I am still waiting on presentations, but here is wrap up of my most important take aways from the conference. Some of these are obliviously specific to my particular communication and marketing challenges but I am sure that at least a few may be of worth to you.

Practically the entire conference revolved around web 2.0, social media, and how to use it. Its the future and its the new landscape that we need to be very familiar with. Traditional press releases are like newspaper advertising, marginally useful (depending on the audience of course) and slowly decreasing. That topic deserves a few hundred blog posts to I will cut it short and just get to my list:

• Using Flash – Casey Paquet of Eckerd College gave an entertaining presentation on the use of flash. Bottomline, flash should never be used to: communicate any important information or as main navigation. Entertainment is the best use of flash, and as long as it does not bog down your site it may be used sparingly. Good example = School Daze, Bad Example= Gotduck(for something as important as a virtual tour it takes too long and you do not get much information as your drill down). Great use of alternate web code that looks like flash but loads and performs much better = Brown U and CODA

• CMS Solitions – Casey also gave a breakout session on CMS and it was also discussed by other presenters. Here are some vendors that were mentioned: Hannon Hill, Ektron, Red Dot, Asp.net. Important note: 80% of CMS implementations fail. You must define clear goals (re-purposing content, scalability) prior to evaluating solutions, no CMS will do everything for you, they all have strengths and weaknesses. Assess your content before beginning. Paul Redfern of Gettyburg College mentioned that his CMS automatically adds google analytics codes to his pages and subsequently he tracks every story his people write using this method. He can then discuss with content providers which stories receive the most hits and tell them why they can or can’t be on the homepage at that time. This is awesome, perfect use of analytics for marketing.

• Usability Testing – Tom O’Keeffe, director of web content at Colgate University spoke about his web re-design. The following usability testing third parties were mentioned: NNG, UIE, Indiana University, Bentley College. Ballpark figures: usability testing = 15-20k, web redesign = $75-100k. They use Asp.net.

• Using Linked-in – Elizabeth Allen of the Caltech Alumni Association gave an informative talk on social networks and my office has actually adopted her office’s stance on making sure that we are on all of them. For those who may be unaware, Linked-in is professional social network. It has established itself in a very specific niche, a professional networking tool. Here is my profile on it. Linked-in can provide a badge for your university or company by creating a group. This works will for alumni or maybe students. Although there are not many other options, including tracking info, it also does not require too much work past the set-up and occasional approval via email.
  

• Monitor your online reputation – Andrew Careaga of Misourri S&T who has an excellent blog at highered.prblogs.org gave a great session on social media and your online rep. (Andrew, all your comedy relief slides were not lost on me, I love the lolcats and rickrolling the conference) Best advice: set-up a regular schedule and review all the following sites or services to make sure you are up to date on what’s out there: technorati, blogpulse, twittertroll, blinkx, delicious, juicy campus, google news alerts, digg.

• Social Media is the future – Michael Sippey of Typepad gave a very high tech demonstration of the power of social media and what will be coming down the pipe. Many blogs are already seen as legitimate news sources. In December of 06 there were 22 blogs in the top 100 news sources. Site/content “aggregators” will be the next wave of websites, taking social network site information or other web 2.0 sites and making a home for all of them. You log on to one site and all your friends, links, videos, etc are all there, no matter what service you use. This topic deserves its own post so I will leave it at that. Marketers should all have a plan to monitor online reputation.

Here are some random notes that I found interesting:

- facebook now has about 69 million active users
- Youtube was create in Feb 2005 (every second 10 minutes of content is uploaded)
- Alexa.com lets you compare sites
- Linked in – 20million users, 150 industries, started in june 2005

That all for now. If presenters allow I will post any presentations they send or link to them directly.

I will leave you with this very entertaining video which does a great job of explaining why the future looks bright: (sorry I couldn’t resist, if you do not understand watch this)

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What does that even mean, Web 2.0? Watch this video and it may help you understand. Web 2.0 simply refers to the new software, language, and features being built into new websites. They allow for more interaction among users and they make users the actual providers of the content. They are breeding a society of people who are always connected and always “feeding the beast”.

Ok, but how can this help me market my company or institution?

It is important to think of web 2.0 sites as channels or communities where your people are already talking about your brand. You cannot stop them, you cannot control them but you can have a voice in the conversation and you can steer the message that you have access to on your piece of the web 2.0 real estate.

Lets start by identifying a couple of web 2.0 sites and how FIU is using them to expand the content they already produce.

Youtube.com – it has the demographics of regular television yet there is no cost associated other than the cost of creating of the actual content which you post. What exactly is there to lose? Yes you could create your own video hosting system and it could be neatly embedded into your site and work flawlessly BUT who will watch it, will it be searchable by millions instantly? Probably not.

We launched a youtube channel last year as a means of hosting our videos for online articles. All together our channel has received nearly 3,000 video views.

Flickr.com – flickr is a photo hosting and sharing site. Our flickr site currently feeds a slide show of campus shots which is updated regularly. Its easy of use makes it the ideal method for uploading and sharing photos, including the ability to integrate them into almost any website or blog and of course they are searchable on the flickr site.

I will continue this discussion with suggestions for the use of facebook, myspace, blogs, rss, and other web 2.0 sites and features in the next post.

Another important note is that by virtue of being on these sites as an institution you are projecting an image of being ahead or at least in line with the latest technology.

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