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.