Tag, You’re It!

You’ve seen them. The tiny icons at the bottom of a blog, video, or news article prompting you to share what you’ve just seen or read with your friends.

It’s called social bookmarking and it allows internet users to “tag” people, websites, blogs, photos, videos, audio clips, and other online content they find interesting.  To create a tag, the user creates a label for the online content based on how he/she would like to categorize the information.  This gives the user a new process for finding, organizing, and retrieving information online.  Most importantly, these applications allow users to vote on, recommend, and share all of their interesting finds with their own networks.  This social dimension is what gives this technology such tremendous momentum in the Web 2.0 world.

According to a recent report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 28% percent of internet users have tagged online content, and on a typical day, 7% of users are tagging or categorizing content.  Access the full report here.

The tags users apply to online content are then tracked to display the most popular labels.  Social bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Fark, del.icio.us, reddit, ma.gnolia, Technorati, Propeller – you get the idea – to highlight the most popular tags in a “tag cloud” (shown below) by increasing the font size and boldness of the type.  The key here is that the list of bookmarks generated is the result of human identification vs. a search engine which returns results based on computer software.

With limited resources and time available, social bookmarking can be an effective way to augment your online marketing efforts.  And because of its relative newness, now is a great time to experiment with this technology.

So how do you get started?  First, make sure your readers/viewers will find the content attention-grabbing, relevant, and worth passing on.  Second, offer users options to tag your content to their favorite bookmarking sites (check out SocialMarker’s free bookmarking tool to get started).  Finally, don’t be a bystander.  Get involved in the process – set up accounts on two or three social bookmarking sites and get tagging!

Mastering the Social Network

Here’s an interesting article in Technology Review published by MIT about how the Obama Campaign leveraged social networking to win the race to his party’s nomination.  Of particular value are the statistics about audience trends in new media and the approach the campaign took to managing their new media strategies.
Throughout the political season, the Obama campaign has domi¬nated new media, capitalizing on a confluence of trends. Americans are more able to access media-rich content online; 55 percent have broadband Internet connections at home, double the figure for spring 2004. Social-networking technologies have matured, and more Americans are comfortable with them. Although the 2004 Dean campaign broke ground with its online meeting technologies and blogging, “people didn’t quite have the facility,” says ¬Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford law professor who has given the Obama campaign Internet policy advice (Lessig wrote The People Own Ideas! in our May/June 2005 issue). “The world has now caught up with the technology.” The Obama campaign, he adds, recognized this early: “The key networking advance in the Obama field operation was really deploying community¬-building tools in a smart way from the very beginning.”
Of course, many of the 2008 candidates had websites, click-to-donate tools, and social-networking features–even John McCain, who does not personally use e-mail. But the Obama team put such technologies at the center of its campaign–among other things, recruiting 24-year-old Chris Hughes, cofounder of Facebook, to help develop them. And it managed those tools well. Supporters had considerable discretion to use MyBO to organize on their own; the campaign did not micromanage but struck a balance between top-down control and anarchy. In short, Obama, the former Chicago community organizer, created the ultimate online political machine.
To read the full article, go to http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/21222/?nlid=1283&a=f

Social Networking and the Awkward Turtle

My wife and I were watching television, while my millennial son was multi-tasking and doing his homework on the floor.  I know… in our world watching TV and doing homework were two diametrically opposed activities, but he’s top of his class… so something’s working.

Anyway, a ribald reference passed by on the tube and my son paused for a second, looked at us, made a hand gesture, and said “awkward turtle” while nodding knowingly.

Being a student of teen behavior, I had to know more.

Apparently, the awkward turtle (AT) symbology is a means for teens, already tremendously self-conscious, to express discomfort or embarrassment at something that’s hanging in the air.  Though it seems AT’s happen disproportionately around parents, I understand the symbol and phrase are widely used between teens as well.

Here’s the thing.  Different sources put the origins of the awkward turtle in different places – and I’ve even encountered it when focus grouping teens in some pretty out-of-the-way towns.  According to the Urban Dictionary (which has several references) the AT, “started in Bronxville, NY and spread quickly all around Westchester.”  However, I’ve traced its origins (in no particularly scientific way) through Facebook to the Director in Charge of Spreading Awkward Turtle, who as best I can figure was a high school student in Georgia.  Journalists at Cornell and Columbia, have even found this thing significant enough to write about.

Where it started is hardly the point.  The fact that a Facebook search finds over 500 results for AT and the first reference is a group with 28,000+ members, is the point.  It’s a tiny representation of the instant interconnectedness of one of our most important target audiences.  And, it’s a lesson in why we’ve got to get our hands dirty understanding this social networking stuff.

Should you be all a twitter about Twitter?

Talking about shiny objects… has Twitter come up in your conversations about Web 2.0 marketing strategies?  If not, it probably will or should.  It’s got some great potential applications… as a relationship building tool for recruiters; news update site for the institution; a tool for sports fans; a way for faculty to engage and connect with students outside of class… you get the picture.  As one professor, who’s using it with his class put it, “The immediacy of the messages helped the students feel like more of a community.” Read the full story.

Here’s the key, like in all things Web 2.0, you have to commit to it.

If you’re asking…what exactly is Twitter?  You’re likely not alone.  In short (no pun intended), Twitter is basically a 140-character micro-blog that people sign up to track or “follow.”  The beauty of Twitter is that your micro blogs can be texted to followers that opt in to the service.  You Twitter… “Am in line for the 5 p.m. of Tropic Thunder at the Cineplex.  Join me.” and Twitter “tweets” your followers via SMS.

The application for individuals is pretty obvious.  But more and more brands, including colleges and universities, are finding ways to incorporate Twitter into their marketing and outreach efforts.  So, does this mean your institution should immediately jump on the Twitter bandwagon?  Not so fast.  Definitely do your homework before establishing your college’s or university’s presence in this venue.  If you establish a page and then don’t post to it for weeks or months or years at a time…you stand to do more damage to your institutional image than good.    Definitely check in on Jeremiah Owyang’s blogs Web Strategy: The Evolution of Brands on Twitter and Why Brands Are Unsuccessful in Twitter before starting out; pay special attention to the part about understanding your audiences.

Here are some higher education Twitter sites to get you acquainted with how others in higher ed are employing this tool.  Also, you can find a longer index of organizations using Twitter at

Are you using Twitter at your institution?  Would love to hear how and how it’s working for you!

Shiny Objects

Going around the country, I’ve been getting a lot of questions regarding when to use new tech such as Second Life, Twitter, and whatever.

One of the smartest takes on this I’ve seen comes from Steve Rubel’s blog Micropersuasion where he introduces the term SOS or “Shiny Object Syndrome”.  As Steve puts it, SOS is the never-ending obsession with emerging social network sites.

SOS of course can apply to technologies way beyond social networking.  It seems to me though that in a higher education marketing context, the best way to control SOS is to create a bin for all these cool tools, define them as “experimental”, and then strategically define a proportion of our effort that’s going to work with experimental strategies (probably no more than 10%).

Seems simple, I know, but… “hey look I just discovered Zinglist and have to figure out how to use it in my…” oh, right.  That’s what SOS is all about.  It’s ok. I’m back now.

So, if we have an experimental strategy and we tell our wildly creative and web savvy colleagues about it, then when they send us their own SOS-addicted links, we can say, “hey thanks, no worries, it can be part of my experimental strategy.”

Now, to test your resolve, let me toss out a couple of experimental strategies I’ve run across.  Bite your lip and hold on… here come some shiny objects.

Cool web portal [http://educationisin.com/#]

Interesting use of Second Life (This is just a screen shot, you’ll have to enter Second life to actually go there). [http://www.sluniverse.com/pics/Search.aspx?Search=ivy%20tech]

Of course, I just sneaked one in on you, I just introduced you to Snapzilla.

Be strong.

Staffing

I hope conversations about staffing needs in marketing come up a lot during the conference! Staffing has always been a hot topic, but the exploding demands of new media make it a critical conversation now.

And I don’t think we in higher ed marketing have made a convincing case to leadership about the need for ongoing increases in investment.

I see rapidly growing need in:

• Website editorial content
• Video production
• Website programming (on the marketing side rather than IT)
• New media research and tactics
• Advertising

The big question is: Are institutions increasing their overall marketing budgets to address these issues? Or are brand managers re-assigning staff, creating internal partnerships with other units, and shifting existing resources to cover new needs? Other solutions?

How are you coping with changing needs? Is it working for you? Please join this pre-conference discussion with your thoughts!

Three Great Videos

As we get ready for the Brand Manager’s Summit, there are three great videos to start off the conversation.

Epic 2015
This tongue-in-cheek look at how Web 2.0 came to be is the granddaddy of “video histories” of the Internet. It was created by journalists Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson, with original music by Aaron McLeran, and was based on a presentation they gave to the Poynter Institute in 2004. The 9-minute Flash movie, now viewed by more than a million people, is a “history” from the viewpoint of a fictional “Museum of Media History” in the year 2015. It explores the convergence of popular news aggregators, such as Google News, with other Web 2.0 technologies like blogging and social networking will have on journalism and society at large in a hypothetical future. The film is factual up until 2007, then launches into fanciful conjecture. It popularized the term Googlezon and touches on major privacy and copyright issues raised in this scenario.

Did You Know?
Did You Know? is one of the best compendiums of “wow!” factoids on Web usage and stats in existence. It originally started out as a PowerPoint presentation for a faculty meeting in August 2006 at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colorado. The presentation “went viral” on the Web in February 2007 and, as of June 2007, had been seen by at least 5 million online viewers. Today the old and new versions of the online presentation have been seen by at least 11 million people, not including the countless others who have seen it at conferences, workshops, training institutes, and other venues.

The Machine is Us(sing) Us
Like the others listed here, this Flash video is a great example in itself of the power and the possibility of new media. It was created by Professor Michael Wesch, Kansas State University, in 2007 for a class in cultural anthropology. And because it was viewed 1.8 million times on YouTube in six weeks, it earned Professor Wesch a coveted spot in Wired Magazine’s “2007 Rave Awards”, a list of 22 “innovators, instigators, and inventors.” Dr. Wesch, had been working for months on an academic paper that would explain new Web tools, but as he struggled to define concepts like hypertext, tagging, mashups, and wikis, he had an epiphany: He was working in the wrong medium. He needed to use the tools of Web 2.0 to explain Web 2.0, marking Web sites with del.icio.us, creating a blog with Blogger, and posting pictures on Flickr. This mesmerizing class video is the result.

Fresh Strategies for a New Age of Marketing

Not since the advent of mass marketing in the mid 19^th Century and the advent of television commercials in the mid 20^th Century has the world of marketing communications changed as much as it has today. Web-based and electronic communications, social networks, viral advertising, user-defined marketing….for professional marketers the landscape is quickly, and radically changing. And with far-reaching implications.

How do you as the chief marketing professional at your institution shape your team to function effectively in today’s marketing environment? How do you guide institutional leadership to the necessary decisions around budgets and investment in these new mediums and strategies? Which mediums have the greatest potential to yield the greatest results and which are flashes in the pan. In short, how do you stay ahead of the game when the game is seemingly changing every day?

Talk with David Pogue, Emmy award-winning tech correspondent for CBS News and the internationally known personal-technology columnist for The New York Times, about the impact of Twitter on consumer behavior and how you can use it in your institution’s recruitment or alumni marketing efforts. Ask Kara Swisher, co-producer/host of The Wall Street Journal’s “D: All Things Digital,” about her thoughts on where open source will take us in the future. Or sit down with Risa Teksten, Creative Ads Program Producer at Google, and discuss best practices in cross-platform advertising strategies.

This is a unique opportunity to hear first hand what’s on the horizon from leading experts in the field of new media, discuss the marketing challenges your institution faces with brand managers at other leading institutions from around the nation, and take home a wealth of best practices, new strategies, and professional insights.

Space is limited! Register by August 29 at www.emgclient.com/summit.