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.

He talks about his diminishing use of the tool in the last few months, something I can very much relate to. I think he’s right on when he says:

For one, I have thoughts longer than 140 characters that I want to share. Tweets can quickly get taken out of context at this character limit, so I find myself expressing thoughts and opinions on other platforms instead, where I have more room. I also think that ’sharing’ can be beneficial, but in a large group it hampers innovation.

About this time last month, I was going through something similar when it comes to Twitter. I was getting burned out on the noise and the shouting. Thanks to everyone who commented on that post, it was really beneficial and I took quite a bit away from the conversation.

Everyone, and every institution, has to figure out what type of Twitter use is best for them, but for me, I think the following are starting to actually help.

Pick the right tool for the job

I’ve pared down my list and am using tools like TweetDeck to better organize the people I follow. Over the last year, I find myself using Twitter for mostly professional development and communication.

If you want to see what sort of music I’m listening to or what YouTube videos I think are funny, follow me over at Facebook. Want to see cute pictures of my boys? Facebook. Want to see where I used to work? Go to LinkedIn. So on and so on.

To get the most out of any tool, you have to decide how, when and why you’re going to use it.

This is especially important for institutions to know. Want to promote homecoming events? Twitter’s good for that. Want to promote ways students can connect with alums for internships and mentoring? Maybe LinkedIn is best for that.

Organize and Segment

I’ll admit that I did caught up in the followers game for awhile.

It was important to me to get to 100, then 200, then 500 followers. As I watched people get to 1,000 then 2,000 and on up, I realized that I don’t have the time, energy or knack for self-promotion on mediums like these that others do.

That was a good lesson to learn.

Much like real life, there are hierarchies and groups of people that I want to pay more attention to than others, much like you have your good friends and your acquaintances. Columns, groups and lists make sure that I don’t miss messages and thoughts from people that I’m interested in and want to hear them.

At my current institution, I segment the University’s followers among a few groups – alums (where I can tell), campus community, Cleveland and so on. This helps me quickly scan the info and respond where needed.

Twitter shines in certain situations

One place where Twitter is very useful is at conferences. Sure, there’s the backchannel, but you can also use it in the, um, front channel (?).

In the session Jesse Lavery and I gave last week at HighEdWeb 2010, people were throwing around plugin and theme ideas and I asked people like the extremely smart Rosalyn Metz to tweet them using the hashtag for the session.

That gives people an easy way to find that information, as well as an archive that we can all go back and look at, like this.

I’ve used Twitter a few times during on-campus events and it’s worked really well. You can read more about it here. Using Twitter means that our users who were following us on their phones were getting updates, as were users using the mobile version of the site, an iPhone/Android app, etc.

This week, Facebook changed their fan pages to, um, like pages. Is that how we’re going to say that? It’s weird. Anyways, now you can say you “like” things instead of being a “fan” of them, including our higher ed institutions.

One other social feature they’ve rolled out is the Like Button, a little widget you can put on any web page and allow your site visitors to interact and say they like it. This action will appear on their news feeds and profile pages, and spread the word about content they find interesting around the web.

What’s interesting to me is the fact that this is much easier for users than using any of the various “share this” type actions, that opens in a new window. Now, it just takes users one click to share that content.

Here’s what it looks like in action. I’ve added a new Like Button to my blog. It looks like this:

It’s blue because I’ve clicked on it already, but as you can see, you will also see if any of your friends have clicked on an item. On your wall in Facebook, the following appears in your activity stream:

It’s an interesting new way to share content – it’s almost like these are little bite-sized interactions, ones that I think will definitely appeal to the more casual user. We hardcore users have been using regular share forever, right?

Here’s how to add it to your site. You can use Facebook’s Like widget builder to set some features up and it will give you either a bit of iframe code or XFBML that you can integrate into your site.

The challenge is that this widget only allows you to create a Like Widget for one page. If you are using PHP or WordPress, Andreas Jacob has come up with an easy way to dynamically have this widget get the current page URL. It’s really a simple bit of code to replace.

If you’re using WordPress, replace the URL string in the code Facebook gives you with this:

[…]like.php?href=<?php echo urlencode(get_permalink($post->ID)); ?>

Regular PHP can be done this way. You have to do a quick URL build first, hence the two lines.

<?php $url = “http” . ((!empty($_SERVER['HTTPS'])) ? “s” : “”) . “://”.$_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']; ?>

Once you have the current URL in a variable, edit your Facebook code, replacing the URL string just as you did above with this:


[…]like.php?href=<?php echo urlencode($url); ?>


I’m sure it would easy to get the current page URL from ASP, Ruby or any CMS platform. Try it out and let me know what you find.

One more thing…why not try it out by liking this post right below this paragraph? Thanks in advance.

We’ll be affected here in higher ed as well. Many institutions have been running admitted student networks or alumni networks in Ning and will need to decide not only if this is something they are going to continue doing it but if they are going to pay the new Ning’s rates going forward.

If you don’t have the budget for Ning or another provider’s services, why not build your own social network? It may be easier than you think.

Enter BuddyPress. BuddyPress is a free WordPress plugin that allows you to easily and quickly create a social network of users that includes features that many providers, like Ning, provide, including:

• Friends
• Private and Public Groups
• Forums
• Private Messages

BuddyPress is dead simple to install and get going, and it’s very supported in the WP community, so fear not that the product will up and go away. If anything, I’d expect to see BuddyPress and it’s features integrated more and more in the main WordPress codebase.

So, how easy is it to install. No lie – I started with an empty directory, installed WordPress (via command line, super fast and easy), logged in, and from the plugins menu, automatically installed BuddyPress. Done.

Total time from nothing to social network: 8 minutes. It took a few minutes longer because I made a fancy logo for the install.

Managing groups and users inside BuddyPress is super easy, and if you’ve spent any time in the WP interface, it will all be second nature to you.

Let’s take a second and look at the pros and cons of using BuddyPress as your social networking platform.

Pros:
You control the horizontal and vertical. You decide colors, layout, templates, features and so on. In the one-size fits all model, you’re stuck with whatever few templates your provider offers.

You may already have the server power to manage this internally.

You can integrate this, via code and plugins, with your content delivery network or other cloud storage you’re using. I’ve been meaning to blog about this more, but file and media storage for your CMS or social network is something that you shouldn’t ignore. You want users to generate and share content, but you want to store and serve that content quickly and easily, all the while keeping an eye on security.

No ads, unless of course you want to run them (and you get more of the revenue. Did sites get any revenue from Ning?)

Finally, by running your own network, you are not beholden to any company that can stop offering its service with little or no warning. If you run the show, you decide what goes on and when its time to upgrade or shut it down.

Cons
While it’s a big pro, the fact that you and/or your IT group is responsible for keeping WP and BP up and running is something to keep in mind as you plan your social network. In running WordPress and Allegheny for almost a year, we had zero issues and no downtime. It’s pretty stable, but something to keep in mind.

By committing to BuddyPress, you’re betting on the fact that the community will continue to develop new features and offer a good support forum where you can share and learn from other BP users and developers.

Companies like Ning are interesting because they do the heavy lifting, software development and support. By striking out on your own, you’ll be responsible for everything from managing spam, user accounts, content and so on. Something to be aware of in an era where we’re all being asked to do more with less, both in terms of people and budgets.

Try it out!

As a matter of fact, here’s the network I built. Here at JCU, we’re transitioning our alumni network from one provider and haven’t yet decided what we’ll use in the future, and while I’ve read a ton about BuddyPress, I’d never actually used it. Now, I’m a big fan.

Feel free to create an account in there and try out the features from the user perspective. I’ll leave it open for a few days.

It’s fodder for a future post, but this model would work exactly the same for a learning management system (LMS.) If you’re not using all the features of say a Blackboard or Angel, like quizzes, why not build networks for each of your classes in BuddyPress? It’s a great collaboration and file sharing tool. Something to think about…

Nice video, huh? Watch it in HD, it’s even cooler.

That’s a clip of “Terrible Lie” by Nine Inch Nails. His album “The Downward Spiral” pretty much defines being 18 and that weird, strange and wonderful time between high school and college. Anyways, Trent Reznor (who attended the college I currently work at for 1 year) has always been a pioneer of using technology to not only power his music but also his fans.

When his recording contract expired, he released a full album on his own, for free. He released, for free, multi-track files of many of his songs so people (myself included) could remix the songs and share them on his site. He released an iPhone app, for free, that allowed people to get up-to-date news, listen to remixes and share their locations at concerts and events around the world. Wanted tickets to his final set of shows last year? Twitter had clues on where to get them. Genius. He leaked new songs by putting them on flash drives and leaving them in the bathroom at shows.

This guy gets the web and technology and social media.

When a deal to commercially film one of his concerts for release on DVD fell through, he came up with a totally relaxed camera and recording policy for this shows on tour. He released raw, high def footage of the shows as torrents that anyone could download and share, mix, edit and basically do with what they please with it.

That video up there? Totally edited, graded, compressed, mixed and released by fans. Volunteers who will make nothing in terms of money, instead doing something because the love it and they want to share it.

How can we in higher education tap into those passionate fans, be it students or alumni, to help us generate content for our websites? That’s going to be one of the big things in the next 18 months, I believe.

Let’s face it, the staged photos of a professor leading a faux discussion with a group of students who happen to cover all races and genders isn’t going to cut it for much longer. Kids growing up in the user generated content era want to get the real info. They’re going to find your students sharing videos that you probably don’t know existed and their Facebook posts and Twitter updates. It’s those media touches that are going to make up a students mind, not the glossy view book.

Something to keep in mind for ’10 and going into ’11. How can we best tap into that base of content and get them to create content for us and how can we promote that content front and center. It’s going to scare the old school to death.

I’m all ears. And eyes.

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Our goal as web shepherds is to make it easy for our users to not only find information on our sites, but share that information with others.

At my college, we’ve been using the AddThis service for several months. I like the amount of customization that AddThis gives me, and I especially like the analytic data that AddThis shares.

Last night was the first chance I really had to dig into that data. And what I saw surprised me. The service users are utilizing the most? Twitter? Facebook? No. Printing.

I try not to print too much, but sometimes I find myself needing some information. If you haven’t yet set up a print style sheet, check out this post by Nick DeNardis over at EduGuru.

Our current and prospective students are as well. They’re chronicling their lives and being social, which is the whole point of web 2.0, right?

One area where I think we aren’t doing as good a job is educating people about how things they post are often visible to everyone and thanks to Google, last forever.

Here’s a quick anecdote I read about this morning.

I live in a rural area of northwestern Pennsylvania. The highlight of every summer is our big county fair. Big name acts perform, animals are displayed, and a good time is had by all. This year, the fair put on a beauty pageant and they crowned their first fair queen Sunday night.

By Monday afternoon, she suddenly and without warning resigned and gave up her crown. Everyone was perplexed – until it was learned an anonymous person sent photos found on, I’m assuming, Facebook, to the local newspaper as well as pageant and fair organizers.

Here’s a quick bit from the Meadville Tribune:

The pictures include two males attempting to bite the clothed chest of a girl who appears to be Kantz. Other photos depict a woman who appears to be Kantz with a young man; some photos seem to indicate a party setting. In one picture the man is gesturing obscenely toward the camera; in another the woman is biting the extended middle finger of a male. Three other photos depict a young woman who appears to be Kantz with others while she holds an unidentifiable drink in her hand.

My question is this: who is responsible for teaching teenagers and college students about how to use these web 2.0 tools responsibly?

Is it high schools? Colleges and universities? Parents? The sites themselves? Everywhere younger people look they’re being asked to share their photos, videos, songs, blogs and more but we aren’t telling them how to do it safely.

Do you include any training in your incoming student / orientation program about these kinds of topics? I wonder how we can best educate our students – not only for their safely and well-being but also as new rules are being set out for groups of students like athletes.

In 2003, I started a directory of Erie bloggers, as there wasn’t a good list. It started off as a subdirectory of a domain I owned, and for a year or two it grew very slowly. Over time, I added in a blog, updated rather infrequently, that talked about local issues. In 2005, I had a partner and a new domain name, ErieBlogs.com. Reaching a couple of hundred people a month, it was a fun hobby and we started to build a nice little community. We commented on each other’s blogs, we linked to each other, it was great.

We also merged with another local blogger who was doing a blog, updated daily, covering news and events around the area. We started selling ads and formed an LLC. Our little hobby had turned into a real business.

Fast forward to May 2009. The blog marches on. Now on my own, the site reaches 35,000 readers a month, a couple of hundred thousand page views and it makes a small scratch of money. We hold a yearly blood drive, we’ve raised money for a local parents of autistic children group and people locally have helped me raise almost $3,000 over the last three years for the March of Dimes.

Now that you have a little background, let’s get the meat of the post. The Press and Tower is a blog that covers media happenings in Erie. This week, they are running a poll asking people who the most influential media person in Erie is. I was included on the list, which is an honor. The other people on the list are media professionals from the TV, print and radio worlds.

After a day or two, I’m winning.

Let’s be honest. There’s no way I’m the most influential media person in Erie. I run a small blog that doesn’t make any money and I do it on my own.

But…

I think in 2009 and going forward, blogs and social media can be a part of the mass media landscape.

While I can’t compete with media conglomerates for eyeballs (its especially hard not having a newspaper I can fill every available inch of unused advertising space to promote my website, or reference it on every newscast and station break on TV), I can do something that they are struggling with.

I can build a community.

I can help people connect, converse, share, experience, learn and more. Since I’m a one-man operation, we can be very nimble and jump into and use technologies like Twitter and Facebook. No corporate oversight or overhead here – our decisions and actions are driven by what’s best for our community, not the bottom line.

When I meet people in Erie or we’re talking about my site, they often say its the first place they go in the morning for a quick news recap and they go on their way. Maybe they come back to see a job posting or what local blogs have updated. They leave insightful comments that rarely turn into the flame wars that were once found when the newspaper’s website had comments enabled. For the most part, it’s a civil, engaging place.

To show the power that a medium like Twitter has, and how you can use it, I linked to that survey from our Twitter account and asked people to vote for the small guy (i.e. me).

So, in 2009, why can’t an independent blog be part of the larger “mass media?” I think it can.

What’s the takeaway for higher ed? Respect your community, and base your actions on what’s best for them. Engage them and keep them part of the process. You’ll see a definite return on that investment.

Have you create a FriendFace area for your institution yet?

Ok, I’m joking, but wow, did The IT Crowd get Facebook/MySpace exactly right? Hilarious. All three parts of last night’s episode are on YouTube. It’s the first show, where they’ve really taken social networking as a whole and deconstructed it. Often, American shows don’t go to this depth, instead using something like Facebook or MySpace as a punchline.

You can watch the episode at YouTube. Here’s part 1.

For those of us who do manage our institution fan pages on Facebook, I noticed a new feature yesterday when I wanted to send an update to our “fans.” I see that you can now target those updates to a specific demographic. Here’s a screencap of the menu:

I think this opens up a whole bunch of new opportunities for us – we can now target alumni specifically or current students. You can also just target a specific geographical area. Very interesting.