#1 sunycuad takeaway: we may be excalibur, but king arthur is the story.

Slide from Georgy Cohen’s “Storytelling as a Framework for Higher Ed Web Marketing” presentation.

Last week’s SUNYCUAD conference featured so many great presentations, people and lessons, but my favorite came from Georgy Cohen‘s “Storytelling as a Framework for Higher Ed Web Marketing” session. Our institutions, Georgy said, are Excalibur — the sword in the stone that helps Arthur become king and a legendary ruler of Camelot. But the story is not about Excalibur, it’s about King Arthur: In other words, it’s about the successes of our students, our faculty and other members of the campus community.

And yet, how often do you see institutions get caught up in tooting their own horn, thumping their own chest and touting their own processes instead of focusing on who really matters? Too often. In most of our narratives, students are (or should be) the heroes, and the key chestnut of most good stories we should write is how the students succeed from their college experience.

As an example, if your college offers a new major, don’t focus on the process of creating the major, the committees involved and administrivia. Do focus on what it can/will do for students — the job opportunities available with this new degree, how the major will help the students grow as people, the niche this program occupies. Are there students ready to declare the major you can interview? (This is often a challenge, but worth asking.) Focus on any true newsworthy angle and the benefits … this is what most readers will find interesting.

Another key part of Georgy’s presentation that supports this is the idea that the most memorable stories involve ordinary people doing extraordinary things. If you work on a college campus, just walk out of your office and you’ll meet people like that every day. That’s one of the reasons I feel so blessed to work in higher education. Everyone from the brilliant student coming up with innovative ideas to the working mother who has overcome so much to earn that degree represents people in our midst who inspire anyone with open eyes, open minds and open hearts. So why not open our storybooks and celebrate their accomplishments?

Their successes tell the story of our institutions’ success. We may provide the tools, but they are the architects, the artists, the builders, the businesspeople, the scientists, the teachers, the entrepreneurs. They are the stories, and there are so many to be told.

higher ed, vendors find common ground; webcast at 11.

Fox News and MSNBC would have been disappointed, but four professionals actually discussed the often-dicey relationship between higher education and outside vendors on Higher Ed Live with nary an insult, shouting match nor discouraging word. Despite a lack of sensationalism, the result provided a lot of substance, room for understanding and even common ground on what makes for a good college-vendor partnership.

It all begin with my blog post expressing frustration over apps vendors “fishing with shiny objects,” or rooting around trying to find buyers for products that have more cool factor than actual benefit to our institution or our students. That brought an interesting rebuttal comment from Brent Grinna of EverTrue, a company that builds apps to meet an institution’s missions and goals. Brent eloquently noted that the bad past relationships of colleges and vendors made it hard for startups to get traction in such a competitive environment. Then old friend Kyle Judah of RecoVend, a startup whose goal is to help colleges find worthy vendor partners, provided additional perspective on how problems lie on both sides of the vendor-college relationship. The whole debate was so juicy I pitched it to Seth Odell, who happily invited us all to probe the issue on his Higher Ed Live online talk show.

If you saw it live or watch the replay, you’ll see how much common ground reasoned people can find when engaged in productive dialogue. I’m glad Brent contributed his viewpoint because it’s helpful and humbling to hear another side of the story and remind us never to oversimplify anything. We noted that vendors who excel and constantly help us try to better serve our campus and our students are really more like partners, and credited the likes of readMedia and Kevin Prentiss of Red Rover.

And it is, of course, wrong to cost all blame on outside forces. I keep a copy of John G. Saxe’s poem The Blind Men and the Elephant and realize how many entities within colleges don’t see the whole picture. Encased in silos with limited vision, they feel the tusk and sense a spear, feel the leg and imagine a tree, feel the ear and envision a fan. And miss the elephant in the room, which is that only by working together can colleges best serve their students.

And if you can’t work together, there’s most definitely not any app to solve it.

social media for a very special birthday.

[Charles Wainwright photo]

We celebrated a very special birthday last week to mark the Oct. 4 birthday of our institution’s founder, Edward Austin Sheldon, in the middle of our sesquicentennial celebration.

How does one celebrate such a momentous milestone? With a large group picture where hundreds of people detail the year of our founding, 1861. With free food. And cupcakes. And, of course, social media.

I posted several photos live via our official accounts through Instagram onto Twitter. We have many, many more followers on Twitter than Instagram at this point, but each photo filtered onto Twitter makes more of our connections aware of this service and our presence on it, as we picked up some new Instagram followers. Our posts drew a lot of retweets as well, which garnered an appreciable amount of new Twitter followers.

In addition, viewing our Twitpics gives a quick look at major components of the celebration …

You could say the reaction was pretty good on Facebook when we posted up the main 1861 photo. At least that seems a reasonable assumption with 121 Likes, 26 comments and 31 shares. That people started tagging themselves and their friends greatly extended the image’s shelf life. This is what I mean by quality content with high sharability.

I also borrowed our office’s small video camera and took snippets as the event came together. I then went into iMovie and spliced together a quick take video. [View video]

Last and not least, we had the opportunity to deliver some happiness to one of our students who missed out on getting a free T-shirt. This thread, which also is my first attempt to use Storify, shows how that took place.

“	Thanks for all the free food! @sunyoswego http://t.co/XLJJZ3MF
	yuhhboiii October 4, 2011

“	@yuhhboiii Bon appetit!
	sunyoswego October 4, 2011

“	@sunyoswego any way to still get a t-shirt?! I didn’t get one
	yuhhboiii October 4, 2011

“	@yuhhboiii Uh oh. We saw some boxes headed in the direction of the alumni office, but don’t know if they had shirts in them. : /
	sunyoswego October 4, 2011

This was actually an incorrect assumption on my part. I later learned Auxiliary Services, which runs our bookstores and other entities, had them. So I put a quick request into the person in charge of Auxiliary Services, who came through. (Thank you, Mike!)

“	@sunyoswego Mail me one!
	yuhhboiii October 4, 2011

“	@yuhhboiii We’ll check and get back to you! : )
	sunyoswego October 4, 2011

“	@yuhhboiii We have something for you! What do you want us to do with it? http://t.co/k53HvL0X
	sunyoswego October 4, 2011

“	@sunyoswego name the place and time!
	yuhhboiii October 4, 2011

I sent him a DM of the time and place, lest others descend upon our office to claim the shirt. And, after the hectic day, failed to realize our @sunyoswego account wasn’t following him back yet, i.e. couldn’t receive his DM. D’oh! We worked it out.

“	@yuhhboiii This is waiting for you! http://t.co/Tn7tECji
	sunyoswego October 5, 2011

“	RT @sunyoswego: Here is how our giant 1861 photo came out. Thanks to all who made it happen! http://t.co/jQB6PUmj
	yuhhboiii October 5, 2011

Was it all a bit more work? Sure. But hey, you only get once chance to celebrate your founder’s birthday during your 150th anniversary … so we may as well find as many ways to tell the story as possible!

“what do you do in social media?” “i have conversations.”

When people learn I’m involved in managing social media communication for our college, the first question they ask is, essentially, what I do. I’ve had a lot of answers over the years, often about tools and tactics, but I’ve decided nothing describes it better than this: “I have conversations.”

Conversations with whom? With prospective students, current students, faculty, staff, alumni, families, fans of our teams, community members, friends of the college … you name it. The with whom part is important because it’s so important to keep the audience in mind. As I’ve said before, social media is about meeting some kind of goal, but without an audience — a community — you can’t achieve anything.

Conversations about what? About what our college has to offer. About their questions and concerns about entering college. About the weather (literally). About sports. About their memories, their hopes, their dreams. Anything and everything. Isn’t that how good conversations work?

I also think that approaching social media from an “I have conversations” mindset helps one avoid some social media approaches I’ve seen that don’t work.

“We use it as a marketing tool!” When this is the goal, it’s so obvious. Every status message or tweet looks like a brief ad. The account will sound less than a human than a tagline generator. You’ll find press releases with little engagement. And why would anyone want to have a conversation, when it seems about as enjoyable as sitting next to an Amway salesman on a cross-country flight?

“We answer questions.” This is an admirable way of looking at it, but if you’re just answering questions you’re being reactive. You should be proactive and try to drive the dialogue. Asking questions, using Facebook polls and starting conversations make for a more robust, interactive community.

“Because we need to be in social media.” Again, goals first, then tools. Don’t view social media as a task or chore. Social media isn’t a problem to deal with, it’s a community to engage and to enjoy. Just this week I met with folks from an academic program who asked about doing a Facebook page. After a discussion, they realized they couldn’t commit to what that required and decided to focus their resources elsewhere. This, to me, is a better outcome than starting and abandoning a social media community. One of the saddest things I see is an abandoned Facebook page or group where people ask questions and there’s no one on the other end to continue the conversation.

We had a very positive conversation on our Official SUNY Oswego Facebook Page this week. I asked: “New students move on campus in just two days! Returning students and alumni: What one piece of advice would you give to those going away to college for the first time?” We’re over 40 responses and counting. Some of the best include: get to know your professors; remember you’re there to get an education, not just to party; get involved outside the classroom; avoid cutting classes; be yourself; bring a toolkit and sewing kit. Most are things we would recommend, but that they come from alumni and current students provide even more cred. Plus the connections made between alumni/current students with incoming students and with our college, providing a continuity of community … well, that’s amazing.

And it all comes from trying to have conversations.

#pseweb11 review: the importance of being human.

It may sound strange, but my top takeaway from the 2011 Canadian Post-Secondary Web Conference, among all the talk of emerging technologies, involves the importance of being human.

This thread tied up neatly in the keynote by Scott Stratten, the engaging fellow behind @unmarketing, as he humorously yet passionately championed humanity, customer service and authenticity as a way we can better do our jobs in higher education. Tools are just channels, and social media does not automatically provide connections any more than a content management system magically generates content.

Scott doesn’t know the ROI of responding to a student who tweets their acceptance to your college, “and I don’t care,” he said. “Just do it!” As to how we let complicated policies and committees get in the way of good conversations, he recalled asking an educational leader (tongue in cheek, I assume): “What’s your social media policy about talking?” The response, an excellent one: “If someone asks me a question, I just answer.”

Both Scott and Penn State’s Robin Smail (@robin2go, in “You Can’t Stop the Signal, Mal … Authentic Social Media) brought up the now famous example of the Red Cross social media worker who mistweeted on the company account about “getting slizzerd.” And how the Red Cross quickly said “oops,” reassured people they were sober and engendered a lot of goodwill. We are a forgiving society full of humans who make mistakes. In social media, we are greater when we act as humans and connect as humans. Social media channels are merely opportunities to connect … it is our content, our humanity, that determines if they are effective.

Many other presentations in a conference addressing technology focused on the human touch. In “Herding Cats: Web Governance in Higher Education,” Mark Greenfield (@markgr) of the University at Buffalo said the keys to creating a great institutional web presence do not involve web tools … they involve the education and empowerment of everyone working on the web and the buy-in of top leadership. With “King Content: A Social Media Audit,” JP Rains (@jplaurentian) of Laurentian University gave a great study of effective content among several institutions, which all came back to knowing your audience and interacting with them. Ryan McNutt (@ryanmcnutt) of Delhousie University, presenting “Fire and Ice, Status Updates and Tweets: Emergency Communications in the Social Media Age,” likewise looked at how relationships with your campus and community are vital bits of crisis communication plans.

PSEWEB also saw an upsurge in presentations related to the mobile web — increasingly important as our users go increasingly mobile — and how to produce great video on a low or no budget. My presentation on geosocial media (viewable online) may still represent a novel subject, but the audience was wonderful. The conference once again had great variety in the presentations and the institutions represented, and I learned such a marvelous melange of lessons and met such a magnificent mix of people.

Moreover, if you follow the #pseweb hashtag, you’ll see this conference creates a community that interacts throughout the year. Much praise to the tireless Melissa Cheater (@mmbc) and everyone who came together for a first-rate post-secondary education gathering!

joining blog high ed: new connections. new content.

Tommy Johnson: I had to be up at that there crossroads last midnight, to sell my soul to the devil.
Ulysses Everett McGill: Well, ain’t it a small world, spiritually speaking. Pete and Delmar just been baptized and saved. I guess I’m the only one that remains unaffiliated.

For a long time, I used those lines from O Brother, Where Art Thou? in relation to my relationship (or lack thereof) with the larger higher education blogging networks. Truth is, no one asked. But that changed this week when Matt Herzberger and Brad Ward asked some folks in the field, including me, to infuse new voices into their collective, Blog High Ed.

It’s a flattering situation, and I’m honored, humbled and happy. But it also brings the added benefit of forcing me to raise my game. Here are some topics to expect in the coming weeks:

* Our efforts at a social Commencement. We don’t have a lot of resources — a few students and yours truly — but we’re trying to step up in terms of connecting this very exciting day.

* The second Canadian Post-Secondary Education web conference, aka #pseweb, taking place next week in Toronto.

* Where’s the love for transfers? One man’s crusade to improve social media resources for perhaps the most overlooked and underaddressed higher education population.

Finding myself affiliated with some really great bloggers, I can only hope I do my part. It’s a great bargain to find company at the #highered crossroads, and I don’t even have to sell my soul.

#hewebroc: a sort of homecoming.

So, this is happening:

… and if you work in anything involving higher education and the web, you should mark your calendar for June 27 for the HighEdWeb Rochester regional, aka #hewebroc. A bunch of great speakers, engaging companions and fresh ideas … all for just $30! Or, if you answer our Call for Proposals and become one of those speakers, we will waive your registration fee.

I’ve attended two previous regionals, at Cornell and Vassar, and those events were very informative, well-organized and excellent networking opportunities. Even though this has come together fairly quickly, I’d paraphrase Margaret Mead’s adage and say that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens (webizens?) can change the world … or at least how we use the world wide web. And that it takes place in Rochester, the birthplace of what is now the huge and influential HighEdWeb annual conference, is an especially nice touch.

The Call for Proposals opens Monday, so give that some thought. And block June 27 for a low-cost (hard to beat $30!) informative conference full of awesome #highered web folks. Hope to see you then!

how twitter helped revitalize a conference lineup.

About three years ago, almost no one outside New York state had heard of the annual SUNYCUAD Conference. Last month, some of the top experts in their fields were celebrating, via social media, being accepted to speak at SUNYCUAD.

So what happened? In large part, Twitter. Not entirely, but the microblogging community really created much more buzz — and, moreover, real-life connections — than before.

The first SUNYCUAD conference I attended years ago featured many vendors speaking. “If you buy our service, this is what you can do,” spilled from a few sessions, and others just didn’t give much in the way of takeaways . Even though I love the organization — for development and communication professionals throughout the State University of New York system — and the event itself, the conference was watered down with too many tracks and not enough fresh speakers or ideas.

When I first joined the programming arm of this group, we already had good speakers, sure, but too many of them, and often the usual suspects over and over. So we compressed the tracks, favoring quality of speakers over quantity. But then a funny thing happened in 2009. We started live-tweeting some of our awesome speakers, and people all over North America said via Twitter: “I have no idea what SUNYCUAD is, but it sounds great!”

Last year we added a panel of top experts we termed our faculty-in-residence, starting with a panel presentation to set the conference tone. I’m proud to say that this year’s conference faculty will include Mark Greenfield, a headline-level speaker around the world and member of the SUNY family, whom I would not know well (nor have asked to speak) if not for Twitter.

With our call for presenters, and perhaps the most successful method of distribution was via Twitter … either the @SUNYCUAD account or various retweeters. Among those who applied and we selected as speakers, many were folks I wouldn’t have known without Twitter, many wouldn’t know SUNYCUAD existed if not for Twitter and some wouldn’t have applied if not for the Twitter announcement of the call for speakers.

So whenever people pooh-pooh the prospect of Twitter building brand or business, I can point to a pretty cool conference in Saratoga Springs this June as proof it works. If you can’t make it, expect to see some pretty cool live tweets!

do you keep a social media inventory?

In preparation for this semester’s first meeting of our student social media team, I decided to compile a social media inventory for all the platforms where our office keeps an active presence — which I posted online as a Google document.

My first two thoughts were: 1) Wow! Even I was surprised at how many channels we had; and 2) Why didn’t I do this earlier?

If you haven’t compiled a social media inventory this yet, the process yielded good reasons why you should:

1. Creating your own social media map. You can see where you are and who’s there. The inventory can note what audiences (prospectives, current students, alumni, etc.) use the channels, what kinds of content we share (video, news links, blog posts, etc.) and any related goals. We can realize what channels are best available for what audiences and what kinds of messages.

2. Facilitating assignments for your social media team. It helps my four-student social media team — three generalists and one web video producer — know what channels need monitoring and can provide opportunities for content they generate. It also can serve as an assignment sheet to break down who focuses on what channels and works on specific projects. And as a Google documents with links, it provides a one-stop shop of where we are.

3. Helping others in your organization understand social media options. If I was mildly amazed at the number of social-media channels we have, imagine the reaction of those who don’t pay that close attention. This document helps underscore the important work of our social media team and, in better budget times, could support any requests for more resources.

Making it a Google document means it is, like the social web itself, dynamic. For instance, I just plugged in a new Transferring to SUNY Oswego Facebook page, which recognized a gap in coverage, since about 1/3 of our incoming students are transfers and have specific questions and needs (it’s a cooperative effort with Transfer Services). Note these are just the resources available to our small team, and does not currently include social media presences elsewhere in the college, including the alumni office’s well-trafficked outlets.

If I haven’t mentioned the backstage answers wiki before, it’s proven exceedingly helpful. We set it up as a place to put all the questions we receive via social media, as a behind-the-scenes reference for our social media team as the same questions come up. New questions, and the answers, are added to the wiki, which is organized by topic for easy browsing.

So if you don’t have a social media inventory yet, consider putting one together. Given the time and brainpower you likely put into your social media efforts, having some go-to information seems a worthy investment.