Category: Friday Five

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.

Social media predictions (not that you asked, but…)

Earlier this week, I snagged this tweet from Rohit Bhargava pointing to a collection of social media predictions by marketing, branding and social media experts, all captured on a Slideshare deck on the Dell Slideshare Network. (Rohit was one of the prognosticators featured in this deck.)

I thought some of these predictions were probably spot on. A few were bold. Many were predictable.

Speaking of predictable, I thought mimicking the Q&A format of Dell’s social media predictions would make a good (read: easy to slap together at the last minute) Friday Five feature for this blog. So, here you go — five predictions based on the Dell questions (which were more than five, so I didn’t talk about everything here). You’re welcome.

My Social Media Predictions for 2013

1. What social media channel do you feel is primed to grow its audience base the most in 2013?

Since the question is about audience base, that rules out more mature social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. How about Instagram? Instagram sounds like a good pick.

2. Which social media channel may disappear in 2013?

I doubt any of them will disappear completely. (I still get occasional emails from hi5, which I haven’t used in ages, so apparently someone is still out there.) But I don’t think the new Myspace will go anywhere.

3. What is the one social media behavior you would like to see more of in 2013?

The #humblebrag. Seriously. Done well, the humblebrag is a wonderful bit of hubris and snark. It’s the act of “[s]ubtly letting others now about how fantastic your life is while undercutting it with a bit of self-effacing humor or ‘woe is me’ gloss.” I know that, way back in 2011, I suggested that the “higher ed humblebrag” needed to go away. But that’s because we were all doing it wrong. To see how to do it right, check Harris Wittels‘ writings in Grantland.

4. What social media behavior needs to stop?

LinkedIn endorsements. What is the point? [humblebrag]Hey, I really do appreciate all the nice endorsements about my expertise in blogging, social media, media relations and strategic communications[/humblebrag]. But unless I can include those endorsements in my annual review and parlay them into a big fat raise, they don’t really do much for me. Please tell me if I’m missing something here.

5. What is your best advice for a brand to connect with its audience one-on-one?

I have to agree with Rohit Bhargava here. “I think it still comes down to being human,” he says on slide 14 of the Dell slide deck. “It does require a stronger focus on creating a real voice for all communications. It also takes a deeper understanding of customer questions and how you can answer them.”

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There you have them. My social media predictions for this year, two months into it.

What are your predictions? How would you answer those questions?