jameskm03

If hindsight is 20/20, then college reviews from your school’s alumni are worth big pots of magical gold to your prospective students. Put yourself in their shoes (or their parents’):  Back when you were looking at colleges wouldn’t you have given anything to learn more about the schools you were interested in from the students themselves? Before parents and students are setting foot on your campus for a tour, you can bet that they’re searching for reviews of your college online. Sure, you... Read Full Story

Dear John, It’s not you, it’s me. At the same time, it almost seems oddly fitting that I tell you all this just before my birthday. 2011 was a somewhat complicated year for me, professionally. I released my book, dotCMS From the Ground Up , spoke at more events than I can remember, did about 25,000 miles in travel, accomplished some great research, and did the most consulting work of my career with other schools. It’s been an enormous amount of fun, but I’m also just very, very tired... Read Full Story

Jason was recently telling us about the launch of their “ Connect with UNH ” page.  Managing multiple social media channels across campus that many of you face daily.  Their approach is very ambitious and I asked him to share it with our readers.  Enjoy!  –@kylejames The University of New Hampshire offers over 100 majors across multiple campuses and enrolls over 14,500 students who engage in daily discovery … including the use of social media. Research shows that social networking sites... Read Full Story

<shameless self-promotion alert> Not a day goes by when I don’t read a blog post by someone in higher ed pontificating on how we all should be utilizing content strategy on our websites, many times accompanied by a list of reasons why one simply can’t fight through all of the politics and slow moving pace (or a million other excuses) to actually implement these things at their school. Time to stop making excuses and start doing awesome work.  Here’s your chance to do everything you’ve... Read Full Story

It wasn’t that long ago that Mike Petroff wrote this blog post about Google+ Pages Launch .  Some new data about Google+ demographics pointed out some interesting trends that I couldn’t help but share.  With a sample size of 45 million crawled public profiles I feel pretty good that the sample data is accurate.  Google+ is estimated at 90 million total profiles.  I definitely recommend looking at the report but here are a couple of things that stood out to me. Read the Google+ Demographics... Read Full Story

I ( @mikepetroff ) am very pleased to announce the launch of my new website  FollowEDU ! It is a searchable directory of Twitter users in Higher Ed. FollowEDU allows users to sign in with Twitter and create an account, list their profile under Interests within higher ed, schools, companies, and more. I invite you to add your Twitter profile today. It’s very easy to create your account. Just  visit FollowEDU.com and click the Join button , then follow the steps to connect your Twitter... Read Full Story

All educational institutions work with vendors in one way or another.  Some like to bring lots of their services in-house and have almost internal agencies who do the work where others tend to outsource quite a few projects.  Either way, when you are preparing a new project you have to factor in an ROI (Return on Investment) analysis in the discussions. For a college or university it still comes down to money and this almost always comes from one of three sources: student tuition, donations... Read Full Story

Blame Travis over at EMG for this article – he pulled me into this question on Facebook about what higher ed should be doing about Pinterest . It was something that shouldn’t have riled me up, and yet it did. It doesn’t help that many of you may have also caught the article over on the CASE blog about Pinterest as well, and are now wondering: “ Is that for us? ” It was written to showcase the work Oberlin is putting in to their Pinterest account  - which I applaud their effort, if not their... Read Full Story

The beginning of the year is a great opportunity to start fresh and look at everything with a new set of eyes. Something that is easily overlooked is who (or what) has access to your social media accounts. It’s easy to change your password and revoke access from co-workers but it isn’t as easy to identify which websites and services have access to your accounts. What is OAuth? OAuth  (Open Authorization) is an open standard for authorization. It allows users to share their private... Read Full Story

The time has come. After a month of data collection, we are ready to release unto you the results of our largest survey to date. When the dust settled, nearly 500 schools had responded to this year’s CMS survey, more than triple what we had last time. The great part about that is the data is certainly good for those of you researching for yourselves. And in that regard, as always, all the research data is available to you under a Creative Commons license for you to use, recut, or combine with... Read Full Story