Month: November 2009

Friday Five: turkeys of the year

Have you ever said something and then immediately wish you could take it back? But you can’t. It’s too late; the words are out there, the deed is done, and there’s nothing you can do about it except hope no one noticed.

But people notice. An awkward silence ensues and perhaps someone politely changes the subject to get you off the hook.

If you blog, though, sometimes you throw stuff out that you wish you could take back. Maybe you posted in haste, wrote about a topic you weren’t well-informed about, or made some obvious error in fact that exposed you for the rube, ignoramus or insensitive jerk that you really are.

These are the “turkey” posts — the ones you should have thought twice about before hitting the “publish” button. But if you’re like me, all too often you hit “publish” and then think about what you should have said or written.

So for today’s Friday Five, in honor of the holiday just passed, I bring you five blog posts that were my “turkeys” of 2009. I own these. Nobody’s fault but mine. But, in my defense, let me state for the record that I was young, I was naive, I was stupid. I’m very sorry.

To the turkeys:

  1. Feb. 4, 2009 – My post of a YouTube video of a Snuggie parody that included the phrase WTF offended at least one reader who took the time to write me an email about it. I probably should have posted that the video was NSFW. But I stand by my original statement that I thought the parody would make a great Super Bowl ad.
  2. Feb. 24, 2009 – In a post titled Mapping the online world, I linked to a fictional geographical map of social media sites that I found on another blog. The map was posted on that other blog just a day earlier. But as I cleverly observed in my post, it “look[ed] like something drawn circa 2005.” Turns out, the map actually was ancient (in Internet time, anyway), as Kyle James and Liz Allen both pointed out in the comments.
  3. April 3, 2009 – I posted my picks for best albums of 2009, first quarter, and I’m embarrassed to see that I included Rusted Root’s digital-only release, Stereo Rodeo. I guess I was still infatuated with the fact that one of my once-favorite bands was attempting a comeback. But the newness of that release wore off quickly. I doubt I’ve listened to it since June. Oops.
  4. June 5, 2009 – I posted a whiny, self-righteous open letter to eMusic, complaining about the online music service’s new pricing structure and their sellout agreement to carry Sony’s back catalog. Guess what? I’m still a member of eMusic, paying more for less, and I’ve even purchased some tunes from the Sony back catalog. So, who’s the sellout?
  5. July 29, 2009 – I posted about the University of Waterloo’s rebranding campaign and dramatic logo makeover (Brave new logo [in a brave new world]), and applauded them for taking such a bold stance. Now it turns out the university has not adopted the new look. smh

Happy Black Friday to those of you who are doing your part to bolster our consumer-driven economy. And happy Buy Nothing Day for those who choose to opt out of the consumption frenzy.

The AMA goes social

Last year at #amahighered there were about 6 twitterers. Amazing how far we’ve come in a year. – Tom Williams (@tom8williams), InnoGage

I just returned from my first trip to the American Marketing Association’s Symposium on Higher Education, but based on what I’d read and heard about the 2008 symposium, I’d have to agree with Tom’s assessment. Last year’s conference did not seem to embrace social media, especially attempts to live-stream or live-tweet sessions. (Karlyn Morissette addressed those issues in her 2008 conference wrap-up.)

This year, though, the AMA not only embraced the social web, but encouraged it. Symposium chair Elizabeth Scarborough (@elizscar on Twitter) promoted the #amahighered backchannel and encouraged participants to live-tweet their take on the sessions. So check out that channel for a load of good information from the conference. (Another popular hashtag during part of the conference was that for the #amatweetup, which was a blast.)

Also this year, the AMA provided free wireless access to facilitate tweeting and blogging, and even walked the talk themselves on the symposium website, incorporating a Twitter stream, video snapshots from conference participants, planners and presenters, and a discussion board.

All told, the AMA appears to have taken a big step toward more fully embracing the social media environment in the past year. Very well done.

P.S. – If following the Twitter stream is too confusing for you, check out the session notes Karlyn Morisette has posted throughout the conference at .eduGuru.

Friday Five: good reads

Lots of great content from this past week. Here are five tidbits worth sharing:

  1. Your New Best Friend, Social Networking in the First Year Experience (Part 1), from the folks at Swift Kick Central. Talks about how while so many organizations are busy reacting to social media and fixating on the tools, “[t]he only fix … is anchoring initiatives in goals. Only then can we measure results for future optimization. Only then can we evaluate a new tool against our goals. Only then can we learn.” I couldn’t agree more.
  2. 10 Ways to Make your Facebook Page Sing. Solid guidance from Stamats’ Fritz McDonald.
  3. The Social Web is a Horse Race, writes Brad J. Ward. Who are you betting on?
  4. Literally, this guy thinks outside the box as though it’s in his DNA. Dennis Miller writes about the words and phrases he’d like to throw under the bus.
  5. A friend of the devil? Dead Heads with history degrees, take note: The University of California, Santa Cruz is seeking an archivist for its collection of Grateful Dead materials.

And finally, your fortune for today:

Obey the cookie.

I, (not) Robot: Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the Borg

Don’t be a robot.

That seems to be the mantra among many higher ed marketing thought leaders these days.

“Being a robot” refers to the practice of using RSS feeds to push content into the social media sphere.

For instance, if you write a news release or blog post at your university and then use RSS to push that same information to your university Twitter or Facebook site (or both), you have gone robotic.

The argument goes something like this:

The social mediasphere is all about conversation and engagement. And nobody wants to talk to or engage a robot, right? Robots have no human voice. Robots are inauthentic.

Besides, the content of your news release is either:

  1. written in an institutional voice, or
  2. written expressly for the traditional news media (journalists)

Nobody but journalists are interested in reading your news releases. Or so the conventional wisdom goes.

Then there’s the fact that your social media platforms — Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc. — target different audiences, which have different information needs. People on Twitter may want one thing, people on Facebook may want another.

There’s more to the argument against robots, but those are the main points, as far as I can tell.

These are all valid arguments, to a point. But they generalize and overstate the issue. For instance, the idea that news releases are written for the press only is fallacious — or should be. These days, if your college or university news releases are written expressly for journalists, then you’re missing a huge opportunity. You’re missing a huge audience of content-hungry bloggers, tweeters, remixers and collectors who are eager to redistribute all sorts of content — even your news releases. If this is news to you, then you might want to check out David Meerman Scott’s book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR.

Also, remember that official information doesn’t have to be boring.

Humans, robots, borgs

There are some distinct advantages to harnessing the power of RSS to help you meet your social media objectives. And I think higher ed communicators ought to embrace that power.

This doesn’t mean you have to be a robot. But you may have to become a borg.

Technically, of course, a borg is more than just some sort of human-robot hybrid. According to Wikipedia, borgs are “cybernetically enhanced humanoid drones” made up of “multiple species,” not just humans, and they make decisions through a hive mind. But this is just a disclaimer for those Star Trek geeks who might be reading. For the purpose of my argument, and to stretch the robot metaphor further, let’s talk about the borg as a hybrid of human and robot.

So, if RSS feeds into the social mediasphere is the invasion of the robots, then a combination of automated RSS and human “voice,” typed in by an actual human being, is the borg. Does this make sense?

Here’s a screenshot of recent updates from the Missouri S&T Twitter account. This gives you an idea of the how the borgian process works. It’s a mix of automated feeds and personal updates, retweets and replies. The most recent update (the one at top) is an RSS feed of a news release, which also is fed to our Facebook site (a major no-no, according to the anti-robots), and the rest are labeled either “human” or “robot” in case you can’t tell the difference. (By the way, the most recent update got its first “like” thumbs up on Facebook just a few minutes after it posted there.)

Becoming a social media borg is a happy compromise for a number of reasons. Among them:

  1. Thanks to RSS, you have a great way to share official content across multiple platforms.
  2. People actually like to interact to official content such as blog posts and news releases.
  3. If you’re strapped for time to spend with your social media communities, the RSS feed option allows for a more streamlined and efficient approach. I’m all about streamlining processes and automating those things that can be if it means we can devote our valuable staff time to those things that absolutely require the human touch.

I know I’m among the minority when it comes to the debate about authenticity. Or at least, judging from what I see on Twitter and the higher ed blogs, I assume I’m in the minority. But maybe there’s a silent majority of borgs out there awaiting their liberator.

Borgs! Romans! Countrymen! Lend me your URLs! And your RSS feeds!

P.S. – The odd thing about the anti-robot crowd is that some of them have no problem including Twitter update widgets on their blogs or websites. These widgets push the person’s latest tweets to a blog sidebar. Look to the left sidebar, scroll up, and you’ll find my status updates from Twitter right there. See? I’m not above using such a feed. But then again, I’m a borg.

P.S.S. – You will be assimilated. LOL.