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.

I’ve compartmentalized my social media as much as I can. I use Twitter for mostly work stuff, and Facebook for more personal stuff (privacy controls and all.) I keep my LinkedIn up to date, but I don’t spend much time there.

I’ve set up a few columns in TweetDeck where I can make sure I don’t miss updates from my friends/family and a bunch of higher ed web people that I’m interested in seeing what they say.

It’s become a big bunch of noise. Foursquare updates. Updates from blogs. Retweets. “What I’m listening to.” “I’m working on something big…”, Hash tags. “I need an email provider – discuss!”, “I’m posting this to win an iPad.” All of it.

As Leo Laporte said, and said very well:

“I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves.”

I miss the early days of Twitter, circa say 2007, when only the really nerdy web folks were on there – and it really was a nice professional development tool. I’d ask a question, Kyle James and Brad Ward and Karine Joly and Karlyn Morissette would share info, and you could get an answer quickly. Now, it feels like everyone’s shouting and it’s less about the community.

I’m not saying everyone shouting is bad, but it’s not working for me.

I’m at a crossroads with this tool.

I find myself thinking about the best way to use Twitter. I’ve un-followed the people who were generating literally hundreds of tweets a day or those that haven’t updated this year. I’ve done some organization.

Do I:

A) Selectively follow the people I’m interested in and manage it with a few tools.

B) Give in to the machine and follow back the over 700 people who follow me. This will dramatically increase the noise, but some creative filtering and grouping would ensure I’m still getting some information that is of value. This will require a bit more effort, but may be worth it in the long run.

C) Chuck it all into the bin.

What method works for you? Which (or some combination of both) is the best way to get value of the tool?

I spoke about how schools in the us, and my school in particular, are using social media to connect with multiple audiences. It was fun to share what we’re doing here in the US and talk to web folks about what they are doing with social media in the UK.

Here’s some great feedback from Daniel Hanly of the University of Glamorgan about not only the entire two-day session but also my little bit. A snippet:

Promotion was the tip of the [iceberg] pyramid as far as the conference went – we had a guest presentation from Mike Richwalsky who is the assistant director of public affairs at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania. He gave a very inspiring and discussion provoking view into using Twitter, Facebook and other social networking tools to connect with your audience and to connect with a potential audience. It also presents a way for your website to grow, facebook groups tend to be viral (if relevant) and twitter gives you access to everyone on the web to push your message to. There was numerous issues here especially from education institutions who believed that their students would see them as “trying to get down with the kids” and then it’ll actually impair relationships with the audience instead of help them, however, they were quickly dispelled by Mr Richwalsky who said that they only push information out as an institution and they do not try and connect with the students, instead just feed them relevant information. Promotion was a very rich topic, there’s so many ways you can get your name out there nowadays, its pretty much impossible to stay behind a closed door.

Thank you to Steve Boneham, Christine Cahoon and George Munroe for inviting me to participate as well as sharing a nice meal in Cardiff with me.

* Photo by Steve Boneham. The photo is from the London session. I was seriously jet-lagged.

According to a 15-year-old intern at Morgan Stanley, Matthew Robson, teenagers eschew Twitter, don’t read newspapers and want ad-free music from online tools like Pandora, Slacker and Last.fm. From the story:

“Teenagers do not use Twitter,” he pronounced. Updating the micro-blogging service from mobile phones costs valuable credit, he wrote, and “they realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless”.

I think we’ve all known that Facebook is getting more use than Twitter in this age group, though I suppose its good to hear it from someone in that demo.

Have you seen Twitter usage among teenagers increasing or staying the same at your institution?

Here are a few mentions from yesterday, some of which were posted during the presentation.

I’ve followed up with a few people via email and Twitter as well to get some more detailed feedback about what they think I should cover in similar presentations in the future, and the questions I’ve received from Twitter, email and Facebook in the last 12 hours have been great, lots of great ideas, suggestions and feedback.

With pretty much every event, web conference, webinar, seminar and get together being tweeted about (and hashed for easy searching), Twitter is becoming a great tool for self-improvement and growth if you present, though you need a somewhat thick skin.

I’ll be talking about social media at the WhippleHill User Conference in early July. If you’re going to that event, please stop by and say hi.

If you’re interested in having me speak at your event, you can check out a full listing of my past and upcoming presentations.

If you haven’t used Twitter’s search tool, you should start doing it now. You can also set up searches in most of the Twitter clients like TweetDeck, Nambu, Seesmic and more.

Is Twitter’s search the most important site on the planet? For fun, I’m going to agree and say yes, it is. Here’s why.

Twitter search does something that not even the mighty Google can do – giving you results that are happening right that instant. Sure, Google indexes quickly, but Twitter gives you results up to the second – and even tells you there are more results that have come in since your initial search, which means even more people are talking about a topic.

To stick with my hockey example from earlier in the week, a few weeks ago Fox Sports Pittsburgh went out on my cable system during a playoff hockey game. My first thought was that our cable company has an outage. I turned to Twitter’s search and typed in FSN.

I quickly found a few people in my area that were having an outage, and after a few minutes, tweets began pouring in from all over the east coast, saying that FSN was out for them as well. After, seriously, 5 minutes, this tweet appeared, saying the source of the problem was a lightning strike.

In the old days (pre-Twitter), if FSN went down, I’d maybe call the cable company and I could guarantee the CSR would have no idea there was even a game on let alone it was out. Now, in five minutes, I had an exact answer, even a link to someone streaming the game on uStream.

Searching Twitter gives you up-to-the-second news, trends and allows you to tap into the world-wide zeitgeist like no other technology before has.

So what can Twitter do for you? It can easily tell you what people are saying about your institution. If you haven’t yet setup a search in a client or grabbed an RSS feed from Twitter’s search results pages, stop reading this and go and do it now.

It allows you to keep up on happenings and trends, and if appropriate, respond quickly and effectively.

Do you think it’s the most important site on the internet?

My friend and occasional hotel room crasher Brad Ward wrote a post last fall about Twitter and its been stuck in my mind ever since.

In it, he talks about a way to market your Twitter accounts to students. He recommends using Twitter’s text messaging powers to accomplish this. He says:

Twitter was essentially designed and built around SMS, but seems to veered away from that. Let’s not forget about this powerful feature.

In essence, you can get certain audiences, especially students, to use Twitter without ever knowing they are using Twitter.

Here’s how.

Once you have a Twitter account, and you’re feeding it content using a service like TwitterFeed or by posting at Twitter.com, you advertise to students that if they text follow youraccountname to 40404, they will get updates on their phone. That’s it. Not once have you mentioned you are using Twitter to send updates.

We started doing this last fall at my institution for people to get athletics updates on their phones and a decent number of people signed up. Now, when a new story is posted by our athletics staff, followers of that account get a text message with a headline or the score of a contest. The people getting the SMS messages don’t need to know what Twitter is or how it works, they just get the updates as regular texts. Don’t forget – after all that setup – you still have a regular Twitter feed you can promote and people can follow. It’s a win-win.

We’re rolling this out over the summer to incoming students as part of our orientation program. We’ve set up a Twitter account (@alleghenyorient) for our orientation team and we’ve trained them in how to post updates from the web as well as from their phones as they’re out and about around campus during the program.

Now that we’ve set up the team and the account, it’s time to start telling the students about it. We’ve posted on our Orientation site with a link to our regular Twitter page as well as how they text a follow message to 40404. We’re also going to start promoting it in our Class of 2013 pages.

We just finished a postcard being mailed to all students giving them some dates and instructions, and we included the text messaging instructions on the printed piece. Here is a close-up of the Twitter information:

That mailing is dropping any day now to students, and I’m interested to see how many people sign up for it. I’ll post updates here over the summer.

Some schools, especially on the recruitment side, monitor accounts and answer questions and some schools re-post headlines. I’m not saying that’s bad–my institution did this for the first year we had an account, though we’re getting better about being active.

Twitter is an intriguing tool beccause allows you to engage your followers in a way that you can’t do via email or a blog. It’s real time, always changing and very participatory.

I love hockey, especially the Pittsburgh Penguins. They are in the midst of a tough series against Alex Ovechkin and the Washington Capitals – but for the last couple of months, they have been using social media, especially Twitter, better then just about any sports franchise out there. You can follow them at twitter.com/pghpenguins.

They tweet updates, roster moves, practice news, scoring updates during the game, and lots more. They tweet if the big screen will be set up outside the arena so that fans can come to the arena and watch the game with thousands of other fans.

This week, they are engaging their followers in a cool way – they are holding a scavenger hunt today that’s happening only on Twitter. The prize: expensive, not to mention sold-out, playoff tickets.

What a great way to engage your audience and have them hanging on your every Tweet as they seek out a prize worth hundreds of dollars.

So, how does this relate to higher ed’s use of Twitter?

Obviously, we don’t have playoff tickets or hundreds of dollars to give away, but we as institutions can be a valuable resource.

We can help our audiences, be them prospective students or alums, figure out the scavenger hunt that can be higher ed and get the prize they want – whether its personal contact, help in submitting their application essays or how to best direct a monetary gift to an area that needs the funds.

We can ask them to come to an event or share with them a YouTube video or blog post we think they’d be interested them. We can ask for their help and their feedback, we can help them feel part of the loop and still part of the campus, even if they graduated 30 years ago.

I think it’s safe to say that Twitter’s hit the main stream. It’s certainly a hot topic in all areas of college marketing, from enrollment marketing to fundraising.

Today, I’d like to talk about your account’s icon – that little 73 pixel by 73 pixel area in the left-hand corner of your account’s page.

Your account’s icon may be one of the most important thing you enter when you are setting up account. Seriously – and here’s why.

Your followers may not be getting your tweets at Twitter.com – they may be using a client like Twitterific, TweetDeck, Nambu, Seesmic or Tweetie. Whether you follow 15 people or 1,500, looking at people’s icons is a quick and easy way to see who’s talking and you can quickly decide if you’re going to pay attention.

If you don’t set the icon, users see this:

That’s not terribly useful. This, on the other hand, is useful:

Your school’s icon can be your logo, your seal, your wordmark, your marketing phrase, a picture of your campus’ version of “Old Main,” just make sure your icon makes people know it’s your school. Here’s an example of an icon that’s getting cut off by Twitter.

That’s the logo for North Dakota State’s Twitter account. As you can see, the entire letter N is cut off and at quick glance, you don’t know who that account holder is. The icons for their other accounts are good, for example the icon for their bookstore’s account is good:

Here are few other ones that are getting cut off, are hard to read, or don’t clearly state what school they are :

I’m fortunate that for the past six years, I’ve had an awesome graphic designer, Penny Frank (@), working down the hall from me and we’ve collaborated on a ton of projects.

Last week, she redesigned many of our account icons. We wanted to make sure that they all had their own personality, but contained Allegheny flavor – colors, fonts, treatments, etc. Here they are, I think they’re great.

I’d love to have you post your account icons in the comments or point everyone towards a few that you think are very well done. I’ll gather them up and feature them in a post later on this week.