University Business - January 2009 - (Page 40)

internet technology A year after, it won the prestigious 2007 South by Southwest Web Award in the blog category, obtaining de facto a direct pass to broader success with technology aficionados. As of October 2008, Twitter was used by more than 3 million people according to Twitdir, a search engine for Twitter accounts. Twitter also has a small but growing following among the higher education web and communication community, as indicated by the early results of an online survey I administrated in October 2008 about different web services targeted to this community. When asked about their communication channels of choice to receive professional development information, 19 percent of the 540 responders (all professionals working in higher education), named Twitter as one. While more and more professionals have started to rely on their personal Twitter accounts in their daily jobs, many have also created official accounts for their institution. In July 2008, Rachel Reuben, director of web communication and strategic projects at the State University of New York at New Paltz, surveyed her peers online about the use of social media in institutions of higher education. Among the 148 responses, 33 percent indicated that their institution had an official Twitter account, managed by the marketing and communication department in half the cases and updated on average between 1 to 4 times per week. But what are these higher ed users doing with their official Twitter account? “Fifty percent use it to communicate with current students, and the other half uses it to reach out to alumni,” reports Reuben in the paper she wrote about the survey, “The Use of Social Media in Higher Education for Marketing and Communications: A Guide for Professionals in Higher Education.” ENgagiNg TwEETS? A quick review of institutional Twitter accounts reveals that most post news and don’t try to engage their follower base in this two-way communication platform. 40 | January 2009 Mike Richwalsky, assistant director for public affairs at allegheny College (Pa.), created the official Twitter account for his college in May 2007 to republish news available on the website as well as via several RSS feeds. In February 2008, Richwalsky automated the whole process using Twitterfeed, a free service that will post to a Twitter account any update detected by the service at a specified RSS feed. Allegheny College’s account had been updated a total of more than 610 times but only counted 159 followers in midDecember 2008. At the same time, the personal account I set up in August 2007 and started to use regularly a year ago had 282 followers as of mid-December. This alone probably says something about the capacity of Twitter to reach members of any campus community. Allegheny College’s follower base on Twitter is actually comparable to that of most institutions. In September 2008, Colgate University (N.Y.) made a bold move by featuring the updates of its official student Twitterer, Ajay Chahar of the class of 2012, on its website homepage, on the bottom left corner. By the Resources Allegheny College (Pa.) Twitter, http://twitter.com/alleghenycol Butler University (Ind.) bloggers, http://go.butler.edu/cs Colgate University’s (N.Y.) official student Twitterer, http://twitter.com/colgateunvrsty EduComm (University Business conference) on Twitter, http ://twittgroups.com/group/educomm HighEdWeb conference, www.highedweb.com/conferences.html Karine Joly on Twitter, www.twitter.com/karinejoly RSS feeds to Twitter instructions, www.twitterfeed.com Twitter homepage, www.twitter.com Twitter directory, www.twitdir.com Wayne State University (Mich.) web blog, http://wcs.wayne.edu/blog Wayne State University on Twitter, http://twitter.com/waynestate end of the first day, Chahar had 10 followers. A month after his first Tweet, that number was up to 43, including several Twitterers working at other institutions or media outlets. “Twitter has not hit critical mass with the demographic I am targeting,” says Brad J. Ward, electronic communication coordinator for admissions at Butler University (Ind.). When he surveyed the incoming freshman class last summer, he had a clear confirmation of the poor penetration rate of Twitter among college-age students: out of the 340 incoming freshmen responding, only 31 had heard of Twitter before and two were using it. That’s the main reason Ward decided in May 2008 to start using Twitter—behind the scenes—to enable Butler student bloggers to provide quick updates about their whereabouts between longer posts on their admissions-sponsored blogs. Twitter acts like a simple backend messenger displaying on the blogs the short updates that the bloggers sent via a regular text message using their cell phones. wayne State University (Mich.) has taken an original stand on Twitter. Instead of using the platform to communicate with potential followers, the Web Communication department has decided to use it as a customer service tool to listen, address, and reply to any problems reported via Twitter. After the creation of Wayne State’s official account, any mentions of variations of the institution’s name were tracked and their authors “followed” in the Twitter sense of the term. “Students started talking more about Wayne State both positive and negative. We made it a point to respond to everyone, figure out what they are having issues with, and offer our help,” wrote Nick DeNardis in a post published in early September 2008 on the Wayne State Web Communication blog. Only time will tell if Twitter can become an effective communication channel with students. However, the best way to find out if it can help you communicate with your peers is to set up your free account and get started. universitybusiness.com http://twitter.com/alleghenycol http://go.butler.edu/cs http://twitter.com/colgateunvrsty http://www.highedweb.com/conferences.html http://www.twitter.com/karinejoly http://www.twitterfeed.com http://www.twitter.com http://www.twitdir.com http://wcs.wayne.edu/blog http://twitter.com/waynestate http://www.universitybusiness.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of University Business - January 2009

University Business - January 2009
Contents
Editor's Note
College Index
Company Index
Advisory Board
Behind the News
Sense of Place
Viewpoint
Money Matters
Financial Aid
Community College
From Data to Information
5 Reasons to Switch to Virtual Servers
Finished in a Flash
Internet Technology
What's New
End Note

University Business - January 2009