September 2009 Archives

Photo/Flickr   In some undergrad journalism classes at CU, students are plugged in and encouraged to tweet findings from the Internet that relate to lecture. Attendance and multiple choice questions are gauged by iClickers.

As I sit amid Pandora-streaming hip hop, logged into Facebook and Twitter, I sometimes forget I'm at work. I'm actually at the Leeds School of Business, which is far, far away from my academic home - the journalism building - both physically and philosophically. In the communications office, new messages chirp from Tweetdecks all day. If we're not filming a professor for our Youtube channel, you can probably find us at a social media webinar, making Flash slideshows of networking events, starting threads on Linkedin or hatching new apps for our Facebook page. The comm team is on the edge of its specialty--communications.

 

But as a journalism grad student, I thought journalists were supposed to be the master communicators. Why is the new wave of media taking longer to engulf the J-school? As an industry, journalism has been sluggish to adopt new media even though the public has asserted its preference for it. After all, it's normal for institutions to reject change when they are entrenched economically and culturally in tradition. (For example, 70% of a newspaper's overhead comes from paper production and distribution. Wouldn't it make more sense for them to develop their Web presence STAT and start eroding their biggest expense?)

 

My boss, a longtime broadcast and print journalist, gave me a couple ideas. First, the communications team is a new, small group that is far more flexible than, say, a newsroom. Second, they weren't bound to the legacy and norms that go along with journalism. They could create a Facebook and Twitter personality without worrying about appearing biased or opinionated--taboos for traditional journalism. Third, while they have to prove their campaign produces results, they have more room to take risks. 

 

Now the journalism school can't afford NOT to take the risk. And it's on the right path:  We just got digital kingpin Rick Stevens from Southern Methodist University, an expert in new media and consultant for news companies who are trying to keep pace with technology. And Sandra Fish, who Twitters in her sleep and has a social and professional network to rival AT&T.

 

My time at The Leeds School has shown me that if you sink your teeth into it, social and digital media offer visible and quick rewards. You don't have to be a super savvy blogger or tech'ed-out computer geek. You just have to jump in and build a presence. The Leeds communications team wasn't afraid of taking the plunge, which is why it's ahead of the curve. I think the sooner journalism programs do that, the better chance we have at remaining a vital part of the conversation.

Greetings from the  of the cave of the puma, 

So I was watching the 3^rd greatest show ever made last night, House (sitting comfortably behind The OC and Prison Break), and realized, Holy Canole!, it's a social media episode.

House in his diabolical wizardry had been sent to rehab again, and his team could not figure out what was wrong with a patient (Uh oh!). This patient, played by what looked like a John Stamos, decided he did not trust House's kids' and began to post his symptoms on the web (aka twitter). And he began to get results, doctor's via tweet began to suggest diagnoses, and one, suggested by a brooding genius doctor from rehab, was right.  (Fox does not recognize the internet as existing, so they could not call the patient's internet use "twittering", but he was)

Can things like healthcare be twitterized? It's a scary notion; list your symptoms, get suggestions, save a hundred thousand dollars in hospital fees?

We see the twitterization in all realms of day to day life. Wale, my new favorite rapper behind New Kids on The Block, even alludes to several uses of twitter as a collaborative tool in his new CD. His song with Jean Grae, was created by him initially asking her to do it on twitter (he then talks about the pitfalls of asking people out on twitter, twitterizing romance?).

We all know about the Youtube-ization of the presidential election, and how everyone and their mom have a facebook now, (lucky for me). Healthcare reform campaigns are going viral. We going to see a collaborative world where up to the minute information is now your primary search engine, email, and everything else.

More so, we may even see a world where there is no longer a need for E-Harmony and match.com because it has been twitterized, social media will steal their space. I hope social media sleeps well at night, destroying the very fabric of online blind dating.

It's a terrifying notion, but a great way to avoid being that creepy 45 year old still going out to clubs, maybe clubbing can be twitterized too?

As for loyal readers of the den,

JustBaked Designs  facebook and twitter only test has sold 23 of the 200 shirts my non-dish cleaning roommate has stuffed in his closet. And while he won't clean any portion of the house, and thinks placing a pizza box next to the trashcan constitutes a new trashcan, we are still trooping along at over 150 fans and following several other designers on twitter.

Also, future bloggifying by me will be the Communications aspect of starting a new blog from scratch for the local CU ski/snowboard community, have to chat with club bosses about resources and try and get some good blogger-ware, but it should be an interesting endeavor, like guys who leave the house in women's jeans and still think they are manly.

Will keep you updated once it is up and running, have some hilarious people collaborating on it so it should be quite the literary spectacle.

Keep your den strong people!

Great blog post from Martin Weller, a professor of Educational Technology at the Open University in the UK on the usefulness of blogging in higher ed:

A few key points:

• The economics of reputation - increasingly one's reputation online is seen as a valuable commodity. This is partly because a good reputation is difficult to establish and also because in an environment where content is free and widely available then quality becomes a differentiating factor.
  
  
• Engagement with your subject area - in many subject areas the blogosphere is where much of the informed and detailed debate is occurring. If this is the case in your subject area then not to be part of it limits your expertise in the same manner as not publishing journal articles (perhaps even more so). If your subject area is not one widely engaged with blogging then this represents a good opportunity to establish yourself as one of the lead experts.
  
  
• Increased reflection - keeping a regular blog seems to encourage a degree of reflection and critical analysis as you comment on conferences, workshops, research, etc.

Read the full post.

Talk about transparency! Microblogging with Twitter is really starting to feel like reading email from people you know casually, but who are sharing all sorts of facts, ideas, and rants, and links to more of the same.

For example (I'm sure you can find tons more):

@vin2109 weekend flings, new "loves", etc. Unfortunately, I found myself immersed in this culture for a time after my divorce

@fo_xy waitin for fafsa ta process then for them to send out my award letter then the money is MINE!

@CielNoirBlaqSky Ahhh...so much romance, bliss, and love around...it's intoxicating... :-)

The book Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online discusses the various ways we slide between our public and private personas, and the good and bad choices we make disclosing more and more of ourselves and our companies. They talk in depth of dropping the shield, of opening up your company's people, or your own thoughts and ideas to the public forum of the internet.

In using Twitter over the last three months, I feel my privacy guard crashing through the floor. I want to share more of my ideas, connections, and friendships than ever before. And where I previously emailed a few friends regularly, now I tweet to over 100 everyday. It's a mental space I used to feel using email: social connection, shared stories, and trust.

Twitter feels like Everyone, telling Everyone, Everything. (Everyone wants to be the first too!) Whereas my friends and I emailed and shared ideas in our little group. Now we tweet and are creating a much larger intimate, and very, very public, space.

Overall, I think this is for the good. I would love to just use Twitter and dump email altogether (except for those extra juicy, start-up, or strategy conversations!) But really, how much of what we talk about is that secret anyway? Aren't we all doing and saying pretty much the same things? That's what Twitter seems to be RT-ing to me.

What do you think?

[ image from http://tommartin.typepad.com ] 

 

I've been wanting to write this blog entry on hashtags for a few weeks now, but then I was out sick, and then on vacation, and then spent last week catching up from being sick and then on vacation .... so here it is, my nugget of social media wisdom:

If you create a hashtag on Twitter for an event, which is a GREAT idea, you cannot, I repeat CANNOT, use punctuation in said hashtag. #justsayin

We learned this a little too late (but still just in time) for our Leeds 2.0 event earlier this summer. Guess what we thought a good hashtag would be? Guess what wasn't?

As this was our first forray into promoting an event using our Twitter account for the Leeds School ( @LeedsCUBoulder ), we thought we were ahead of the curve by determing the hashtag for the event before the actual event occurred. I've been to a few conferences or events where you have competing hashtags or you don't even know what the hashtag could be. Which is too bad because the whole point of hashtags on Twitter is to link tweets and the people who wrote them with each other in real time, possibly creating this "conversation" we hear so much about joining online. #jointheconversation

So #leeds2.0 was to be the hashtag and I proudly put it out there on the twitterverse and ... was promptly informed by a tweep that um the period in said hashtag excluded the zero and stopped the link, so the hashtag looked like this: #leeds2.0 instead of #leeds2.0 (if you click on the hashtag in a tweet, it zooms you to the search.twitter.com page where you can see other tweets containing that exact hashtag!). #uhoh 

Another lesson: Be the first user. You might dream up this stuff, but try it out first and make sure it works and is actually useful. See Sarah Martens' entry on our Facebook Follies. 

We quickly tested a new hashtag --- #LeedsCU --- to keep it short, simple and functional (very important). Social media sweetheart Gwen Bell later said that was one of the things we did right at Leeds 2.0 event. #sweet

I'd love to hear what others have learned or discovered about hashtags (or any other social media quirks). See, I (thought I) had done sufficient research on how to create and use a hashtag, but looking back I didn't recall coming across any social media materials telling me to be aware and beware of punctuation (is it all punctuation? can't see to find a definitive answer yet) with hashtags, which I'm sure lots of others including businesses and organizations wanting to connect people, would have liked to know.

So remember: It's the little things that make a big difference, even in social media. #booyah

If you are like me, you could enter a room and not say a word to one person the entire time, unless someone approached you. Now, some may consider this to be a bit snobbish, but I simply believe that it's a fear of public speaking that takes over.

My whole life I have tried to stand on the sidelines, and just observe others around me strike up a conversation. Even through my academic career of giving numerous presentations on various topics, including ones in Spanish, and serving as my sorority's chapter president, I still did not feel that my social skills had prepared me for real world interaction.Talk about lack of confidence!

It wasn't until my final semester of college that I realized the real value added by exposing myself to new environments with people I did not know. The time to take myself from wallflower to 'girl who can work a room' was long overdue. I needed to get out there and socialize!Graduation was nearing, the world was in an economic crisis, and I was unsure of where I would be after walking in my cap/gown to receive my ever so expensive piece of paper that would read that I was awarded a Bachelor of Arts in Spanish. What to do?

An opportunity finally came to take any skills I had ever learned and put them into action. A local group called Boulder 2140 was hosting a networking event at the Rembrandt Yard Art Gallery where locals in the Boulder community could gather for drinks and hors d'oeuvres to chat it up with others in the 21 - 40 year old range. I racked up some confidence and headed to the event by my lonesome.

Once there, I walked into a crowded room of people, none of which I knew, signed in, put on my name tag, and went straight to something that was comforting, food. I mean you can certainly strike up a conversation with anyone about food. How hard is that?

After striking up several conversations I realized that this isn't so bad. People talked to me about being an 'almost recent grad' and what I was going to do with my life after I graduated. Aren't you supposed to score a job at these types of things?I mean I was going to be a recent grad, with a degree in Spanish, lots of great work experience, who wouldn't want to hire me?

That's where I went wrong. Because what I have learned from that event is it's not what you know, but who you know. And that going to a networking event doesn't guarantee you a full blown career with salary and benefits, but it empowers you to want to engage in these conversations more often, and build a sense of confidence, that I lacked before, within.

Working for the Leeds School of Business for three years of my college career, helped change my persona to that of a professional, and a big part of my job has been networking with all types of individuals on a daily basis. To say the least, networking is always on my mind. Networking this, and networking that. It takes practice and refinement to really understand the possibilities associated with this type of activity. It's not something everybody will be good at, but everyone can do it. So get out there and put on your networking boots and socialize your way to whatever it is that you are looking for.

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Posted by Gabrielle Makray

Found a great blog post by a faculty friend on the (potential) usefulness of Twitter for faculty. His argument is that Twitter's usefulness is best decided by the actual users. So let's be creative!

Read the full post for more details, but here are the links to some ways (so far) that faculty have utilized Twitter in higher ed:
 

• Twitter and World Simulation - Video of a class building a political world via social media
• Tech Tools for Academia - Great list of ideas to use social media to enhance teaching.
• 50 Ways to Use Twitter in the College Classroom - Grouped into the categories of Class Projects and Knowledge Discovery, Communication, Find Faculty to Follow, Tools, and Getting Ready for Life After Graduation.
• 50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Education - Ways to engage via practical tactics. Explains the basics and goes from there. 
• The Twitter Experiment - A short video sharing a professor's and student feedback on using Twitter in the classroom at UT Dallas.
• Twitter Tweets for Higher Education - List of links to additional ways to use Twitter.

If you find something here to be helpful (or not), please comment!

Our student Tyler was an avowed Twitter and Social Media-phobe. But he started to see the light once he was turned onto pre-ESPN breaking news from Twitter.Then he started blogging, and the rest as they will be saying more and more, is new work history. Meaning, he's been hired by a local student ski group to be its Social Media Coordinator.

The is awesome for him and great for us: He widens his knowledge and shares his deepening expertise with us. And, by actively engaging with the medium he has found out first-hand how powerful it is.

In the same vein, I am hoping more of our faculty and staff will have similar "road to Damascus" experiences. I want them to spend just a little time with it and see a. how engaging it is, and b. how useful the tools are to "get things done."

If you already love it and use it, welcome and keep going! But there is nothing like the slow smiling conversion of the anti-Twitter-er to Tweetdeck that just brings a tear to my #eye and warm glow to my #followfriday heart.

Greetings from the den!

We had a meeting with the 104West people and Mitchell Ashley from Converging Network today.  These are the social media guru's; along with my boss all dragging people through the muck to the Web 2.0 blogosphere.  While in the meeting daydreaming of Kelly Clarkson's new single status and whether or not Vin Diesel is really that strong in person, I had an idea; but an idea that starts with a story.

My dear roommate concedes the entrepreneurial spirit.  Or so he likes to think.  In his eyes the entrepreneurial spirit included him peddling expensive orange towels (Super Shammies, the things that the guy who looks like a drugged up Ryan Seacrest sells at 3am on Telemundo), puppy calendars (Calendar Club), and 1000 count Egyptian cotton sheets across Midwest malls.  Yes, the entrepreneurial spirit my dear roommate embodies leads him to the bustling and beautiful cities like Ft. Smith, Arkansas; Tulsa, Oklahoma; and Rapid City, S. Dakota for months on end peddling orange towels and calendars to people who think Toby Keith is god and are unaware that Ted Kennedy died (or who he is). 

But in his attempt to prolong going to school or getting a real job.  He stumbled upon an idea.  He and I, being Colorado boys, have a complete and utter man crush on the Nuggets.  And in his spare time, he began to design a couple shirt ideas, culminating in the Obama Hope design being applied to Chris "Birdman" Andersen's face.  And in his infinite wisdom, he created 200 of these shirts to sell before the Nuggets home Playoff games.  Now needless to say, it did not end well.  The shirts did not come back until the western conference finals and the Nuggets did not do well...But he did manage to sell about 30 of the shirts in 2 games. (170 left)

 

But now that leaves me and my Heath Ledger like good looks to help.  I began to think, how can I help him out by getting this stuff out of his closet, and how can we do this for free?  You sense where I am going with this?  Getting excited?  You should be?

After several instances of me threatening bodily harm, he has created a Facebook Fan Page and Twitter for his brand name JustBaked Designs, and he, with my undying pushing is going to rudimentarily push his shirts and brand name out onto the social media realm.  And since he is lazy, and I am unaffected by this, we are going to try it without a website.  

Normally, you would say that to sell shirts online, you need a website.  But my friend, normally you would cruise Main Street listening to Whitesnake and girls would smile at you.  Not anymore.  By using a simple model of Facebook to promote his designs, and twitter as a customer service platform.  He is going to try to peddle all these shirts with a simple send me money; I send you a shirt model.  We will see if this Social Media hoopla has some value alright.  My guess, we don't need a website, people are sick of PayPal.

There is an intriguing thought here; do we need a website to sell something online?  Classically, I would say yes.  I like the Amazon guarantee and filling out pages and pages of forms on EBay, and then getting the wrong thing and spending three weeks calling the help desk before I actually talk to a person.  And then getting my debit card information stolen from Amazon after they get my order wrong.  Buying stuff online has always been scary for me, but maybe using this social media hoopla, buying stuff can make the customer more connected with the product.  (You can absolutely wreck someone's Facebook page if they mess with you).  And using Twitter as a collaborative customer service tool is really inspired.  I think the way consumers purchase online is in for a shift, and we will see more people selling things via Facebook and Twitter.  So now we run an experiment, call me the scientist.

Someone is going to figure out how to sell stuff on Facebook and Twitter, and they are going to get absolutely paid, so I will hopefully be talking about my new helicopter purchase and engagement to Kelly Clarkson soon enough.

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Posted by Tyler McAnelly

We have asked and yea have replied. Look at all our blogs! It's exciting not just because we have seven blogs (small pat on collective back), but because each of these groups has a unique voice, a unique story to share. And they will each grow to create engaging and useful conversations with their readers.  

So to our teams, thank you! We are here to blog our ways into the hearts and minds of the larger Leeds community. I hope our fresh start, like a young sapling, will grow into a mighty tree of sharing and community.

Executive Education Today
Insights on executive education opportunities and strategy in today's complex global economy.

Dean's Blog: New Perspectives
Dean Dennis Ahlburg shares his thoughts on trends in business education and research.

The Entrepreneur's Pitch
The inside perspective on educating entrepreneurial leaders.

Leeds MBA Experience
Our MBAs report on life at Leeds.

Research and the Real World
Insight and analysis from the Business Research Division at the Leeds School of Business.

Life as a Leeds First Year Student
Follow our incoming freshman as they navigate the highs and lows of college life - exams, friends, activities, laughs and reflections. It's the real deal.

Last weekend was CU's first football game of the year versus in-state rival Colorado State, nicknamed the Rocky Mountain Showdown. We had a big tailgate celebration and our office bought 4 tickets to the game that we decided to give-away by doing a Facebook photo contest in the week leading up to the game. We asked people to submit their best CU pride photos and asked our Facebook fans to vote on their favorites (full contest rules here).

The first place gentleman won great seats to the game with 80 votes (hard to see, but he's wearing a CU sweatshirt and he's at the top of Mt. Fuji)!


The second place runner-up finished strong with 54 votes.


Overall, we were thrilled with the response with 9 people submitting photos and over 250 people voting on their favorite pictures (see all photos here). We accumulated over 200 new Facebook fans and our Facebook insights (metrics) gave us 5 stars for "post quality" for the week. A great success? Yes. But would we do everything the same again? No. Below are the dos and don'ts for future Facebook photo contests.

Do

1. Get the word out to as big an audience as possible. We posted a Facebook status message, Tweeted a link to the contest rules (and asked people to RT), put up signs around the building, included a message in our weekly student e-newsletter, and spread the message via word-of-mouth.
2. Have people send photos directly to you as opposed to them posting directly to the site. We liked that we were able to standardize the format of the album, review photos before they were posted and look up an individual's class year, etc.
3. Follow up and thank everyone who submitted a photo and remind them to get their friends to vote for them. Though voting was open to everyone, we noticed that the people with the most votes reached out their friends and got them to vote.
4. Stick to your deadlines. We had the contest end at 5:00 p.m. so we made sure we were on the site at 5:00 p.m. to note who won. It came down to the wire with a couple people battling it out so we needed to be prompt and on the ball when ending the contest to determine the true winners.
   
5. Promote the winners through photos on the Facebook site so people can see who the winners were.

 

Don't

1. Have a photo submission deadline. It someone submits a photo late in the game, it's only to their disadvantage that they won't have as much time to get people to vote for them. I received a great photo after our photo submission deadline that I wasn't able to include because I didn't want to break our own rules.
2. Run the contest over an extended period of time. Our contest took place over the course of one week. If we'd spread it out longer, we probably wouldn't have had the urgency or competition that came out due to the short deadline.
3. Assume everyone will know how to 'vote' for their favorite picture. We learned late in the game that you had to be a 'fan' of the Leeds School of Business before you were allowed to vote. One loyal alumna had forwarded her photo to dozens of friends and family but many couldn't determine how they could vote because they weren't fans of the page. Though we know that some individuals realized they had to be fans to vote (as we gained new fans and over 250 voted), we didn't specifically spell out that fact and didn't know ourselves until close to the deadline.  It resulted in an unhappy participant:

Though a few kinks presented themselves, we're happy with how it went overall and are thinking ahead to the Homecoming game to determine how we'll give those tickets away. We'll probably peruse some other institutions websites for great ideas. Any suggestions you want to share?

The numbers in this video tell the story: We ARE in a social media revolution. The question then is how do we "revolve" and "evolve" into it? And not just get crushed on the rolling wheels? Or even worse, left behind?

"Take right action!" I say. And so do many others such as market guru Seth Godin on Social Networking and How to Do it Right, and Why Blog.

Check out the video(s) and get inspired.

Starting the school blogging would be a process, but what I didn't realize was that blog building and content population were just the beginning. The bloggers within the school have great stories to tell. And they have begun to tell them in the same way we all know, a story that goes out to the world. This is great! But who does it go to, and why will they be interested? When I ask them this last question, they look at me for an answer.

At first I thought, "well, you are the content creator, you know your own story". But then I realized what they didn't know was the context, the new blog-cific process to position it in the world. I would have to help them with that. I would have to be their coach (see above).

Mitchell Ashley made this point very clearly to me recently when I went through a similar discussion with him, but with me in the noobie seat. "Bizzzz" went my fizzling CFL-light bulb brain. Ohhh. I have to get one-on-one, mano-a-mano with our bloggers and share tips, tricks, best practices, and maybe even some inspiration. I need to up my blogging experience from theoretical dabbler, to "full contact" participant. I need to blog, day-in, day-out to grow from the One Who Knows, to the One That Shows. So, personal blog, here I come.

Do you have a personal blog? If so, please share!

Greetings from the CommTeam assistants lounge.

So let's face it, you can't go 12 minutes these days without hearing about Twitter this and Facebook that. It seems to me like streams of communication are changing.  Facebook and YouTube seem to be more than a way to meet girls you'll never really meet, or watch people taking the cinnamon challenge.

I am a 20 year old man of the Playstation generation with dashing good looks, charm and a body you could throw quarters off of.  Deep down, I am an old, old man resistant to change.  KFC says they are grilling their chicken now?  Everyone can just record their favorite shows with TiVo?  And my roommate brags to me that he has 512 MySpace friends yet refuses to go out on a Friday night?  No sir, fry me up some chicken, pop Space Jam into the VCR and invite some real people over because I am not ever going to be suckered into this 2.0 hoopla.

Or am I?

I write this blog as an ode to the skeptics.  It is changing.  Space Jam won't be available on VCR, MySpace friends will start coming over to hang out, KFC grilled chicken will still suck, and the words "social media networking" will begin to enter our vocabulary set.  

I was dragged into the 2.0 world kicking and screaming like Ruben Studdard being pulled away from a Cold Stone Creamery.  But after my hissy fit, I saw its use in work, play, school, and almost everything.  

Now my formal training on Twitter and Facebook as primarily a tool for talking to girls from Georgia that have a public account.  But Twitter and Facebook are more than just a way to "meet" (cough stalk cough) girls.  Follow your favorite sports teams, authors, news sources, and celebrities.  You will be surprised how up to date you are on the news (I am a Denver Nuggets master at the moment, learned about Dahntay Jones and Linas Kleiza leaving before they did).  Become fans of your favorite institutions on Facebook (cough Leeds School of Business cough) (sorry for the shameless promotion), and you will see how much more information you have readily available. 

Need to find something?  Don't Google it, search it on Twitter and see how much better the information you get on twitter is (I was having a Microsoft Word meltdown trying to search Google for help, fed up, searched MS Word on Twitter and a Microsoft help specialist tweeted me and helped me fix my whole paper.).  And there is still nothing better than learning about how YouTube can make United Airlines a little bashful for smashing guitars (3 Million views in a week), or learning the nuances on the Evolution of Dance (Most viewed video)

The point is that I am not trying to make a shameless promotion for all these sites.  This Social Media hoopla has significant social and cultural relevance.  Its powerful stuff and it is the way communication and technology is going.  And more importantly, these are not fads; these are the way people will communicate in the future.  So I am not saying jump on board right away, but just check it out or else you will be behind the curve.  And no one likes the 35 year old in a Firebird with an 8 track blasting Whitesnake cruising Mainstreet (So blog or else).