Rolling right along with the new SMC Bloggers page. I’ve spent the last two days in CMS hell during this redesign, but I’m almost satisfied with how it’s coming.

Why Rebuild?

1. Because our blogs are good. They’re better than good. They’re great. They averaged over 2,000 hits a piece last year.

2. Because our other efforts are bad. Real bad.

We (the Office of Admission) rolled out a Facebook group specifically dedicated to high school prospects interested in SMC. It bombed. It has 35 members, 4 are SMC Class of 2012. The rest are alums and current students.

Our online photo albums are weak. Not a lot of photos, and not easily accessible. I’m not even sure where it is on our website.

We were in what I call the “Old Marketing Approach” when we built these things originally. They were all done before Facebook really took off and we didn’t have a good understanding of it. We thought that all we had to do was build it and they would come.

That’s clearly not how it works.

I have this article that was sent around my department posted on the wall in my office: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/06/03/facebook as a reminder of that old mentality. It’s an article in a higher education marketing magazine praising this new, revolutionary, initiative on Facebook.

Number of users: 0.

Again it is that old we’ll build it, you come mentality. It’s gimmicky and the kids who are on Facebook see right through it.

What I hope this rebuild will do is cut through the marketing junk. The only “marketing” that will be going on are honest conversations with our students, faculty and staff. And the blogs will help to initiate that conversation.

Introduction: Blogs; Building the relationship: Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, and more(?)…

Regular blog readers begin to develop an emotional relationship with the writer wether they realize it or not. You can’t help but not to. These students are giving prospective student and families and glimpse into life at SMC. Extending the glimpse into other social media will help to strengthen these experiences.

Blog relationships tend to be one sided however. That really is the nature of the format. Certainly there is the ability to post comments, but it isn’t a fluid conversation.

Adding Web 2.0 applications like Flickr, will give the blog readers a wider view of the bloggers experience at SMC and that of a typical SMC student by providing visual evidence of these experiences. The benefit of Flickr over other e-web albums is the social aspect. Users can post comments on the photos and discuss and share with others.

YouTube is much the same except in video format.

The tricky one here really is Facebook. The new Facebook page will be centered around the SMC Bloggers. It’s all about them. I don’t want the Admission Office to be there first association when they visit the group. I want it to be a means for them to connect with the bloggers and continue to grow that relationship. No admission marketing speak. Honest conversations are more valuable.

My hope with this new webpage is that prospective students and their families will have access to all of these social media through one site. They’ll be able to read the read the blogs, connect with the writers on Facebook, see their photos and videos, and get up to date info on what their doing through Twitter.

Implementation

Building these things are easy enough, but how I’m going to teach the bloggers how to use these tools?

Teach really isn’t the right word because I think they already know how to use the technology or it at least won’t take them long to figure out. I need more of a guided exploration experience. So how to do this?

1. Summer homework

I have started by asking them to upload some photos of “Summer Fun.” I gave them a lot of freedom to go out and get photos (appropriate for our audience) and upload them into our Flickr account (SMCBloggers).

I will also ask them to take video of their first week on campus. Moving in, seeing friends for the first time, first night of homework, first day of practice, that sort of stuff.

2. Geek Session on campus

We’ll probably have a meeting during the second week of school to which I’ll have them bring their laptops so we can have a real geek session (hopefully we’ll have wireless by then).

They all have Facebook accounts, but I will have them all set up accounts in Blogger. This way they can customize them, giving them a feeling that it really is their blog.

I will also have everyone surf around each other’s photos on Flickr and post comments to them.

I will also work with them to upload the videos they made of their first week back on campus to YouTube.

From then on it is up to them to keep blogging, uploading, posting, etc.

I’m testing out www.twitterfeed.com. It’s supposed to feed my blog to my Twitter account.

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Now playing: The Black Crowes – Jealous Again
via FoxyTunes

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook

Hodkinson’s article here is interesting. Clearly anti-Facebook, he looks into the money behind Facebook.

His strongest two arguments against Facebook are that all that data is being mined and sold to advertisers, and all the data available makes it much easy for orgs. like the CIA.

He really weakens his argument, by going after Thiel so hard. He clearly disagrees strongly with the guys politics and spends a ton of time in the article attacking him. He also really over simplifies the abilities of Facebook.

Sure Facebook connects people who work and live around each other, but it also connects people of great distances as well. I like to give the example that my brother lives in San Francisco, my sister in Maine, and we’re all playing a game of Scrabble on Facebook.

He seems to argue that bringing people together globally is a bad thing, but I don’t agree with him.

Hodgkinson does make the reader think by writing about the money behind Facebook, but he just comes off a little too strong for me.

I can’t remember which part I’m supposed to read, so I’ll read this one too.

• Everything is political. That’s what I grab from the bulk of this. If a show chooses to address a political issue then it’s obviously going to be political. If it chooses not to address a political issue, then it is being political as well. in fact, the book says, “the most non-political programs may be making the strong political statements of all.”(p 254)
• Viewers will interpret ambiguous political message in their own way.
• Music can have political influence as well. However, it can fade away too. Dylan used to be the anti-establishment. Now he’s selling cd’s in Starbucks. It’s proof that the music industry is interested less in the message and more in the money.
• Cultural Imperialism – Western culture is distributed around the world, especially developing countries. Western culture can be influenced in the reverse order, but it happens on a smaller scale. Think Beatles going to India, Paul Simon going to South Africa and Tiananmen Square

I read the “Project Harmony” article first, and it is such a cool idea. Not only is it important for American students to understand the American media, but it is also important for them to learn about foreign media as well. I’m sure it was also eye opening to hear their opinions on American media and culture.

This is also why Web 2.0 stuff is such a great teaching and learning opportunity. I’m sure the students were able to communicate well using email, blogs, youtube, etc.

Onto the last two sections of Chapter 7:

Whoops, should be reading chapter 8 not 7:

• “Interpretive Resistance” in other words is essentially the idea that people have preconceived notions and it’s hard to break those down. It happens when people read messages that are in direct opposition to their preconceived notions.

  The authors use Ms. as an example to illustrate that audiences will see what they want to see and may miss the larger message in doing so.

• I like the “Semiotic Robin Hoodism” term for those who remake billboards or ads to poke fun at the original.
• Pleasure in media – This is the reason it is so popular. I bet that most media is used as an escape to distract for other areas (and perhaps more important) of life. the authors talk about fantasy and how it can be empowering and pleasurable and liberating to escape reality into a fantasy world.