what a johnny cash cover band can teach us about project management.

[Daniel Laird photo]

Strange things happen sometimes. Like going to a conference in Austin and winding up in a Johnny Cash cover band, as took place at HighEdWeb11. But the experience also offered lessons on some factors in successful project management.

Behind the scenes, group members secured a surprise slot on the stage at the Highball club in Austin, rewrote songs by the Man in Black to reflect working on the web in higher ed and handled all kinds of logistics required to bring it all together. We only had one practice in advance, and that didn’t include all songs or all members. But it came together, somehow, because of four strong aspects to the project:

Social. Communication took place through a secret Facebook group. I was the last in, invited because Georgy Cohen knew they needed a bass player. Earlier, members had collaborated on reworking titles on Cash classics and sharing new lyrics they penned (one of my faves being from “Frames and Tables Blues,” formerly “Folsom Prison Blues”: “I bet there’s rich folks working in a fancy CMS/I bet they’re drinking coffee, not cleaning up this mess”). In hindsight, we probably could have used a Google hangout to practice a bit more in advance if we could have somehow coordinated schedules.

Passionate. It certainly reflected a labor of love for a group of devoted Cash fans with varying levels of musical talent. Granted, it’s much easier to bring passion to something this fun and crazy as opposed to, say, building a web portal. But if you can focus on the positive results that can come from any project, that can help you become excited about the outcome.

Democratic: Aaron Rester was the ring(of fire)leader, but ideas and suggestions came from many group members. We each brought our own skillset to the mix and the group collectively figured out how to pool our talents.

Flexible. When you only have one practice in a hotel room (apologies to any neighboring rooms), you figure you’ll have to adjust on the fly. And we did, such as when Larry Falck stepped up to take on vocal duties for “Get Tweetin” (“Get Rhythm”) which included his suggestion via Facebook to change keys and chord structures on the day of the show to accommodate his vocal range. Because the project was social, passionate and democratic, we could easily be flexible.

Between-song transitions could have been smoother, and I played the first verse of “Frames and Tables Blues” in the wrong key, but the surprise performance was exceedingly fun and very well received. We ripped through seven Cash covers and (for the absurdity of it) Rebecca Black’s “Friday” without major incident to a crowd that really seemed to enjoy it. We even had folks clamoring for an encore, which is tough since we didn’t know any other songs. If that was our biggest problem, I’d say it was a success … thanks to some sound principles of project management.

1 page speaks volumes on how web has evolved.

Last week I finished working on a new landing page for our Admissions Video, and it made me realize how far we have come — which I mean globally as well as locally.

Here was the old site in our old design, hosted by vendor, created several years ago:

And here’s the new one, presented (via YouTube embed) on our site:

First and most obvious, the new one represents our cleaner, sparser redesign which makes content more user-friendly. Did you notice anything else? Like that visitors no longer have to download/use RealPlayer or QuickTime to view the video?

I really think this transition reflects larger web trends over the past few years.

• Better sharability. YouTube was not the commonly trafficked site back then, and its cloud-based platform that can be easily embedded is (overused phrase ahead) a real game-changer. Paying for outside hosting of static web video is less necessary also because of …

• Improved metrics availability. One of the reasons I’m told we went with this vendor was the ability to track number of visitors, plays, etc. Which we easily can now do on our own site via Google Analytics as well as YouTube’s own metrics. We could also set up funnel reports to see how many people go from this video to fulfill other tasks … which, since this video is currently a conversion tool, will be increasingly interesting come next admission cycle.

• Increased in-house web knowledge. I had only minor involvement in (and less knowledge of) the web when Admissions set up the previous system. We had limited awareness of what other options may have existed and certainly did not have access to the awesome collective resource of Twitter #highered folks. I love that Admissions will come to us now for web solutions that we can provide at no or marginal cost with greater functionality. I think (or hope) colleagues at other colleges have similar experiences.

coming together: colleges unite to fight facebook fraud — updated

Imagine you’re driving through unfamiliar territory and your car starts malfunctioning. You pull into a small-town garage and ask the mechanic to look at your vehicle. “I can’t do anything about your car, but I can get you in touch with other people who bought this car,” he says. As you stand there perplexed, he adds: “Hey, would you like to book a hotel room?”

“I’d like you to see what’s wrong with my car,” you respond, growing a bit irked.

“We’ll happily book your hotel room,” the mechanic replies. Then you realize there are no cars in the shop, no oil stains and the gent saying he’s a mechanic has a spotless uniform. Something is amiss.

Now imagine you’re a high-school senior looking into colleges. You see a “Class of 2015″ group for a college you’re interested in. You join it, but instead of finding anyone who can really answer your question or receiving timely info, you see posts promoting a roommate-matching service. Something is amiss.

Welcome to shady Facebook marketing, a near-annual ritual facing incoming students. New York Times education blogger Jacques Steinberg offers an interesting look at the latest fraud — where a roommate-matching group called RoomSurf (nee URoomSurf) created more than 150 fake pages for colleges from coast to coast.

How did he learn about this? Because a group of higher-education web professionals found out about the shady-looking pages, compared notes and conducted some research. A lot of research. We found the same names coming up over and over creating groups posing as official college groups.

Why do we care about this? Simple. Because we want to make sure students and parents looking at colleges — any colleges, not necessarily our own — can get honest and helpful information during this important search. It has been remarkable to see the higher-education community — outsiders may see different colleges as competitors, but we are also colleagues and collaborators — come together and perform research well into the night to make sure students (even if they won’t be our students) don’t get duped.

Whatever the shakeout of this story — whether this attention will prevent shady Facebook marketing from becoming an annual rite — I’m thrilled to see so many colleagues at so many colleges really go to great lengths to make sure we put our students first. Because when you’re kicking the tires of your ride for the next four years, you really deserve some honest answers and connections.

UPDATE, 7:50 p.m.: What a crazy day it was, with additional developments.

- By afternoon, most Class of 2015 sites created by RoomSurf now bear disclaimers saying they are not officially associated with colleges and say they were created by the RoomSurf roommate matching system. See more in New York Times blogger Jacques Steinberg’s recent update.

- Late this afternoon, the State University of New York legal office served RoomSurf founder Justin Blackwell, aka Justin Gauthier, and the company a cease-and-desist order on behalf of the 10 SUNY institutions found to be impacted by the suspect Class of 2015 groups.

- By around 6 p.m., Blackwell’s profile had disappeared, at least from view, on Facebook and he is no longer listed as creator of said groups, multiple sources confirmed. Whether this was his own choice or has anything to do with the investigation Facebook mentioned in last night’s story remains a mystery at this time.

21st century problem-solving: first to the crowd, then the cloud.

When I ran into an idea with no easy implementation solution on Wednesday, I went the way so much web problem-solving runs these days: first to the crowd, then to the cloud.

As part of many meetings toward redeveloping our website, I met with one of our more engaged and engaging music faculty and, after some brainstorming we thought: Wouldn’t it be cool to take recorded work of our faculty and students and embed an interactive playlist? We have plenty of original and accessible work in the rock, pop and jazz spectrum, and having a playlist of this material seemed a great way to promote the college to prospective students.

But how? A Google search on building playlists came to this Mashable article, but Mixtape.me, 8tracks and Grooveshark fell way short in one key way: Forget trying to upload original music onto them. If I wanted to build a playlist of Eminem or Snoop Dogg or Lady Gaga, I would have been fine, but those sites have no love for musicians who aren’t famous.

So next I went to the crowd and asked around on Twitter. Some earnest suggestions there, including iLike, which I learned has partnered with MySpace. And as you would expect when two social-media platforms with some of the worst usability merged, the directions and “help” led me in circles that made me abandon all hope.

Finally a Twitter conversation with a recently graduated musician bore fruit when she enlisted the aid a bandmate, another recent alum. He recommended SoundCloud. On the free cloud-based system, you can upload any music onto it and create embeddable playlists. The free version is limited to two hours of music, but I think that’s more than enough. So after a few minutes of fiddling, here was the result:

SUNY Oswego Music by sunyoswego

One drawback of the solution is that it’s Flash-based, which we’re trying to move away from on the new site. But it will do for now, as the crowd-sourced question also brought a suggestion of jPlayer which, since I’m not a coder and my developer is way busy with our overall web project, we can explore down the road.

But this is less about the solution, the destination, than the journey to reach it. Problem-solving in the 21st century is a lot more social, a lot more collaborative, than ever before. Which makes it, in a way, even more enjoyable.

i finally used Google Wave for a project …

… and all I got was a mutual agreement to abandon using Google Wave halfway through. But at least I realized some of the strengths and weaknesses of this new and hyped collaborative tool.

Our three-person team collaborated on a holiday video project where various students — individually and in groups — sang lines from our alma mater. As concept/director/talent wrangler, I had a place to post an updated schedule of shoots and ask for thoughts when shoots didn’t pan out for technical or logistical reasons.

Our cameraman/first editor could post various takes and we could collectively decide which was the best. I had most talent sing more than one line of the alma mater so that we had backups for most parts, though the idea was to build from solo to larger groups while showcasing the campus and our students.

The ability to refer to various production elements worked very well, as did the opportunity to brainstorm and discuss in real time. So why did we abandon the wave halfway through? Because of weaknesses others who try to use it tend to cite:

1) Lack of notifications. It was quite possible someone would reply to one of my questions, or that the other two collaborators were having an important conversation, but I may not know unless they contacted me another way. Yes, I know there are plugins and the like that can enable notifications, but if Google Wave is all that and a bag of chips, shouldn’t it come standard?

2) Lack of anchoring. When I revisit any wave, I find myself arbitrarily plopped in the middle of the conversation, not where I last read. If Plastic.com figured out nearly a decade ago how to anchor so you could resume where you last read a discussion, you’d think the leviathan that is Google could have built it in too. The lack of anchoring particularly confuses when combined with …

3) Lack of adequate marking. For some larger waves, I can read the whole conversation and it will remain bolded in my list of waves. So unless you’re memorizing time stamps you don’t always know which waves have new comments. Worse is that once you hit a new day, waves are marked only by date and not by time. Our team works late and often has discussions after 11 p.m., but if I last looked at a wave at 10 p.m. Dec. 9, when I’m on Google Wave the next day, that wave is only marked Dec. 9, no time. And since even waves I’ve read are bolded, the lack of adequate marking means I rush back to check waves that are not updated.

In terms of user experience, the most common response among those who waited and waited for that Wave invite would be: Is that all? After all the hype, many just refer to it as a glorified chatroom and all kinds of waves started with subjects like Trying A Wave sit wrecked and idle like ghost ships. For a user experience analogy: Imagine working at a college where your prospective students, upon visiting campus, say: Is that all? Safe to say, we wouldn’t feel like we’re doing a good job.

But I come to neither bury Google Wave nor to praise it, but to merely provide a status report in its beta existence. Like Thursday’s child, the Wave has far to go. The ability to collaborate in real time while incorporating all kinds of media and documents points to a bright future. But the development team — and I’m sure it’s a large one — has a lot of work to do until it reaches a user-friendly level.

PS: I forgot! Here is the finished video project!

caring collaboration > fraud on Facebook.

So I spent a couple hours Thursday night among a small dedicated band helping track apparently the biggest fraud ring in the history of Facebook, or even social media.

I surfed onto Twitter to see a link to a blog post by Brad J. Ward at Butler University. A colleague at another college had a question about multiple Class of 2013 groups. Brad did some top-notch sleuthing and found similar names starting the groups. More research revealed that a small ring of people — especially Justin Gaither, Patrick Kelly, Jasmine White, James Gaither, Josh Egan and Ashley Thomas — started hundreds of supposedly “official” Class of 2013 groups at different colleges.

There are two groups for the SUNY Oswego Class of 2013. I Googled one group’s founder to find tales of his athletic feats at his stated school, and the admissions office confirmed he applied and was early accepted. The other was created by one Kyle Krennan. A Google of Kyle Krennan found a Facebook page that, when accessed redirected to … ring member Josh Egan. And no such person applied to Oswego. I realized we’ve been had, as had about 20 of our students.

Fig. A: One of hundreds of fraudulent Facebook groups.

First we got mad, then we got organized. Brad (who, imho, deserves the first Pulitzer Prize in social media) set up a collaborative Google document where we researched Class of 2013 pages and listed creators/admins. I volunteered to search for all SUNY schools, and found the infamous Kyle Krennan also created pages at Brockport and Plattsburgh. The majority of SUNY groups we found had ties to the ring. Out 300+ groups researched by a couple dozen of us, well over 200 (maybe more) were suspicious.

All arrows pointed back to a group called College Prowler which, among other things, uses “insider student” information to compile college guides. That in and of itself is one thing, but to set up groups and to perpetuate fraud — and probably collect a lot of user personal data — on such a wide scale is deplorable and takes advantage of students looking for genuine connections and information for their future colleges.

I posted a message on our official Facebook Fans page and one student posted on the bogus page that it was a fraud, and a lot of prospective students flocked to the legit student’s page. Word spread throughout the blogosphere and into the media. And in a surprising move, the CEO of College Prowler posted on Brad’s blog and said it was a marketing project gone awry, promising a strategic retreat.

Some commenters on Brad’s blog (not surprisingly, many anonymous) poopoo the effort, whining that Facebook is open. They miss the point that misrepresentation on Facebook (claiming you’re something you’re not) is against user policy. And downright unethical … though I sometimes wonder if ethics are lost on some youth today. Moreover, college logos and property are copyrighted, and inappropriate use for financial gain amounts to theft, period. And some of us who sprung into action were quite concerned about our prospective students potentially being scammed, data mined and otherwise exploited.

I also think our effort shows the collaborative power of social media. That a small dedicated band of Twitterers and bloggers were able to uncover more than 200 fraudulent Facebook groups in the space of a few hours — and cause their creators to give a public mea culpa — is all quite amazing.