Social media at UniSA

If you’re not convinced that social media is here to stay, watch this video and you may just change your mind.

Below is a summary of a couple of articles you might find useful when thinking about social media in the higher education workplace.

Help Me Help You: Social Media Education. This post talks about some things to think about if you want to create a social networking presence for your school for example, and whether that’s the right path to go down. It’s not just a matter of setting up a Facebook page and waiting for things to happen. Firstly you need to listen to what’s being said about your school or event, then think about the content, integration with other marketing efforts and measurement as to whether it’s successful or not.

10 Ways Universities Share Information Using Social Media. A showcase of ten examples of universities using social media for PR, for example; showcasing student and faculty work, emergency notification, creating a dialogue and communicating to students etc.

Happy reading.

Lastly, the EduWeb conference is happening as I type in Chicago. There should be some interesting things coming out of it which I will endeavour to summarise here once the conference is over. Meanwhile you can follow it on Twitter.

Steve Berlin Johnson presented a keynote at the recent MarketingProfs Business-to-Business Forum talking about how Twitter is a great tool for finding out what our/your customers are thinking and reading about, and leveraging that for your business. He also recently featured the cover story on Time magazine.

You can also see a short video on what his keynote was about.

If you’re not on Twitter already and want to find out for yourself what it’s all about I suggest you get yourself an account and start following people and/or organisations. If it all seems a bit overwhelming here’s a great article on where to start to find people on Twitter.

On early Saturday afternoon (our time in South Australia) I got online and registered UniSA as a Facebook username. You may, or may not have, noticed that the Facebook URLs aren’t that friendly or easy to remember but Facebook changed that for pages/profiles over the weekend. Read more about it on Inside Facebook.

Now you can easily find the University of South Australia (UniSA for short) by typing www.facebook.com/unisa into your web browser.

We were able to do this as we have over 1000 fans but for pages without this many fans, you can claim your username in two weeks time. Individuals, however, can also claim a pretty URL right now.

As part of our exploration into the social media channels we came across YouTube Partners. UniSA already has a presence on YouTube but being a partner offers a bit more. The main thing that being a YouTube partner would give us was extra branding options for our UniSA channel and allow us to upload longer videos.

We went through the application process and were informed that we probably weren’t eligible but we applied anyway. A few days later we received an email informing us that we’d been accepted as a YouTube Education Partner, something we’d not heard of before. The reason we hadn’t heard of it was because it is only very new and they must have been building the list of Edu Partners before the whole thing was announced.

Now people interested in university and college content can visit the YouTube Edu website to see what’s been the most viewed, most subscribed, and also view a directory list of Education Partners. At the time of writing UniSA is not on this directory. I’m not sure why a university can’t be added when they’re accepted into the program as surely it doesn’t take that long to do. We were informed that the list only comprises universities and colleges within USA, but we have noticed others outside of this.

As an institution we can only apply once to be an Education Partner but if other areas within the University feel they need their own channel we can link to it from ours. View the University of New South Wales’s channel (they’re also a YouTube Education Partner) and note the links from their main channel to the Community and E-Learning channels.

Don’t worry, this isn’t turning into a Twitter blog but a colleague passed this clip onto me earlier and I thought I’d share. It’s a comic representation about what Twitter is.

As it’s easier to watch a video and understand concepts sometimes I’ve included a couple of other clips about Twitter also.

This one shows why people love it and why they use it.

Lastly, this one explains what it is and how it can be used for business. It’s an hour long video though.

I wrote earlier about UniSA using Twitter and I mentioned it’s also possible – to a certain extent – to monitor what people are saying on Twitter. This can provide valuable insight to us, or any, organisation about what we’re doing well, or not.

So how can you monitor what people are saying on Twitter?

If you go the web address – http://search.twitter.com/ and enter a search term – eg UniSA into the search box and click the Search button, you’ll see everyone’s who’s used the term ‘UniSA’ in their tweet.

The only trouble with using UniSA as a search term is that the University of South Africa uses this acronym too and wading through results can be a bit time-consuming (hint - clicking through to the person’s Twitter page might inform you as to their location).  A search using the term University of South Australia yields results mainly from the media.

It may be that Twitter takeup is more predominant in South Africa than South Australia and we’ll catch up here soon and therefore have more to monitor.

It is also possible to subscribe via RSS to the search results so they show up in your feed reader to save you remembering to have a look in Twitter search whenever you remember to do it.

 Note that, unlike Facebook, it is possible to view Twitter pages without having an account or being a friend.

We have dipped our toes, and are starting to get our feet wet into the sea that is social media with accounts on Flickr, YouTube, Facebook and blogging but are yet to delve into Twitter. At least I think so as I’m unaware of any UniSA specific Twitter accounts. Updated: UniSA are now on Twitter.

There are myriad uses for Twitter, but first of all, what is it?

Twitter is a micro-blogging platform which allows 140 character status type updates and a very quick way of getting the news out there. When the plane crashed into the Hudson River people were Twittering about it before news reports happened. It was also an immediate way of finding out what was happening with the Victoria bushfires.

As a regular reader of social media type blogs, and others, Twitter is mentioned a lot and while I can’t find out how many users there are, its use is very widespread as Barack Obama,  Stephen Fry, and you can see others on Twitterholic use it. I read just as much about Twitter as I do about Facebook, if not more, and its recently taken off in a big way as more and more people use it.

So how could Twitter be used within higher education? My initial thought was that it would be good in an emergency or crisis situation and hopefully we won’t have one of those. But there are other potential uses. 

Jeremy Wilburn suggests using it as a substitute for live chat in admissions. For us it could be Campus Central and perhaps Student Admin using it to help out new students enrol and feel their way around studying at UniSA.

Mike Volpe on HubSpot suggests we could engage our CEO (our Vice Chancellor) in Twitter, have live updates about events, or keep in touch with media.

I had a scout around to see which higher education institutions are using it, or what Twitter might be used for in higher ed. This is what I found:

• Twitter tweets for higher education
• Twitter in education: practical solutions
• Master higher ed Twitter list - a pretty comprehensive list of those in higher ed who are Twittering
• Twitter – a different kind of conversation
• Activating alumni networks with Twitter (includes a white paper)
• Uses of Twitter in higher education

So there’s some reading to keep you going for a bit.

But I haven’t mentioned another powerful use for Twitter, that is monitoring the conversation about an organisation. That’s for the next post.

UniSA have recently started a pilot using QR codes on some of its publications. QR codes only recently came across my radar when a friend mentioned them to me so when I saw a code (similar to image on left) on one of those big cardbooard movie advertisements that cinema foyers have, I knew what it was.

What is a QR code? QR stands for Quick Response. A QR code is kind of like a barcode that’s on just about everything we buy, but a QR code can hold a lot more information like web addresses and other textual information like contact information.

We’ve written more info about what QR codes are, and we’ve even got an explanation video on how to read them.

I came across this video today and it explains social media in layman’s terms.

And icecream is the perfect analogy to use on a really hot day like today.