I read this post last night on Techcrunch about Best Buy’s twitter campaign and thought it was a fantastic idea.

I think this would be a phenomenal way to improve customer service and live our brand promise. I understand that not everyone is on twitter but getting an account is so simple and there are so many ways to access it (a new user is bound to find one they are comfortable with).

Training
Obviously, the first step would be to make sure employees understand how twitter works and what the do’s and don’ts would be. (identifying oneself as an employee, not asking for any personal info, etc).

It is also important to offer training to new twitter users.  An easy solution to this might be to aggregate the best training videos (for the various twitter applications) from the web.

Sign-up
Best Buy created a custom web application that includes an employee number for sign-up.  The legal information is also a great template.

How it works
It is actually a rather simple solution for the users. By signing in, employees add their tweets to the best buy stream and also have the ability to tweet under the collective twitter account.  They do this by adding a keyword to their tweet.

Alternates
I know there are solutions out there to have multiple users share an account (co-tweet, hootsuite) but I really think that this is a better enterprise wide solution that does away with the scheduling aspects and makes it easy for all to get involved quickly.

Imagine if your university could have at least 1-2 employees from each department/school/program using this system.

best buy, brand, marketing, social media, twitter, web 2.0 Hide

Just clicked through this on SlideShare and I found it to be a great resource for presenting the idea of Web 2.0 to folks.  Normally, online slide cannot hold my attention but the visuals and information worked great.  Kudos to the creator and contributors.  Great Work.

[slideshare id=522091&doc=web-20-1216646700998493-9&w=425]

presentation, social media, web 2.0 Hide

If you are like me, you found it much easier to grow a facebook group than a facebook page since you cannot send out “join” requests for a page and until recently we were not able to even see a page without logging on.  Groups however were easier to grow and a bit more viral in the features available. (Credit to my assistant, Karina, who discovered this recently for me.)

A request to Facebook and 24 hours is all that is needed to turn your group fans into page fans and maybe grow your page from:

this

to this

in 24 hours!!!

Here is all that is required:

1. Visit the Facebook Help Form Page.
2. Subject line should read: Convert Group to Page
3. Make sure you include the url for both the group and the page in the body of the request.
4. Watch your page fans grow!!

We doubled are fans with this new feature.

facebook, group, marketing, page, web 2.0 Hide

I received an email yesterday concerning this product. Here is a copy of it:

HEP has announced the release of a new product called Social Network Analysis (SNA), a complete package that allows non-profits and colleges and universities to develop an intelligent strategy for the social networks a.k.a. Web 2.0.

How to respond to the explosive growth of the social networks and the ways the next generation of donors and alums communicate can be daunting for a non-profit.

Social Network Analysis answers a lot of questions for non-profits including, what sites are most popular with our donors and alums. What donors or alums have the most “friends” who are possible fundraisers for our non-profit? SNA provides the constituent profiles as well which often include employer information.

According to Steve Hafner, President of HEP Development, “Social Network Analysis takes a lot of the guesswork out of coming up with a WEB 2.0 strategy. When the board asks what is your strategy, SNA provides you with answers.” For several examples of the reports provided visit http://www.hepdata.com/socialnet.cfm

The sample charts seem to be useful. It appears they are pulling data from social networks on your specific constituents. (I guess maybe by email address and/or keywords).

Seems to be a tool or service for monitoring alumni and donors on social networks and helping you come up with a web 2.0 strategy based on where they are and what they are using. I would love to hear from anyone using something like this. I will post again if I find out any more.

analysis, marketing, social networks, web 2.0 Hide

We are currently using issuu.com to host our university magazine. I wanted to write a bit about our experience, the pitfalls and my crude work around.

Challenge: Get our printed publication online as soon as it’s approved and at the printer.

We have specific obstacles at FIU since we do not have a dedicated central web team. In the past our magazine has been produced as an individual html website like this. Problem is, it takes a few weeks (or months sometimes) and requires a lengthly proof/approval process.

Solution: Enter issuu.com. I discovered it by accident while searching for PDF to flash options. It has a beautiful full screen viewer. You can even subscribe to an rss feed for receiving future issues. They features one of our issues on the home page and we received 1500 views in a few days.  Tip: make sure you pick your username as you will not be able to change it.

Technical issues: We use In-Design for our magazine and there were weird boxes appearing around certain graphic images in the magazine. You will not see the errors until it is converted and posted online, so you will need to review the publication carefully once its up.

Our low tech solution: We opened the pages from the PDF file with the problem in photoshop and recreated PDFs from photoshop for just pages that had the problem. We only had 2-3 per issue so this was not too difficult.

Conclusion: There may be many ways to do this but this is just so simple and fast that it trumps most any other I have seen. The logo and link to issuu.com is very small and the full screen viewer is very slick looking. We are still wrestling with whether we need to post the articles as web pages or maybe using blog software. The reason being, of course, that search engines will not necessary find an article and it is difficult to link to particular story. However, the search engine on issuu.com does a great job of searching the flash, even pulling up specific pages in the publication.

I will post a follow-up with our new site for hosting these flash viewers once we finalize it.

fiu, flash, issuu.com, magazine, pdf to flash, web 2.0 Hide