Live from the CASE conference in Philadelphia: 10 steps to You 2.0 or how higher ed marketing/PR pros can get ready for Web 2.0

I’ll be posting later the presentation about Web 2.0 Joe Hice and I gave this morning at the CASE Conference for Senior Communication and Marketing Professionals currently taking place in Philadelphia. At the end of our talk, we shared a checklist of things marketing and PR professionals can do to get ready for Web 2.0: “10 steps to You 2.0”

You (or your boss) might want to go through this list to find out how you’re doing and what you should do to keep up with Web 2.0.

• Use a RSS reader: several are available free of charge, you can download some to your computer or use a Web-based one. Bloglines is the one I use, and if you’re interested just email me at karine@collegewebeditor.com and I’ll happy to start you up with a few good higher education rss feeds already loaded in your free bloglines account.
• Set Technorati watches or Google news alerts: with so many sources of information, it has become very difficult to keep track of what the blogosphere writes about your institution or your president. But, fortunately, tools are available to monitor blogs on specific keywords. With Technorati and Google, you can set up some watches that will alert you via RSS or email whenever somebody’s posts includes your keywords.
• Read/Listen and comment on blogs/podcasts: we have entered the age of the Read/Write Web. You have also the right to comment, talk back and give your opinion, so make sure you do and start to read blogs, listen to podcasts and watch videoblogs.
• Create your Facebook account if you don’t have one yet: Again, our students are there, so you should at least know what it’s all about – and maybe you would end up using it as a venue for your advertising dollars.
• Get your press releases on a blogging platform (I use WordPress) – they will be automatically optimized for search engines, they will have an RSS feed that journalists or members of your target audiences can subscribe to. And, depending on the platform you’ll use, you will also be able to provide a quick button for people to bookmark them in Delicious – which is a good way to help bloggers and journalists do their job when they are researching stories.
• Create and update your institution Wikipedia article – I went through this in another post. Definitely something to do ASAP.
• Set up a myspace account with your institution name – Actually, I’m not advising you to jump into myspace – as it might not fit your institution culture, but by reserving the account, you’ll make sure you can use it in the future if you want, and if you don’t that nobody else will.
• Set up a delicious account for your team – It’s a great way to share links and even online news clips. If you create an account and everybody on your team uses it, it will be a breeze to share individual findings.
• Set up a YouTube account with your institution name, for the same reasons as you would with myspace: to use it or to make sure nobody else does. But, in the case of YouTube, make sure you search the site from time to time to see what’s uploaded there about your institution, and if you feel like it just go ahead and upload your own institutional videos
• Last, subscribe this blog, collegewebeditor.com. You can do that via RSS or even via email if you want – although my email newsletter isn’t sent as often as the RSS feed is updated. I’ve been covering web, marketing and PR in higher education since February 2005, so it’s a good way to keep updated on the latest trends. If you do something interesting at your institution, email me, I’m always on the look out for stories for my blog or my column at University Business. And, if you need help to get your institution ready for the paradigm shift in communication that is Web 2.0, you should know that I also provide consulting services. Just email me at karine@collegewebeditor.com, and we’ll see what I can do to help you and your institution.