January 2012 – Page 3

Mike Petroff, web and technology manager for Emerson College in Boston and a member of the .eduGuru crew, has been working on a new online tool to help the higher ed community further collaborate and learn from one another.

Called FollowEDU, the tool is a searchable directory of higher ed people in the social media sphere. FollowEDU is still in beta, but a public launch is planned for next week. Meanwhile, you can sign up for an invitation at the website or follow the site’s Twitter account, @WhoToFollowEDU.

I asked Mike via email to share a little bit more about this project. Here are my five questions and his replies:

1. FollowEDU is billed as “a searchable directory of Twitter users in higher ed.” Why do you think such a searchable directory is necessary?

Mike Petroff: The higher ed community on Twitter is incredibly collaborative, supportive and creative. I’ve found it to be a great resource for reaching out to thought-leaders on specific education topics.

Typically, I’ll use a variety of ways to try to expand my network on Twitter and find new users to follow: reading blogs, asking followers for advice, joining in on new hashtag chats, and following the backchannel of education conferences.

Directories like wefollow.com and twellow.com were helpful for broad categories, but I found that there was a lack of niche lists to search through. I found it difficult to browse through several categories within education and find users sharing good information.

2. What inspired you to create FollowEDU? How did it happen?

Mike Petroff: I have always had a passion to connect people, whether it be on Twitter or at conferences and events. While walking around Boston with Michael Fienen before the eduTweetup Boston 2011 event, we discussed the idea of a better version of Twitter’s “suggested users” list. It got me thinking about building a platform where Twitter users could attach their profile to specific interests within higher ed. The platform would then be sortable and searchable, helping new (and seasoned) Twitter users connect and network.

I reached out to a few friends and developers and eventually worked out a partnership with Stamats Catchfire to do the development work on FollowEDU. The team there was incredible to work with. I’m very fortunate to have their designers and developers join in and be part of the project. We’ll continue to work together to build new features into the site.

3. I see FollowEDU members can be listed by “rank.” How are these members ranked?

Mike Petroff: In the beta version of FollowEDU, we played around with the concept of ‘rank’ as a sorting option for our list pages. The concept is still under development and may be very basic for the launch. We have a variety of data points to point to and pull from, but it may take more time and data to create a realistic ranking for certain interest areas within higher ed.

4. We often hear a lot of flack about social media sites like Klout that use a ranking algorithm to rate users. How is the ranking mechanism on FollowEDU any different?

Mike Petroff: As we develop the site and add more features, we will look for data points in Twitter, Klout and other sources to help us develop a ranking system to show a user’s impact within a topic or interest in FollowEDU. Personally, I feel that a user’s Klout score should not be the sole factor in determining their resourcefulness or impact within a certain topic, so with FollowEDU I hope to include a variety of data.

5. Finally, what are your future plans for FollowEDU?

Mike Petroff: After launch, FollowEDU will continue to evolve with new features for users. There’s already an extensive list of features we’re exploring. I can’t give away too much just yet, but users can expect more Twitter integration throughout the site, a growing list of Interests to join, and other features that make finding (and creating) lists of influencers much easier.

My goal is to have FollowEDU continue to be a resource, directory and networking platform for the higher education community.

This post originally appeared on this blog on Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2009, under the title Media relations, taking the long view and other lessons from Martin Luther King Jr.. MLK Jr. Day 2009 also coincided with the eve of President Obama’s inauguration, so references to that event have been deleted in an attempt to keep this post relevant. I hope it gives you pause to reflect on how you live your life and approach your most meaningful work. – AC

As our nation honors the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. today with a national holiday, I pause to consider a bit how King’s worldview and moral stance against evil has influenced my own life.

I’m in no way attempting to compare my life with King’s, for I’m no civil rights leader, no martyr, no leader of any consequence by comparison. But I’ve long admired King not only for his leadership in civil rights, but more for his clarity of vision in the sense of moral and spiritual matters, as well as his PR savvy. The fact that he understood and used mass media to his advantage should not be separated from King’s quest for justice and equality, but it does point to the man’s ability to use the tools and systems of the temporal world to further more idealistic goals, and that’s something any of us who work with the media ought to understand.

One of the most poignant (brief) commentaries on King’s life that I’ve read comes from Philip Yancey’s book Soul Survivor: How My Faith Survived the Church. Yancey was a good ol’ Georgia boy when the civil rights movement started gaining traction in the early 1960s.

“When I was in high school,” he writes, “the same students who cheered the news of President Kenedy’s assassination also cheered King’s televised encounters with Southern sheriffs, police dogs, and water cannons. Little did we know that by doing so we were playing directly into King’s strategy.”

That strategy, from a media relations standpoint, was brilliant, for it opened the nation’s eyes to the tragedy and brutality of racism. “He deliberately sought out individuals like Sheriff Bull Connor and stage-managed scenes of confrontation, accepting jail, beatings, and other brutalities, because he believed a complacent nation would rally around his cause only when they saw the evil of racism manifest in its ugliest extreme.

“In that goal,” Yancey writes, “King succeeded spectacularly.”

But separated from what Yancey calls King’s “long view of faith,” that media relations success would have rung hollow.

“Already convinced of the justness of their cause,” Yancey writes, the civil rights workers “wanted someone to lift their sights beyond the long string of disheartening failures.” King, with his long view that justice will triumph, was the man to do just that.

We now look back on the civil rights movement as a steady tidal surge toward victory. At the time, facing daily confrontations with the power structure and under constant intimidation from policemen, judges, and even the FBI, civil rights workers had no assurance of victory. We forget how many nights they spent in rank southern jails. Most of the time the present looked impossibly bleak, the future even bleaker. …

For King, the long view meant remembering that, no matter how things appear at any given moment, God reigns. Later, when the famous march from Selma finally made it to the state capitol, the building which once served as the capitol of the Confederacy and from which the rebel flag still flew, King addressed those scarred and weary marchers from the steps:

I know that you are asking today, “How long will it take?” I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because truth pressed to earth will rise again. …

* * *

It seems the long view has been in short supply in our culture for many years. Witness what has happened on Wall Street, in our banking industry, and just about everywhere else you look in our culture, and you see the fruits of short-term, get-what-you-can-while-you-can thinking. Even in our educational system, sadly, the short view too often reigns. We live from fiscal year to fiscal year, from project to project. Even our long-range plans extend no further than five years out, and the goals are largely based on numbers, rather than the essentials King spoke of — the essentials of peace, justice and love.

What about us? Do we connect our day-to-day actions, our work? Our lives, to a greater, nobler cause? Those of us in higher education ought to. It’s pretty easy, really. We’re in one of the most noble pursuits there is. I’m fond of quoting William Butler Yeats, who supposedly said that “education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire.” On my better days, I like to think that what I do helps to fan those flames of knowledge.

I can’t say I’ve always done the best job of taking the long view, or for contributing to King’s ideal of a world in which peace, justice and love reign. But re-reading Yancey’s chapter on MLK has reinvigorated me and encouraged me to think more about the long view — in my job, in my life, in my other pursuits. I hope this post encourages you to do the same.

Month: January 2012

Repost: Marketing (and life) lessons from Martin Luther King Jr.