Category: measurement

Gain inspiration for the new year with #Resolve2015

Introducing-Resolve-2015-1024x768Editor’s note: Even though I’ve resolved to make no resolutions for 2015, that doesn’t mean I’m opposed to moving forward and making improvements, personally and professionally. My higher ed colleague, Liz Gross, has kicked off the new year with a series of blog posts from other colleagues in the higher education business. Today’s post by Liz outlines that project and offers a peek at what is ahead for her readers over the coming weeks. – AC 

Guest post by Liz Gross

A new year is upon us. Hopefully, you haven’t given up on your resolution yet—or maybe you haven’t gotten around to making one. Andrew has kindly given me the opportunity to tell his readers about Resolve 2015, a series of 30 blog posts in 30 days from higher ed professionals in the U.S. and Canada designed to inform and inspire you to make 2015 the best year of your career.

The series kicked off on January 2 with reflective post from Lisa Endersby, National Chair-Elect of the NASPA Technology Knowledge Community, which encouraged us to define success by ourselves and for ourselves, not by what we’re seeing and hearing from others. In a world full of “humble brags” on social media, this is a very poignant message.

While the remaining posts will come from professionals within a variety of functional areas in higher education, I’d like to highlight the posts from folks working in marketing, communication and web/technology—those with job functions similar to readers of this blog. Here’s what you can expect from your higher education colleagues this month:

  • Kristen Abell, web developer at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, will encourage younger professionals to consider non-traditional career paths instead of marching straight up the prescribed career ladder.
  • Ma’ayan Plaut, manager of social strategy and projects at Oberlin College, brings us a double-header with two posts in the series! She’ll write about the value of investing in your own professional development and sharing your work.
  • Keri Duce, external relations manager at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, will publish a post about the importance of understanding your sphere of control.
  • Bryan Fendley, director of instructional technology and campus web services at the University of Arkansas at Monticello, will share his experience with online professional development.
  • Deborah Maue, senior strategist at mStoner, is writing about mindful meditation.
  • Lori Packer, web editor at the University of Rochester, will help the more bashful among us with tips on attending your first professional conference.
  • Karine Joly, founder of Higher Ed Experts, will help us write better conference proposals, focusing in on upcoming calls for proposals from PSEWeb and EDUWeb.
  • I shared my first post today, How to Create Your First Professional Conference Presentation, and later this month will write about how to create and maintain successful relationships with service providers and vendors.

There are many more posts to come from colleagues working in other areas of campus, all across the country (and in the great land to the north). All of the posts are hosted on my blog, Gross, Point-Blank. If you’d like to receive every post for the rest of the series in your inbox, you can subscribe here. This will also add you to my mailing list, so you’ll continue to receive future blog posts when Resolve 2015 is finished. I’ll be blogging much less frequently (usually only a few times per month), and you can unsubscribe at any time.

 

What’s the frequency, Twitter?

Tweet-birds-muralI guess by now we’re all aware that with Twitter, the more frequently we post, the greater the opportunity that our posts will be seen and acted upon.

But how much is too much?

This is something I’ve thought about since Guy Kawasaki brought it to my attention back in 2009. (See my post, To drive traffic, tweet and repeat, about Kawasaki’s test of tweet frequency.)

I’ve also worried about this idea of frequent and repeat tweeting. Like every other blogger with a PR or marketing background, I want to drive traffic to this blog. One way I do this is by sharing links to my blog posts on Twitter. I usually repeat the post a couple or three times, and generally I tweak the wording a bit in an effort to appear somewhat less lazy than a guy who automates tweets to churn them out at regular intervals. I don’t think I tweet too much. But I can’t help but wonder whether others see my approach to repeat tweets as obnoxious or spammy. I wonder whether followers ever notice those repeat tweets, and whether they think I’m posting too much about my own content.

When Kawasaki ran his experiment in 2009, he put eight hours of time between each repeat tweet. (He scheduled four identical tweets over 24 hours, then reported his results.) But a new experiment by Jade Furubayashi of SimplyMeasured makes Kawasaki’s test appear to be a model of restraint.

Furubayashi tweeted for one week in 15-minute increments, and another week in 30-minute increments. Her results showed that the more frequent the tweets, the greater the traffic from Twitter to her website.

So, frequent tweeting seems to drive web traffic.

But one item not addressed in Furubayashi’s experiment (and an issue raised in the comments to her post) has to do with the content of the tweet. Which also has to do with the headline or description used. (More about that in a previous post.)

What do you think? What’s the sweet spot for tweet frequency?

Image: Twittering Tweets Mural by cobalt123 on Flickr.