Jessica Krywosa – Director of Web Communications – Suffolk University

Jess has been the Director of Web Communication at Suffolk University for closing in on two years now.  Although newer to higher ed, Jess has been a leader in electronic outreach strategies for grassroots educational non-profits for over ten years. She currently is focused on strengthening virtual relationships with a heavy emphasis on enrollment and retention based efforts. You have probably seen Jess on Twitter and feel free to connect with Jess on LinkedIn.  Her personal website and blog Krywosa.com has been a source for great content around web marketing and social media for a while now.  You might even remember Jess from her guest blog post, Integrated Grassroots and Social Media Efforts.

Mike Petroff – Web Manager for Enrollment – Emerson College

Mike is the Web Manager for Enrollment at Emerson College.  He leads web marketing and online recruitment efforts for undergraduate and graduate admission.  Mike also chairs the social media group at Emerson as they work on coming up with cutting edge ways to use the social web to recruit the next generation of students.  You can also follow Mike on Twitter or connect with Mike on LinkedIn.  You might remember his post at the end of last year advising us all on how to Protect your College’s Intellectual Property on Facebook.

Welcome!

So help me welcome these two gurus to the team! We look forward to them sharing more of their expertise in the coming months.  I’ve known them both for a while and have had great conversations with them about internet marketing and social media use in higher education. It will be great to have them share these stories in an open manner!

Photo credit: Petronas Twin Towers by Ehsan Khakbaz

Related posts:

1. Protecting your College’s Intellectual Property on Facebook: Learning from the Class of 2014 Groups
2. Introducing Blog High Ed: Aggregating the Best of Higher Ed Blogs
3. Surprise! New Guru Writer – Paul Gilzow

The Ask the Gurus page is set up so you can send a question to us. This message will go to the entire .eduGuru staff, and will allow one or more of us to answer your question and give you some feedback that you’ll hopefully find helpful. This might be a question about which CMS to use, a good content strategy, or an opinion on a landing page design. Then, once a month or so we’ll feature some of the best questions we get in a post for everyone. You can opt out of that if you’d rather not share your question, or if you want to share the question but remain anonymous, you can do that to.

We just ask a couple things:

• We’re happy to help out and lend advice, but we aren’t a consulting firm. As such, we ask that you help us by observing the “use, don’t abuse” rule. The simpler your questions are, the more quickly we’ll be able to get back with you.
• We don’t know what kind of volume to expect yet since this is brand new, so be patient if it takes us a little while to answer you.
• If you want this to become a permanent component of the .eduGuru site, please, USE IT! That’s how we’ll know how successful it is.
• Understand that just because you say we can share your question doesn’t mean that we will.
• If you appreciate the tool, please let us know! We want to find ways to better serve our audience in 2010, and if you think this is a good way of doing it (or not), your feedback will help us direct our efforts.

Down the road, besides monthly posts, we’re also considering building a “knowledge base” of sorts out of the questions and answers that are produced as a result of this little experiment. We’ll be watching how this whole thing works out. We hope you like it and find it helpful!

Related posts:

1. Happy Halloween from the Gurus
2. Managing Tip: Three Questions You Should Ask Direct Reports
3. Presenting .eduGuru 2.0!

• 97,793 unique visitors – compared with 39,536 in 2008.
• 159 posts – compared with 196 in 2008.  I guess this is partially my fault as I wrote the majority of those in 2008, but then again we are all much busier this year.
• 2,000 comments – compared with 1,200 in 2008.  Either we haven’t been writing as “remarkable” content as we did last year or people are remarking differently.
• 46,000+ Spam Comments caught by Akismet as compared to 55,000+ last year.
• 1,700+ RSS/Email Subscribers – compared with 600+ in 2008.
• Visitors from 183 countries/territories
• Traffic from 1,352 sites – Top 6:
  1. StumbleUpon
  2. ow.ly – essentially Twitter traffic that we get through our Twitter following
  3. Twitter
  4. Google – (Non Search)
  5. BlogHighEd
  6. <uwebd/> Social network
• 58,876 visits by Search Engines (over 95% from Google) – compared to 14,853 visits in 2008
• 34,214 different keywords in those visits – compared to 9,855 in 2008

All in all I think we can say that 2009 brought very big growth as far as the numbers go.  Oh yeah, we also won a people’s choice award as the best higher-ed blog in 2009.  Yeah, we had a REALLY good year.  So what can you expect from us in the future?  We are constantly bouncing around ideas, but here are some of our goals for the site in 2010…

Feature More of You

That’s right, we want to keep creating great content, but we also want to be featuring more of great things that you are doing.  Are you doing something cool at your school?  We want to know!  Share your stories through guest posts which are always welcome.  Also look for more lists of schools “doing it right.”

More Surveys and More Research

You are really interested in research and quite frankly we like good data too!  We would like to do more surveys and sharing of that data.  If you have ideas then help us brainstorm or leave a comment with your ideas.

Help Us Help You: Ask Us More Questions

There are seven of us on this team now.  We have a guru in pretty much any field related to the web.  From web development and web design to internet marketing and web security, we have an expert.  We also have you all in our wonderful network, and if we don’t know the answer then we know who to connect with that does have the answer.  Tell us what you are challenged with and let us answer it for you.  We haven’t finalized all the details on this yet, but look for more information to come.

Product Reviews

I think everyone is interested in getting more information about products and solutions specific to Higher Education.  We haven’t used all the solutions, so I hope to havecontent created by some of you about this.  Also, being able to cross reference various products based on specific requirements and standards is also open game.  Just having a list of the email marketing solutions or content management systems used by colleges and universities would have a lot of value.

Closing

So those are some of our ideas.  We definitely want to increase user engagment through comments and user generated content from the community.  This blog is only as good as the value our readers get out of it. Help us continue to keep it relevant and valuable to everyone!

Related posts:

1. Recapping 2008 and the 2009 Game Plan
2. Top 10 .eduGuru Posts of 2009
3. eduWEB 2009 Reflections

So let’s take a look.

1. The Great Keynote Meltdown of 2009 – This post was nominated as a most influential post in 2009 by a higher ed community and was linked to from many influential bloggers around the web and a controversial mention in the Chronicle of Higher Ed.  Since I write on this blog I’ll toss my two cents out and say that the Chronicle and reader comments really came out in that article as clueless.    Anyway great article by Michael Fienen and an experience that anyone who attended will not soon forget.
2. Web Development Tools. What’s in your web toolbelt? – Nick DeNardis’ post from way back in January continues to be a page people visit daily and a staple of advice for anyone who is serious about Web Development.
3. Is Your University Using Twitter to Its Fullest Potential? – Another early in the year post where Rachel Reuben helps individuals get a grasp on how to leverage Twitter.  If you are still struggling with this, you might want to check out this post.
4. Summary of the new 2009 E-expectations summary for higher education – This Noel-Levitz research report provided lots of insight into student recruitment, but as with any report it never hurts to have an expert go through it and break down what all the material means.  We have Rachel to help our reads with that.
5. Understanding On-Page SEO for a Higher Education Website – In preparation for presenting on SEO, I wrote this post in a string of posts about SEO.  This one really took off although it is important to mention its Off-Page SEO companion as just as important.
6. sex…Sex…SEX! Now I Have Your Attention. – This provocatively titled book review post by Karlyn Morissette has gotten quite a few visitors searching for sex multiple times.  Hopefully the content provided them the value that they were looking for!?  Anyone looking for information about Neuro Marketing should check out this post.
7. Feeling Naked: A Tale of the Disappearing Facebook Fan Page – Rachel tells us a horror story of what happened to her school’s presence on the juggernaut known as Facebook.  Although it didn’t make the list, the follow-up post is also worth mentioning in this thread, Protecting your College’s Intellectual Property on Facebook.  This follow-up post was actually a guest post by Mike Petroff.
8. Social Networking Research: 99% of 18-24 Year Olds are on Social Networks – I remember writing this post as a reaction to some research I discovered on another site.  It was actually one of the easiest and quickest posts I have ever written so it’s kind of surprising to me to see the long term value in it.   This just goes to show that timely and relevant information is important to your audience.
9. Café New Paltz – 5 days in – Of the many posts written by Rachel about Café New Paltz this was the most viewed.  If you are thinking about setting up or creating a social network for your recruitment efforts you should definitely take a look at all of these posts.
10. Easy ROI on Facebook Ads – I’m a big believer that PPC (Pay Per Click) and online ads are a VERY untapped marketing channel for Higher Ed in general.  Facebook Ads are one of the cheapest and can easily target your specific audiences with visual ads.  Karlyn tells us exactly how to measure the return on investment from these ads.

Bonus: Older Posts People Still Care About

Not surprisingly, we have some older posts that have stood the test of time and that fit right in with these other posts.  These posts show the true power of SEO and creating remarkable content.

1. The Use of Social Media in Higher Education for Marketing and Communications – Rachel Reuben’s guest post from the summer of 2008 launched a true social media guru.  It also was the most viewed post in 2009 even though it’s 18 months old.
2. Google Analytics Filters: Helping you Better Segment, Clean, and Understand your Data – This is another 2008 post that was actually the second most viewed post in 2009.  Like Rachel’s post, it could be said that this post launched me as an authority on Google Analytics, something that I’ve made numerous presentations on, including an upcoming webinar in February.
3. What is the Best Multi-Client Instant Messenger Software? – I named Digsby my winner back then, and I still use it today so this one still holds up.  Of course Mac or Linux individuals will still have to look for something else.
4. Tracking Flash with Google Analytics and Example – Nick DeNardis’ very first post on this blog continues to help individuals get everything they can out of Google Analytics around tracking flash.

Hopefully everyone is looking forward to a BIG 2010 and a whole new decade!  We always have big plans, so stay tuned for our annual recap if you are interested in where this blog has come and where it is going.

Photo Credit: Sculpted Mirrors by Cold Press Publishing

Related posts:

1. The Top 10 Posts of 2008
2. Recapping 2009 and What to Expect from .eduGuru in 2010
3. Recapping 2008 and the 2009 Game Plan

DESIGN 1

DESIGN 2

DESIGN 3

DESIGN 4

DESIGN 5

VOTE!

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Related posts:

1. T-Shirt Contest Extended! Win a SIMTech registration.
2. Win a Stamats SIM Tech registration!
3. Reflections on Stamats SIM Tech

What makes a blog like this a success or not is completely dependent on the community.  When you have a community that might be separated and spread out across the nation, it can be hard to stay connected.  Without readers, is there any point in having a blog? It is these important connections  that hold us together and why conferences and events like this tweetup are so much fun.  There is a group of individuals that really understand what you go through daily and run into the same set of challenges and situations.  With humans being a very social species it’s very important for us to bond and to realize that we aren’t alone.

I realize that not everyone could physically attend the event, but it’s the true sign of a community when you still make the effort to virtually attend!

Social Media = Relationships

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again…social media is simply about building relationships.  There really isn’t anything more complicated about it than that.  Yes, it’s a fun buzz word that we can’t seem to get enough of, but it’s really the oldest form of marketing, not this brand new concept.  Through networks like Facebook and Twitter we are able to build upon existing relationships and make new connections that might otherwise have been physically impossible.  Your connections really are only as valuable as the relationships that you have built with each.

Create Your Own Event

Nothing beats getting the chance to meet people that you have associated with for months on the web.  So I’m really leaving you with a challenge here.  Take the tools that you have available and nuture your own community.  Bringing together a group of prospective students or coworkers has never been easier.  The tools are all right there and available.  Connect the dots and let the web assist you in taking these relationships to the next level.  Remember: 99% of your prospective students are on social media!

Here are just some of the tools available for you to organize and promote an event.  What are you waiting for?

• Upcoming – Yahoo event management tool,
• EventBright – Online Event Registration
• Facebook Event Invitations – Come on, who isn’t on Facebook?
• Twitter Hashtags – Create your own and let the community share along.
• Yelp – In a metro area find a great place to have the event.
• Outlook – Even this “ancient” email client can easily allow you to create and schedule a meeting… er, I mean event.
• Word of Mouth – Yes, this still gets the job done.

Related posts:

1. eduTweetup in Harvard Square Area (Boston, MA)
2. Creating an exclusive online community for fall 2009 accepted students
3. Reining in the outliers for a university-wide cohesive social media presence

We’ve gotten some great entries for this contest so far, but want some more.  Don’t be discouraged from entering if you’ve never designed a t-shirt before!  Head over to Zazzle and  just start playing around.  It’s fun!  Kyle and I have literally wasted days on this site, and (as you can tell by our current selection of t-shirts), neither of us is a designer.  Your shirt can just be a tagline, an image or have both.  Get creative, be clever, and win yourself a free conference registration!

So kill some time at work.  Head over to our original post on the contest for the rules and for some graphics you can use in your design.  Leave us a comment with any questions!

Related posts:

1. Win a Stamats SIM Tech registration!
2. .eduGuru Gear, Get It Now!
3. Want a .eduGuru T-Shirt? Links of the Week Edition

If having a Tweetup in Boston wasn’t enticing enough, it is like the cradle of education with over 35 colleges & universities in the surrounding area, and to top it off, we are having the Tweetup in the Harvard Square area.  Maybe you have heard of the little institute that the square is named after?  I’ve been told that it is quite famous, but I’m not really sure because it is just down the street.

The Information on the Event

Check out the eduTweetup event on Upcoming.  If you think you can come, please RSVP so we can at least have a head count and know the cool people who are attending.  I’m sure that we’ll go do some exploring of the area at some point in the evening, so hopefully we will have some incredible weather.

eduTweetup in Boston
Twitter Hashtag – #edutweetup
Saturday August 8, 2009 at 7PM
Grafton Street Pub – Google Map
1230 Massachusetts Ave
Cambridge, MA 02138

Photo: Grafton Street Pub by CellPhoneSusie

Related posts:

1. eduTweetup: It’s STILL About the Community, Stupid
2. College Ads on the Boston Subway
3. T-Shirt Contest Extended! Win a SIMTech registration.

• “Division III institutions now are free to use such media as Facebook and Twitter to publicize game results and other athletics news without worrying whether prospective student-athletes are receiving those “electronically transmitted” messages, provided the communication meets some new objective guidelines established by the Division III Management Council.”

The original bylaw said:

“Electronically transmitted correspondence that may be sent to a prospective student-athlete by, or on behalf of, a member of the institition’s athletics department staff is limited to electronic mail and facsimiles. All other forms of electronically transmitted correspondence (e.g. instant messaging, text messaging and social networking Web sites) are prohibited.”

They’ve now added to this — “except as specified in this section.”

• “Any member of the general public may become a member of the group to which the electronic transmission is sent.”
  • In other words, no closed/gated online communities
• “A prospective student-athlete who chooses to receive electronic transmissions through the electronic service must retain the ability to decline receipt of the communications at any time or may unsubscribe from all electronic service at any time.”
  • In other words, use common sense and always have unsubscribe options with all forms of communication.
• “The content of any electronic transmission that is sent to a public group that may include prospective student-athletes must be the same for all members of the group (e.g. news alerts, admissions and alumni information, scores) and of a general nature.”
  • We can’t send custom content to recruits.
• “The proposal does not allow direct person-to-person electronic communication with an individual prospective student-athlete sent by a member of the athletics department staff, or on their behalf, (e.g., instant messaging, comments via MySpace, Wall-to-Wall via Facebook, direct messaging via Twitter) except via electronic mail or facsimile. Further, the proposal ensures the communications are being sent from the athletics department or the institution, and not from the individual members of the athletics department acting on their own.”

This last paragraph is most crucial, and makes it even more important for collaborative efforts on your campus. Your athletic director likely received this communication (it was e-mailed at 9 a.m. ET this morning, July 22), but it may be a bit confusing for those that don’t have a great understanding of the various tools.  From that e-mail, they offer this example:

• “If your coach uses Twitter or Facebook on their own for communication of athletics related information, and that information is delivered to prospective student-athletes, you will need to report that violation.”

Am I the only one thinking they’ve contradicted themselves here? On one hand they’re saying if it’s generic information and publicly available to anyone, then why would a coach disseminating that same public information in a public space be in violation?

Here is the complete PDF that was attached to the e-mail communication this morning. I’d love to hear your take on it.

Related posts:

1. Register for “Recruiting on a budget 101: Master plan to win the social media jackpot with prospective students”
2. LiveVideoU: Changing the Way a Prospective Student Views your Campus
3. Social Networking Research: 99% of Your Audience Are On Them, Still Need More Convincing?

There are many ways to promote your faculty, just giving their contact information, linking to their personal or university web sites or give them the ability to control their own profiles with some constraints. Faculty seem to be pretty particular with their information and control of their content which can make promoting it quite difficult.

Why are Faculty so Important?

Talking to graduate students (especially Ph.D.) about why they choose the university they did it comes down to two key factors, faculty research and grant availability. What happens if that information is not available online? Prospective graduate students could easily overlook your university. Although the faculty do a pretty good job of publishing and talking at conferences, why not throw in some SEO and self promotion?

At Wayne State University we have ~2,800 faculty in over 350 degree programs and since our department does not oversee all the web sites at the university its hard to keep track of them all. I have put together a list of base information that every faculty should have on their site or profile page. I have also included a base profile from one of our faculty to the right.

Base Profile Information

• Name, Title
• Contact Information
• Office Hours
• Homepage, Blog
• Biography
• Degrees and Certifications
• Academic Interests
• Courses Teaching
• Recent Research
• Recent Publications
• Recent Grants
• In the News
• Photo
• CV Download

Motivating Faculty

Motivating faculty can be hardest part, but what I’ve found to be the best motivator is their peers having a better looking and a more complete profile. Basically competing internally to look the best. Giving them the tools to update their own profile and the fields that make them feel good and sell your university at the same time can go a very long way.

Motivating them to keep it updated is yet another story. I recommend sending an email after the end of each semester with a link to edit their profile. If you are lucky enough to tie your profiles into course management software it might be more apparent and likely they will update it, especially if they don’t have to remember a second username and password. Otherwise a nudge each semester from the dean with a nice note thanking them for a great semester seem to work well also.

So how does your institution promote your faculty?

I think this is the most overlooked piece of the web puzzle, there are many content managers to keep track of pages and files but what about faculty profiles? Is your faculty profiles stored in a central database and linked to the appropriate departments? Or do you even have trouble keeping track of your faculty’s externally hosted web sites? Does your institution offer web hosting for your faculty and have you had success or failure with it? What university site have you seen that does a really good job promoting their faculty?

Photo by: Paul Chenoweth

Related posts:

1. 3 Ways to Build Knowledge Base #FAIL
2. Teaching Them to Fish: Strategy for Implementing a Knowledge Base
3. 3 Social Media Assumptions Not to Make

Related posts:

1. eduStyle Awards: Best Higher Ed Blog (People’s Choice) Goes to .eduGuru!
2. Come Give Rachel a Birthday Present!
3. Nominate .eduGuru today!

I can’t think of a better present, but I need your help to do this!  The competition is TOUGH and fellow guru writer and also competitor Karlyn Morissette has already given her blessing to not vote for her wonderful blog so what better reason than to help celebrate Rachel’s Birthday than with an award?

Finally if you aren’t following Rachel on Twitter already, and let’s be honest who isn’t, jump over to her favorite social channel to give her a follow and a quick tweet telling her HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

So just in case you didn’t see the link above:

Vote for .eduGuru for Best Higher Ed Blog Award

Photo Credit: Birthday Cake Candles by Jessica N. Diamond

Related posts:

1. Happy birthday to our founder, Kyle James
2. Congratulations Rachel Reuben, MBA!
3. Recapping 2009 and What to Expect from .eduGuru in 2010

YouTube supports two formats: SubViewer (*.SUB) and SubRip (*.SRT). “To add several captions to a video, simply upload multiple files. If you want to include foreign subtitles in multiple languages, upload a separate file for each language.

There were a few tools out there but most were expensive or did not work too well. It was a major detractor for promoting accessibility.

YouTube releases CaptionTube

CaptionTube allows you to caption one of your own videos or one owned by another and simply email them the caption file. I tried it out and wanted to post a review/how to add captions. Because I don’t have personal videos uploaded so I decided to do one uploaded by my institution. Its seven minutes long and has a narrator, I decided to just do the first one minute.

Loading up CaptionTube

Initially presented with just two options, import one of your videos or type in a link to a video. The site is powered by Google’s App Engine, it has the feel of a Flash/AIR app. I typed in the URL of the and it loaded up.

Getting into the timeline view

The timeline view is like most video editing applications you can skip around and zoom in/out.

Skipping to the first spot the narrator starts to talk was not easy, pinpointing a specific time jumped a few milliseconds before or after. Since I didn’t have a transcript of the video I had to just type as the video was playing.

Its all about timing

The next difficulty came in when you click the “Add Caption” button. It was not a problem to keep up typing with the video but once done the length of the caption didn’t update. It defaults to two seconds, then its up to you to put in the length of time. If it could update the length with the play/pause times it would have saved a great deal of time.

Overall to caption one minute of video (eight total sentences) took about 15 minutes. And that included the time it took to orient myself with the software. Not bad especially for the first time.

Exporting the captions

Exporting is simple as pie, when finished just click the “Export Captions” and it allows you to Download (sub file), email the file or copy/paste the actual captions with timing.

The end result

Adding the caption file is simple, upload it right from the Edit Video area. After saved they will show up immediately. View the end result.

What is nice is if you need to make changes to the captions after reviewing the video you can log back in to CaptionTube and your captions and timings will be saved. Although I did not see a place to import an existing caption file which would be nice.

After thoughts

CaptionTube is great and needed addition to the YouTube/Google toolbox. It’s about time captioning went mainstream. Overall the site is very easy to use, just needs a few tweaks for someone typing in real time to make it more useful. I also wish YouTube allowed the CC file to be viewed as text on the front end, not just an overlay on the flash video. Not only would that increase SEO for video content but also give someone a full overview of the video’s content.

I’m not sure if it was just added this week but I have watched all the previous Weekly Presidential Addresses and this week was the first time I noticed closed captioning was enabled on all his video’s.

I encourage everyone to start captioning video’s, especially if they are associated with your institution. It not only shows you care but it also gives any who has trouble hearing or don’t have speakers the ability to still enjoy your content.

Related posts:

1. Taking Soundslides to the Next Level, Videos!
2. Designing a Custom Flip Cam
3. Wofford’s President Dr. Benjamin Dunlap went Viral!

Note: You can follow the discussion on #HETweetup

List of Attendees (and Twitter Handles)

• Jason Woodward – jdwcornell
• Adam Epstein – epsteada
• Georgy Cohen – radiofreegeorgy
• JP Bourget – punkrokk
• Gordon Ryan – Gordon_ryan
• Megg Brown – Stomer
• Kyle Rose – squarooticus
• Rick Allen – epublishmedia
• Steve Brown
• Adam Auerbach
• Karlyn Morissette – karlynm
• Kyle James – kylejames

Just a few pictures and Rock Band videos from the event.

Always good to finally meet people that you have communicating with for months and make that in person meeting happen.  Lots of great discussion flowed around, some that I’m sure will lead to blog posts.  Rock on!

Related posts:

1. Making a case for Twitter
2. Happy Halloween from the Gurus
3. Join Us for a Pre-HighEdWeb Saturday Night Tweetup

The Information on the Event

Please RSVP if you are coming, as I need an exact head count for the restaurant.  As far as it being strictly higher education people, we obviously aren’t being super critical about that, as this blog is the extent of my current connection with higher education. Please join us!

Check out the event on Upcoming.
Location: Lucky’s Lounge

So, come out and meet all the people that you tweet with, but might have never actually met in person. Even if you are way out of town Lucky’s is close to the airport, so fly in and hang out anyway!

Related posts:

1. Pictures from the first HighEd Tweetup
2. eduTweetup in Harvard Square Area (Boston, MA)
3. Upcoming Bronto E-mail Marketing Webcast with this guy!