Recently in Technology Category

There's a lot of discussion about how to make alumni magazines more relevant and viable against a rising tide of online content, not to mention dynamic competing media in a variety of formats; the blog Alumni Futures recently covered this topic in a post titled "Be Read or Don't Bother."

 

We've had an exciting time with our latest issue of Portfolio, the alumni magazine of the Leeds School. For example:

- A Taste of Leeds: We held a food fair event here on April 30 which highlighted this issue's theme, our alumni working in the food and beverage industry. We had 16 booths featuring food and drinks and approximately 200 visitors in our atrium on a Friday afternoon. Faculty, staff, students, alumni, and friends of the Leeds School attended. Current students chatted it up with alumni. Alumni caught up with their former instructors. In a word: Connection. In a phrase: Living our brand.  

This delicious event (to see photos, visit our Facebook Page by clicking here) was born out of a brainstorming session as the magazine was pieced together a few months ago. Writing about the smorgasbord of alumni got us in the Alumni Relations and Communications staff thinking about (read: salivating over) all the variety of products. Wa-lah: An event is born! We're now considering a magazine-related event to kick off every new issue of Portfolio. (Pssst .... The theme for Fall 2010: Technology. Email us if you have any ideas we should check out.)    

- Speaking of technology, our alumni magazine uses Zmags, a page-turning media-rich format that allows embedding of links to, for example, the blogs, Twitter and Facebook accounts, video clips, etc., of the featured alumni in the print publication. Zmags allows us to highlight the multimedia dimensions of our alumni in a way that is both engaging and immediate with a simple click right then and there if the reader/viewer so chooses (instead of hoping readers/viewers head online once they are done reading the print version).

- Web extras: This section (you can see our latest offerings for the Spring 2010 Portfolio by clicking here) is a great way to add even more storytelling opportunities to the alumni magazine. In this issue, our web extras included lavender recipes, an audio slideshow of a tea shop with live music and tea ceremony, a video segment on how strawberry sorbet is made, podcasts on LBOs and Revaluing the Food Chain, as well as Q&As (text, podcasts, and videos) with our featured alumni. Traditional publications, while still valuable, are no longer limited by the cost and space of the printed page when universities utilize their web space and embrace online content if that content is complementary and symbiotic. And sometimes the extras, if executed well, instead of being the final piece can be the gateway by introducing outsiders to the print publication, and to what the Leeds School is for and about.  

Case in point: Our audio slideshow web extra of the Ku Cha House of Tea (which is featured on the cover of this issue of Portfolio) was picked up by the main campus communications staff (their photographers worked on the piece for us and their shared it with their colleagues) and placed prominently on the homepage which you can see by clicking here. In the reporting of the print story, I saw the shop was a gorgeous locale (meaning GREAT photography) and learned they had live music every Sunday (meaning a chance for GREAT audio beyond just an interview). 

Simply put, this was a storytelling opportunity that could engage the senses and provide context to a story about two of our MBA alums (and in their own words). And it's bringing traffic to our YouTube channel, as the video has more than 200 unique views as of today (typically one of our videos gets 10-15 unique views).

As we begin to think about the next issue, we continue to seek these opportunities for a multimedia and multi-dimensional story and take these creative risks

We have eight active blogs, and more on the way. Beyond just your regular blog-roll, which is coming soon, how do we help our readers find not only content on this blog but across all our blogs and social media outlets? Well, I was meeting with Leeds MBA student Josh Whitney and he turned me onto Lijit, a robust search aggregation and content find-ability service. Not only is this web app created right here in Boulder, but Lijit has hired Leeds student interns (Josh is one, Julie Penner another) so we were even more happy to partner with a company working with our community.

Why Use Lijit?

• The big reason is that Lijit search makes it easy for our readers to find all sorts of other Leeds content. We have great stories, but they exist in lots of different places. Lijit lets users search in one easy place, and find all Leeds postings in blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and our main Leeds site. It's like a "walled garden" of just your content. Go ahead and try it. Search box up to your right. (Go ahead, I'll wait...) Cool, huh? :)
  
• From an administrator perspective, it's drop-dead easy to configure, install, and customize. Their "Wijit" creator (makes the code for your Lijit search box) is a simple step-by-step process that adds tons of functionality to your Lijit search with a few mouse clicks. Also very easy to add "Wijits" to new blogs.
• Awesome support (Thanks Grace)! The Lijit crew have been super helpful answering our questions and helping us integrate the service. From our conversations, you can immediately tell that customer service is very important. This is a great thing!
  
• Engaging stats: See a dashboard of where your visitors are from, and top searches. Of course some of this is stuff you can get from Google analytics, but with Lijit it is right at your fingertips. No digging down through a bunch of links, just your searches in your blogs. Efficient and actionable: I use the search terms to help guide future blog content.
• We are pretty new to Lijit, so I'm sure other reasons will become apparent as we grow.
  

So, in a world where creating and managing multiple content streams is now the norm for PR pros and communications departments, having a way to effectively share all that content with your readers not only strengthens your brand, it makes it much more useful and engaging as well.

My grad student career has finished, concluding my student job at the Leeds School communications office. Writing the job post to replace myself made me reflect on what I've learned since I've been here. When I applied, the job description asked for someone who was "creative and motivated" (check) with writing skills (check), Web 2.0 skills (check),interviewing skills (check), social media familiarity (check), and video production skills (hmmm...).

I spend at least 50 percent of my time on video production: interviewing, filming and editing video of faculty and students from our makeshift studio downstairs. I also spent a solid three weeks building an animated template using Actionscript 3.0 (in which I was practically illiterate). I may have embellished my software savvy on the job application, but several forces saved me from floundering in my role here: a willingness to jump in headfirst, and the team's willingness to give me a chance. When I pitched a Flash audio slideshow project that was well outside of my repertoire, they gave me the green light. When I wanted to edit movies in Final Cut, they threw footage into my outstretched novice hands. A week or two later, I could cut, chunk and transition confidently.

As a journalist, I wasn't sure I would like the world of communications, where everything needs to be approved up the chain of command and can be de-flavorized in the process.But this job actually made me a better journalist. And it provided me with the essentials I need to be satisfied: autonomy, the chance to grow my technical and communication skills, the ability to be creative every day, and an endless supply of stimulating content (fueled by lots of smart professors, students and co-workers).

Now I'm leaving my student job at CU for a real-life journalism job in Alaska. I consider some of my most marketable skills not just those I learned in J-school (objectivity, narrative style, ethics), but the multimedia and project-management skills I developed at work. Let's see how those serve me in journalism!

Posted by Molly Rettig.

 

Greetings from the ARC lounge, nothing makes blogging cooler than saying you are doing it from a lounge setting.  So we are going to start this session of the lounge with a little Q and A...

Tyler, it is obvious you do quite an array of very valuable projects; what is your favorite?
The first week of every month I hitch up my pants, crack my knuckles, throw on some of R. Kelly's greatest hits ("Step in the Name of Love" is a classic), and begin compiling our department metrics for the month.  What has started as a simple two page spreadsheet taking about fifteen minutes has amassed eight pages and three hours of work; with numbers used across a spectrum of presentations and strategies within the school. 

Why should I capture metrics?
This blog is all about how to communicate with our audiences, specifically emphasizing how social media campaigns can extend awareness and reach to audiences.  But proving a ROI is key to these campaigns so pages and pages of metrics become necessary.
So without discerning all my metric secrets and calculations, I feel it proper to share some of the revelations I have come to while compiling the numbers month after month.   And most importantly remember that these are purely quantitative numbers and do not speak for the qualitative interactions with your audience (though several social media platforms try to).

Man you sold me, so what Metrics should we capture?
Ideally having some set of numbers for everywhere on the web you are present is the goal; and most platforms have some sort of way to capture numbers so why not do it?

The big boy.
Our beautifully and intricately designed website leeds.colorado.edu is just bursting with content and information and we love to see what people are looking at using Google analytics.

We capture unique views for:

• the top 10 pages visited
• the top 10 alumni pages visited
• clicks on homepage
• Avg. Time on pages
• Geographic areas for certain pages
• Navigation summaries for homepage spotlights (as well as what percent of views are coming from the homepage versus alternate routes)

E-mail marketing
We love Constant Contact and we always capture open rate, top 5 links, and unique click throughs per our monthly newsletter sent out.

Blogs 
We are incredibly proud of our blogs at cuboulderblogs.com, and using google analytics we capture which blog is getting the most traction as well as individual posts that are popular.  (Like this post will undoubtedly be). 

Press
We use a wonderful combo of Meltwater News and Vocus to analyze press hits per month versus target peer/aspirational schools.  As well as making some beautiful visual charts of our progress that are great for presentations.
Social Media

Twitter
Followers and number of tweets, as well as tweets per day via tweetstats.com
and if your exceedingly bored reading this, check out our twitter page.

Facebook
Eventually everyone will realize that facebook fanpages are so much more useful than groups because fanpages allow you to get "facebook insights", which means they give us/you some very valuable numbers unavailable to facebook groups. 

We capture fans, views, photos, posts, comments per month.

Becoming a fan of Leeds is the cool thing to do by the way.

LinkedIN
Members, discussions, job posts - don't you want to get in on this action?

YouTube
Videos, unique views, comments, which video is getting the most traction.

Zmags
Putting our publications in a sweet online format gives the ability to see some qualitative aspects of our publications; as well as the general quantitative numbers you would get with google analytics.

We capture views per publication, zoom and click throughs (inferring people actually reading), and avg. time on each publication.


This is a very raw display of what we capture, (we do capture a little more than presented above), but this is the basic set.  Then I use these numbers to compare these to previous months and years and find patterns, what is working, what isn't, and find the right numbers to report.  And then push out what is popular in every communication channel possible.  In the end, these numbers need to compliment your communications strategy; and finding what proves your strategy is working is the goal...so good luck, and feel free to click these links and add to our numbers.

Isn't all this metric madness hard Tyler?
Yes, I probably deserve a huge raise.

Posted by Tyler McAnelly

Browsing Google Reader at the blogs that I follow, I noticed a new post from Andy Shaindlin's Alumni Futures blog titled: 2010 Alumni Relations Issues for the Year Ahead.  As alumni relations is what I do here for the Leeds School of Business, I figured it would be beneficial to see what Mr. Shaindlin had to say. His main points asked how alumni relations professionals can continue to be relevant and useful and meaningful to our alumni in the face of changing times and advanced technology. With the proliferation of social media and peoples' ability to organize into groups through online tools - do they still need and want us to do that for them? With the extensive reach of Google, Facebook and the white pages online, do alumni still need our help finding and connecting with other alumni?

Andy suggests the answers are yes, and I tend to agree. In this day and age, our alumni EXPECT that we have a presence in these new online spaces and they WANT to be a part of the School's official fan page, group, etc. on Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

And we are happy to have them.

But this major shift in how we communicate with our alumni was not obvious or immediate. Many universities and schools had and still have online communities exclusively for their alumni (including CU's Forever Buffs Network and Leeds' LeedsLink). However, as the space of social media has developed, we've come to learn that exclusivity is not always where it's at. For instance, we have been posting job openings to LeedsLink thinking our alumni would find this as an exclusive benefit and visit the site in order to see what jobs were listed. However, my director and I met yesterday with our Career Connections staff to discuss using LinkedIn instead of LeedsLink to post jobs. The group consensus was to find alumni where they already are and to make our LinkedIn group more relevant and dynamic by giving people what they want - opportunities for jobs. Instead of assuming alumni would want to take the extra step to look for jobs on LeedLink, we recognize that we should provide value to them in the space that they already inhabit, LinkedIn.

As this is a brand new change to how we operate, we don't yet know how it'll go, however, I'm optimistic that it will be well received. Exclusivity is sacrificed as alumni could easily forward and share the job posting with whomever they please in their various networks, however, that is the way the world works these days and who are we, alumni relations staff, to stop them!

For a complete list of how you can connect to the Leeds School using social media, including Linkedin, please visit: www.leeds.colorado.edu/socialnetworking

 

While we have been using video here at the school for years, only recently did we purchase an inexpensive Flip camera. For those of you not familiar with the Flip, it is a small, tiny, hand-held, fully HD-quality video camera. There is no real zoom and really only one button: On and off. But the ability to grab HD-quality video anytime and anywhere is pretty incredible, and very useful.

For example, our Director takes her Flip with her to alumni events for impromptu interviews. These are short clips with our alumni sharing a story about their time at the school, or their excitement at being at the event. Not only do we get fun, engaging quotes from real people, but our alumni are excited to see us using the newest technology. They ask about the camera, try it out, and love that they will shortly be online, viewable by other alums.

In addition to the Flip, we set up traditional video interviews with faculty and researchers here at the school. These are pre-planned and organized recordings and are the more structured way to create video. This process is another great tool for us because these clips tell a deeper and more involved story. They share a different kind of knowledge and offer another kind of engagement. 

But with the Flip we can grab video on the fly, as we think of it. Suddenly you are on video safari, everyday, 24/7. The chase is on, and the challenge is: Can you capture it? Are you willing to accept on-the-fly editorializing? Reality TV? Sometimes it's great and sometimes not, but with a little editing, these live action snippets give a very real and immediate face our alumni outreach and larger goal of sharing the great stories of the Leeds school.

So the Leeds Communications team has done a pretty good job of educating and engaging our internal faculty and staff about Social Media and its possible relevance to their personal and professional lives. At least I think we have.We still get puzzled looks and raised eyebrows from some of our constituencies who don't see the ROI. But then many of them are not "in the trenches" as those of us trying to build communications, media and PR strategies in a rapidly changing communications landscape with, in our case, very limited resources.

Interestingly, the more we pursue a SM strategy, the more feedback and connections we are getting from others who are active in SM or just interested our efforts. It's been great too! One of my campus communications colleagues shared a blog post of another higher ed professional who is leveraging these new tools to benefit her faculty. Rather than relying on the traditional mainstream media model of pitching faculty stars for possible coverage, she is using SM to do it herself. It was gratifying to see her rational as we are pursuing similar strategies for our faculty and programs as well. To pave the way, we held several SM presentations including "What is SM?" "SM Basics" and "Social Media and Pedagogy" ( I had to throw the "pedagogy" word in--it's big in academia) Actually, we didn't host that one, a school colleague did, but it was definitely in conjunction with our efforts. We've gotten positive feedback and folks seem grateful to have a better understanding of blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. And just in recent months we have been getting great response to our online efforts in these areas. Not bad for "free"?

Homecoming is one of the most cherished and well-attended university traditions at college campuses across the country. This year our Homecoming celebration was scheduled for Saturday, October 31 on a big beautiful quad just west of our building. The tent was to be set up on Wednesday, October 28 for some other school events that week with Homecoming being the grand finale before the football game on Saturday.

Well, the Colorado weather gods had another thing planned altogether. On the Wednesday the tent was to go up it snowed, oh I don't know, over 18 inches! What!?! See photo proof below. It was so bad that they closed the campus and sent us home at 2:00 p.m.

We returned to work Thursday (though it was still actively snowing) to be informed by CU's groundskeeper that due to the snow on the ground and the inherent wetness should it miraculously melt in the next 36 hours, all Homecoming events scheduled for grassy areas on campus would be cancelled.

That would include our event. Ugh. Though many other campus entities had no choice but to cancel their events completely, we are blessed with a beautiful new building that has the perfect space for large receptions and gatherings. After confirming the availability and feasibility with our building manager - we were good to go.

Homecoming shall go on - but we've got to let people know about it!  As many other outdoor CU Homecoming activities had been cancelled, we had to spread the word that 1. Our event was still taking place and 2. That we had moved indoors. And here's how we did it:

1. We updated the home page of the Leeds School of Business website
2. We updated the Homecoming page on the Leeds School website
3. We sent one email to our e-newsletter distribution list and asked for help spreading the  word (it's worthy to note that we usually only send one email a month but that we made a special exception in this situation)
4. We used our Facebook fan page to post status messages about the change for multiple days leading up to the event
5. We used our Twitter account to announce the change and asked people to retweet for multiple days leading up to the event
6. We emailed our internal faculty and staff and asked them to share the news with their friends and colleagues that normally attend the event

Yay for technology! The event was a true success. We probably didn't have the sheer numbers we would have had being outdoors on a beautiful game day, however, we had 200-250 people come out to enjoy the food and activities (face painting!) before the football game.  Photos and video from the event can be seen here!

Reading the WideFoc.us post on Content and Conversation: The Only Things That Matter, I am again reminded how ephemeral the technology we use to communicate with each other, and how important and lasting the actual conversation.

Whether it's Twitter, blogs, Facebook, whatever, WideFoc.us says,

"You should use social media tools to propagate your content and to engage your audience(s) in meaningful interactions--conversations that you start, but also ones already occurring that are relevant to you. It really is that simple."

Simple, yes. But that kind of simple is real work. So we continue to ferret out, understand, and hone our stories. Our care and attention in this area is what sets us apart and gives value to our constituents. Not how many "friends" or "followers" we have.

So we work hard on finding and telling the interesting, compelling, and sometime flat-out jaw-dropping stories of the people and events shaping lives at the Leeds school.

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.