Category: twitter

Friday Five: Goodbye to all that edition

Guess what, readers? It’s the final Friday of 2011, so I bet you can guess what’s coming: A year-end list of five things about … something. Yep. You’re on to me.

For the final Friday Five of 2011, I present to you my list of:

Five things I wish would go away in 2012, but probably won’t

1. Collegiate sports scandals. Seriously. We’ve seen enough in 2011. I long for the day when I can read the sports page just for stories about last night’s games and not child molestation, grand jury indictments and NCAA rules violations.

2. The higher ed humblebrag. The humblebrag creeps up all the time on my Twitter and Facebook timelines. 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.” Harris Wittels writes a terrific monthly column about humblebragging on Grantland, where his focus is mainly on celebrity humblebrags, of which there are many. But the humblebrag bug has bitten higher ed, too. None of us are immune from it. I’ve bragged about speaking gigs, people I’ve met and other bits of awesomeness, often with the requisite self-deprecation. As Wittels writes, the need to brag “is ingrained in us and our desire to be validated,” and while “humblebragging is annoying … it is less annoying than just bragging.” So if you must brag in social media, keep it humble.

3. Celebrity Twitter nonsense. From Charlie Sheen’s #winning antics to Ashton Kutcher’s clueless support of Joe Paterno (must be something in the water on the set of Two and a Half Men), to Alec Baldwin’s snarks about American Airlines, celebrities turned microblogging into high-profile buffoonery. And while we’re at it, let’s get rid of the children of celebrities, like Wayne Gretzky’s daughter Paulina, who got in trouble for posting racy, MySpace-esque photos on Twitter, forcing her to delete her account. Oh. Wait. Maybe not.

4. Facebook. Yes, I know quitting Facebook would be like quitting air. Impossible. But I’m going to try to limit my interaction on the world’s biggest social network to wishing friends a happy birthday. Wish me luck.

5. Bloggers’ year-end lists. Enough said?

What about you? What would you like to see less of in 2012?

Friday Five: Top #highered news of 2011

There’s still almost a month left of 2011, but before we all get caught up in our end-of-semester and pre-holiday activities, I wanted to share my thoughts about the big events and happenings of the year from a higher ed marketing perspective. (Hey, if Hollywood can release a movie called New Year’s Eve on Dec. 9, then I see nothing wrong with posting my end-of-year lists a little early.)

The higher ed marketing community is a pretty small one, so the items I highlight here may seem less than momentous in comparison to some of the bigger higher ed news of the year. You won’t see any mention of big-time athletics scandals or Occupy protests — just topics that pertain to the subject matter of this blog and our little community of higher ed communicators.

Here are the top #highered news and trends of 2011, as I see them.

5. Higher Ed Live. Even though Seth Odell’s live video show made its debut in September 2010, Higher Ed Live grew legs in 2011 and became a weekly ritual for many in the higher ed community. Even if we weren’t all watching it live, many of us were talking about the show in the #higheredlive Twitter stream, and we were watching archived episodes asynchronously. Thanks, Seth, for bringing some of the top higher ed marketing/PR/web folks to our screens, and for committing cash out of your own pocket to keep the stream ad-free.

4. WTF, Oberlin? The creation of two Oberlin College alumni, the website Why the f*** should I choose Oberlin? caught the attention of many in the world of higher ed. Since the edgy single-serving site since it launched earlier this fall, visitors have posted thousands of reasons why Oberlin is their effing college of choice. As this InsideHigherEd article points out, the point is not to merely drop f-bombs. Its two creators, Ma’ayan Plaut and Harris Lapiroff, devised the site “to showcase the love and shared experiences of those who attended Oberlin.” In Georgy Cohen’s blog entry discussing the merits of this site, she says the site works because “its creators … are not too far removed from their target demographic. Also, the site is not official, and it likely didn’t languish for months between conception and launch. WTFSICO is a natural extension of their love and enthusiasm for Oberlin and a natural expression of what, to them, is an effective web presence.” Fortunately, no one else has tried to duplicate the gosh darn thing.

3. Content’s king and queen. With the launch of MeetContent last March, co-creators Georgy Cohen (@radiofreegeorgy) and Rick Allen (@epublishmedia) have given the higher ed community a blog focused on a very important component of web, print and any other form of communication: content. This site is a terrific resource for higher ed’s content creators.

2. A broader, better BlogHighEd. When the higher ed blog aggregator BlogHighEd launched back in February 2008, it had a pretty easy job to do. There were only a handful of higher ed blogs out there. But as the higher ed marketing community grew, and more new bloggers cropped up, BlogHighEd unfortunately remained a closed system, focused on the few bloggers it started with. That all changed last May, when the site, created by Matt Herzberger and Brad J. Ward, opened up to include dozens more blogs. As I wrote back then, “Bigger isn’t always better, but with the higher ed blogosphere expanding (relatively) dramatically in recent years, I think it’s good for an aggregator site like this to incorporate more perspectives. The addition of new voices adds more value to BlogHighEd, keeping it fresher and giving blog readers more reason to visit that site on a regular basis.”

1. #MBTeamS FTW. You have to go way back to January for the top higher ed marketing story of the year. That is when the team of Todd Sanders and John Petersen, two higher ed guys and Packers fans from Green Bay, won Mercedes-Benz’s big “tweet race” to the Super Bowl. Right before the event, I posted a Friday Five offering five reasons why the higher ed community should help Todd and John in their quest to win the race. Not that they really needed my help, as Todd and John had amassed a groundswell of support long before the race began. After the race, fellow higher ed bloggers Karine Joly, Michael Stoner and Patrick Powers discussed why this event was such a winner, not only for Todd and John, but for all of higher ed. The event galvanized the online higher ed community as we all rallied around a great cause (not just winning for winning’s sake; as part of the effort, Todd and John raised a lot of money for charity, and many of you helped). Patrick put it best: “Social media, at its best, is fun.” Thanks to this event, all of us who participated were winners.

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So those are my picks for 2011. What are yours?

P.S. Speaking of lists, I’ll soon be joining the other members of the Higher Ed Music Critics collective for our annual countdown of the year’s best albums. I hope you’ll follow along.