Month: September 2008

Friday Five: higher ed odds and sods

Important stuff about Twitter, LinkedIn, Unigo, rankings and geeks

While I slack, other higher ed bloggers and news outlets have been cranking out some good stuff. Here are five recent posts you should check out:

  1. 10 reasons to monitor Twitter. Fellow Twitter junkie Brad J. Ward‘s list is solid. And he offers examples, straight from the tweeters.
  2. A case study on setting up a LinkedIn alumni group. Last spring I posted about Caltech’s use of LinkedIn to connect with alumni. Kyle James picked up and ran with the idea. Here, he details how Wofford College set up their own LinkedIn group.
  3. Creating the college anti-rankings. Inside Higher Ed reports on the Education Conservancy‘s creation of College Speaks, “an explicitly anti-rankings system for the college search.” A prototype was presented Thursday at the National Association for College Admissions Counseling Conference in Seattle. (The Education Conservancy is best known for campaigning against the “reputational” surveys used by U.S. News & World Report for its rankings.)
  4. Sam Jackson extols the virtues of Unigo. Unigo is the latest player in the college search game but it leverages the power of social networking by involving students. It launched last week with 225 colleges and universities and 30,000-plus reviews. Jackson was involved in its creation so he has an insider’s perspective.
  5. MIT: We’re not all geeks. Really. This MIThBusters video protesting the MIT nerd stereotype may have had the opposite effect. According to the Chronicle’s Wired Campus blog, “the video frustrated one of MIT’s most-famous geeks, Henry Jenkins, a co-director of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies Program.” He ranted on his blog: “Most of the folks they depict still come across looking like geeks, not that there’s anything wrong with that!”

Social networking’s two-thirds majority

According to this, 68 percent of Americans who use the Internet say they visit social networks, which for the sake of this study includes blogs. These numbers come from the August/September 2008 Insight Report from MarketTools. (You can download the latest MarketTools report, and earlier reports, from this site.)

Other gleanings from the report:

  • 19 percent of adults say they visit blogs, communities or social networks daily
  • A higher percentage of women do so than men (22 percent vs. 16 percent)
  • The older you get, the less likely you are to visit social networks daily
  • 33 percent of Generation-Y respondents (people mostly in their 20s) visit these sites every day.
  • 17 percent of Generation X (mostly in their 30s and early 40s) visit these sites daily.
  • 11 percent of Baby Boomers (in their mid 40s to early 60s) visit social media sites daily.
  • 8 percent percent of Seniors visit daily.

Nothing too surprising here. Women are generally more social than men, and younger Internet users are more steeped in social networking than their elders. But it’s nice to see numbers that back up our hunches.

Via KD Paine’s PR Measurement Blog.