SociallyRed

Yesterday was a first for me in my professional career. I presented at a conference. It was rather nerve-wracking up until I got up there. I was lucky to be a part of an all-star panel, so my part wasn’t significantly long. I spoke for about 5-6 minutes. About what you ask?

Our panel was gathered to talk about how universities can utilize social networks like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to attract students, keep them and stay in touch with alumni. This topic has been presented on and presented on at many conferences. This time was nice because we also touched on how best to control/influence your message once they’re out there.

I presented alongside Brad J Ward of BlueFuego, Scott Kilmer from Abilene Christian University and Andrew Meyers from Hope College. The session was at the AACRAO Strategic Enrollment Management conference at the Hyatt Regency in Dallas. Kai Drekmeier from InsideTrack.com hosted the session. So after we all spoke, we opened it up to questions.

Overall, I think it went pretty well. Especially for my first presentation.

After the session, Brad and Scott had to head out, but Andrew and I went to grab a bite and found an awesome place in Deep Ellum called Twisted Root Burgers. They had amazing burgers and house-brewed root beer. The flavor of the day was Champagne Root Beer. I was a bit skeptical at first, but it was pretty good.

Overall, great trip. Although 6 hours on the road for 3 hours in Dallas was pretty harsh.

Stewart Foss – President, eduStyle.net

What is the purpose of your homepage?

the primary purpose is to help users find the information they are seeking.

Does it look good when it’s doing that?

Re-Designs don’t need to be a tear down situation. In the vast majority of cases you can fix the specific problems.

Incremental ReDesign – Research, Tweak and Repeat.

Read more…

Dmitri Glazkov from Google presents The Next Big Thing

“I don’t know what the next big thing is…sorry” – Dmitri

You can help but get inspired by the things that are done on the web. The Iranian election, how we all came together for a common cause. When Michael Jackson died, the web basically slowed down because we are operating as fast as we can, at a high demand.

Why is the web broken? The technology is the triggering force. But people also are the force. it’s a chicken and egg situation.

Technology means different things to different people. It’s really a supply chain. One person builds something that then enables further development.

There is consumer facing technology - flickr, facebook twitter

Developer facing – javascript, css, ajax, etc.

The browser is the invisible technology.

Read more…

What I would call one of facebook’s biggest faults is going to be remedied by what many are calling the “facebook Land Run.” (nod to @mkokc) Beginning at 12:01am EST, Saturday, June 13 users of the popular social network will be able to claim their username as a “vanity url.” What this means is that the web address of your facebook profile will no longer be a series of odd punctuations, numbers and equals signs, but will now be simply www.facebook.com/username. The caveat to this is that you will be the one coming up with the name for your facebook vanity url. Read more…

Yesterday, the folks at Twitter made a big change to the way their users get messages. See my previous post for details. After a rather large uprising in their users (a la Facebook), they have gotten the message. @Biz posted this message today on Twitter.

Hey folks—thanks for your feedback, here’s a plan for #fixreplies http://bit.ly/6cSnh

The blog post linked states that while totally replacing the feature they removed is not possible due to scaling, they are working on a new feature set that will give users more control over how they see messages containing @ replies. He also allayed some fears with this part of the post:

First, we’re making a change such that any updates beginning with @username (that are not explicitly created by clicking on the reply icon) will be seen by everyone following that account.

full post

This will still allow users to put another user’s name at the beginning of a post without fear that the message won’t get out. This is great for when people intentionally put someone’s name in a post to tell someone about them, however, this does little to replace the serendipitous nature of conversations on Twitter.

The way this will now work is that when someone simply types “@username” in a post, everyone will see it. But if they use the “reply” button on Twitter.com (or possibly in an API program like tweetdeck or tweetie), no one but those following both the sender and the user they are replying to will see the message.

The new feature set that @Biz has promised might fulfill that part of it, but if I’m reading his post right, we’ll have to change this on a user by user basis. It might get a little klugy for people following more than a few people to have to in to each one and set it up to receive those messages.

I’ll wait and reserve judgement on the new feature until it’s out and ready to go. But I’m hoping that they at least include some sort of batch setting process for this rather than only on a one-by-one basis.

UPDATE 10:41pm: @Biz has updated the blog post about the updates to say that when someone is mentioned in a tweet, you still get those updates even if you don’t follow them. This would seem to keep things like #followfriday in place. I’m waiting on information regarding how the placement within a post effects if people will still see the update. (ex. if I put @username at the beginning, does Twitter think this is a reply)

The powers that be at Twitter.com have now decided that if you aren’t following somebody, you don’t want to see when someone you follow @ replies to them in a post. They will now remove that tweet from your stream.

We’ve updated the Notices section of Settings to better reflect how folks are using Twitter regarding replies…However, receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don’t follow in your timeline is undesirable. Today’s update removes this undesirable and confusing option…

full post

Note that they call this a “small settings update”

On the face of this, it would seem to be a logical update. If I’m not involved in a conversation, there isn’t much need for me to see that tweet. But what this really has done is eliminate any chance of discovering new people through followers. The biggest example of this is in the #followfriday phenomenon. Every Friday, hundreds of twitterers will post the names of several people they think that their followers might want to follow. Whether that’s interesting people, people that post funny tweets or most useful in my case, people in the same industry that you might not be following. I have begun to follow several people on the basis of #followfriday. I’ve met many interesting people who work in higher education because I’ve either seen them in a #followfriday post or seen a person I follow reply back to them.

What Twitter has really done is once again, misunderstood the way we use the @ system. I’m sure they really meant to it be a true “reply” function, but it has turned into much more than that. Your users utilize the system in ways you couldn’t imagine and made the service truly useful. But now, you have broken what made it special. You have broken the system by which you find new people to follow.

First, all apologies about not ever posting here. No excuses. But on to the news.

I just booked my flight and registered for eduWeb Conference 2009. This year, the conference will be held in Chicago at the wonderful Double Tree Magnificent Mile.

On the schedule for this year is what looks like a great set of sessions. I’m particularly excited to see how different colleges are utilizing Facebook and Twitter on a regular basis.

I’m hopefully going to be able to focus better this year than last. Last year, it was my first conference, so I was busy meeting new people and making new connections as well as not being totally sure of where my job responsibilities were going to fall. This year, I’m firmly footed in using both email and social media to reach our recruits. So I’ll be looking forward to those sessions especially.

Read more…

It’s been a while since I checked in, but I wanted to post this video shown to me by Michael Fienen of SuperSatellite.com and doteduguru.com. It’s a very powerful video made by students at Kansas State University about how students vew the world around them and it’s potential future.

When working on a big project, it is easy to get lost in it. For the past two months, I’ve been working almost 30 hours a week just on moving our website to a new content management system. It’s been a bear of a project because we have a ton of content. Because of this, it’s been a battle not to get buried in my to do list for the project. A battle that unfortunately, I have been losing. So here are a few tips that will help when you face a big project.

1. Plan your timeline conservatively

More often than not, your project will take longer than you plan. Make sure to give yourself enough time between deadlines to account for delays. Don’t get over-ambiitous when it comes to setting deadlines. Your boss/client will appreciate you finishing early more than they will enjoy pushing a deadline later. Make sure to be honest about how long it will take, taking into consideration the things that will come up. This includes other projects and daily issues that come up outside of your major project.

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A few weeks ago, I received an invitation to attend a webinar presented by OmniUpdate and the title was “How to Implement Effective Social Networking.” My first impression was that this was going to be a sales pitch for some new product that they were offering for their CMS product. But then I thought that maybe, just maybe a vendor was finally going to offer something of value beyond their own product. So I went ahead and RSVP’d that I was coming. I mean, it was only going to be maybe 45 minutes of my day in what was looking like an easy week. So if it turned out to not be what I thought, no big loss.

The presentation was given by Lance Merker, President and CEO, Director of Omni Update and Sasha Peterson,  Managing Director of Hobsons EMT. Read more…