Twitter is on life support

Posted on March 4, 2009 by hetypesshetalks

He Types

Matthew Levy

I am on the verge of declaring the unthinkable (at least for Web communications folks) – Twitter is dead to me. Well, almost.

It hasn’t even been a year, and I am just about ready to give up on the much beloved network, just as they try to move their operations toward profitability (though I doubt Twitter taking on Google is the right move; acquisition anyone?). While there are undoubted successes in our year together (Facebookgate, Rick Sanchez), there hasn’t been that much value added to my life.

Too much noise
The biggest problem is that Twitter’s signal-to-noise ratio is untenable. Others have commented on this problem before me, so I know I’m not the only one facing this. I can’t filter through all of the commenting to find the content of value to me. While searching Twitter is an option, I am not going to turn to the Twitter collective over the Google collective anytime soon.

Too many friends
Why not unfollow people that are too noisy? Well, this is a social network after all, and there is a certain amount of bad taste in disconnecting from someone. I’m generally a friendly person and don’t want to build a reputation as anything other than that. I just wish I had been able to achieve the following/follower ratio of Avinash Kaushik, but that isn’t realistic for anyone other than tech rock stars. I had high hopes that TweetDeck would ease my pain with its groups of friends, but the interface is too clunky to bother having it hog desktop space (and I have two 23″ monitors).

Too much declaring, not enough questioning
I have tried throwing questions to the collective, and rarely ever get a response. This is how I know Twitter’s search-based business strategy is doomed to fail. Within my fairly small circle of tweeps, Twitter serves as a way to showcase your work or knowledge and set yourself up for that next job or consulting gig. I get that the 24-35 year-old demographic is in the business of moving up the ladder (heck, I’m guilty of it), but it starts to get old after a while. A little more give-and-take around specific questions would help me use Twitter more effectively.

Too many best-selling authors
I am especially annoyed by the snake-oil salesmen that proliferate the network. They’re real people (supposedly), and maybe I went to high school with them – I can’t remember. In any case, hitting the “block” button is an act I really want to reserve for dedicated spam bots, but I think my hand is forced here.

My last ditch strategy
I want to like Twitter – really. I love its simplicity and its personality, but changes are in order. As of today, I will:

  1. Unfollow low value folks: when I say “low value” I don’t mean it personally. I just mean I’m not gaining much from your updates. It isn’t meant as disrespect. I might follow you down the road.
  2. Block anyone that’s selling something: Basically, I’m going to stop using Twitter as a marketplace for anything except ideas.
  3. Unfollow political entities and journalists: So yes, I’m following Barack Obama, Ron Paul, and Rick Sanchez among many others. I just don’t get much from the relationship that I couldn’t get from an RSS feed. I’m headed back to that old stand-by.
  4. Target my updates to @’s and my field of interest: I’ve tried to keep my posts of high value, but I’m going to redouble my efforts to only put up content for a specific person or for a high-value reason. I’m going to be all web tech, all the time.

If you think I’m crazy (or just mean) drop me a comment or @mdlevy.

Filed under: twitter | Tagged: | 5 Comments »

Web Usage Surveys: Students, faculty and staff report on site usability and online behavior

Posted on February 20, 2009 by hetypesshetalks

We’re both talking (so you know it’s good)

Matthew Levy

Rachel Beanland

About a year ago, we (half-jokingly) declared “E-mail is so Nineties” to our co-workers in the Arts & Sciences dean’s office. We probably unknowingly stole that quote from somewhere, but in any case, it’s served as a half-hearted rallying cry for modernizing our communications and web efforts to meet the expectations of millenials. We’re still in the planning phases of our next-generation site, and the more we learn, the more we re-think some of our initial assumptions. We imagine many other higher ed folks have made similar assumptions and might like to see some of our more astute findings:

E-mail is still better than Facebook (barely).
Though Facebook might want a recount, our survey found that more students regularly use e-mail sites than Facebook. Also, students depend on the University’s daily e-mail digest, more than any other medium, to learn about campus news and events. Faculty and staff also heavily rely on that daily e-mail digest.

There is a chicken-egg scenario here – our sites aren’t terribly sophisticated in the ways that information is delivered, so our constituents have little choice but to rely on e-mail. Of course, in the areas where we do offer more modern communication channels, our users aren’t flocking to them (Twitter, RSS).

Student web usage - top sites by category

Student web usage - top sites by category

College students aren’t content contributors.
Despite the proliferation of online content in the past five years, 18-22 year-olds are not the primary creators of it. While the myth persists that college students are experts in all things Web, they are really just experts in all things Facebook, and that only holds true if they are used to the interface (who could forget the mass chaos unleashed with “new.facebook”?). Students are not contributing videos to YouTube, they are not regularly commenting on blogs, they aren’t even uploading photos with great frequency (55% of survey respondents report uploading photos to Facebook monthly; 23.5% weekly).

If RSS feeds to the forest, and no one reads it, did it make an impact?
Both students and faculty/staff report they never read RSS feeds in overwhelming numbers. Coupled with the lack of dedicated blogging consumption (45% of students and faculty/staff “never” read blogs), we have a population that isn’t terribly sophisticated in it’s Web 2.0 information consumption. And of course Twitter, the stomping ground of higher ed tech folks, has almost no penetration among regular people (#tooweird).

What’s a “yooarel”?
Despite a simple, consistent site naming convention, a discussion with several first-year students revealed that they don’t know how our sites are named (i.e. biology.richmond.edu). They only know the web addresses of a small handful of high-value sites (cdc.richmond.edu, library.richmond.edu), otherwise they rely on navigation and search to unearth the rest of our content. In our survey, 57% of students reported that they’ve memorized some of our URLs, though I suspect that this confirms what the first-year students told us. By contrast, 65% of students report having bookmarked UR sites, with 49% reporting that they use the links on our “on campus” landing page.

These numbers tell us that students use a host of navigational techniques (direct navigation, bookmarks, link lists, in addition to search) to reach our content. As such, we should build systems that encourage multiple entry points and simple navigation structures. We can’t rely on URL naming conventions to assist with site navigation. In the very near future, the idea of navigation based on URL will become decreasingly important. As we’ve seen with Chrome and Firefox, searching and caching from the address bar is simplifying the URL-typing process. This will become more necessary as the number of domains available increases – ICANN is planning to change the methodology behind domain naming so as to increase the number and variety of domains available. With increased naming conventions comes less confidence in the ability to type the correct domain, hence we’ll see an increase in the reliance on navigation bar searching.

Texting is the generational dividing line.
Two numbers tell this story: 84% of students send a text message at least every day (55% of those students send a text message “hourly”). 24% of faculty and staff send a text message every day (42% never send text messages). While there may be a lot of buzz surrounding Facebook’s move into older demographics, texting remains an activity of the young.

While we can’t build entire site strategies around texting, most universities are opting out of the most critical communication channel available to their students. A modern college site should give students ample opportunity to opt-in to specific types of text messages (event reminders, deadline notices). With 53% of our students enrolled in an unlimited text messaging plan, we are missing a critical opportunity to reach a broad swath of our “on campus” audience.

Mobile is coming, but we have some time.
Down the road, mobile strategies will play an increasingly important role in how colleges distribute information. As mobile browsers evolve, there will be an increased expectation that your site work with that device. UR sites are woefully inadequate on mobile devices. Luckily, we don’t see a large percentage of mobile browsing among students or faculty/staff (about 10% have visited a UR site from a mobile device), but we surely will during the next cycle of phone upgrades. Now is the time to get in front of this issue.

We have to go back to basics, but well-designed basics.
When we asked students what they want in a site, they don’t want much. In the world they’ve grown up in, Google has always been a simple little search bar on a blank canvas of white and Apple’s design principles have sunk deep into their subconscious. They want a functional site that looks clean and attractive. Good design matters as much if not more than good navigation (especially since they’re not using the navigation anyway) and universities’ Web feng shui is ultimately factoring into where they send their deposits. They gushed about some of the sites they loved as they were going through the admissions process, sites that helped them envision that they were already on campus. They were equally dismissive of the ones that didn’t speak to them, admitting that bad Web sites led them to make assumptions about the entire university.

Where does this leave us? With lots more research to do, that’s where. But we’re honestly a little relieved. As a higher ed institution, it’s tempting to measure ourselves against corporate competition and feel like we’ve been left in the dust. And so we have. But as the dust settles, we look around and realize we’re surrounded by friends–current students, faculty and staff who haven’t reached technology’s furthest frontiers yet either and who are waiting to follow our lead.

Filed under: Strategy, analytics, feedback, social networking, user experience | Tagged: , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Social Network Case Studies on Ning – Richmond Road Runners

Posted on February 11, 2009 by hetypesshetalks

He Types

Matthew Levy

This is part two of case studies in social networks. Part one discussed the successes and challenges of the UR Groups site. This study will examine a different network, one with a strong community committed to a single goal – running in Richmond, Virginia. The Richmond Road Runners club (RRRC) is one of the largest running groups in the country,

Audience demographics

Richmond Road Runners

  • Several thousand club members
  • Club members and groups were dabbling with primitive social networking functionality (discussion boards, blogs, maps, etc) across several services that weren’t integrated with the home site.
  • Highly focused (on running, obviously), highly active user base
  • The group needed an efficient content management system that supported user contributed data to ease the burden on the site webmaster for content updates.
  • The Ning site was launched in December 2008.

RRRC – successes and challenges

The migration process with RRRC was very smooth for the most part. Much of their activity is time-sensitive (things such as upcoming races, club announcements, and group meet-ups) so we were able to mostly focus on streamlining their navigation structure and configuring Ning to best meet the club’s objectives, instead of worrying about moving and housing old content.

With a very active user base, we knew that the discussion forum would play a critical role in the success of the site, with group creation secondary to that. We also knew that event management was strategically critical so the club could promote and organize events. Obviously, Ning makes all of those things very easy to accomplish.

Though I don’t have analytics from the old site, the Ning-based site seems to be a panacea of content stickiness. The bounce rate hovers below 20% with a time on site over 4 minutes per visit, coupled with a pages per visit number greater than 7. Like with UR Groups, these data support the notion that socially powered sites are simply more sticky than non-social sites.

The biggest hurdle with the site was attempting to consolidate a legacy membership database with the account concept in Ning. We realized fairly quickly that there was little chance of integrating the two, so the group continues to outsource their membership database needs to another vendor. The club also makes use of an .asp page that displays race results from that membership database. As such, they are forced to maintain their old web hosting account to support legacy .asp files. If Ning hadn’t eliminated PHP access, these forms could have been tightly integrated into the new site – well… that said with the caveat that we would have needed access to a database to store data, which is (in my estimation) a necessary addition to the Ning platform long-term. I haven’t been able to recommend Ning to groups with MySQL needs due to this lack of a feature (in those cases, WordPress is a better light-weight CMS).

Ning does news feeds

On the RRRC homepage, we highlight a “featured” blog maintained by the club’s webmaster to give that page the “breaking news” functionality that many organizations crave for their sites. Ning makes this very easy as the blog is maintained on Ning, and we just dropped a “blog” widget onto the home page layout.

Discussion boards gone wild

While we couldn’t sustain a discussion thread on UR Groups for anything, the RRRC has cranked out 200 discussion threads in about 2 months of use. While not every discussion is multiple threads deep, many are, and reflect the breadth of activity throughout the club. For a group that had a very primitive discussion board prior to the Ning conversion, this feature has been a dynamic addition to their club. The difference between the success of discussion forums on RRRC when compared to that of UR Groups clearly stems from the differences in the sites’ audiences.

Spammers in our midst

Probably the most annoying aspect of maintaining a Ning site that is open to the world is the deletion of spam accounts. Though there haven’t been many spam accounts created on RRRC, there have been a few, which manifest themselves when the spammers post blog entries or pages related to some “very special” services they offer. As a best practice, Ning site owners should review all blog posts and all pages created on the network on a regular basis and ban anyone that posts anything questionable. I also recommend auditing member pages to check for misuse, though this becomes difficult when you have several thousand members of your site. This is the one area that might catch newly-minted Ning webmasters unaware – you will spend time checking for abuse by your members.

Long-term strategy

With RRRC having used the Ning platform for only a few months, we will no doubt return the site at some point and make some modifications to its information architecture and graphic layout. Balancing the needs of the club’s administration with the system features of Ning will be a long-term challenge, though all feedback to this point has been very positive. As a CMS replacement, the club’s webmaster is very pleased, though as with UR Groups, there is a need for an improved WYSIWYG module. I fully expect that an organization with RRRC’s level of member commitment and interaction will benefit directly as Ning enhances the platform.

Filed under: Lessons Learned, Strategy, ning, social networking, user experience | Tagged: , , , | 3 Comments »

Social Network Case Studies on Ning – UR Groups

Posted on February 11, 2009 by hetypesshetalks

He Types

Matthew Levy

I thought it might be interesting to share some results from two Ning-based social networks and the very different ways they have been utilized. One example, which reader’s of this blog won’t be shocked to hear about, is UR Groups, the social networking site at the University of Richmond. The second site is the Richmond Road Runners club, which Rachel and I recently migrated to Ning. (The Richmond Road Runners study is a little different for this blog as it lacks a specific focus in higher ed, but there a number of take-aways of value.)

If you aren’t familiar with the Ning feature set, I recommend reading up on that as a reference for this article. I’ve already talked a bit about some of the platform changes Ning made late last year, and will briefly mention how those changes impacted site designs. I’ll also discuss Ning’s features and how they were utilized (or under-utilized) by the site audiences.

Audience demographics

University of Richmond

  • Approximately 3000 students, 300 faculty, 1000 staff members
  • Social networking/technology usage varies heavily, from Facebook-generation students to e-mail-printing faculty and staff.
  • Campus Web sites have been undergoing migrations to a new CMS,  with information architectures focusing on top-down messaging throughout the sites.
  • The campus relies heavily on a daily e-mail digest to communicate events and announcements.
  • There are disparate interests across the user base with varying degrees of commitment by users and groups.
  • The Ning site was launched in May 2008 (read more).

UR Groups – successes and challenges

After taking our school through site migrations that removed much of the messaging freedom from our academic departments, we knew that we needed a web space that allowed for user-contributed content in a very flexible manner. Our first attempt at this was through advocacy of WordPress Multi-user installation that allowed any person or department to have a blog with almost unlimited creative freedom. We quickly found that the core of faculty and staff committed to active blogging was fairly small, and the idea of using WordPress strictly as a content manager for static web content never caught on. We felt that blogging would never be the collaborative space we had envisioned for faculty, staff and students. At the same time, we had a small and clunky intranet set-up for the School of Arts & Sciences that really caused more confusion than anything, but given the needs of our School’s main site, we had no where else to put this content.

After stumbling across the University Web Developers site, we thought we might have a solution to both problems in a Ning-based intranet-type site. We assumed our students would be very comfortable working in a Facebook-like space, and that our faculty would appreciate the ease-of-use that comes along with the Ning platform. We also saw an opportunity to integrate and push the content we were creating on our other web sites through the RSS widgets and the Ning APIs. I also loved the ability to work directly with the PHP behind the network, so our options to build on Ning’s platform were nearly limitless.

During the summer of 2008, we recruited several hundred students, faculty, and staff to UR Groups and asked them to work and communicate in various capacities on UR Groups. During the summer we saw bounce rates under 25%, time on site numbers averaging 6 minutes per visit, and saw pockets of interest among the community members. We felt that a recruiting push at the start of the fall semester would make UR Groups an indespensible communication channel. We were only partially correct.

On the positive side, bounce rates and time on site continue to hover around 25% and 4 minutes per visit, both numbers that easily trump the rest of our traditional sites. It seems like visitors to the site do in fact use it (and we are seeing several thousand visits per month). Our most popular content was, obviously, the content that was being pushed with a purpose – course work, “intranet”-type documents, and discussion groups focused around specific groups on campus (like a scholarship community).

For groups with very specific communication agendas, UR Groups proved to be an easy-to-use medium (like a wiki, only friendly). We found that the groups had to have at least one (preferably more) dedicated content creator that pushed the other group members to return to the site. Without that, there was little reason to randomly log-on to the network.

We also learned from focus groups and surveys of students that the UR Groups homepage was confusing and overloaded with information. This was a design mistake on our part – while we wanted to take advantage of the RSS widgets built-in to Ning, we shouldn’t have cluttered the home page with information that wasn’t related to the core goal of the site – group creation and information sharing. Our push towards an “intranet” site collided with our need for groups/mini-sites. The two can’t really exist in the same place.

Coupled with the design challenges, we often heard that students really weren’t sure what to do with the site. As a result of the feedback, we re-designed the look of UR Groups, and threw out (or at least hid from the home page) every feature that didn’t support group formation and collaboration. We also added explanatory text prominently on the home page. With the refreshed look and simpler interface, we’re hoping that UR Groups can live up to its potential as a group/mini-site platform.

UR Groups Old:
groups-old

UR Groups New:
groups-new

An evolving platform

The good people at Ning are nothing if not productive. They continue to modify their product and push out new releases. Generally, I have been pleased with the changes in the product over the past nine months, though I continue to miss the PHP and API functionality. Though I miss that developer toolset, the loss of those access points did lead to a re-thinking of how we might leverage a general-user Ning site in our overall Web strategy. I continue to believe that there is a strong need at UR for a micro-site/wiki type platform that allows users to quickly generate content, collaborate with colleagues, and share that information with the world. We took a strong step in that direction with the removal of the convoluted log-in process I put in place at the start of the project, instead moving to an open social network (as a general bit of advice I see little to no value in having a closed social network – unless you are in K-12. That’s what Facebook is for, and folks just aren’t going to log-in to another closed social network).

Before I list some of the specific challenges we have, I want to add that Ning is an incredibly well-built, robust platform that offers a lot of features. We wouldn’t be in the position of considering a “micro-site” platform without the ease-of-use that comes from having Ning do the heavy programmatic lifting. That said, some of the challenges that work against Ning as a sustainable micro-site platform for us are:

  1. A lack of calendaring/scheduling specific to a group – since we are pushing groups as collaborative spaces, naturally those groups want to integrate a calendar of some sort. Though Ning has a robust event calendaring system built-in, right now it doesn’t support segmentation of events in a way that integrates with the groups. This problem could be fixed by allowing the global event RSS file to be tailored based on tag type (the blog RSS feed allows for this), though a tighter integration between groups and events would be very welcome. Another solution seemed to lie in using embeds from Google Calendar, though I was disappointed to learn that non-administrators can’t add iframe tags to HTML fields in Ning. Perhaps with the newly added roles feature, we could see something that would let group creators add iframes with approval.
  2. A primitive WYSIWYG editing interface – Our group creators don’t want to learn HTML – hence an improved page editor would be a big help.
  3. Awkward document management – while our users have successfully navigated file uploads and attachments within Ning, it would be very helpful to have: 1. a list of documents posted per person; 2. a list of documents posted per group or discussion; 3. a master list of all files posted to the system.
  4. Account creation/approval process – let’s be honest – everyone in higher ed (and probably anyone with corporate interest in Ning) wants to approve folks with myschool.edu accounts, and review/deny anyone using a non-myschool.edu accounts. Letting network creators have more control over account creation and permissions would be a huge plus in the long run.
  5. Content restriction based on account type/account access – it would be great to restrict access to certain site functions based on user group; for example, I can see wanting to restrict photo access to only people with myschool.edu accounts.

Long-term strategy

I realize that our usage of Ning is a bit unconventional, though I don’t think our strategy is so unusual that our concerns aren’t valid. Ning could be a robust platform for corporate and higher ed intranet/micro-site usage with a few additional features and refinements to current features.

The plan is to push UR Groups as a platform for micro-sites. In no way does our Ning site attempt to replace our core sites; rather it serves to complement them by giving space to the lesser-resourced groups on campus – a carpooling effort, scholarship groups, even a faculty/staff document repository. We intend to monitor site usage to see if we can spur interest in making it an “on campus” home page/portal-ish landing page, though that goal is now clearly secondary to the micro-site goal. With any luck, Ning’s development goals will continue to align with ours.

Filed under: Lessons Learned, Strategy, ning, social networking, user experience | Tagged: , , , | 5 Comments »

Let Yahoo! Pipes Extend Your Content Management

Posted on January 24, 2009 by hetypesshetalks

He Types

Matthew Levy

We all have love/hate relationships with our content management systems. They give us our best hope of corralling the thousands of data bits our constituents generate, but at the same time, all systems have their limits. Even the best out there don’t necessarily help you if you made any customized tweaks to your set-up.

Most everyone that reads this blog is familiar with Google Reader and its powerful RSS aggregation features. You can mash up the feeds of your favorite blogs and sites and output them into one or more cohesive feeds. Not as many people know about Yahoo! Pipes, Yahoo’s aggregating tool. More than just an RSS masher, Pipes lets you control the input and output of data streams in highly targeted and specialized ways.

Rachel and I manage 53 sites within the School of Arts & Sciences, and on each of those we have several feature stories that showcase faculty and students. We have a great assistant (Giavanna Palermo) that helps us write and maintain those stories, but with several hundred of them, we can lose track of what goes where. Given the limitations of our CMS, we’ve relied on Excel spreadsheets to track which feature goes where, as well as log it’s details. That really isn’t a great solution, and we’ve never really had an easy to spot check our features quickly.

A second challenge for us is the lack of RSS feeds on our feature stories. We have RSS for our news releases, but not features. This means that when we need to audit 53 sites worth of features, we’re facing hours and hours of clicking and Excel logging – not fun by any means. Well, we were facing that until I spent some time with Pipes.

Pipes not only mashes up RSS feeds, but also can accept Web pages as data. Leveraging this feature, I was able to build a pipe for each of our feature index pages and output those pipes as RSS. Once I was able to move our static HTML regions into RSS, it was a simple thing to build a small PHP page that parsed those RSS files and aggregated them together in an easily readable format. As one last step, you can grab RSS files of your account’s pipes’ RSS files, so you can build a list of all of your lists (it sounds confusing, but once you get in there and mess around with Pipes, you’ll see what I mean). Take a look at the end result on our feature aggregator page (just be warned that it is a ton of data, so it can be a little slow to load).

A couple of caveats:

  1. Unfortunately, I have to build a separate pipe for each page that I wan to turn into an RSS file (and I haven’t finished that yet as it takes a little bit of time to keep cloning pipes). If I were able to work with feature RSS files, rather than translate static HTML, I could build one pipe that mashes it all together. It would be great if Yahoo extended the page input function to grab multiple pages at once.
  2. You have to publish each of your pipes to get the RSS file to list in your profile’s RSS file.
  3. The PHP behind the scenes isn’t completely automated. I had to hardcode some values based on the number of pages of RSS files I create. Yahoo limits the number of Pipes listed in your account’s RSS file to 10 per page, at which point you have to toggle a GET flag in the RSS URL (page=2, etc).
  4. I have to rely on Javascript or PHP to sort the objects on my output page. There is no way to sort the order of my pipes in my account, so if I mistakenly enter chemistry’s pipe after education’s, the output files won’t be in alphabetical order (and as you can see from the aggregator page, I did that very thing, and haven’t written the Javascript to move things around in the correct order).

In any case, Pipes is a very powerful aggregator and has the potential to let you build content views that your CMS can’t give you. So long as your pages and feeds are well structured – or at least consistently structured – there is almost no limit to the amount of data aggregating you can achieve. Happy mashing!

Filed under: Content Management | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Thoughts on Facebookgate/2013 – if you can’t trust your classmates…

Posted on December 23, 2008 by hetypesshetalks

He Types

Matthew Levy

With the dust settling from Brad Ward’s exposure of College Prowler’s creation of several hundred college-branded Facebook groups, the comments, both on Brad’s blog and on the Chronicle have shifted away from the core issues. The facts of this situation remain:

1. College Prowler used trademarked materials without consent and attempted to profit from their use.

2. College Prowler employees or associates misidentified themselves to thousands of high school seniors in an attempt to drive traffic to their own web properties via Facebook. In so doing, they violated Facebook’s terms of use.

The arguments as to whether this was a matter of consequence, or whether colleges are over-reaching in controlling their brand are completely off-point. These are separate issues. Any action, whether taken by colleges or Facebook, will and should have already centered on the two core issues.

To poke, or not to poke

I’ve noticed that several of the commentators are arguing that colleges should ignore Facebook and just let the communities develop naturally. After all, the argument goes, colleges can’t control what happens in Facebook and shouldn’t stifle communication. Colleges are acting as censors when they shut down “unofficial” groups.

Truly “unofficial” groups, pages, and other web properties are not of any serious consequence for universities. What is of consequence is the misuse of collegiate intellectual property by a for-profit organization, especially one engaging in deceptive practices. Knowing silence by Brad – or any other college administrator – would have nearly been complicity in fraud. As a college administrator, if you learn that your students are intentionally being deceived, you have a duty to intervene to the best of your ability. Even if your concern is purely one of marketing and not student affairs, protecting your students is akin to protecting your brand.

Social media depends on trust

Trust is the driving force behind the social web. Violations of that trust will only erode the experience for everyone. If web marketers intend to stay in business long-term, they should work to bolster trust in social technologies. Self-described “aggressive marketing” actions by College Prowler do nothing to that end. Even Facebook has a decided interest in seeing that its trust models remain intact (hence the verbiage of their terms of use).

Just as much as College Prowler and other marketing organizations feel a need to protect their ability to reach their audience, so too must colleges. Our brands depend heavily on the relationships between our students, staff and faculty, and alumni – we cannot sit idle while our brands and constituents are misled. Kudos to all those that worked on exposing College Prowler’s actions and here’s hoping other “aggressive” advertisers have taken note.

Filed under: Facebook | Tagged: , | 5 Comments »

Facebook Fraud Under Investigation

Posted on December 19, 2008 by hetypesshetalks

Brad Ward is leading an investigation into apparent fraud in the creation of several hundred Facebook groups by a ring of folks apparently tied to College Prowler. Read more on Brad’s blog SquaredPeg and follow live events on Twitter with #2013.

Filed under: Facebook, social networking | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

Evolving User Expectations: “Make it like Gmail”

Posted on December 9, 2008 by hetypesshetalks

He Types

Matthew Levy

Here’s a quick thought on the evolution of user expectations. I’ve heard from a few students this semester as they’ve worked on course evaluations that they’ve had their sessions timeout before they’ve had a chance to submit their work. I’ll need to do some background work on my server configuration, but I think my sessions timeout after 60 minutes of “inactivity”.

I don’t blame the students for being upset – I know I would be. It just seems that this year in particular I’ve had a spike in users expecting an “autosave” function, and a couple of them even suggested that I need something “like Gmail has” to prevent the loss of data. My hunch is that we’re seeing a shift in user behavior as students work with Web applications more like desktop applications, and expect a similar level of uptime and reliability.

Probably more than in any other sector, applications developed for student use must keep up with innovations in work processes. I guess this is one more reason to simultaneously love and hate Google. Google’s ubiquity and genius has given us unparalleled excellence as users, but has also challenged developers to keep pace.

Tech mavens, if you ever wondered if you’d run out of work someday, I think you can rest assured that day won’t come.

Filed under: AJAX, Google, user experience | Tagged: , , | 5 Comments »

Top 10 Tips for Surviving a Collegiate Photo Shoot

Posted on December 5, 2008 by hetypesshetalks

She Talks

Rachel Beanland

I’m slightly deranged due to lack of sleep, since I woke up multiple times last night worried I’d forget my food coloring at home. Food coloring, you ask? Sure. How are you supposed to run a day-long collegiate photo shoot without food coloring? Those chemists have to cook up something attractive in the lab.

Today marked my second foray into the land of day-long or (heaven forbid) multi-day collegiate photo shoots. The day began at 5 a.m. when I bolted out of bed afraid I’d slept through the first shot (I hadn’t) and ended a couple of hours ago. As we were wrapping everything up, I realized the day had gone much more smoothly than I’d anticipated and that I’d actually learned a few things since I organized my first shoot the year before. You might wonder how a collegiate photo shoot’s different than any other photo shoot. I’m here to tell you… it just is. I’ve slogged film crews through tiger dens (no joke, I did PR for a zoo) but photographing students and faculty makes photographing lions, tigers and bears seem tame.

Without further ado, here are my top ten tips for surviving a collegiate photo shoot:

10. Never schedule less than 45 minutes per shot. An hour is preferable. Less than 45 minutes is insane.

9. No matter how many times you insist that students bring two changes of clothes, they will arrive wearing only the shirt on their backs. Get used to it and make sure you hire a photographer who’s really good with lighting.

8. Carry water and snacks. For one day, you need to forget that you can’t cook grilled cheese and pretend there’s a cub scouts den mother trapped inside you, just waiting to get out. Sugar-starved photographers will thank you and you never know when you’ll need a ½” high granola bar to elevate a prop.

7. Safety pins make every shirt a shirt your grandmother would love.

6. Never forget to overstate the obvious. If your students are going to wear collegiate gear in the photos, the tees and sweatshirts should advertise your university. As much as we all know they loved the first-choice university that waitlisted them, we’re all working hard to promote the university that they ultimately did decide to attend.

5. When you’re confirming your schedule, ask for students’ cell phone numbers. We all know they don’t even plug phones into the dorm landlines anymore and since it’s entirely possible you’ll give at least one of them a wake-up call the day of the shoot, you might as well be prepared. I came THIS close to texting each student 15 minutes before his or her time slot today. And no kidding, two students were late. Next time, everybody gets a text.

4. Forget about photojournalism. I hate staged shots and I love candids but it’s positively impossible to capture a faculty member looking scholarly yet approachable while simultaneously capturing a student looking intellectually curious—in the same frame. Not. Going. To. Happen.

3. Don’t schedule more than eight shots in a day. Build in a lunch and feed your crew well. Our communications assistant gets big props for carrying seven Starbucks coffees over to the science laboratories mid-morning.

2. Pay off faculty members who go out of their way for you with coffee (see number 3) and the promise of homemade goodies. Be serious about the coffee but no one actually expects you to deliver on the promise of homemade goodies (see number 8; remember you can’t cook a grilled cheese sandwich).

1. Follow up with handwritten thank you notes to all the people who made the shoot possible. You paid the crew to be there but you’ve got a limited pool of faculty and staff to tap every time you need to photograph campus. Make sure they know that going the extra mile to portray the very best the university has to offer is appreciated.

Oh yeah, and bring food coloring.

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Saying Goodbye Before Saying Hello – Ning Ends API Access and PHP Development

Posted on December 4, 2008 by hetypesshetalks

He Types

Matthew Levy

Though Rachel and I are in the middle of crafting a follow up to our original Ning post, I needed to jump in today and vent some serious frustration with Ning. One of the reasons we chose Ning as a social network platform was its support for PHP development and open APIs. This would let us work the network into our overall site strategy and present content as we need it. So much for that line of thought.

On October 21, 2008 Ning discontinued API and PHP support with little warning and is instead encouraging everyone to focus on OpenSocial development. Lucky me, I started working with the Ning API around October 10 and last touched my infant data calls on the 15th. I also have several PHP tweaks that let us customize the log-in process to suit our needs. Today was going to be the day I finally hooked everything up, but lo and behold, Ning has tied my hands.

Ning still offers a WordPress plug-in that uses PHP and the cURL command to make a remote authorization call to Ning’s servers. This is similar to what I want to accomplish, which is to make a remote authorization call and then programmatically navigate to a data feed behind our closed network. This would let me build activity feeds from some groups and output summaries of them to other UR sites (think outputting the Chemistry group’s forum feed to the Chemistry Department’s real site). Since the WordPress plug-in still works, I knew the remote authorization still worked in theory, so long as Ning didn’t cripple it.

Ning crippled it.

I understand Ning wanting to focus developer time and support on OpenSocial, but I do not understand shutting down the API access. Maybe they want to funnel developers onto Google’s platform to make a buck or two from Google – who knows? Whatever their motivation, I don’t see any reason there couldn’t have been support for the APIs alongside OpenSocial. One is primarily for supporting app development for the Ning instance (OpenSocial) and the other is for driving data to external apps (APIs).

My only option for extracting feeds from our closed network is now to use some sort of middle-ware instance of OpenSocial (perhaps some server running Apache’s Shindig or some other Google App Engine-esque implementation) so it can talk to Ning and then report back to our regular UR servers. The point of APIs was to reduce the amount of work Web developers had to do to make data mashups. Instead, I’m stuck with a social network that is basically siloed from the rest of our Web arsenal without some major work.

To pour salt on a wound, Ning won’t even let me open/edit/delete my PHP/API files from my site. I know full well this means there is no way I can tweak the fully customized log-in page we’re using. Look out if we have to change the text on the page – because we can’t!

There are still plenty of things to like about Ning, but this isn’t one of them. We’ll see if this turns into a deal breaker in the long term. The more I think about it, the more it seems like one.

Filed under: ning | Tagged: | 4 Comments »

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