Secrets from the Inigral Design Team
I’ve worked at a lot of companies, but none that have impressed me more than the team at Inigral. I wanted to share with the higher ed. community an insider’s view on our design team’s process. Howard Kao is one of our lead product designers and Mike Petroff is an amazing client who acts as [...]
Facebook Developer Conference Three Key Takeaways
For the first time ever (last month) Facebook had 500 million users in one day. 1. Facebook is launching a redesigned profile called Timeline. The marketing is around “All your stories. All your apps. Express who you are.” The original profile focused on basic stats, but it was really only the first five minutes of [...]
Recruiting International Students with Social Media
Early this morning I saw an article from The Times Higher Education UK that had quite a catchy title. International students ‘do not use Facebook to choose their university‘ It was a bold statement, although I’m not sure where/how the survey was conducted it makes for some interesting dialogue. The main statistic that led to [...]
Does Social Media Affect Student Diversity?
“The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d rather not.” – Mark Twain In the fall of 2011 there was a New York Times Editorial bashing Roommate Matching technology (like RoomSync) as one of the many new technologies that take the randomness [...]
5 Reasons Colleges Can Do Social Media Themselves
Last week I was on a call with the director of marketing at a college where he explained the trouble he was having managing the school’s “social media.” He stated he was interested in hiring a consultant or agency to help him manage the admissions/marketing presence and was thinking about drafting an RFP to pay someone [...]
EduWeb Recap: Lessons Learned from Texas A&M’s Social Media Scavenger Hunt
Texas A&M set out to bring divergent social media platforms together to build a brand through their Scavenger Hunt.
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 [...]
Using HootSuite to Manage Student Communications
Everyone is using Twitter to engage their community in less than 140 characters. But not many departments have come to rely on the microblog as their primary communications channel with students. Florida State University’s Mike Sklens has led the charge in incorporating social media into the Admissions department’s day-to-day workflow. And through leveraging Twitter as a customer service hotline, their department has cut their response time in half.
What if Social Media was around in the 1940s?
As a part of their “Everything Ages Fast” campaign, the Sao Paulo, Brazil-based Moma Advertising Agency whipped up a set of vintage social media prints, taking themes from the late 1940s and early 1950s. My favorite quote from the Facebook piece is, “SHARE abundantly.” They didn’t only pay careful attention to the visual, but also [...]
Experimenting with Social Media at Noel Levitz’ NCSRMR 2010
At Inigral, we’re so excited about what the teams at Foursquare and Plancast are doing that we’ve thought long and hard about how Higher Ed can gain practical application out of these two game changers. So for this year’s National Conference on Student Recruitment, Marketing and Retention by Noel Levitz, we decided to conduct an experiment using Check-ins and Plans.
“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.
Location-Based Services Will Rock Higher Ed
Imagine if you could see check-ins to libraries and student activity centers; imagine if you could see trends in social habits. The campus is a natural place for mobile-device mediated friend making. People freely friend on Facebook and all of these services. Increasing the frequency that students bump into one another in virtual spaces (which double as real ones with location-based services) drives how connected they feel to one another, even in real life.
Multiple Social Media Tools: Overwhelming but Okay. Actually, a Must.
There is no such thing as “duplicating your effort,” there’s only “multiplying your presence.”
How Facebook is Eating the Internet
Inigral was at f8, the Facebook Developer Conference, and my friends previous assessment that “Facebook is Eating the Internet” finally became a reality. Here’s how they’re doing it:
Understanding the Power of Twitter
If you’re a Twitter hater, you might want to read this. I was a hater myself only a few months back. “I don’t have anything to Tweet about and I don’t care what others are Tweeting about” was my mentality. Funny thing is, I had — and still have — so many friends who shared my belief about Twitter’s uselessness.
2010 Twitter Facts and Figures
This morning at Chirp, Twitter’s first Developers Conference, their CEO, Ev Williams revealed some interesting facts about Twitter. Some key takeaways are:
Twitter has 105,779,710 registered users (didn’t disclose how many of those users are active though)
Every day, 300,000 people register (also didn’t comment on the fact that the average life span of a user is less than a month)
Social Media for College Admissions Professionals
Social Media is one of the most popular trends in higher education today. How much time should we be spending on social media? What types of presens should we have? How will we measure success?
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.
Social Media Spring Cleaning: Presentations, Guides and Other Goodies from 2009
Our marketing team has been doing some Spring Cleaning. For us, this doesn’t just mean re-organizing our Dropbox folders and directories. But we’re going to be publishing some things that have were only shown to people at conferences or brown bag lunches we’ve sponsored at various universities. Below, find an assortment of resources for you to share with your team on campus.
Social Media Week Comes to San Francisco
This week, Social Media Week came to our neck of the woods to educate, evangelize, and advance the use of social media with the help of San Francisco Bay Area executives and companies. Each day presented several opportunities to hear talks, meet people, and geek out about all things social media.
Top Links of the Week (1/15/10)
Hey hey! The subject in this week’s Student Affairs Chat was focused on engaging students through Twitter. The conclusion was that Facebook is more useful at this point for engaging students because that’s where they are. So, here are some links about Twitter and more for you to read and share!
Location Based Gaming in Higher Ed: Harvard and Foursquare
As we recently covered, the location-based gaming for Higher Ed battle is just beginning. Gowalla has started “featured trips” at a few universities, including University of Texas at Austin. But after announcing a partnership with Intel for the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and winning the annual crunchies award for best Mobile Application, [...]
Accepted Student Social Networks: 9 Questions to Ask
An up and coming trend in Admissions is to adopt an Accepted Student Social Network. If you’re looking at one now, here’s some things to consider:
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