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.
