This post also appears at www.edsocialmedia.com.  You should check it out.  It’s decent despite the fact that I write for it.

Charlie Croker: You’ve got no imagination. You couldn’t even decide what to do with all that money, so you had to buy what everybody else wanted. 
Steve: Try this on your imagination, okay. That gold is already gone.
From the Italian Job 

I came across an unnamed college Web site the other day that looked oddly similar to the Saint Michael’s College blogger page.   At first I couldn’t believe I was seeing such fragrant laziness.  Below is a side-by-side comparison (I did my best to block out the other institutions name so as to avoid embarrassment).

Uncanny huh?

I think this is pretty egregious for three reasons:

1. You have to at least put in some effort.  When I built the SMC bloggers page in 2008, I took a great deal of inspiration from the Butler University blog page.  That page had photos of the bloggers, their names and bios, links to their blogs, and a Twitter feed (that actually didn’t work).  I incorporated each of those into our new page.  At the time my coding skills were relatively limited (still are) so the page came out the way it did.  I’m embarrassed to admit the amount of time I spent building that stupid page.  I know that it took me half a day to figure out how to change the color.   Despite a redesign when @MalloryWood took over in 2010, some of the key design features still hold true.

The point is, you have to own it, in order to make it work.

2. This is cheating.  Literally this is plagiarism.  You’ve taken 90 percent of a Web site, added your name and colors, and published it as your own.  If a student at your institution did the same on a research paper, they would be expelled.   It is the responsibility of the institution live by the same values it expects out of its students.

Now, I’m not suggesting there was malicious intent here.  I’m guessing that this is just ignorance at play.  That being said, you just can’t do this.  It makes your institution look bad.  It makes the institution that you copied look bad.  It makes you look bad.  And lazy.

3.  This damages both brands.  Your applicants overlap.  Small residential, liberal art, college in the north east.  Yup.  That means there will be plenty of cross over between your apps.  It makes the both of you look lame, packaged, and discredits any authenticity you’ve established.  Unfortunately for SMC, this means they need to change their page immediately because this other institution is making SMC look bad through their laziness.

I think SMC has to move here.  It’s already December and high application season.  In order to maintain their brand (which is pretty damn strong) and authenticity (also pretty damn strong) they have to roll out a new design.  Like the quote at the top says, “The gold is already gone.”  SMC has to rebuild it.

So what about that saying I hear over and over again, Copy And Steal Everything?

Clearly this is said tongue in cheek.  There is plenty of room to allow yourself to be inspired by others, but you have to transform that inspiration into a product that truly reflects your institution and brand.  Social media is all about authenticity, and your ripping off a site from another school, you’re not being authentic.

Pay attention. Look at what others are doing, and figure out how you can adapt them into your own channels. While you’re at it, keep an eye out for those who are ripping you off.

Hi there,

Drew Millikin just shared an Instagram photo with you:

view full image

“Dewman”

Thanks,
The Instagram Team

Pulling on the first sweater of the season and that smell that let’s you know that it’s been in your drawer for six months.

I’m riding to raise money to fight this lousy disease. Please join me in supporting the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. Donate today.

I ran into a funny little quirk with our Facebook page yesterday afternoon. One of our Fans posted on our wall, “The Bing map on your FB page is ALL WRONG!!! ”

I first this was some sort of spam post that seem so prevalent recently, but after clicking around our page a bit, I noticed that there is a Bing map under the “Info” tab. I hadn’t paid any attention to it before, but I could clearly see that it had us in Groton, VT, not Groton, MA. The address field was correct, and I tried to move the pin to our actual location, but was told that it was to far away from the original. That’s because Groton, VT is 155 miles north of us. I tried to suppress it, but then my “Wall” went away.

@MalloryWood and @ChristineSMC replied over Twitter that the SMC Facebook page had a similar bug, moving my Alma matter a few hundred miles south from the venerable Winooski Park, VT to somewhere in the Nutmeg State.

Checking back today, we are now located in Blanchardsville, MA. This time however, I was able to suppress the map without losing my Wall.

Clearly this is a result of Mr. Zuckerberg’s dropping out of college before he had an opportunity to take Geography 101.

Has anyone else experience something funky like this? Combine this with all of the annoying Osama, embarassed girl, and other SPAM out there and I’m starting to wonder what type of shop Zuck’s running.

@dmolsen had a great post about QR codes the other day. It reminded me that I had been tossing a similar post around in my head for a while and it was time to write it.

I think QR codes are a massive waste of time. They’re over hyped, a pain to use, and just not that interesting. Here three examples of why QR codes are a waste of time, and why I’m sick of hearing about them:

1. Back in January, I came across an article in the alumni magazine of a New England independent school. The article was an alumni profile and highlighted some of the work he was doing for this school specifically the new QR code he had created for the school.

Excited, I pulled out my iPhone. Downloaded a QR app on a slow 3G signal. Snapped a photo of the code and waited for the magic.

The code brought me to the school’s Website. Not a mobile version of the Web site, but the school’s Web site.

2. Riding on a Metro bus in Washington D.C., I saw a QR code on a poster of the bus route. Thinking it would give me a similar map formatted for a mobile phone, I searched through my iPhone apps trying to find the QR code app that I had downloaded back in January. Sifting through folders with my thumb, I finally came across it, and snapped a photo.

It brought me to a mobile site that asked for my comments as to the quality of my Metro experience.

3. We own a Ford and got one of their magazines in the mail the other day. In the market for a new car, I saw a QR code next to a photo of one of the new Ford Explorers, and I tried to give it a shot. Sifting through the folders on my iPhone again, I could not find the QR code app that I had downloaded sixth months ago.

I gave up.

Investing in QR codes at this moment is a total waste resources. Right now the technology isn’t well implemented, does not meet consumer expectations, and the readers is not seamlessly integrated into smartphones. Until I can take my phone, just take a photo, and the be quickly and automatically brought to content that is interesting, useful, and exclusively available through that code, then there’s really no point.

Frankly, I have no idea how education could use these things. Campus maps? Maybe, but only if you’re a huge university with a lot of acreage. Stories about buildings? Not compelling. It is rare case that a building on a college campus is compelling and interesting. Free screen savers or other give-a-ways? Now you’re thinking too highly of yourself and reading your own headlines.

Save your money. Save your time. Save your resources. Skip the QR codes.

I helped our admission office here host a chat for prospective students. We used CoverItLive, and for our first go round, I think it went pretty well.

I looked around for something that was free or really cheap. CoverItLive was free, it looked cool, and it was free. That being said, if the crowd had been the 25-30 I had expected, I don’t know if it would have worked well. Admittedly, I didn’t spend much time playing in the guts of the thing, but I had to approve every comment. It would have been much easier if everyone’s comments were automatically posted, yet I retained the ability to unpost them.

That is assuming the crowd had been the 25-30 I was expecting. I’ll get back to this one.

So we gathered in the admission office with some cookies and milk to say thank you to the 12 prefects who had volunteered their time to be the student chat leaders. I gave them a brief overview at what was going to happen and then switched the room on 15 minutes before the advertised start time. No sooner had I opened the door when comments began flooding in-and I mean flooding. I was clicking away trying to approve comments, set our students up as admins and quickly became overwhelmed. There was consistently a 4 minute gap between when a comment was submitted to when it was posted.

It turns out that we had 710 people log into that chat. My experience had me expecting 30 at the most. For a while I was worried that we would have more prefects then perspective students. We had only sent an email out announcing the chat three days prior. That I guess is the power of reputation.

So the feature that was originally a major pain, turned out to be a life saver. I can only imagine the chaos of an unfiltered chat. It would have been impossible to keep up. For the next one, I think we’re going to have to include some text explaining how the system works, that not all questions will be answered, but we’ll try. The last thing I’d want is for a kid to get frustrated that their question didn’t get answered because the chat room was too crowded. That is so not who we are. We’re a small school where everyone gets attention and I’d hate to leave anyone with a different impression.

If you’d like to get a sense for what it was like, the transcript is still up here. We’re going to be doing another one soon for admitted students. It’s a pretty fun time and we have a blast with the students. I might try to video tape it. I’ll post it here if I do.

I hold a grudge. Sorry I do. I know that I should probably be more forgiving and let things slide, but tough. That’s not me.

I recently got a Facebook friend request from a former co-worker at a past job that I absolutely hated. It was the most miserable place I have ever worked and this person was a part of that dysfunctional culture. There was never any hesitation to toss a coworker under the bus , light a math and watch them burn.

It was two years of hell.

So no. I will not accept your friend request.