Links to all of the talks mentioned can be accessed by navigating through the presentation itself. Also mentioned in the presentation: Dennis Crowley’s foursquare check-ins visualization video:

Foursquare check-ins show the pulse of New York City and Tokyo from Foursquare on Vimeo.

Looking for more SXSW Interactive 2013 content? Check out their Soundcloud set of various sessions you can listen to at your computer or on your mobile device.

We also briefly discussed the Battle for BU (thanks to Ryan Bersani for explaining it to us), and Spredfast, which is currently being used by PR, the Dean of Students office, Admissions and Alumni Relations.

Finally, we reviewed a web timeline of communications sent out from the University during the week of the Boston Marathon. SMC members should receive an e-mail shortly with a link to that timeline. Thank you again to all of our Communicators who helped spread important announcements on their platforms and answered questions.

We will plan to meet again in late August. Please feel free to email us with suggested topics.

Pinterest

As Pinterest membership continues to grow, some SMC members have asked if it will work for their marketing efforts. Among the BU communicators adopting Pinterest:

• Dean of Students: Kat Hasenauer pointed us to Kenn Elmore’s page, which will be used during orientation to curate the presentation topics on the fly. Each presenter will be “pinned” with their name, office, and one key takeaway: “My advice to you as a freshman.”
• Student Activities Office: Melissa Grove helps to curate SAO’s Pinterest account as a resource for students. Boards help students with event planning and ideas, as well as fun boards like “We Love Scarlet.” They are also following other schools to see how they’re using the tool. They plan to increase their efforts on the platform over the summer with the help of student workers.
• College of Communication: Though COM’s Pinterest may soon be targeted to only the Photojournalism program, Paul Kresge admitted that they wanted to experiment with the platform because “it was there and it was something new” (a sentiment that felt common across the room). Paul also pointed to their Springpad account, recently set up by the company’s ambassadors, which pulls in richer data, including Google Maps and Yelp reviews, which may make guides for students more useful.

Overall, the feeling about Pinterest seemed to be 1) it’s caught our attention because of the user base growth & news, 2) it may not be a tool for every department, but it’s worth experimenting with for now, and 3) the best use case so far seems to be to provide useful information & guides for students. One person pointed to Drake University’s Pinterest as a great example of a higher ed institution using the tool well.

Class of 2016

Gordon Ryan, Admissions’ new Digital & Social Media Marketing Manager, spoke briefly about the Class of 2016′s reaction to admissions decisions on March 24. Using @ApplytoBU, Gordon estimates he responded to over 500 students with tweets of congratulations (dashing the myth that high school students aren’t on Twitter). He also mentioned that the Class of 2016 Facebook page jumped from about 500 members (from Early Decision) to over 3,000. The page now has nearly 3,800 fans (for a class of 3,900, a significant participation rate). Gordon estimates that about 10 percent of their website visits during that week came from social media referrals, and every post they put up receives between 500-2,000 engagements (clicks, etc).

Individual schools are experimenting with social engagement for their new fall class, too. The School of Public Health will be piloting a Yammer group for one class, and possibly a Facebook group for another at the same time. The College of Communication also has established a Facebook page and Twitter account for its freshman class.

Facebook

A few new features of Facebook were discussed in brief, namely the new “Groups at Universities” functionality that Boston University is a part of. Current BU Facebook administrators have no control over the activity here (no “superadmin” capabilities), and pages are not listed here, nor pre-existing groups. For now, it is likely a listening tool for connecting with students, but if SMCers find other uses for it down the road, please let us know.

The new “messages” capability for Pages was also mentioned as an aside. This can be turned on or off, but can serve as a way for fans to ask questions that they may not want to post on the Page’s wall.

If you are interested in sharing with other SMCers more between meetings, don’t forget to join the BU Social Facebook group.

CAS Presents

Jeremy Schwab presented the latest campaign from the College of Arts & Sciences, a series of faculty expert videos dubbed “CAS Presents.” He showcased one, “Why is Modeling a Bad Job?” featuring sociology professor Ashley Mears:

Using the help of his department’s interns, Jeremy will continue to produce video showcases of the CAS faculty. You can view all of their videos here.

We will aim to schedule two more meetings this summer, the first in June focusing on Google Plus, and the second in July or August. Please reach out to Mary or Jenny with any questions, or post it to the Facebook group.

We asked attendees about progression of their blogging efforts, and the sentiment from many was that groups are moving away from blogging due to time constraints and management. BU Dining Services said they had recently taken to Tumblr, as it easily allows them to post pictures and other shorter pieces of content. Admissions brought up their new blog, which allows them a way to provide more information to prospective students. PR mentioned that one of their latest blogs, Professor Voices, had been migrated from blogs.bu.edu to a new BU WordPress site.

Kat Cornetta of the Dean of Students office advised that departmental blogs, rather than being made separate entities on blogs.bu.edu, can be integrated into BU WordPress websites by:

• Creating blog posts in “News”
• Assigning each post to a category, which is the blog’s name
• Adding the category to the site’s main navigation

By creating multiple categories, you can create multiple “blogs,” which are simply subsections of your website.

Next, we discussed location-based services like Foursquare, and though some groups expressed interest in using it, no one seemed to have solid strategies yet. An example was brought up about using the Foursquare “Lists” feature to compile recurring features, like BU Today’s “Nearby Neighborhoods” or “Lunch Anyone?” series, to repurpose content and drive Foursquare users back to BU sites.

Other technical discussions followed, including:

• Embedding playable Vimeo clips on Facebook pages
• Reserving Foursquare venues and adding venue managers
• The inability to create LinkedIn sub-pages (currently limited to one main company page for Boston University, per LinkedIn’s guidelines)

We also shared a link to a Google Doc for all Social Media Communicators to post events that need cross-promotion. If you still need this link, please send us an e-mail.

Did you have an interesting discussion that wasn’t mentioned here? Feel free to leave it in the comments.

Some key takeaways included:

- eMarketer estimates that by 2014, 60% of internet users will read blogs at least monthly (from 45% in 2008)

- Lines between blogging, microblogging and social networking are continuing to blur

- Facebook still leads the way in top method to promote blog content (according to Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2010)

- Fostering & maintaining relationships with local influential bloggers is an ongoing priority for Public Relations

- One of the best ways to get BU noticed by bloggers is to create rich, relevant content (blogging ourselves — pull vs. push)

If you are a member of the Social Media Communicators Google Group, you can now access the full presentation. We look forward to hearing more from our SMC’s as they develop their own blogs. If you are interested in speaking to the group about your school’s or department’s blogging efforts, please let us know.

Image courtesy Kristina B on Flickr.

Ryan started by presenting some of his experiments with Facebook’s social plugin tools. He has incorporated them on his own into alumni event registration pages (managed with the help of Harris Connect). He has a test site and has set up redirects for the Facebook components with the format bu.edu/alumni/like/xxxx (where xxxx is the event and date indicator). Ryan explained that the redirects are necessary because WordPress (on which the alumni site is built) does not support the alteration of meta tags, which is required for some Facebook social plugins to be functional.

Jacki DeAngelo and Adriane Dean shared their experience in using Radian6. Though they have been using it for a short time, they are already understanding the depth of what Radian6, a web conversation monitoring tool, can provide. They emphasized the “river of news” portion of the tool as being most useful, and the ability to gauge sentiment around a particular professor or program is useful. They noted that much of Radian6‘s features are more catered to corporate clients, rather than higher ed (for example, brand sentiment comparisons), but they have been tweaking the system to cater to the information they’re interested in. Jacki and Adriane would be glad to set up a tutorial one-on-one with anyone in the SMC group who is interested in test driving Radian6.

BUniverse

Ben Agoes (of the Creative Services group) presented on BUniverse, a video portal for the BU community (students, faculty, staff, alumni and our editorial team at BU Today) to share content. The BUniverse project is headed up by himself and Scott Dasse (New Media), and is currently in the beta phase. While full-scale promotions will launch in the fall, BUniverse has been integrated in many locations including the Dean of Students site, BU Today content and the BU homepage, and has been quietly gaining a following on Twitter and Facebook.

BUniverse fulfills the need for a video portal that can be tailored to BU-related content, while still tapping into the power of YouTube’s resources. Videos can either be uploaded through the site (which then uploads the video to BU’s official YouTube channel) or can pull metadata from an existing YouTube video. Tags can be added to categorize videos based on courses or colleges, which have already been populated in a smart search field to help categorization.

Contributors require a BU login to upload content and comment on videos, but anyone can view, share and embed BUniverse content. The community is moderated by Nelia Ponte (Editorial) and staff to ensure that videos and comments are within BUniverse’s Terms of Service. The top video on BUniverse has nearly 5,000 views as of 05/25, and there are currently more than 20 videos on BUniverse with over 500 views. Agoes encouraged all departments to upload their content (lectures, event videos) to BUniverse to further populate the library.

Daily News Digest

Jo Breiner (Public Relations) spoke with the group about a recent change she’s made to the Daily News Digest, a collection of news articles concerning Boston University that is sent internally to just under 300 staff and faculty members each day. She has begun using bit.ly for most of the URL’s so that she can track the number of clicks in an e-mail and gain insights on which pieces are of most interest to the internal audience. She also advised everyone to be mindful and not share videos of news coverage from our tracking service outside of the university. She stressed that while we may pass around the videos internally as much as we’d like via e-mail, we do not have the rights to distribute them externally on websites, Twitter or anywhere else.

Other Issues

Mary Tunney (Public Relations) advised the group of Public Relations’ plan to be visible at orientation and work with parents to connect with BU on Facebook and Twitter accounts (and help them get set up on the services if needed). She also updated everyone on the status of Boston University’s new Community Page on Facebook, and that we hope to know more of Facebook’s direction with Community Pages and privacy standards in the coming week. For some background on how Facebook Community Pages are currently affecting higher ed, read Michael Fienen’s “Facebook Hates Your Brand” on .eduGuru.

Next Meeting

Our next meeting will take place on Tuesday, June 29th, and a couple of our Communicators will present on their trial experience with social media monitoring software Radian6. Mary requested that the Communicators e-mail her with any other topics they’d like to discuss at the next meeting.