Category: Flickr

Friday Five: A social St. Pat’s

Missouri S&T's St. Pat's tradition began in 1908. Here, student George Menefee, the campus's first St. Pat, poses with members of his "court."
Missouri S&T’s St. Pat’s tradition began in 1908. Here, student George Menefee, the campus’s first St. Pat, poses with members of his “court.”

For most of you who celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, the subject of this post may seem premature. But at the university where I work, students have honored the alleged patron saint of engineers for 105 years now, and their celebration begins long before March 17.

The annual St. Pat’s Celebration at Missouri S&T begins in early March with students using hand-carved walking sticks to drive snakes from campus to prepare the way for St. Pat (it’s okay; the snakes aren’t real), and wraps up this weekend with a knighting ceremony, big parade and a lot of parties.

Historically, St. Pat’s is one of the biggest social events for our campus. (It’s even been named one of the top 15 best St. Pat’s parties in the nation by BroBible. Yes, BroBible is apparently a thing.)

So it makes perfect sense that we should embrace social media to help connect students, alumni and others to this campus tradition. That’s why the Internet invented social media, right?

So here are five ways we use social media to help make the annual St. Pat’s celebration a great time for everyone involved.

1. Blogging

bestever.mst.edu
bestever.mst.edu

Way back in 2008, when our campus celebrated the 100th anniversary of our St. Pat’s celebration, we launched the Best Ever Blog as an attempt to connect far-flung alumni with the big centennial to-do.

We launched it in January 2008 to help build momentum for the anniversary and to have a little bit of fun along the way. Irreverence is a big part of the annual celebration, so it’s important that we have a human voice when we talk about St. Pat’s. It all begins with the blog. Also, the “voice” must extend beyond words. St. Pat’s is a very visual time of year — and very, very green — so we try to incorporate as much photography and video into the blog as we could.

2. Flickr

From the start, we pulled a lot of the images for that blog from a collection of St. Pat’s photos housed on our campus Flickr account. We still use Flickr to collect and organize the great shots taken by our campus photographer, but for those in-the-moment shots of events as they happen we’ve equipped several staffers with access to …

3. Instagram

Instagram-screen

To coincide with St. Pat’s Week (which began this past Monday), we launched our official university Instagram account, and boy has it been fun. The visual nature of the week’s events makes it ideal for smartphone coverage. Four of us attend events and snap pics with our cameraphones, while our real photographer weeps into the viewfinder of his professional-grade digital camera. (I think it’s a Nikon. But I don’t know for sure. All I know is it isn’t an iPhone.)

4. Twitter

Even before we launched the Best Ever Blog back in 2008, we were on Twitter. During St. Pat’s Week, our Twitter account (@MissouriSandT) is packed with St. Pat’s-related tweets and references. This year, thanks to Instagram, we posted many more photos to Twitter than in the past, and that expanded activity and reach. The student organization that puts on the annual event (@StPatsBoard) is also active on Twitter. And our students and alumni talk up the event with a variety of hashtags, including #StPats, #StPats2013, #BestEver, #RollaStPats and #105BestEver.

5. Facebook

FB-StPats2013

Ah, yes. In terms of raw numbers, Facebook still rules. (But in terms of activity among our followers during St. Pat’s, Twitter wins.) During St. Pat’s, our Facebook site becomes more visual than during most other times of the year (as is the case with most of our social media). We change the cover photo to something frivilous. We get a lot of thumbs up and a few shares, even the occasional comment.

Bonus: Vine

This year, for the Wednesday arrival of St. Pat and his court to downtown Rolla, one of our staff members recorded the arrival and part of a walking stick presentation using the iPhone video app Vine. We tweeted the arrival Vine video and posted it on Facebook.

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St. Pat’s is an unusual celebration that is distinctive to our campus. It’s also an annual event that gives us an opportunity to test and experiment with social media. this year, the experiment extended to Instagram, Vine and, although I didn’t talk about it here, even Pinterest. A year ago, Vine didn’t even exist, but we posted some videos on our YouTube channel. So next March, who knows what new social media toys or tools may be upon us? What will the 106th annual “Best Ever” have in store for social media?

Whatever it is, we’ll be sure to investigate some of them, and see whether they fit with the nature of our annual rite of (almost) spring.

Guest post: Georgy Cohen’s favorite things

The guest blogging continues today with a post from Georgiana Cohen, managing editor of web communications at Tufts University. Catch up with her on Twitter (@radiofreegeorgy) or check out her own blog, Safe Digression.

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Everyone always talks about how great it is to have rich photo and video content on your site. Better yet, how about user-generated rich photo and video content? Sounds good, right? But with everything else you have to do, how can you find time to shoot and edit your own multimedia content, much less run a contest or solicit content from the community?

The good news is, students are producing this content anyway, and there’s a relatively easy way to catch a lot of it, thanks to the ability to “favorite” selected content.

When users upload photos or video to Flickr and YouTube, they have the option or adding tags to their content. Some people do, some people don’t; some people may use the name of your institution, or some may use its unsightly nickname. But a lot of folks are tagging content properly. So, as long as your school has a relatively distinctive name (sorry, Brown and Temple), you stand a good chance of finding photo and video content from your community.

Instead of going to these pages all the time, I import the feeds for each tag (YouTube; Flickr) into my RSS reader. I created free Flickr and YouTube accounts (which also serves the purpose of reserving my institution’s name so an imposter doesn’t settle in), and I am always logged into these accounts when I peruse this content. When I see a photo or video I like, I favorite it. Just like that, I am reaching out into the content stratosphere and creating collections of user-created, institution-approved rich content.

Now what?

Now the challenge is, what do I do with them? Ideally, I don’t want to have to rely on people stumbling across the favorites page on my institution’s YouTube or Flickr account. Luckily, there are ways to bring that content onto your own website. Flickr makes it easy by providing an RSS feed of your favorite. With YouTube, it’s a little harder since all they offer is a page and not a feed, but there are some ways to pull that content. (Metafilter has some guidance.)

If you have a talented developer at your disposal, he or she can probably work with those feeds to whip up a nifty presentation of that content on your site. If you don’t, never fear. Many of the YouTube and Flickr apps that you can install on your Facebook page have options that enable you to pull your favorites. To highlight this content on your own site, Yahoo Pipes has some quick and dirty solutions for embedding your Flickr and YouTube favorites. They may not be pretty, but they’ll get the job done. (This is how we do it at Tufts.)

Is this ideal? No. Aside from being at the mercy of externally created content and third-party formatting, there are arguments about whether it is proper to highlight other people’s content on your own site. That is a question you will have to resolve within your own institution. But at the very least, nothing prevents you from aggregating your favorites and linking to them, so long as you don’t present the content as your own. And if you are hopeful of gaining the capacity to create your own media-rich content in the future, you can take away some lessons from the authentic, organic content you peruse on these sites, maybe even make contacts with some of the more compelling content creators. Those relationships could prove fruitful in the future.

People are talking about “listening” a lot nowadays with regard to brand and reputation management, particularly in the context of Twitter. But by extending your listening to media-rich services like Flickr and YouTube, you can not only see what media people are creating in relation to your institution, but use some of it to enhance your own web presence and maybe create a community in the process.