Month: September 2006

Philly bound, and blogging live

I’ll be headed for Philadelphia on Tuesday to attend the CASE Annual Conference for Senior Communications and Marketing Professionals. I’ll be hobnobbing with bloggers like Karine Joly and sitting on a panel with two distinguished Philly bloggers, Dan Rubin and Dave Ralis. Several other marketing and communications experts from higher ed will be there as well.

Both Karine and I plan to blog from the conference as time permits. So, if you can’t come to the conference in person, be sure to check back here and at College Web Editor for updates.

Saving face, saving Facebook?

The folks at Facebook have upgraded privacy options for users in the wake of the user backlash about recent changes to the site that some see as an invasion of privacy.

Founder Mark Zuckerberg announces the change early, early this morning in an open letter posted on the Facebook blog. “We really messed this one up,” he says.

This was a big mistake on our part, and I’m sorry for it. But apologizing isn’t enough. I wanted to make sure we did something about it, and quickly. So we have been coding nonstop for two days to get you better privacy controls. This new privacy page will allow you to choose which types of stories go into your Mini-Feed and your friends’ News Feeds, and it also lists the type of actions Facebook will never let any other person know about. If you have more comments, please send them over.

Oh, I’m sure they will, Mark.

Student protests, the Facebook way

Or, All we are saying is give feeds a chance…

Facebook‘s recent changes that allow online buddies keep closer tabs on each other has half a million Facebook users — many of them college students — up in arms. The Facebookers fear the tweaks create a “creepy” and “stalker-esque” atmosphere on the social networking site.

The changes come in the form of news feeds that notify users when their friends have uploaded new photos or changed their profiles in some other fashion.

A disgruntled user has created a petition urging Facebook to go back to its old-school ways. As it currently stands, “We all know who has dumped who, who is doing what, and who doesn’t like something anymore. This is invasive, and while it is displayed for others to see, it is not meant to bombard their homepage.” (Source: Digital Micro Markets, which tongue-in-cheekedly likens the protest to the civil rights protests of the 1960s and suggests that “the thousands of unhappy, non-paying users of Facebook can … use their allowance pools to hack an online social networking cool app more to their liking!”)

Meanwhile, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is urging calm. “We are listening to all your suggestions about how to improve the product; it’s brand new and still evolving.”

I don’t get why the subscribers are so upset. When you join a social network on the web, you’re forfeiting quite a bit of privacy and are tacitly agreeing to live a fishbowl sort of life, at least to your closest online friends. But perhaps this will be a wake-up call for millennials to think about issues of privacy and use a bit more caution in who they let into their social networks.

College magazines: What’s the point?

Food for thought for college magazine editors comes by way of Rob Westervelt’s UBrander blog. He urges us to think of our magazines in terms of return on investment and suggests a businesslike approach to definine our magazines’ overarching objectives:

If you don’t have a brand objective for your magazine, here’s how to craft one:

Example:
Our objective is to brand [YOUR SCHOOL] as [INSERT SCHOOL’S DESIRED BRAND POSITIONING IN ITS CATEGORY] so that [YOUR SCHOOL] becomes the first place [YOUR AUDIENCE] sends its students and dollars.

Once you’ve established your objective, write out your methodology for accomplishing the objective (i.e. how you’re going to do it). Remember, magazines are about readers, so write articles that connect your brand with the things your readers care about.

Good advice that should also translate to alumni magazines — and to hybrid college/alumni magazines, like the one our university publishes. Many college magazine editors have never had to think in terms of ROI. But it’s a practice worth adopting. So is Rob’s brand objective exercise.

Dude, you’re getting a battery recall: consumer advocacy in cyberspace

Bloggers and cyberjournalists are getting some credit for keeping the pressure on Dell to recall batteries that had the potential to catch fire.

This Business Week article traces how the blogosphere became a consumer advocacy network over several weeks this summer. It began on June 21, when the Inquirer, “a British ‘tabloid-style’ news site for techies, published a series of shocking photographs showing a Dell notebook computer in flames at a tech conference in Japan. The photos and an account of the incident came from ‘Gaston,’ the pseudonum of a loyal Inquirer reader who did not want to be identified because he’s in the computer business.”

The story grew legs and ran all over cyberspace.

“Industry analysts were soon e-mailing their take to mainstream reporters and investors,” Business Week reports. Soon, “Gadget news blogs like Gizmodo and Engadget spat out facts and rumors with equal zeal. They were relentless advocates for the consumer, too. On July 31, Engadget posted photos of a Dell notebook that had caught fire in Singapore. Its comment: ‘We’ll keep posting these until we see a recall or a solution, so please, Dell, treat ’em right.'”

The cybermedia didn’t merely expose the dangers of computers catching fire. They kept the heat on the manufacturers to do something about it and helped the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) conduct an investigation into the burning batteries.

Link via BuzzMachine.