Social media at UniSA

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.

We started a University of South Australia YouTube channel in May of this year. Since then 105 videos have been uploaded. Most of the videos are student testimonial type ones.

There are also some others like ‘Tomorrow’ which has been the most popular.

We also add many of these videos to our corporate website but YouTube provides another channel for marketing UniSA to people who might not otherwise visit our website.

View our other videos on YouTube.

Worth a watch, wow, I did not know

Did You Know 3.0

Today we launched our television commercial. We’ve added it to our website of course but we’ve also added it to our YouTube Channel.

Here it is. What do you think?

In the last couple of years the terms ‘web 2.0′ and ’social media’ have been bandied about more and more. So what is social media?

First, let’s take a step back to the days before social media or web 2.0 when websites served up webpages and you as a reader arrived at them to view. That’s pretty much all you did. Then websites started to become places where you could leave comments, eg weblogs (blogs), Flickr, YouTube and Facebook to name just four. Now you could participate in the content that people were putting up and it became so much easier to add your own content and discuss it with others.  Hence, the term social media.

Ben Parr’s definition is:

Social Media is the use of electronic and Internet tools for the purpose of sharing and discussing information and experiences with other human beings in more efficient ways.

There’s so many social media websites these days that it can be quite overwhelming. Here’s a diagram of a conversation prism from Brian Solis (click to view larger image):

There’s no way that you could participate in all of these, and you probably wouldn’t want to either, but if you want to get your feet wet with social media, why don’t you join some of them and have a look around?

If you want to keep it work related, then visit UniSA’s presence on social networks, have a look around, leave comments if you want (you may have to register to do so).

• UniSA’s Facebook page
• UniSA on Flickr
• UniSA on YouTube

What do you think? Leave a comment (link at top of this post) and let us know.