Yeah, so that lasted exactly one day. It only took one night of a teething infant and one too many drinks to convince me that my attempt to quit coffee was ill-fated before it got out of the gates. I also couldn’t convince myself that I was going to see any real benefit as I tea at an obscene rate to wake up for the lack of coffee.
That being said, I am trying to limit my intake and have had a cup yet this afternoon.
I could really use on though.
I have got to start writing more. Here we go.
I’m quitting coffee.
I think.
I don’t really know why I want to do this, but for some reason I feel like toning down my coffee intake. Notice I’m not saying that I’m going to quit caffeine – just coffee.
Typically, I have my usual morning pot (a 6 cup french press which equates to two good sized mugs). Normally I’d get to work and have another cup or two and maybe one in the afternoon. Lately however, I’ve switched the at work coffee to tea. This morning I flip flopped and made a nice pot of vanilla tea, and then had a cup of coffee in the office. I have to say that I was doing fine until I had that coffee. Just after the first sip, the headache came. This has me wondering if I’m not better off just cutting out the coffee altogether and switching completely to tea.
Again, I have no idea why I’m doing this.
What about, ‘slow news day’?
All this news about Tuft’s now accepting YouTube videos is a bit silly. Revolutionary? Hell no. Kids have been sending art portfolio’s, dvd’s, resume’s and add-on’s to their applications for years. I remember one application from a kid who sent in some goofy glasses with the big nose and mustache. We wouldn’t encourage them to do it as Tuft’s apparently is now, but they sent it anyways. That doesn’t mean we looked at it.
It’s fun, I’m sure the kids enjoyed it, but will it change college admissions.
Umm no. Chill out people.
Do the folks at Tufts really have time to watch over 1,000 YouTube videos? (BTW that’s less than 7% of their total apps.) I wonder….
As a marketing tool, I totally agree that it’s a fun little hook. But please stop with this “It’s going to revolutionize college admissions” crap.
BTW if you google Tufts Youtube, this is what comes up first. Love it.
I’ve got to eat some crow here. Turns out, I was totally off on that last post. What I didn’t notice was that each post to Twitter fed from a Facebook feed has redirects a user to Facebook. It looks lame and is totally bush league looking. My bad Rachel. You’re totally right.
This somehow started out as a simple comment to Rachel Reuben’s recent blog post this morning and somehow ballooned into a 568 word blog post of my own.
Rachel’s post essentially said that linking Facebook and Twitter updates is something to be avoided. Now, I think Rachel’s broader point is valid, original content on each channel is best, but I don’t agree with you that linking the Facebook and Twitter pages is bad idea. In fact, if we’re talking about fanpages for schools (personal pages, absolutely agree with Rachel. There’s already too much noise on both media, no need to increase it), I think it’s a great idea.
I have the Groton School fanpage linked to the Twitter page so that Facebook updates (photos, events, wall posts by me, etc) are published to the Twitter account NOT vice versa. The Facebook page is updated once a day.
Groton’s got 1,000 Facebook fans and 145 followers on Twitter (if you take out folks like jenna5443 who wants me to check out her naughty photos, probably more like 100).
Let’s say I’m doing an alumni event in NYC. I create the event in Facebook and it posts to the wall. It also posts to the Twitter account. Now I could go ahead and create an event in Twivite, but my audience is only about 100 legitimate followers. In an NYC event, we may get 300 – 400 people. When I do an event, I want my audience to see that there a ton of people going to this event. They’re not going to see that if I create separate events on Twitter and on Facebook.
I also contend that while it is the same content and I’m willing to bet that those 100 legit Twitter followers are also fans of Groton School on Facebook, how those two audiences access that content is completely different. I’m guessing that the Twitter user has Twitter open either on their laptop, BB or iPhone all day. I doubt that’s true with Facebook as many employers block it. I post damn good (it’s at least good, well maybe just okay) content to our Fanpage at least occasionally. That’s content that Twitter users might miss out on if I only posted it to Facebook.
Somehow my linkage is one-way. I don’t know how I set it up that way, if I did it consciously, or if I just got lucky, but I thin that’s important to note. I do agree with you that Twitter is a more active medium and it’s a place where it’s okay for me to send updates of the score of the football game. Facebook is not an appropriate medium for that. That’s annoying.
Now, the key is to be on both in order to respond. Yes, I may just be using Facebook to push content to Twitter, but I also have Tweetdeck open and I’m at the ready should anyone respond.
To me, this really is just another tool, and like any other tool, you need to understand how to use it. I’m not willing to say that you absolutely should or shouldn’t, but, rather, it depends.
*One other throw in here, people have been commenting that one major reason is the 140 character limit in Twitter. Are you publishing novels to your Facebook status? If you can’t say it in 140 or less, then don’t – Twitter, Facebook, doesn’t matter. Huge FB updates are obnoxious and difficult to read on my iPhone.
Sometimes I feel like I just upload photos to Flickr without looking at them. I came across this as I was looking for photos for a presentation. It’s the view of Camel’s Hump from across Rte 15 from Saint Michael’s. I took it as part of our Farewell Vermont tour just before we moved to Massachusetts.
So despite spending a significant amount of time bitching about this headcold I have, I’m having a great time at the 40th CASE/NAIS conference here in NYC.
One thing that has struck me is the lack of social media presence here. Granted this isn’t a tech conference. They have been advertising the #casenais hashtag, but I’m guessing that there are only a half dozen twitter users using it- a number not helped by the fact that there isn’t wireless in the conference rooms thus why I’m writing this on my iPhone.
I think that scenario sums up the over all situation with these tools and how independent schools use them. They understand it’s important and that it’s where their young alumni (and I would argue that their not so young alumni and current parents) are. They understand it’s where they need to be but they’re not serious in their approach to how they use these marketing tools.
Ignorance is an ugly word, but I see it in the use of social media here. I sat in on one session where the presenters encouraged the audience to make up a fake personal profile for their schools. Thankfully someone in the crowd stood up and pointed out that to do so is against Facebook’s TOS and could result in the profile getting nuked.
I’m not pointing this out to be critical, but rather I see a huge opportunity for rockstars. These schools are just diving into these media, and there are only a handful that do it well.
This gets me so pumped! I feel like this is the new frontier and we’re pushing west baby! More challenges to be sure. We’re working with minors, and in my case, an elite (can’t pretend it’s not) school with a lot of old school New England prep school history. That beast is not one that loves change and openness that the Web 2.0 world requires. That being said, we’ve got resources. We got talented students, alumni, and parents. There’s no reason we can’t be rockstars.
Groton had and maybe still has a reputation for being old school and behind the times when it comes to this stuff. I want to change that. I want to be at the top. I want people to think of us when the think of schools who are doing this social media thing right. I know we can get there.
– Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone
I’m feeling a bit fatigued at the start of this New Year. No, it’s not the teething five month old. That’s not the kind of fatigue I mean. I’m getting tired of the staleness that I see in the Web 2.0 world, and I’m wondering what’s next.
Thinking all the way back to 2007 when Facebook (as we know it to be) was a mere three years old, Oprah and that idiot Ashton Kutcher weren’t on Twitter, and MySpace was still relevant, it all seemed so new, fresh and exciting. We were all trying to figure out just what these new communication tools could do and how we could apply them to our trade.
But that was a lifetime ago. Now, the Boomers have invaded Facebook, and @BlueFuego is reporting that Facebook FanPage interaction is way down. I’ve got to imagine that’s a symptom of teens and tweens not wanting to hang out in the same social space as their parents. Twitter, well, someone still needs to explain to my why I care about following celebrities and brands that spend more time talking about the love they get from fans and clients then what they’ll do for me.
I’ve unsubsribed to most of the blogs I used to read. Those websites with multiple authors have really just gotten old. The content just isn’t as fresh as it was 2 years ago. They seem to focus no on analytics and number crunching and that’s fine, but something seems to be missing from the conversation – like we’ve all gotten tired of playing and now are just jogging down the first base path.
Where’s the fresh content? Where’s the innovation? Where’s the next big shift? Why are we doing this?
Sadly, I can’t claim it’s coming from me. I’ve completely neglected this blog the last 6 – 8 months. And to quote our president, “That’s my responsibility.” Saying it is one thing, but acting on it is completely different. I’m not great a finishing projects and I often find the last ten percent truly dull and drab. I’d much rather frame a building than do any type of finish carpentry. Perhaps my dis-allusion with the current state of this new media is that it’s no longer new. It’s evolved and become more sophisticated.
One place where I am finding a chance to frame a building is here at Groton School. I’ve only been working for an independent boarding school since August, but my sense is that there is a movement towards more sophisticated marketing strategies. Certainly there are schools out there like Andover and Exeter with $1 billion plus endowments that run a pretty sophisticated show, but for the most part, these independent schools seem a few years behind higher ed. This makes sense in a lot of ways because studies showed that higher ed was quick to adapt those new social media (there I said it) tools into there marketing campaigns. At SMC, we had been blogging since ’03 for example. Not the case here.
The difference between these schools and higher ed is these schools are doing it with much smaller shops, and they’re doing it with unique restrictions (i.e. a campus full of minors). That is what’s getting me going and lighting a fire under me.
I think this stuff still works. You just have to keep your eyes on what’s important, and guess what, it’s not about you. It’s about me.
It’s always been about me and what you can do for me. As a skier, I’ve really been impressed how ski areas have been using social media. Check out @jaypeakresort and Okemo on Facebook. They’re using those two tools to offer their followers deals. One recent deal from @jaypeakresort included room, meals, daycare and lift ticket for $140ish. A great deal and a great use of marketing. Yeah they talk about their snowfall and their new buildings but in a way that entices the follower to want to take advantage of their deals. I have no idea if these deals are exclusive to Twitter followers but they sure make it seem like it and that makes me, as a follower, feel special. And I think that’s what has me fatigued. All they talk has moved from the emotion that these powerful networking tools can spark in people, to raw numbers and data and how a seller (because we’re all selling something) can get his message out to the potential user.
I’m not a data guy. I have tried to be but I just hate it. I’m emotional and irrational and I love to create positive emotional experiences for people. To do so I have to constantly realign my perspective so that it’s not focused on what I want, or what I want audience to want, but rather it’s about creating that space for the audience to interact and create and share emotional experiences together. (I have shamelessly ripped that off of Seth Godin’s Meatball Sundae p110)(rest assured I just threw up a little in my mouth after paraphrasing him.)
Wow. That was a massive brain dump and at times raging venting exercise. Whew! Great way to kick off the New year with that off my chest. I know I’m going in a couple of different directions with this post, but this really was more of an exercise for me. Remember it’s always about me.
It’s coming. I’ve been thinking about this post that I wrote a couple of years back. Although it’s no longer August, it still seems too early to be fall.
Looking at the calendar, I’m realizing that this it the first weekend that I’ve been in my house since the beginning of May. I’m not complaining at all. We’ve had a couple of trips, a couple of weddings and the rest have been spent upta camp with my family. In fact, if I thought I could convince Wife, I’d be up there this weekend. But being away has left a number of projects that need to get done.
The roof was looking pretty rough and Wife and I decided that we did not want to risk a Vermont winter and thaw with an iffy roof. The roofers have been working since Monday. They’re doing good work, but I’m definitely sick of the banging and commotion. It hasn’t been the quiet weekend I was hoping.
The windows sills are looking pretty rough and all need to be primed and painted. The garden needs to be pulled up. And there’s a bit of touch up work here and there that need to get done. All this and I need to hit the road in a week.
This week coming up will be a challenge no doubt. It’s the last week before I hit the road. I’ve got a huge to do list on my desk and I’ve thought of a half dozen other things I need to add to it when I get to work on Monday. Not that I’m stressed about it though.
This travel thing is getting old. I’m almost 30. I don’t see how I can be on the road for 5 or 6 weeks when I have a family. What I need to do is propose that our office create a e-communications position like others have. It will mean that I need to step it up as well and produce on the ideas that I have and am rolling out this year.
I also don’t doubt for a second that it’s the changing seasons that’s getting me in this mood. I’ve had a great summer here in Vermont and don’t want to see it go.
An incredible weekend and a beautiful wedding! Good luck Trevor and Annika!
@drewmillikin 