You may notice on lots of site people have avatars next to their comments. Why don’t you? You probably haven’t made a gravatar. Next you might ask:
What is a gravatar?
A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an avatar image that follows you from blog to blog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your posts on web forums, so why not on blogs?
How do I get a gravatar?
All you have to do to get one is go to http://gravatar.com/ and add your avatar image. They when you make a comment on a site is pulls the image that is associated with your email address.
Test is out
Feel free to leave a comment on my site to test out your new avatar.It is supported by many blogging platforms.
Time and time again I get this feeling that lots of people in higher ed have their head buried in the sand. People fail to realize that many of the things they do and resources they create can be useful and time saving for others. It seems like everyone wants to tackle every project on their own level when there asset might be helpful to people all the way up the chain, (ie department > college > university) or whatever hierarchy you have. Not only is this a waste of time but a waste of money, lots of it. And at a time like this we should look to eliminate this waste.
From when I came to this job I realized lots of sticking points when dealing with people from other areas, there is always a hesitance and a sort of hoarding mentality. Which I don’t understand do the the fact that “we are on the same team”. I think people feel threatened by buying into the greater good which is unfortunate. I have always attempted to be the first to support and give buy in to university wide projects and extend things I have developed to others in the community. I guess I have a sort of grass roots or open source mentality. I always prefer to give up what I have done with no strings attached.
A few of the things that I have recognized time and time again are:
Events calendars
People recreate the wheel time and time again with this one, i think if at all possible calendaring should be a university wide project rather than one tackled on a department level. One unfortunate thing is that in my quest for more than three years now I have never found a calendaring system that does everything I want. A few features I would look for tagged events that can be aggregated at multiple levels, RSS / iCal and Microformats. Notable open source ones VT (Virgina Tech) Cal but that project has been dead in the water. Cal Berkeley / Nebraska Lincoln cal are based on the same framework but they have pretty heavy code for a non developer like myself and they lack a great mechanism for the hierarchy of events. Last but not least Bedework, very promising, still an active open source project but just not perfect for me
Campus photo archive
This is one that I feel is very neglected in many cases every department simply had a huge hard drive or cd’s that have the same photos over and over again. They are organized by at best a folder structure that doesn’t really communicate what they have or enable finability. What I would advocate is some sort of a flickresque at least in function if not using flickr system that has tagging, easily accessible to all, ability to put large image, geotagging, licensing if need and possibly even a rating system. This might be a larger problem than just images I think asset management for images, video, documents, etc. could be handled in much the same way. At a university there are certain things like the football stadium, basketball arena, academic building, and the student union. The list goes on and on, but these places are of interest to all students and deparments. These pictures would be useful to communications / marketing people in all departments and a tool like this would be a great way to manage your universities abundant resources.
Content management system (CMS)
This is a huge undertaking of a project but when done well it can really help. Higher ed content management runs the gambit of flat html with no file management, small cms systems that are run on a departmental level to large enterprise cms’s that can handle entire universities web presence. One the the best bits of knowledge I have learned from all the cms demos I have attended is that for a large or decentralized university you will need something way more than lets say a drupal or a wordpress. You will probably need a decoupled system this means a system that is programming language agnostic where people can still use their own resources and servers. For example there would be a central application server that would handle content, user management etc. But they then tend to push out a flat file to each depts own server. Therefore, what ever language a department uses be it php, asp, ROR whatever they are able to provide hooks in the flat files and still use their languages. Another gain is that is the CMS server goes down every site at the university doesn’t go down with it. I could go on for hours about CMS’s but I will leave it at that. Hopefully people will buy into this, some think it will take away their job but I see it as using resources to free up my time to work on other stuff.
News system
This is one that I see as being very similar to the calendaring system. There are assets “news” in this case that may need to be leveraged at the (department > college > university) level and it is great when you can use some mechanism, lets say “RSS” to pull all these together in an aggregated format. It cuts down duplication. PR people don’t have to send press releases in email all over the place.
So in closing I hope you think about who else could benefit from your work and how you can benefit from others because we are all able to make each other look good and save money while doing it.
If you would like to read further here are the sites I used to learn about Social Media press releases. http://del.icio.us/mherzber/smpr
Please feel free to ask any questions or leave comments below. Or you can email me at mherzberger [at] gmail [dot] com. I’m always will to help so feel free to ask. You can also get great info about interactive marketing at http://bloghighed.org.
I’ll finish with one last video that cover the points in a fun manner, Thanks – Matt
I will be doing an upcoming conference in St. Petersburg, FL for the Stamats Integrated Marketing Conference. I will be speaking about press releases in a talk named Press Release 2.0: Generating Buzz in the Social Media Era. This is a talk that I have done before that I have since revisited and changed quite a bit. I originally talked about social media press releases and now it has changed to both social media releases and building newsrooms and making them engaging.
I am going to be attending HighEdWeb 08 and look forward to meeting lots of you. I will also be presenting a session on Tuesday at 9:45am. Press Release 2.0 – News Releases in the Social Media Era. I did this talk once before with what was a very social media press release take on it. I plan to change it a bit while still integrating social media press releases also talking about how to make a good pressroom as well.
I plan to be in town on Sat at 5pm ish so feel free to find me. I am heading to this meetup on Saturday night. Otherwise, I am totally open and look forward to meeting lots of you. Here is a photo below so you know what I look like.
Also if you have any questions about BlogHighEd feel free to ask.
I have noticed a trend over the last year at many conferences. The only discussion being had is not that of the speaker on stage. But that of the attending and following along online audience as well. This isn’t an entirely new revelation people have been live blogging and irc channels for years. But not with the addition of tools such as twitter, ustream and a few others; there is a timely back channel going on discussing the positive and negative points of the talks.
Eduweb 2008
This year at eduWeb there was a solid twitter back channel. The discussion was aggregated with the hashtag #eduweb2008. I, while not an attendee was able to follow most every session at the conference from my office. I was even able to interject some questions at the conference from my remote location. I had my questions relayed via twitter. Ustream was another very helpful service that was used to stream live video of conferencesessions.
Now as the organizer people might think, oh no bad idea. Wrong, this was able to get more buzz out about this conference that probably ever before. It made it relevant to more than just the attendees and the buzz can be carried on from here.
SXSW vs Lacy
One of the best examples of back channel rebellion is that of SXSW v Sarah Lacy when she was doing a live keynote interview of Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg. She lost trust of the audience and boy did things go south. If you want to read more about this just google sxsw and sarah lacy.
Tools of the back channel
There are many tools that can be used to create back channel at a conference; they can all work in unison to create the big picture.
Twitter
a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send updates (otherwise known as tweets) which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.
Twitter search
this is the search tool used for the twitter service, it can be used to search real time via #hashtags, usernames, keywords, location and date among others
Ustream
a real time free live video streaming site, where you can view conference sessions live, it also has a chatroom so you can add to the discussion while the session is going on
Meebo rooms
Chat rooms with a theme via the Meebo browser based instant messenger service
Flickr
as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, tell the story of the conference via pictures
Call to action – HighEdWeb 2008
So now that we have all these tools and a proven model from eduweb 2008. I think we need to improve on this. This is where you come in. If you plan too attend or not you can participate in the back channel at HighEdWeb2008.
Here are a few ideas I had for how to add to what was done at eduWeb.
Audience ombudsman
A person or many in the audience of every session (just anyone ,no nomination needed) that will monitor the back channel of a session and ask the questions of those who are following via twitter or ustream.
Central hub
A place where all the back channel can be monitored at the conference, for example as screen in the lobby that will display all the tweets with #highedweb2008 live. There is a tool called twittercamp that can accomplish this. I’m sure with all the geeks attending we can find other way to accomplish this as well. Or create our own tool if needed.
Ustream the sessions
As was done during many of the sessions at eduweb 2008. I think people should stream the sessions this year to provide coverage for those who are not able to attend and another vehicle for back channel.
Let me know your thoughts and lets get moving before HighEdWeb 2008!
Unfortunately, I’m not able to attend this year but since I am going to be keeping up online I thought I would provide all I find as a resource to others as I did last year. This post will be updated multiple times over the course of the conference.
I had one of the best web user experiences I have ever had the other day. Enough that I feel obligated to post about it.
I was purchasing a Flip camera via Amazon. Amazon in general is a great shopping experience. The cart the recommendation, the reviews. It ties everything together in a great package. So I was kind of flustered while ordering and I forgot to change my shipping address. I was getting it shipped overnight and I needed to change it quick. So I got to my order and there was a edit your order link.
After I click it gives me options a contact and an urgent contact. I needed this changed quick so I go to urgent and it says phone. So I click expecting to have a phone number to call where I will have to sit though 30 voice prompts. I was wrong, it asked for my phone number and within 3 seconds my phone was ringing. It was a computer but I was told I was already in the queue and within approx 30 seconds I was on with a live human being. No enter 3 for this and whatnot. Straight to a real person because they knew I needed a really person fast.
That in an of itself was great. Now I tell them my issue and they say the item has already begun the shipping process. Bare in mind I only purchased this item approx 2 minutes ago at this point (talk about well oiled machine). So they sent the item back or origin, they reset my order and told me to refresh the order page and there was now a link that said “change order info”.
This is an amazing experience, in the day and age of people dreading most customer service interactions Amazon took the time to care about me and address me in a timely manner and I was left feeling great and now I am selling them to you as a genuinely satisfied customer.
So now to the hook, imagine a student in the recruiting process getting this kind of VIP preferential treatment. They give us their info and have a personalized call made to them in a short timely manner. In my experience of universities I have dealt with the recruiting process is a very confusing and poorly planned process for many students. I will follow up shortly with more experiences I have seen lately.
Remember the students are now in the power position in ever step of the process so we need to treat them like royalty, user experience is a huge deal and can leave a positive or negative impression of your organization.
I had a running “Friday Design Inspiration” series that I would post here on the site and due to the fact that I am ridiculously busy with consulting and other things I am going to change it up a bit. Rather than the Friday highlight posts I will just update whenever I find something.
