The “Real” World
Earlier this week, I noticed a new feature on the New York Times website. Right above the “Most Popular Articles” box is a new “Times Wire” news feed. It features every article and blog post that has been added to the site during the prior 20 minutes, as well as an indicator of how many minutes ago the post was put up. This is apparently just the latest tool in the “real time” web trend.
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Charting the Hype
Recently, it seems like every time something noteworthy happens, we not only read about the incident, but also how people are reacting to the incident via social media. It should come as no surprise that the latest cause of Facebook and Twitter frenzies is the swine flu. According to Mashable, 10,000 tweets are posted each hour that mention the virus. When I think about 166 people writing about swine flu every second (not to mention what’s on Facebook), it makes my head spin. Are these people actually adding anything substantive to the issue?
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To Twitter…?
I was disappointed but not surprised to see that washingtonpost.com cut back on some of their online chats (every day they have about 7 or 8 forums on various topics, from celebrity gossip to local politics, hosted by an expert in that field). Could it be that even online media are feeling the pinch that their print colleagues are experiencing? Not long ago, my hometown paper, The San Francisco Chronicle revealed its financial troubles.
Is the internet to blame for the woes of traditional publishers?
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Intelliworks Social Marketing: Product Introduction
As many of you know, we recently introduced the Intelliworks Social Marketing application to enable colleges and universities to connect their social networking presence on sites like Facebook to their broader relationship management initiatives. A few of the basic things this application allows you to do are:
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Skittles Exposed
In some of my past posts, I’ve written about schools that haven’t been afraid to turn part of their marketing and branding over to their students and why institutions should embrace this as a chance for honest and open communications with their constituents. Earlier this week, one brand took that notion to the extreme. The new skittles.com website links you directly to their Facebook fan page (which has over half a million members to date).
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Privacy and Web 2.0
Earlier this week, the blogs, Facebook and even the Washington Post and New York Times were up in arms over the news of changes in Facebook’s terms of service. The blog, The Consumerist, broke the story: Facebook changed the language of their terms of service to reflect the fact that the company may still archive material that you post, even after you delete your account. The blog took this to mean that Facebook would now “own” anything you post on the site. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s creator, tried to quickly quell the controversy by posting a blog telling Facebookers that their information is safe, and the change in terms of service was only meant to reflect what was going on already- that is, any material you post may still live on Facebook even if you delete your account.
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Don’t worry, kids are still using Facebook and growing up.
Much ado was made this week when a study by iStrategy Labs found that 35-54 year olds are the fastest growing demographic on Facebook with 276% growth over the last 6 months.
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The Mystery of the Purloined Facebook Group
There’s some stellar dectective work going on at SquaredPeg to get to the bottom of who exactly is setting up a number of “Class of 2013” Facebook groups for colleges and universities across the country. It’s scary to see just how easy it is for someone to use your brand, and (perhaps) mislead people about your institution. While it’s unclear what the intentions of these groups are, it’s certainly not school lead which means anything can happen.
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A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing
From a post by Brad J. Ward on SquarePeg.com, it looks as if people who are not official representatives or constituents of institutions are falsely creating Class of 2013 Facebook Groups for incoming students. One word for this: shaky.
Being an alum of SUNY Oswego, who by the way have a great Computer Science program, I was notified via the SUNY Oswego page on Facebook.
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Your Mom’s on Facebook
According to a recent report by American Council on Education, Mapping New Directions: Higher Education for Older Adults, the proportion of the population over the age of 55 is expected to grow by 50% over the next 20 years. As many in continuing education and community colleges know, older students are starting to make up more and more of their student body. However, 40% of the institutions surveyed by ACE do not make any efforts to ID these students’ needs and offer them outreach or help with financial aid. This group, with their varying experiences and needs, can seem like a challenging group to reach but help is coming from an unexpected place- Generation Y.
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