Social Media and College Admissions Usage
We found some great research from Dr. Nora Barnes and Eric Mattson from The University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth that provides some insights into the higher-ed social media landscape. Their study, mining surveys and interviews from 478 schools, has shown that social media has solidified a prominent position in the toolkit of admissions and enrollment [...]
Inigral Receives Program-Related Investment from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Inigral Inc. announced today that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has made a $2 million program-related investment (PRI) in the education technology company. Students use the application to obtain and share information about the academic and social environment at their school, as well as to find other students with similar interests, experiences or course loads and to organize face-to-face meetings.
Intentional Purgatory – the new place for Marketing and Communications
Marketers, you are now in “Intentional Purgatory.” I call it this because you’re now in a box just made for you – a box that people “intend” to get around to looking at, but most likely never will in any way that will command their attention for your message.
Facebook Announces “Places”
Facebook Places a “skunkworks” project last year. But last December, the team came together around a specific vision to allow Facebook users to share where they are with their friends. Places was built on three premises: Sharing where you are Seeing who’s around you Seeing what’s happening where you are
“Email is probably going away,” says Facebook’s COO
A major leader in the social networking industry has made a bold statement about the state of email. While the statement “Email is probably going away” may ring as bold and uninformed, Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg has sound reasoning for making that claim. At Nielsen’s Consumer 360 conference yesterday, Sandberg spoke about the value social media has on businesses.
Facebook Uses Users to Shape the Direction of New Product
If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and you work in the tech community, there’s a good chance you’ve been invited to, or know someone who has gone into Google for usability testing. Just recently, Facebook has made it possible recently users to apply contribute to the development of a new feature their releasing called “Questions”.
Keeping up with Facebook in Higher Ed
The Game is rigged. Facebook has you spend time and money promoting your presence on that platform to users of their platform. Of course they’re going to make that take more clicks and cost more money in the short run. While they’re the only game in town, it only benefits them. The best way to differentiate yourself from the confusion, in our opinion, is to introduce a Facebook Application for your College or University.
Accepted and Enrolled Student Communities using Ning: No Longer Free, Never Was Good
Ning just announced they’re killing the free version of their niche social networks.
In the battle of Ning vs. Facebook, Facebook won bigtime. People are more interested in connecting with their friends than with niche communities…. Or, are they? Kind of….
And BTW Higher Ed, Facebook’s Changing Again
Unlike previous major updates to Facebook, they are showing progress in terms of updating users of major changes and releases before they take place to allow people to prepare. This is a practice that every service provider should aspire to master. And at Inigral, we’ve taken some queues from the team at Facebook ourselves in terms of keeping our community up to date.
Student Clubs, Virtually: A Reply to an Inside Higher Ed Editorial
Community is one of the most influential factors to a student’s persistence at an institution, and has the largest effect (outside of financial reasons) on student retention as well.
Facebook Patents Newsfeed, Good Thing We’re on Platform
Good thing we’re on Facebook Platform. We’ll get to focus on our product success while others have to hire more lawyers :)
Facebook Highlights Applications Over Pages and Groups
Internally, we had mixed feelings about the new Facebook layout, with most of us having warm feelings about the change. But one thing we all were able to agree on is their preferential treatment of applications. I’ve gone on record numerous times saying that 2010 will be the year of Facebook apps. And it feels [...]
Facebook Turns Six and Launches a New Homepage
Yesterday, Facebook rolled out a new way to navigate around the site to a subset of it’s users. Like previous updates to major sections of the site, the new layout may have caught some people off guard, despite them announcing these changes at one of their developer roadmap sessions last year.
Social Software in Higher Education: Reflections on Predictions
At Inigral, we have to execute against our predictions of the future. With Gartner announcing five key predictions in a press release today, we wanted to provide some color commentary on their projections.
Bboogle Boondoggle: Why Integrating Blackboard and Google Apps is not Meaningful
Making uninteresting information appear in more places is just not a viable product strategy. The key is to enable meaningful interaction that can create new, meaningful information.
Top 10 Links of the Week (1/8/10)
At Inigral, we hope the first week of the decade was good for everyone! Here are our top 10 links for the week of January 8, 2010.
Keeping up with Facebook
This is why Facebook as a channel is simply not something to ‘have’ or ‘not have’ via an enterprise purchase, it is an evolving ecosystem that requires continued innovation. Look for a company that has bet their fortunes on Facebook even more than you have. Look for a relentless focus on the user experience and an engineering capability
Twitter to Release ‘Contributors’ Feature
Today on the Twitter blog, Animitra Banerji from their product team wrote about the ‘contributors’ feature, which allows organizations to signify which individual from their team is tweeting. Already enabled by third-party applications such as CoTweet, the difference with Twitter’s “By” functionality is that it is native to Twitter.
Community Colleges in the Spotlight
With 44% of all U.S. undergraduates enrolled in community college programs, the spotlight is finally hitting this population and shining light on the success that these programs have, not only in awarding degrees themselves, but in helping students graduate from 4-year schools.
Living with Facebook’s Updated Feeds
Over the weekend, about 300 million people were surprised to find that Facebook had changed the default home page, without any warning. There are completely different options for what shows up on your news feed now – you can view a “Live Feed”, which is a continuously-updated stream of *everything* your friends do, or a [...]
Christmas Shopping on Facebook?!
Facebook announced a revamped Gift Shop yesterday, complete with a “mall style” design that allows users to browse gifts by type. Aside from the old selection of virtual gifts, users can now purchase school-themed gifts from a number of major colleges like Oklahoma State, gifts by Causes that benefit charities and…music! It also looks like Facebook will be rolling out the option to purchase and have actual, physical gifts delivered.
UPDATE: Are Facebook Pages and Groups Merging?
According to AllFacebook.com, it appears that Facebook is possibly merging Pages and Groups. Some groups saw the changes on Tuesday, October 13th, but their Group layouts reverted back to the old design within 24 hours. Is Facebook merging the two? Do you think they should?
Facebook for Retention: An Annotated Bibliography
As more and more colleges and universities dive into using social media and social networking to attract and keep students, there is an increasing body of literature on the topic. The following is a collection of resources showing the success of using Facebook to keep students engaged and to increase retention in higher ed.
Students Equal Authenticity, Says M.I.T. Admissions
A recent study by the Association of American Medical Colleges finds that most medical school deans were aware of students posting unprofessional content online, including photos of drug paraphernalia and violations of patient privacy. “Some infractions resulted in warnings, others in being expelled,” says an ABC News reporter.
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