In my years that I’ve now spent in higher education, one universal truth I have found is that nothing quite moves a project along like when someone much more important and much less web savvy than you deems an issue worth addressing.  Such was the case only a couple months after I had started at the university, when the Director of Marketing noticed that new information she had put up on the site wasn’t coming up in search results, and the results that were hitting weren’t particularly relevant to the topic in the first place.  Thus, a mission was born, to find a way to make our search better, and to do it NOW.  That’s the other thing about people higher up than you, when they say jump, generally you jump.

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In the last few weeks a few new tools have come out to help in monitoring an online identity.  Because of this I think it’s important to take a deeper look into what to monitor.  As if you didn’t already have enough things to do in a normal day, there is a whole list of things that require regular monitoring.   Although this article is specifically geared towards monitoring a college’s identity, you could easily apply the same strategy to monitoring any company or even your own online identity.

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Intro 

In a simple explanation del.icio.us is a bookmarking service that uses tags instead of folders to organize bookmarks.  Because del.icio.us is an online service it is not restricted to a physical computer.  The only thing that you need is a web browser.  Many sites across the Internet support multiple bookmarking options and del.icio.us is one of the most widespread.  Instead of trying to explain del.icio.us any further here is a really good short intro that explains del.icio.us and even gives a pretty good educational related example.  Read the rest of this entry »

The search engine field sure is getting a whole lot busier the last few months and it looks like 2008 will be a busy year as we attempt to sort through the vast mountains of data that we continue to create and modify. 

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I’ve noticed that Compete and other blogs post web search market share numbers each month. Google is by far the dominate player and their share continues to grow every month. With this knowledge it’s super important to make sure that your users can find you on Google over the other search engines. Well I wanted to take this a step further to see how this universal data compares to traffic to Wofford.edu. Here is the results (by the way I’m pulling these results from our Google Analytics account): Read the rest of this entry »