Month: June 2010

Friday Five: Summer re-runs

tv_kidsThe spring blogging season has long ago passed us by. With Monday’s summer solstice, this week ushered in the official beginning of summer, which means it’s time for some summer re-runs.

And guess what? They’re not just for TV anymore. Now, you can read recycled blog posts right here!

Here are the five most visited posts from this blog since Jan. 1, 2010. Now you can enjoy them all over again.

  1. Of purple cows and sacred cows: Yet another response to Seth Godin, May 2, 2010. This was my take on Godin’s popular and provocative piece on the coming meltdown in higher education. Money quote: “[O]ur biggest marketing problem in higher education in the United States is one Godin points to: that higher ed is largely a commodity. If you don’t agree, consider that there are more than 4,800 colleges and universities in the U.S. (thank you, Wikipedia). That works out to about 96 post-secondary institutions per state. Many of these schools offer largely the same degree programs, and many of them are indistinguishable from the others. No wonder Godin makes the point that ‘most schools aren’t really outliers. They are mass marketers.’ It’s true.”
  2. Friday Five: social media-savvy schools, May 7, 2010. Ah, it’s nice to see one of these Friday Fives make the list. This one summarized the top five campuses who were ranked as the most web 2.0-savvy by the website CollegeSurfing.com.
  3. Infographic of the day: the social media triage, from the April 15, 2010, edition. I stole an infographic from the twittersphere and reposted it. Nothing original here, but very good information and a very good flow chart to help organizations determine when and whether to respond to comments in the social media world.
  4. Stylebook gone wild, April 17, 2010. “In case you missed the news, the editors of the Associated Press Stylebook announced on Friday that the book was changing its use of ‘Web site’ to ‘website.’ … [J]udging from the reaction in the Twittersphere yesterday, you’d have thought the Vatican had just announced that it was allowing gays into the priesthood.”
  5. Social media’s impact on website traffic, from all the way back on Jan. 6, 2010. In this post, I riff off a December 2009 blog entry by Ann M. White about what impact social media has on driving traffic to institutional websites and share some data for our campus.

Have a great weekend. Go play outside, but stay hydrated.

Image via Paultastic Musings (here).

Spreading the hate

angry-iconAren’t you glad there isn’t a list like this for colleges and universities?

It’s the 15 most hated companies in the U.S., via the website 24/7 Wall St. (hat tip to Ragan’s PR Daily). The site came up with the list using these criteria:

  1. Employee impressions.
  2. “[T]otal return to shareholders from these companies over one-year, two-year and five-year periods, compared to the broad market and other companies within the same sector.”
  3. Customer satisfaction and reputation — “analyzed from a broad array of sources, including Consumer Reports, JD Power, the MSN/Zogby poll, Vanno, and the University of Michigan American Customer Satisfaction Index.”
  4. “[B]rand valuation changes … based on data from Corebrands, Interbrand, and Brand Z.”
  5. “Finally, the views of taxpayers, Congress and the Administration of these companies were considered where applicable.”

AIG tops the list (“Taxpayers despise the firm because it received nearly $180 billion in government aid”), followed by United Airlines (cited for “poor results for ‘reservation experience’, ‘check-in experience’, and ‘costs and fees,'” but not, interestingly, for breaking guitars). What’s interesting is who’s not on the list: BP, Toyota and AT&T — three big corporations that have been served a lot of haterade in recent months. Maybe next year.