Two conferences in Boston

CASE Communications Marketing and Technology Conference
(April 15–16 Boston, Mass)

Speakers include:

• J. Todd Bennett Managing Partner decimal152
• Mark Greenfield Director of Web Services University at Buffalo
• Karlyn Morissette Web Producer Dartmouth College
• Luke Robinson Web Manager Calvin College
• Peter Holloran & Josanne DeNatale Cognitive Marketing Inc.
• Sree Sreenivasan Dean of Student Affairs  Columbia University Journalism School

Technology is dramatically altering how higher education professionals—and a multitude of others—communicate about our institutions. This conference offers best practices for managing online reputations while detailing concrete steps to engage prospective students and maintain strong ties with alumni.

Benefits of Attending

• Learn how to develop and implement a strategy for Web and electronic communications.
• Decide how the Web and new media fits into your overall communications plan.
• Find out how to engage your target audiences using social networking tools.
• Get all the tips, tricks and pitfalls of a Web redesign project.

Who Should Attend

Associate vice presidents, directors and other positions that deal with strategy and implementation in the following areas:

• Web communications
• Marketing
• Admissions
• Electronic communications
• Public relations
• Alumni relations
• Advancement

The American Marketing Association Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education: 2009
(11/15/2009   – 11/18/2009  in Boston MA)

The call for papers is now out and are due by April 3.

In 2008, over 550 leaders in higher education marketing joined together at the AMA Annual Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education. Join us in 2009 as we continue the tradition with provocative keynote speakers and in-depth discussions on cutting edge approaches to marketing in higher education. This year’s topics will include:

• Building strong college and university brands
• Using new technology effectively
• New methods of marketing and measurement
• Long term strategic planning
• Internal marketing buy-in
• Skill building/professional growth sessions

In addition to inspiring general discussions, intense advanced learning sessions and skill building activities, the program also includes more than 30 marketing presentations and case studies in four traditional tracks including: Measurement, Strategic Planning, Execution and Technology. Each session offers a unique opportunity for higher educations marketers to learn from what others are doing in the field.

Don’t miss this highly interactive, thought provoking, skill building and energizing event

Ten Ways To Increase Your Twitter Followers

From TechCrunch, here’s an article by guest author Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg and the cofounder of Revision3 and Pownce. Kevin, who has over 88,000 followers on Twitter (making him the second most followed after President Obama), also “bloggs” at kevinrose.com. He is an investor in Twitter.

Here’s the short hand version of the whole article:

1. Explain to your visitors what retweeting is
2. Fill out your bio
3. “Link it up” – Put links to your Twitter profile everywhere
4. Tweet about your passions in life and #hash tag them.
5. Bring your twitter account into the physical world (business cards, email signature, powerpoint slides)
6. Take pictures.
7. Start a contest.
8. Follow the top twitter users and watch what they tweet
9. Reply to/get involved in #hash tag memes.
10. Track your results.

BTW, webpub is now on Twitter. Follow “us” at mitwebpub.

Create your own social network sites

Ning (http://www.ning.com/)

Ning is great for those without alot of technical knowledge and who don’t want to host anything on their own hardware. It takes seconds to set up a site (I made one here for fun http://mitwebpub.ning.com/) and you can choose from a number of design templates available.

What makes your own social network on Ning special? It’s yours. Your brand and visual design. Your choice of public or private. Your very own members.

Free features include inserting your own brand, member management, your choice of custom text and widgets, rss feeds in and out, discussion forum, video feature and branded video players, chat room, facebook integration, groups, member blogs, and an events calendar.

Premium services are for fee, and include things like controlling ads, removing the Ning promotion, transferring your own domain name, more storage and more bandwidth.

Elgg (http://www.elgg.org/)

Elgg is an open, flexible social networking engine, designed to run at the heart of any socially-aware application. Building on Elgg is easy, and because the engine handles common web application and social functionality for you, you can concentrate on developing your idea.

Elgg is open source. That means, when you use Elgg, you have the benefit of being part of a large developer community, with the security and stability that hundreds of eyes can provide. It’s also headed and used by Curverider and its partners, so you can be assured that it’s in commercial use and will cope with the demands of a popular application. 

It runs on Apache, PHP and MySQL – the same open source platform that the majority of web applications are written in. Elgg is compatible with enterprise technologies like the Zend Platform and any server environment that can run the Apache web server.

We believe in an open, distributed, social web. As a result, Elgg supports technologies like OpenDD, OpenID and OpenSocial, and we are directly involved in community efforts to push the envelope when it comes to data portability, federation and the user experience. Elgg is a great way to future-proof your social applications.

Elgg was founded by Ben Werdmuller and David Tosh, and has been powering networks since 2004.

NYTimes article: The Socializr

The Socializr: A night out with Jonathan Abrams

The article is mostly about Jonathan Abrams, the serial entrepreneur who founded Friendster in 2002, and Socializr, a site devoted to optimizing users’ social calendars. I mostly found it interesting because it mentioned some newish Web enterprises I hadn’t heard of yet. Check them out:

• Dropbox
• Disqus
• Justin.tv (this one i remember from when it was just a kid wearing a tv camera on his head and streaming the feed, but its grown alot since then)
• Scribd
• Snaptalent (relaunching in Feb ‘09, read more about them on TechCrunch)
• Livemeeting

Facebookgate

A great play by play on how Brad Ward, Director of E-Comm at Butler University, uncovered “Facebookgate”. I’ve included an excerpt from his blog below…

A colleague asked him to investigate a couple users that started a ‘Class of 2013′ within their Facebook network. Mr. Ward found a startling trend – the usernames were popping up on class groups from coast to coast at private and public universities.

http://squaredpeg.com/index.php/2008/12/18/facebook-pay-attention/

See how many times those names appear in admin for these groups, and look at their friends and see how many times those names pop up. A LOT. This isn’t just the Common App Effect, where students apply to every school under the sun. These people aren’t interested in going to every school they have started a group for. No, this is an inside ring with a common purpose. They don’t always create the group, but they do always get in, friend someone, and get control rights.

You might have the same thought I had at first. I responded to Megan, “That is very interesting. I don’t really see where squatting could be beneficial. After all, the students who join and participate will steer the group in whatever direction they take it. I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

Sure, not for one school. Not for tiny little Butler, with 900 incoming students.

But for 500+ schools? Owning the admin rights to groups equaling easily 1,000,000+ freshman college students?

That’s huge.

Think of it: Sitting back for 8-10 months, (even a few years), maybe friending everyone and posing as an incoming student. Think of the data collection. The opportunities down the road to push affiliate links. The opportunity to appear to be an ‘Admin’ of Your School Class of 2013. The chance to message alumni down the road. The list of possibilities goes on and on and on.

I’ve said many times, step back and let the student group start on its own.  Today, I change that position. It seems that we have been gamed, and we need to at least own the admin rights to the group in an effort to protect our incoming students. To end the possibility of them being pushed ads and “buy these sheets for college” stuff this summer. You know there is a motive behind all of this. And you know it has to do with money. And you KNOW you’re going to get calls about it when it happens.