Month: May 2013

Friday Five: Quotables of the week (on change, shoes, reach, online education and college essays)

quotesHappy Friday, #highered folks! You made it through another week. But no rest for a lot of you, as you’ll be working through the weekend on various aspects of commencement. (That’s me next weekend.)

And with commencement, of course, comes a phalanx of speakers, each of whom toils over finding just the right words to inspire and motivate the newest crop of college graduates and hope a few of their words resonate with the listener. (I remember just one part of the speech by Linda Ellerbee, who spoke at my commencement from journalism school. She said something like, “You don’t need a journalism degree to practice journalism. But I guess it doesn’t hurt.” Thanks, Linda.)

So for this week’s Friday Five, I thought I’d share a few quotes from some of my favorite blogs posts of the week. Maybe they’ll be even more inspiring than whatever commencement address you’ll get to sit through this year.

1. “Reach is not a measure of engagement. It is a raw score. In sports—except for golf—the person or team with the highest score always wins, but it isn’t necessarily true in social media. Your number of followers is just a ground floor indicator, if you will.”

— C.K. Syme, writing about measuring social media activity in Going Beyond Reach in Social Media Engagement

2. “Few benefit from the growth of distance learning more than people with military experience. They value knowing that if relocated for work they may still further their educations from wherever home is, without having to retake courses or contend with separate admissions and accreditation standards.”

— Eric Brooks, in Why U.S. News Ranks Online Programs for Veterans

3. “Shoes are more than their design or color or whatever. They ground us. They plant us on this earth, and they help us stay up straight. They point where we’re supposed to be moving.

— Tonya Oaks Smith, writing about a recently created tumblr (higheredshoes) in Walk in My Shoes

4. “The worst advice for the college essay is ‘write a college essay.’ If you sit down to write for a nameless, faceless and highly judgmental admissions reader, your essay will not capture who you are and what you believe.”

— Rick Hazelton, in a May College Checklist for Juniors in the New York Times’ college admissions blog The Choice

5. “Change is scary and painful. It takes us out of our routines and comfort zones and into uncharted territory. It makes us feel uncertain, insecure, and (quite frankly) a little bit dumb.”

— Erik Gruber, in 8 Obstacles to Change and How to Overcome Them

Quotation mark image via MatthewRad on Flickr.

On the other hand, numbers do matter

numbersReaders of my previous post (The elements of a great #highered Twitter account) could come away thinking I don’t care about numbers. That would be wrong. I do care about numbers.

Numbers matter in social media.

Dan Zarrella makes this clear in his popular Science of Social Media presentation. In the simplest of terms, if you want to get your message out to as many people as possible, then the bigger your potential audience, the greater the chance you’ll reach a bigger group of people. (This assumes your audience is paying attention to you, and that assumes they find your content worth paying attention to, sharing and acting upon. And that ties back to your credibility among the audience and their level of trust in you and your message.)

But that’s just potential reach, and as C.K. Syme points out in a recent post, reach is only a starting point. But it can be “the beginning of great things.”

“Raw numbers don’t give us a good mirror of effectiveness,” she writes, “but they are one of the indicators.” She suggests social media managers consider other measures, such as potential reach and share of conversation, and she points readers to some tools and resources that can help them do that.

Flickr photo by Mervyn Chua.