 7 2009, 1PM-2PM ET – Rain date: July 14, 2009 1PM-2PM ET
Going Paperless: How to prepare and survive the transition from print to digital
John Lofy, Editor of Michigan Today, will explain why and how his 40-year old alum magazine took the paperless route by switching to a web magazine combined with an email newsletter. He will share lessons
learned, practical tips and advice to prepare and survive this major change.

July 8 2009, 1PM-2PM ET – Rain date: July 15, 2009 1PM-2PM ET
Paper and Pixels 101
Bonny Griffith, Editor of Fuse at Ithaca College, will tell you why and how her 2-year old hybrid print and digital magazine helped her institution reach prospective students. She will also share some winning strategies to integrate and optimize efforts using both media.

July 9 2009, 1PM-2PM ET – Rain date: July 16, 2009 1PM-2PM ET
The Editor’s Guide to the Digital Galaxy: How to edit a paperless and multimedia magazine
Karl L. Bates, Manager of Research Communications and Editor of Duke Research will explain what it means to go from print to digital for writers and editors. He will share practical tips, winning strategies and useful pointers to write and edit a multimedia, digital and paperless magazine.

Webinars: Higher Ed Experts

Institutions that have already registered include:

Missouri State University
ISU
Messiah College
Penn State University
University of Notre Dame
Eastern Kentucky University
Erikson Institute
Emory University
Lynn University
University of Colorado at Boulder - Leeds School
University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
Hendrix College

Registration is open until June 29 July 3rd at www.higheredexperts.com/stopthepresses

Please email me at karine@higheredexperts.com if you have any questions.

What I really like with Twitter is that it’s a great medium to get answers to most questions.

Earlier this week, I asked a quick question to the people who follow me on Twitter - and the general Twitterverse:

Twitter / karinejoly: Quick question: Why and what do you retweet?

I got a few answers to my question, but nothing that could help me get a better understanding of the practice of retweeting.

@mgraca: @karinejoly Any message I want to spread from the Wheaton College account, as well as interesting items from people I follow. #pleaseRT

@davidlmulder: @karinejoly I retweet anything that is particularly useful or interesting that I think people would enjoy #pleaseRT

@sliebler: I RT anything I find insightful, usually interesting blog posts since interesting blog posts are so difficult to find on my own. #pleaseRT

And, then tonight, as I’m doing my usual session of blog reading, I find this gem courtesy of danah boyd: the draft of a descriptive paper about retweeting as a conversational practice written by her, Scott Golder and Gilad Lotan.

The paper - currently under review - is titled “Tweet, Tweet, Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter” and is available as an 11-page PDF file.

I’ve just finished reading it and thought I’d share some of interesting points found in the analysis of the data sets used for this research - to get you to read it:

About tweets - from a sample of 720,000 retrieved from Jan 26 to June 13, 2009
22% of tweets include a URL (‘http:’)
36% of tweets mention a user in the form ‘@user’;
86% of tweets with @user begin with @user and are presumably a directed @reply
5% of tweets contain a hashtag (#) with 41% of these also containing a URL

About retweets - from a sample of 107,116 retrieved from April 20 to June 13, 2009
52% of retweets contain a URL
18% of retweets contain a hashtag
11% of retweets contain an encapsulated retweet (RT @user1 RT @user2 …message..)
9% of retweets contain an @reply that refers to the person retweeting the post

There’s definitely more to this draft paper, so go read it now!

But, before, why not tell us why and what you retweet by posting a comment?

In higher education, we don’t like to talk about money, especially about how much students have to pay to get an education.

Until recently some institutions didn’t even want to display a clear price tag on their offerings (to avoid sticker shock?), and made prospective students and their parents chase the information about costs on their website after a real treasure web hunt.

Things are changing though - because of the economic situation, but not only - as more and more university websites now feature cost and financial aid calculators demanded by students and their parents.

While most non-profit institutions don’t like money talks (unless it’s to get or report big donors’ gifts ;-), it’s a talk more and more of their target audiences want to have.

Well, Dartmouth College has chosen to have this talk in 2 minutes and 21 seconds with a video about its “wacky” business model (via Karlyn who works there).

And, let me tell you this is brilliant and very well done, so drop everything else and just watch this video to find out how to justify the cost of an Ivy League education in those tough financial times.

Like it? Hate it? Tell us what you think by posting a comment!

My fourth UB column for 2009 is now available in the June issue as well as online: “2010: Print to Web Odyssey? A five-step plan for assessing and negotiating the transition from print to web publications”

BTW, If you want to learn from editors who went digital or totally paperless with their magazine or newsletter, you should definitely attend “Stop the Presses,” a 3-webinar series about the topic scheduled on July 7, 8 and 9. Places are limited, so make sure you don’t wait too much before registering at www.higheredexperts.com/stopthepresses

Here are the 5 steps described in the article:

• DON’T PANIC: Get the facts straight about existing publications.
• DO YOUR HOMEWORK: Ask readers and target audiences about their preferences.
• LEARN MORE: Determine possible cost-saving options for mission-critical print publications.
• EXPLORE: Figure out different electronic options for other print publications.
• MAKE A DECISION: Share it with stakeholders, target audiences, and readers.

2010: Print to Web Odyssey?

If you are a University Business reader who has just discovered collegewebeditor.com, welcome! Don’t forget to subscribe to this blog via RSS or email.

UPDATE: Tony Dunn has just announced that he decided to put his blog, TFRL, to sleep after 2 people had complained about it to his CIO. That’s a very sad day for the higher ed blogosphere and the higher ed web community. The blog is still nominated for the award, so feel free to vote for it.

Tales from Redesignland: RIP TFRL

As you’ve probably heard (or read in my previous post), the eduStyle awards include a people’s choice award for the best higher ed blog this year.

As a partner for this category and a fervent supporter of higher ed blogging, I’ve decided to publish a series of interviews with the 5 nominees for this award. My goal for these interviews was to provide a good and fair introduction to all these blogs — and help you cast your vote. So, don’t forget to vote by June 1st and let the most popular blog win!

Blog title: Tales from Redesignland
First blog post: Welcome to Redesignland
Number of posts since you started: 57
Total number of RSS/email subscribers: Unknown
Number of unique visitors in last 12 months: Unknown

Authored by Tony Dunn, Tales From Redesignland is a very different higher ed blog - a cartoon chronicling the road to web redesign happiness in the land of committees.

1) Why did you start your blog?

I originally started my blog in December 2007 as a way to explain and document the redesign process at our university in a humorous format, but it quickly became a place for me to express some of the strange and occasionally frustrating things I’ve experienced as a higher ed web worker.

2) In your opinion, what is the biggest differentiator of your blog? What makes it different from the other higher ed blogs?

Well, it’s a cartoon, so there’s that. Also, I think that it expresses – in a humorous way – some of the frustrations and craziness that all higher ed web workers experience during the course of their jobs. It isn’t a blog about how to do your job better, or about best practices or trends in the industry; it’s about what the lives of web workers in higher ed are like and the stranger-than-fiction realities of our jobs.

3) What are your most popular posts? What’s your favorite post?

The most popular posts comment-wise are “The Home Page Redesign Committee Meeting” and “You Think I’m Kidding”, which I think express people’s frustrations with committees. As to a favorite post, it’s hard to pick since I’ve lived them all, but as far as recent posts, I particularly like “If Star Trek Was Like Us.”

As you’ve probably heard (or read in my previous post), the eduStyle awards include a people’s choice award for the best higher ed blog this year.

As a partner for this category and a fervent supporter of higher ed blogging, I’ve decided to publish a series of interviews with the 5 nominees for this award. My goal for these interviews was to provide a good and fair introduction to all these blogs — and help you cast your vote. So, don’t forget to vote by June 1st and let the most popular blog win!

Blog title: SquaredPeg.com
First blog post: “Welcome to SquaredPeg”
Number of posts since you started: 210
Total number of RSS/email subscribers: 835
Number of unique visitors in last 12 months: 73,627 absolute unique visitors

Authored by Brad Ward, SquaredPeg is the blog that uncovered the so-called Facebook Gate in December 2008.

1) Why did you start your blog?

SquaredPeg.com was started in September 2007. It was originally intended to be a team blog between myself and three co-workers at Butler University in the Office of Admission. I eventually took over the blog on a personal level and continued to grow it from there. We wanted to have a platform to share our thoughts and connect with others, as well as showcase the cool things we were doing with technology and new media in admissions marketing and recruitment. I have been blogging in some form for about 7 years now, so it was natural to start a new blog dedicated to my work and professional career.

2) In your opinion, what is the biggest differentiator of your blog? What makes it different from the other higher ed blogs?

Practical advice from someone who doesn’t just talk about the tools or possibilities, but has actually done it in higher ed. I’ve tried to focus posts on projects where these tools have been implemented and the successes or failures of that implementation. I hope that my blog provides practical advice, insight and encouragement to others who are trying to figure out or implement new media and the social web into their strategy. There are a ton of blogs out there that talk about the social web and new media, but they often don’t even use the tools themselves or have any experience with the practical application or strategy of it. I hope my experience and knowledge helps SquaredPeg stand out from others in the blogosphere.

3) What are your most popular posts? What’s your favorite post?

‘FacebookGate’ is definitely the most popular. There were about 55,000 views in the 5 days after that was posted. It had about 275 comments. Other than that, there are several posts with more than 20 comments and other posts with 1,000+ views. My favorite post is from when I celebrated 200 posts a few months back. It was a lot of fun to go back and see how far SquaredPeg has come!

As you’ve probably heard (or read in my previous post), the eduStyle awards include a people’s choice award for the best higher ed blog this year.

As a partner for this category and a fervent supporter of higher ed blogging, I’ve decided to publish a series of interviews with the 5 nominees for this award. My goal for these interviews was to provide a good and fair introduction to all these blogs — and help you cast your vote. So, don’t forget to vote by June 1st and let the most popular blog win!

Blog title: .eduGuru
First blog post: “Look, Ma. I’m a Blogger”
Number of posts since you started: 267
Total number of RSS/email subscribers: 960
Number of unique visitors in last 12 months: 65K

Launched by Kyle James - who left higher education to work for the inbound marketing agency HubSpot last January, .eduGuru is authored by a group of six bloggers: Kyle James, Karlyn Morissette, Rachel Reuben, Nick DeNardis, Nikki Massaro Kauffman and Michael Fienen.

The interview was done by Kyle James. Karlyn Morissette - also nominated for her personal blog - chose to answer my questions for both blogs. Her interview follows Kyle’s.

1) Why did you start your blog?

I started the blog as a way to network and share my experience working in an institution. There were some key areas in Higher Education web that I felt like nobody was talking about and were very important. Mostly Web Analytics, SEO, and Social Media (although Social Media has become the hot subject lately).

2) In your opinion, what is the biggest differentiator of your blog? What makes it different from the other higher ed blogs?

What makes .eduGuru so special is the community of writers. We have six strong writers and absolute experts in the industry writing on this one platform. It’s a respected group and we are all each a little different and have different expertise. It is a great collection of bright individuals who are all passionate about what they do and in the community and I think that comes through extremely well in each individuals posts.

3) What are your most popular posts? What’s your favorite post?

It is hard to really label a favorite post. Not all the posts were written by myself and each of the over 250 posts has had a special reason for being written. I put together a top ten posts of 2008 the beginning of the which highlighted a lot of the most visited and best performing posts over the first year. If you really had to single out a single post though i think it would have to be Rachel’s The Use of Social Media in Higher Education for Marketing and Communications, a post that has been passed around the web and even received a link on Mashable.

——————————————-

Blog titles: KarlynMorissette.com and .eduGuru
First blog posts: “Re-introducing myself” and “New Standards for Email Subject Lines”
Number of posts since you started: 234 posts on KarlynMorissette.com - I’ve done 20 posts individually on .eduGuru
Total number of RSS/email subscribers and Number of unique visitors in last 12 months:
None of anyone’s effing business :-) (Seriously though, I don’t give out traffic stats for my blog. Those shouldn’t matter to people as long as the ideas are valuable)

Karlyn Morissette blogs at .eduGuru, but also on her personal blog, KarlynMorisette.com. Both blogs were nominated for this award.

1) Why did you start your blog?

Well, I’m nominated as a part of two blogs in this category so I hope you’ll excuse the longness of my answers, so I can address both :-)

I started (or I should say re-started) KarlynMorissette.com in January 2008. I had previously blogged about using the web to recruit students in 2006-2007. To my utter shock, people actually started reading it! Fast forward about several months later and I was presenting a conferences and getting more attention outside of the institution I was working at and I ended up experiencing what many higher ed bloggers who work for institutions experience - backlash from the people I work with. To make a long story short, I was given the ultimatum that I had to clear every post on the blog with my higher ups to continue it. Those of you who know me or have read me for a while probably realize that just didn’t sit well with me, so I had a few cocktails one night and deleted the blog altogether. A few weeks later, I quit the job entirely and moved on to another school.

The original experience with professional blogging scared me away from the medium for a bit. I moved on to a different job and laid low for a few months, but, since I’ve been a blogger in one form or another for about ten years, my return to blogging was probably inevitable. I originally viewed the blog as a continuation of what I had previously started, and kicked myself for deleting the previous blog before saving the posts from it! I keep coming back to blogging because I genuinely love what I do, and I love writing about it and sharing my passion for it with others.

I got involved with .eduGuru this past summer. Kyle and I had been talking a lot and he was looking to expand .eduGuru to make it a multi-author site. I loved the idea and immediately wanted to become involved with it because I felt that it could be a great resource for higher ed web people. I looked at it as a different sort of publication than KarlynMorissette.com, particularly because it was going to include multiple people from different backgrounds. I loved the idea of working either others, because ultimately I think that delivers a better final product. Plus being involved with two blogs just took my obsession and belief in the medium to another level :-)

2) In your opinion, what is the biggest differentiator of your blog? What makes it different from the other higher ed blogs?

For KarlynMorissette.com, the biggest differentiator definitely is the fact that I address a lot of things that I think are problems with higher education. I love this industry, but there are just a lot of things that do not make sense and I feel like addressing the problems in a forthright manner is the only way they are ever going to be solved.

For .eduGuru, the biggest differentiator is the format - six different authors who come from very different points-of-view and experiences. It’s not just marketing, or just social media, or just development, or just SEO and analytics - there truly is something for everyone on it.

3) What are your most popular posts? What’s your favorite post?

Tough question. On KarlynMorissette.com, definitely the most popular post was the Higher Ed Twitter List, which I swear one of these days I’m going to go back and update! The live-blogging posts from conferences are always popular too (especially my posts from An Event Apart, since Jeffrey Zeldman posted them on his website). I don’t have a favorite post, but I’ll give you my top 3 of the moment:
-A Twitter Discussion on Higher Ed Consultants
-Organizations Don’t Like Experts
-Back to Basics: An Email Marketing Framework

On .eduGuru, my most popular post was one I did comparing the Obama and McCain emails. My favorite post on there of the moment is the one I called Making A Case for Twitter, since I’m on a Twitter-kick :-)