Friday Five: Random-access edition

A longtime blogging buddy in the UK recently posted what he called a blogpost of no consequence. It was, of course, nothing of the sort, as it was filled with all sorts of interesting links and even a fun YouTube video. It was a post of random observations, and randomness is not without consequence.

Today’s post is random. The only thing not random about it is that it follows the order of five things, as is my custom for Friday blog posts. So let’s get to it:

  1. Dave Olsen, well-known in the higher ed marketing community for his activity on Twitter and elsewhere, has launched a blog called Mobile in Higher Ed. It’s a great niche and I can’t think of anyone better than Dave to address what’s happening in mobile right now.
  2. Meet Leroy Stick, the man behind @BPglobalPR. I started @BPGlobalPR, because the oil spill had been going on for almost a month and all BP had to offer were bullshit PR statements. No solutions, no urgency, no sincerity, no nothing. That’s why I decided to relate to the public for them.
  3. Embracing Web Analytics is Karine Joly’s latest University Business column. It’s also the latest salvo in Karine’s call for an analytics revolution.
  4. The rise of page-view journalism means companies (and higher ed) must generate their own media.
  5. For all the needless drama of life (and really, is there any other kind?), try the Drama Button. (Warning: You may need to turn down your speakers.) Here’s hoping you won’t need this button till Monday.

Happy Weekend, everyone.

P.S. – Celtics in six.

Friday Five: social media-savvy schools

Sometime during the Winter Olympics, CollegeSurfing.com decided to host some winter games of its own and came up with the Web 2.0 College Olympics to identify the most social media-savvy campuses for prospective students. But instead of limiting their competition to single gold, silver and bronze medalists, the CollegeSurfing.com folks listed their top “50 social media innovators in higher education.” Here are the top five from that list, with links to their Twitter feeds. If you’re looking for examples of how to do social media in higher ed, these are the top of the top — the gold standard.

  1. Tufts University gets kudos for its twittering dining halls, vibrant Facebook group and my favorite, Spark, a site devoted to the campus’s social media tools.
  2. Johns Hopkins University is cited for its “prolific” Twitter feed and “gets props for letting the Twitterverse in on its tongue-in-cheek swine flu lexicon.” (After these Olympics, Johns Hopkins earned my further admiration by pulling off the cleverest and most elaborate university April Fool’s prank of 2010.)
  3. Ithaca College is lauded for a lighthearted approach to Twitter “and more than a dozen blogs are easily accessible from the school’s home page.”
  4. Butler University. “Kudos to Butler for letting its mascot, an adorable bulldog, run his own Twitter account.” ‘Nuff said.
  5. Case Western Reserve University’s Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing. The only school within a university to earn gold medal status, this school earned notice for live-Tweeting a disaster drill for flight nursing camp students and for their own YouTube channel.

Special thanks to Georgy Cohen (@radiofreegeorgy), who first pointed this out several weeks back.