A local Saab dealership is holding a contest where 100 people each week receive a Saab to drive around. Our goal as drivers is to get people to be our “fan” on a contest page and to snap the 2 QR codes on the car, one on each of the back windows and one on the interior (which is worth more points.) Contestants also receive points if someone scans a QR code on the car and then visits one of the contest sponsors where there’s another code that earns the customer a discount or benefit. The people I’ve shown the car to so far have been most excited by the fact they get a free coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts if they scan the car. Finally, I’ll receive points for each time I post a photo of the car. I’ve put up a few so far, and the process has been smooth and easy.

After a semi-final round, finalists will select 1 of 5 boxes, each containing a key. If the key opens the Saab, you win the car. Personally, I don’t really need a new car, but I could use the money to re-do our basement, trashed this year in floods.

Anyways, to play the part of good contestant, I need to ask for your help and tap into my social capital. Here’s how you can help. It’s okay if you’re not in the northeast Ohio area or even in the USA, you can “like” me from anywhere, as well as scan the QR code. You might not get a free coffee, but you’ll be helping me out.

First, visit my contest page. Scroll down to the lower right, where you’ll see this area:

Click on that “become a fan” link, where you’ll be prompted for an email address. I’ve been promised the emails won’t be spammed by the dealership, but to be safe, use that second or third Gmail account you have for stuff like this.

Second, scan this QR code on your phone:

If you don’t want to go through all the trouble, just visit this link, which the QR code takes you to. You’ll be asked for your location, so it can find the closest sponsor location to you.

So, that’s how you can help. Now, let me put on my marketing hat for a bit.

So far, the contest has been managed and handled very well, which is key. They held an orientation session last week for participants where the rules were explained, forms completed and there was food. There have been constant email communications from the dealer to participants with updates and schedules, which has been helpful.

On Sunday, when I picked up my car, there was a good check-in system, where the last of the paperwork was completed and any questions I had were answered. From there, I was off the pick-up area, where my car was brought up from the lot. I was walked through the vehicle and off I went. All in all, a good system was in place and there were plenty of people staffing the various areas so there was no wait. I’ll return the car on Saturday and expect the same setup upon check-in.

From a technology standpoint, the contest site is set up well, works well in mobile browsers and image uploads by contestants are stored and served from Amazon S3. I don’t know if this is being run by a national company that sells this product to local dealerships, but it’s put together very well and the design is nice.

So, I’m two days in so far. The car’s fun to drive (and fast, thank you, Turbo.) I wish it had a hookup for my iPhone, like my Hyundai does, but beggars can’t be choosers.

Thanks for your help. I’ll update later in the week on my progress.

One part of their servers on demand product had issues – specifically their Elastic Block Storage product in one of their availability zones. Many servers use it for persistent storage, something the EC2 product doesn’t offer by default. With these volumes being flaky, throwing errors or being office, many sites were in trouble.

The services that we use the most here at John Carroll, the Simple Storage Service (S3) and the Cloudfront content delivery network were not affected, thankfully, so I could enjoy the holiday weekend. I would have liked to play some online games on my PS3, but as you’ll see below, that too was off-line.

So what are some takeaways I see coming out of this outage?

First, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill posted a very detailed blog post about the Amazon outage and how and why his company’s servers there weren’t affected. He says:

All of our services in AWS are spread across multiple Availability Zones (AZs). We’d use 4 if we could, but one of our AZs is capacity constrained, so we’re mostly spread across three. (I say “one of our” because your “us-east-1b” is likely different from my “us-east-1b” – every customer is assigned to different AZs and the names don’t match up). When one AZ has a hiccup, we simple use the other AZs. Often this is a graceful, but there can be hiccups – there are certainly tradeoffs.

Second, if you are going to leverage the cloud for services, and you should, you must have a backup plan or set of protocols for what to do if it hits the fan.

For example, if S3 did go down, our WordPress CMS would be affected, as we store user-uploaded assets in S3. To remedy that, we keep a local copy on our server, so our assets stay available to our site visitors. If S3 goes down, we can make a change to a plugin configuration and our assets will still be available. When S3 comes back online, we’d flip the switch and go back to serving things from the cloud.

Third, have a communication plan ready and keep users updated during the day.

The only spot I was finding out official information on the outage was on the AWS Service Health Dashboard, which is fine, that’s where it should be. In addition, many sites put up their own pages (Quora, Reddit come to mind) saying their were being affected by the outage.

If you have a blog, use it. Same goes for Twitter and Facebook. Amazon, even though the info was hidden, was good with updating exactly what was going on and where they were in the process of getting services back online. For example:

Apr 24, 5:05 AM PDT: As detailed in previous updates, the vast majority of affected EBS volumes have been restored by this point, and we are working through a more time-consuming recovery process for remaining volumes. We have made steady progress on this front over the past few hours. If your volume is among those recently recovered, it should be accessible and usable without additional action.

Good information that’s being updated often is important to help keep customers in the loop. Compare that to Sony, who’s Playstation network has been offline since last Wednesday. Their updates have been nebulous, at best. On April 21, they posted on their official blog:

While we are investigating the cause of the Network outage, we wanted to alert you that it may be a full day or two before we’re able to get the service completely back up and running.

The last update given by the company, on April 23, said this:

We sincerely regret that PlayStation Network and Qriocity services have been suspended, and we are working around the clock to bring them both back online. Our efforts to resolve this matter involve re-building our system to further strengthen our network infrastructure. Though this task is time-consuming, we decided it was worth the time necessary to provide the system with additional security.

We thank you for your patience to date and ask for a little more while we move towards completion of this project. We will continue to give you updates as they become available.

And then, silence. It’s now Monday morning in the US and the service is not online and the current status/ETA for being online hasn’t been updated since Saturday. IGN has more on Sony’s PR response to this outage.

That type of communication wouldn’t work on our campuses. Part of your planning must be a communications plan for who is responsible for keeping a certain audience up to date on the status of services.

My colleagues at Allegheny are doing it right this morning. They had a power outage over the weekend and took to their intranet to update the campus community, on a Sunday.

Am I going to stop using Amazon’s cloud services over this outage? No, definitely not. Is this going to make Amazon improve the service? Yes. Is this a sucky way to do it? Of course.

I’ll be updating this post with feedback from other higher ed web and marketing folks. Andrew Careaga has some interesting thoughts on the outage looking at it through a lens of education.

Alexandra Wallace, a student at UCLA, posted a video on YouTube making fun of Asian students in the UCLA library. Here is her video:

It didn’t take long for the video set off a firestorm on the Internet. It was picked up by blogs large and small, news outlets, blogs, YouTube and more.

Then something interesting happened.

Gene Block, Chancellor of UCLA, posted a video response and statement online to Ms. Wallace’s video, condemning it and saying that it was not representative of the UCLA community.

I understand why UCLA responded – they were getting comments and pressure from around the world, but I wonder if this sets a dangerous precedent.

Will we, as institutions of higher education, now be expected to respond to every negative blog post, video, Twitter and social media mention that’s in any way negative about our institutions or one of our affinity groups? Granted, this was an extreme case, but it is something that we’re going to have to seriously think about at our institutions and, possibly, start to plan for.

I’ve read blog posts and watched YouTube videos critical of institutions I’ve worked at. One time, David Duke included the college I worked at on a list called “The Best Colleges for Whites.” We responded to none of these in a formal way, though there was sometimes calls for us to do so.

Finally, the UCLA student, Alexandra Wallace, has now withdrawn from UCLA effective immediately. She writes in a letter to the UCLA Daily Bruin:

I made a mistake. My mistake, however, has lead to the harassment of my family, the publishing of my personal information, death threats, and being ostracized from an entire community. Accordingly, for personal safety reasons, I have chosen to no longer attend classes at UCLA.

For years, it’s been a very symbiotic relationship. We use the rankings done by U.S. News & World Report to promote ourselves and they use us to sell magazines and college guides. It’s a fair trade, and everybody wins.

But, something’s changed this year.

Want to use the little U.S. News Best Colleges logo? The one we’ve all used with no problems in the past? That’s fine, but now its going to cost you.

I can understand charging for reprints or using the logo in print materials/magazines, but for use on the web? That’s strange.

We’ll be referencing the rankings starting tomorrow once the embargo is lifted. One thing we won’t have is the logo. I don’t know if having that along with our news release is worth $700-800 and way up from there for print rights.

Will some schools pony up for the logo? I think so. But I would guess many won’t – seeing how bad budgets are right now.

I quite like Karine’s idea:

In particular, I like the idea of testing product names via Google AdWords. In the video, Ferriss talks about the process he used to name his book, The 4-Hour Workweek. He would buy AdWords placements for many different titles and see which one got the best click-through rates. The ads went to blank pages and he got great market data for a relatively small amount of money.

Might be an interesting thing to try when we’re thinking about marketing slogans and branding in higher ed.

The video also has interesting information about angel investing and advising new and small businesses. If you’re interested in how some pretty visible people look at investing, you may learn a thing or two.

This morning, my cards arrived, a little more then a month later. I put 2 cards in my envelope – one saying “bring some thunder,” which I hope I’ve done, and the other was some ideas of how to best communicate ideas with upper management.

I’ve tried to do a better job of that lately. I’m not sure if I’ve succeeded, but this card activity was a great way to be reminded about a goal or idea and serve as motivation to complete the task if you haven’t.

As you’ll see its a relatively simple spot, but the challenge was to show all 11 varsity sports as well as have some text at the end. Sounds easy, but it was actually a bit of a challenge. 30 seconds is not a very long time.

Believe it or not, I actually did the spot in iMovie (and not the past version, the most recent version). Since we decided to use still photos, iMovie was the quickest way to get them imported and easily set the movement effects. I created the final text screens in Photoshop (watch that pixel ratio or it will look scrunched) and output to raw DV for dumping to tape and DVD.

Once we had a version locked down, it was exported to DVCAM tape and I delivered the tape, and a DVD backup, to the Fox Sports video truck that was broadcasting the game from our facilities this past Saturday.

I was working in the press box at the game, so I had to DVR the game. It was really cool to finally see it air and to see it someplace that wasn’t my monitor at work.

Allegheny Athletics Commercial from Allegheny College on Vimeo.

I can’t stress enough how important it is to have people you trust watch the video for anything they notice that’s out of the ordinary. By the time you’ve got something completed and ready for review, you’ve seen it hundreds if not thousands of times and you lose all objectivity. Grabbing a group of people to watch it a few times proved invaluable and early drafts of the spot were much cruder then the final cut above. We were even making changes as late as Friday afternoon – all for the better, thanks Penny and Josh.

I think in the end, the spot is upbeat and meets all the goals we set out to reach.

Beware some salty language if you’re at work.

p.s. did you notice his zenned out slides? That’s right. No slides. It’s all about the content.

The videos aren’t specific to institution and feature our VP for enrollment and marketing.

From the technical side, we shot them using our Sony HD camera outside our main administration building on our rustic bridge. The videos were edited in iMovie. I blogged last month about how great iMovie is. For now, we’re just putting these in YouTube though we will eventually upload them to Vimeo in HD.

This webinar will provide an overview of the available video sites out there including the different types of YouTube channels, affordable and scalable cloud hosting, Facebook, Vimeo and more. He will also share tips and best practices to promote and track the success of your videos on the Web.

Whether your institution is just getting into online video or you’re experienced, I think you’ll find this webinar informative and educational. You can register online.

I’ve attended as well as spoken at several webinars put on by HigerEdExperts.com and they are always informative and get you thinking. Karine Joly, HigherEdExperts wrangler and EduWeb keynote speaker, always makes sure that things are running smoothly and the sessions are productive.