Month: October 2012

Twitter Cards: 50-plus ways to not leave your Twitter

Example of an expanded Tweet (aka “Twitter card”) from @HuffingtonPost

Hop on the Twitter bus, Gus. To get the news, information and deals you want, you may never even have to hop off.

The folks at Twitter recently announced they had expanded their “expanded tweets” function. That function, implemented earlier this year, lets Twitter users preview photos, video and other content within a single Tweet — simply by clicking on the tweet, rather than a hyperlink to another destination. The expanded partnerships now gives users “more than 2,000 ways to bring more interactive and engaging Tweets to your stream,” Twitter said in the recent announcement.

This means that now, in addition to seeing previews of Instagram photos and YouTube videos, or lead paragraphs of news stories, you’ll also get to see product descriptions, ratings, prices and reviews from Amazon.com products, video clips from the presidential debates from CNN tweets, movie previews from Fandango or audio clips from Soundcloud.

With these expanded tweets (also called Twitter Cards), why would anyone ever need to leave Twitter to sample content?

That’s precisely the point, writes Jennifer Van Grove of VentureBeat. If Twitter can become the medium for aggregating content, it becomes the source for all types of information from trusted sources that you, the Twitter user, select.

“[W]e’re all one step closer to that Twitter-centric vision,” Van Grove writes. But it’s a vision that “consumers, publishers, and developers will either love or hate.”

How will this affect higher ed? Colleges and universities could conceivably take advantage of the expanded tweets function to deliver content more directly to their audiences who are on Twitter. But will it change our approach to Twitter? Rather than trying to use Twitter to extend our reach or draw audiences back to our sites, will it mean we think of Twitter as the destination for users interested in our content?

And more important: Will the consumers of our content love it or hate it?

(Thanks to Jeremiah Owyang for drawing my attention to Twitter’s recent announcement — via a tweet, naturally.)

Friday Five: On creativity, social 2.0, ‘Networked,’ higher ed’s future, ‘useless’ degrees

Happy Friday! Enjoy these nuggets of knowledge gathered from some of the brightest people and organizations on Twitter:

  • For all you misunderstood creatives out there, take a couple minutes to watch this video on how creativity works (and if you’re a brave soul, share it with your favorite clients). Via @timsamoff.
  • An introduction to Networked: The New Social Operating System, the new book by Lee Rainie (of the Pew Internet Trust) and sociologist Barry Wellman. According to the Pew Internet Trust, Networked discusses how “the large, loosely knit social circles of networked individuals expand opportunities for learning, problem solving, decision making and personal interaction.” After skimming this excerpt and watching Rainie discuss its premise on video (embedded in the first link), I’m convinced this is an important resource for higher ed marketers. It is now on my ever-expanding to-read list.
  • Welcome to Social 2.0. This infographic (shared by @NealSchaffer) identifies four new market segments “most likely to look to customer communities when making purchasing decisions.” While none of the four groups is directly relevant to purchasing decisions related to higher education, their characteristics could offer insight into some of our more recent graduates or lifelong learners.
  • Five ideas for improving the future of postsecondary education, from Toronto’s Globe and Mail, may address specific challenges facing Canada’s institutions, but some of the ideas could transfer to institutions elsewhere that face similar situations. Thanks to Jake Pringle (@jdp2222) for sharing.
  • Finally, for a refreshing perspective on the oft-maligned liberal arts education, read The Importance of Being Useless, from Times Higher Education. In these days, when we try to measure and quantify every conceivable aspect of higher education in order to demonstrate the value of college to a jaded public, it’s comforting to know that, in Aristotle’s day, “a useless education was the highest and most noble form of education because it represented the genuinely free education of the genuinely free man.” This essay argues that looking at the history of liberal arts “creates the opportunity to consider what a modern liberal arts education might look like in relation to its ancient and medieval counterparts.”

Your input needed on a book in the (social) works

Our good friends over at mStoner have been busy putting the finishing touches on a forthcoming book about social media campaigns in higher education, and now they’re turning to the higher ed social media community for input.

The collection of case studies is called Social Works: How #HigherEd Uses #SocialMedia to Raise Money, Build Awareness, Recruit Students and Get Results. The editor, Michael Stoner, recently discussed this project on the mStoner blog, where he pointed out that 17 contributors (including me) wrote “25 detailed case studies illustrating how 26 institutions in the US, the UK, and South Africa have used social media, along with other channels, in successful campaigns to recruit students, raise money, muster public support for institutional projects, create brand awareness, and boost alumni affiliation.”

Now, Michael is seeking your input on the cover designs. He’s posted three potential versions on his blog, and he wants to hear from you on which you like the best. I’ve already cast my vote. Now it’s time to cast yours. (By completing the survey on Michael’s blog, you could even win a free copy of the book.)

P.S. – As the publication date for Social Works draws closer, I’ll share a bit more about my contribution to this project. I’m grateful to be a part of it, and I’m looking forward to reading about other great social media campaigns.

The end of Newsweek: A turning point for magazines?

A collection of recent Newsweeks, which sit, unread, on my desk.

Today’s announcement by The Newsweek Daily Beast Co. (yes, that is the company’s real, official name) that it is ceasing publication of the once-venerable newsmagazine Newsweek probably comes as no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention to the recent history of that magazine. When Newsweek was acquired by The Daily Beast in 2010, the publication was already struggling. Then Fareed Zakaria, who was probably Newsweek‘s biggest franchise, jumped ship to join TIME magazine. Editor-in-chief Tina Brown “seemed to continually push the Newsweek half of Newsweek/Daily Beast to the back burner—when she wasn’t cooking up desperate, attention-seeking covers,” writes Dashiell Bennett in The Atlantic Wire’s coverage of today’s announcement. Brown’s sensationalism is something I mentioned in a recent blog post about Newsweek‘s coverage of the state of higher education.

So now, Brown and company are transmogrifying their publication into an all-digital something-or-other to be called Newsweek Global. Writes The Newsweek Daily Beast Co.’s CEO Baba Shetty, the “single, worldwide edition” will be “targeted for a highly mobile, opinion-leading audience who want to learn about world events in a sophisticated context. Newsweek Global will be supported by paid subscription and will be available through e-readers for both tablet and the Web, with select content available on The Daily Beast.”

The demise of the print version of Newsweek was inevitable, I suppose. As Slate’s Matthew Yglesias points out, a weekly newsmagazine is no longer relevant in today’s always-on digital world.

In the era of print newspapers and nightly TV news, newsweeklies provided the extremely valuable function of timely up-to-date coverage of news and culture that didn’t rely on you literally checking the same news source every single day. The Internet in some ways exacerbates the dysfunctionalities of the daily news cycle by promoting relentless over-hyping of everything that occurs, but Google makes it trivially simple to just find a news story from Monday if you’re interest in reading about it on Thursday. There’s no need for a digest format and if you do great original reporting you want to publish that reporting as soon as possible not sit on it for two days to wait for a magazine distribution process.

I’m going to miss my print version of Newsweek. But Yglesias is right. It’s no longer relevant. The last two issues have been lingering on my “to read” pile for days, untouched. The commentary is really the only thing worth reading anymore, but after Zakaria left and they brought in Niall Ferguson, the quality has slipped, in my opinion.

Anyway, the folding of Newsweek may signal a turning point for the magazine industry. Or perhaps it’s just the latest chapter in the decline of print, precipitated by the Internet. General-interest media are losing ground to special-interest media, and that trend will likely continue.

Maybe this new Newsweek Global will thrive and set a shining example for higher ed to follow. All-digital alumni magazines, anyone?

Like a boss

Image via fashionablygeek.com

Today is National Boss’s Day, and if you’re like me, you think of it as just another conspiracy by the greeting card, floral delivery, and bagel and cookie industries to get our hard-earned money.

(I say this even though I’m very grateful for the carry-in luncheon my colleagues in the S&T communications department threw in my and my assistant director’s honor on Monday. Thanks, guys! It was a great treat and totally unnecessary, but appreciated!)

But even if National Boss’s Day is a corporate conspiracy, maybe there’s some value in recognizing — and thanking — the bosses in our lives. After all, if we are fortunate enough to hold down jobs in this economy, we either are bosses or have bosses, and the people who are bosses always have bosses of their own. And with employees everywhere being asked to do more, many of us are essentially our own bosses most of the time.

So, whether we like it or not, we are like a boss.

So maybe we should like a boss — as in, show some appreciation for their efforts or at least sympathy for their plight.

When it comes to bosses, I tend to agree with Bob Sutton, the author of Good Boss, Bad Boss, who says that most bosses have good intentions and want to do a good job. (There are, of course, exceptions, and we’ve all encountered them. Sutton also wrote about them in his book The No Asshole Rule.) As Sutton writes on his blog, “[M]ost bosses I know work extremely hard and are dedicated to improving their skills” and are “concerned about becoming better at practicing their difficult craft.” While writing Good Boss, Bad Boss, Sutton worried about the plight of supervisors and “how hard it is to be a good boss — the job is never done, it is amazingly easy to screw-up, and wielding power over others makes it all even harder because you are being watched so closely (and are prone to tuning-out your followers — the other half of the toxic tandem).”

“Yet, despite all these hurdles, the best evidence shows that many, if not most, people find their bosses to be competent and compassionate.”

So, whether you are a boss, report to a boss, act in both capacities, or work as your own boss, here are some tips from around the web that can help you be more like a boss, and perhaps even help you like a boss. And if you’re like me and aspire to be a competent and compassionate boss, perhaps these tips will help you on your journey.

(By the way, if you’re in to reading business books, I highly recommend Good Boss, Bad Boss. It mad the list of my favorite books of 2010.)