Seth Meranda, one this year’s guest bloggers, sat in this session presented by Matt Herzberger from the College of Engineering at Texas A&M University. This is Seth’s first post.
Matt started his presentation with The Machine is US/ing Us.
Where to Start
To begin with, Matt gave a quick review of major social media tools, including MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, WordPress, Flickr, Wikipedia and del.icio.us. In addition, he discussed the importance of knowing what exists about your institution on these sites. You can’t control these, however as a marketer and developer you should be aware of the conversations taking place. It is also important to participate.
Get a login for each of the sites and stake your territory.
Play around and experiment.
Some items you can even update (ie., Wikipedia), after all, you – or someone in your institution – is probably the expert on much of the content currently posted.
The reason these sites are desirable is the mass of users each present. If you have content, share it. Post your videos to YouTube, upload your photos to Flickr. It automatically puts them in front a larger audience than your University’s site.
Problems
Matt went into the common resistance found when working with these social tools. Though these are starting to fade, and more universities are opening up to non-traditional outlets, they are still prevalent. You will not be able to control the conversations, but you can moderate. The conversations are going to happen regardless if you are there or not.
Many resistors fear the negative aura the media conveys on the web. He urged us to remember that we are not creating the problem, nor are we contributing. You must take the negative with the positive. Keep this in mind.
Benefits
Why should we do this? It creates some new marketing touch points. You gain access to a bigger audience. You can duplicate the technologies behind Facebook, but you can’t duplicate Facebook’s audience.
It also deters from the “corporate voice.†Matt mentioned all posts he coordinates are done by him, not the paid writers. That way his “poor grammar†(as he called it) is displayed instead of the “corporate fluff.â€
With the use of RSS, you can easily share your information with millions of users. This should fit into any business model – create content and share it with millions at little to no cost.
And speaking of costs and business models, the ROI can be high. Most of these networks are free to join, and only staff time is taken up (which could be expensive). The important part to remember is that the typical tracking methods are no longer valuable. New methods (blog comments, video impressions, tag counts) are the new ways to measure effectiveness.
Future
Matt went into a great summary of possible future technologies. If you are a reader of technology and development blogs like Mashable and TechCrunch, you may familiar with many of these. Even so, they are important to point out:
- Microformats – the ability to tag content to be used accroos many tools
- OpenID – a single sign-on approach. Make it easy for a user to get in and aggregate content.
- Mobile/Location based Social Networks – the power of communicating with not like-minded users, but closely geographical located users.
- Mashups – combing web services to form new ways of viewing and reporting on content.
- Tagging – different people see the same element in different ways. Support it.
In the end, Matt gave possible ideas to get started or continue to work with these tools:
- Experiment. Many will fail, but you won’t know until you try it out.
- Hire student workers that already use these tools on a daily basis. Tap into their desire, expertise and connectedness to your target market.
- Have a goal.