Archive for March, 2007
Spring might be upon us, but some folks at the University of Alabama at Birmingham have really their mind more focused on ice, snow and Web 2.0. To promote their research team's expedition at Palmer Station Antarctica, they launched, earlier this month, a dedicated website called "UAB in Antarctica" that uses a lot of Web 2.0 components (a blog by the researchers themselves, technorati tags, delicious links, a flickr photo stream right from the ice and even a few YouTube videos shot before everybody left for the trip). While browsing the site, I read the blog entry by UAB Ph.D. Philip Bucolo,...
Read MoreWhile I tend to focus my posts on US higher ed institutions, I know that more and more readers actually work at Canadian universities and colleges. That's why I've decided to interview for this series about higher ed media Peggy Berkowitz, the editor of University Affairs published in print and online by the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada. 1) How do you use the Web in your work? Do you prefer RSS feeds or email? I use the web for so many aspects of my job that's impossible to name everything but these include: finding university faculty members...
Read MoreDon't worry, I don't plan to run a five-part series on RealNebraska, the video show produced by the admission office of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. But, I HAD to tell you about this. David Burge, the host of the show and the associate director for admissions at UNL, posted a comment to my previous post where he explained that while RealNebraska hasn't gone viral on YouTube, he was featured on the TODAY show for 6 days as part of a contest just a month ago. Interesting development for a show mainly produced to be distributed on the Web, don't...
Read MoreMy next column about social networking websites will soon be published in the April issue of University Business. I wrote it a couple of months ago before having a chance to discover a very interesting MySpace page (with 883 friends at the time of this posting): the Colleges and Universities MySpace. Heather Mansfield, Web editor at Drury University and a MySpace consultant for non-profit organizations at DIOSA | Communications, is the person behind this original initiative. 1) Why did you start the universities and colleges MySpace profile? I started the Colleges & Universities MySpace in December 2006 to monitor the...
Read MoreI'm just back from a short and random tour of campuses in SecondLife. I typed "university" and "colleges" in the search engine of the application to see what any regular visitor will find. My journey took me to a few different places including the SL Island of Vassar College. On Vassar Island, a small but nice campus, visitors are invited to sit in a red and black flying saucer (well, not exactly, but that's what I thought about when I saw it the first time) to take a guided tour of the premises. During the tour, I was told by...
Read MoreI'm always looking for innovative practices to showcase on this blog. This past week I exchanged a few emails with Phil de Haan, director of media relations at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI. We talked about how we use social networking websites such as Facebook and Linkedin. In his email, Phil explained how he uses Facebook in his daily work. Since there's no reason why I should be the only one to find out about this interesting practice, I asked Phil the permission to publish his comments along with a screenshot of his Facebook profile. How do you use facebook in...
Read MoreIn November 2005, I wrote about this great show produced by the admission office of the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. At that time, the episodes had just been made available as video podcasts a few weeks after the launch of the the video Ipod: It didn’t take too long to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to repurpose its admission-oriented streaming videos available on the Admission website, “Real Nebraska” As reported in “UNL podcasts reach out to prospective students” an article published in The Daily Nebraskan, this show is “modeled after The Daily Show staring Jon Stewart. Real Nebraska is a monthly recruitment...
Read MoreHigher Education Web Professionals Association (HighEdWeb) defines itself as "a non-profit organization whose mission is to advance web professionals, technologies and standards in higher education." The organizers of HighEdWebDev, the great annual conference in Rochester, NY are the ones behind this new professional organization. Here are the current members of the Board of Directors: Dale Grady, University of Rochester, President Steve Lewis, SUNY-Brockport, Secretary/Treasurer Jeremy Trumble, Rochester Institute of Technology They will continue to serve on the Board of Directors after the addition of the new members. So, it's my understanding that the association wants to assure a broader national diversity at...
Read MoreChances are you've heard about (or suffered from ;-) the dreaded website redesign by committee: a group of stakeholders making life and death decisions on the design created by the Web team or the external agency. With the help of usability advocates like Steve Krug, more and more institutions have tried to balance this approach with a more user-centered process: educated decisions based on metrics, trends and the results of real testing done with members of target audiences. To make the process even more transparent, a few higher ed teams in charge of their website redesign (Cornell, Duke, Ball State, etc.) have...
Read MoreI've just spent a few minutes listening to lots of "Can you hear me, now?" at NMC Campus in SecondLife at the beginning of a stress test for SL integrated voice application. It's supposed to be released in June. And, this was pretty exciting and very... clear. It sounded like a Skype conference call or a Skypecast, but sure looked different ;-) I couldn't stay until the end of the test, but this is a very promising start for voice chat in SecondLife, which I identified as a very important step for the future of the platform in higher ed marketing and...
Read MoreLast week, I posted about a survey report released by College Parents of America, a national "association dedicated to advocating and to serving on behalf of current and future college parents." At that time, I noticed on the homepage of the association website a link to its blog: "Hoverings, A Blog for College Parents." Launched in September 2006, this blog is written by the president of the association, James A. Boyle, a veteran marketing and communication executive. While "Hoverings" isn't the blog of a higher ed professional per se, I thought you'd be interested in finding out how College...
Read MoreLast Tuesday, I got an email from Paul Baker asking if I could name a few success stories of new media or social initiatives implemented by universities and colleges: I'm looking for inspiring stories from colleges and universities who have successfully used any New Media tool or social media tool as part of a campaign to influence their publics' attitudes or behavior. I would be particularly interested in hearing about how they measured and evaluated the success of their effort. Although many institutions have jumped into the Web 2.0 bandwagon, only a few have launched these initiatives with a clear ROI strategy in...
Read MoreI've already posted about helicopter parents, this new breed of college parents. It's difficult to ignore them when you work on a campus. And, we shouldn't. Never has a generation of parents been so involved in their kids college life, which is why they have become one of our main target audiences (the fact that they pay some - most? - of the bills is also a big factor). A couple of weeks ago, College Parents of America and Student Advantages surveyed their members. More than 1,700 parents answered the web-based questionnaire. The resulting 8-page PDF report, the 2nd Annual National Survey...
Read MoreI don't know if Dennis Miller's last post or Andrew Careaga's ealier comment about the topic have helped make the case for open access I started when I submitted my final draft a few months ago. But, I've just heard from Andrea Gabrick, the CASE editor I worked with on my article about Web 2.0, and they've finally decided to provide unrestricted access to "User Generation" until April 15, 2007. As a result, if you want to read (or share with your president, VP, director or coworkers) a good primer about Web 2.0, you can now (even if you are not a...
Read MoreAndrew Careaga and its PR team at the University of Missouri Rolla went through a crisis a few days ago after a graduate student claiming to have a bomb and anthrax was subdued by campus police, then arrested and charged with six felonies. In his very nicely titled post "UMR, the media and the war on error," he shares some interesting new facts-of-live about the new role of the blogosphere in this kind of crises: At the outset, we did not release the student’s name. He hadn’t yet been charged, and we decided that the release of that information should come either...
Read MoreHave you read "Educating the Net Generation," a free PDF e-book published by Educause? In the post I wrote about it 2 years ago, I mentioned that this collection of essays published by Educause would help spread the word that Web 101 wasn’t enough anymore in colleges and universities. In other words, it was a great way to educate your stakeholders about the new generation of college students. Today, you get a chance to ask your questions about this generation and its information-literacy skills to Diane Oblinger, co-editor of this book and VP at Educause thanks to The Chronicle of Higher...
Read MoreAs I mentioned yesterday in the first post of this series, "How higher ed journalists use the Web: Scott Jaschik, editor at Inside Higher Ed," I interviewed a few journalists for my last column: "PR on the Web 101." My big boss at University Business, Tim Goral, also shared with me how he uses the Web in his work as an editor. 1) How do you use the Web in your work? Do you prefer RSS feeds or email? I use both. I’m a big fan of RSS feeds. I subscribe to maybe a dozen feeds from higher ed organizations, and...
Read MoreWith its new website redesign, Campus Technology has made the leap into the RSS age. The magazine targeted to higher ed IT and Web professionals now offers news and updates via an RSS feed. Go subscribe to it with your favorite RSS reader! Now, if only their newsletters had their own individual RSS feeds as well...
If you've read my last University Business column titled "PR on the Web 101," you know that I've interviewed a few higher ed PR pros as well as reporters and editors to come up with 7 components of highly effective media relations web pages. But, I'm sure all the readers working in PR and Media Relations will probably be interested in learning more on how higher ed journalists use the Web. If you work in a Web department, forward this post to your insititution's communication or marketing team. You'll make friends ;-) So, let's start with Scott Jaschik. Editor and co-founder...
Read MoreDid you know that Francis Ford Coppola graduated from Hofstra University, the largest private university on Long Island, New York? I didn't. And, I had never studied this institution's marketing initiatives before I discovered this interview of Francis Ford Coppola on YouTube - as any prospective students or parents (well, anybody actually, but you get my point) interested in Coppola will by doing a search on the famous director's name: As you might expect, this interview offered in 2 parts on YouTube is professionally produced. It also includes a dream-come-true-for-marketers sound byte from the director: "If I ever had a moment in...
Read MoreAfter I presented with Joe Hice at the CASE conference for senior marketing and communication professionals in Philadelphia last September, Rae Goldsmith, CASE Marketing VP, asked me to share the content of our presentation about Web 2.0 with the readers of their magazine. I wrote the article, "User Generation," and it's now available in the March issue of Currents. Unfortunately, you have to be a CASE member to read this article online. If your institution isn't a member, you can get a pretty good idea of what's in the article by looking at my presentation slides and reading this post. If you're a...
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Lin Larson on 
Julie on 