Summer Presentation Series Part 2: School and Community at St. Mikes

I'll be presenting a session on social networking at the St. Mike's School and Community Course (GED 684) on Tuesday, June 24th.

My objective is to provide a brief overview of some of the social networking tools that are available, provide context on what it really takes to create community, and then show some working community-based sites that I think are well done and have great potential, and finally show two tools that might help these educational leaders to begin creating their online communities.

Here was my charge for the day from Val Gardner, the professor for the course:

My hope for your time with us is to have them begin to understand and think differently about “communities of the future” and how social networking will or could assist them in their work in building community – both within the school and with the broader geographic and global world. As leaders, they need to be looking at their schools in relation to the world in which their students will be living. In addition they need to believe that they can help shape that future.

PRESENTATION OUTLINE
Our burning question today is how social networking can help academic leaders build connection within their schools, their local neighborhoods and create active and engaged communities.

1. It’s about value creation: Can your online space answer the “What’s In It for Me?” question for each of your constituents? What is the compelling reason for someone to join the site and keep coming back?
2. It’s about responding to a need: What is the need that you have that you think your online space will help with?
3. It’s about building trust: What will you do to help your constituents build trust in the site so not only do they come back, but they feel comfortable enough to post and engage?
4. It’s about getting people to go there: Remember the old adage, if you build it they will come? Well, that’s not really true! See #’s 1-3 above!

Creating “community” is the holy grail of the online experience and with today’s social media tools, we are closer than ever!

The basic foundation has been MySpace and Facebook. These are certainly not the only ones out there, but they are the most well known. Let’s take a look at my Myspace and Facebook and talk about how or if I’m creating community using these two sites.

What about my blog? Does that create community?

What about something as simple as “Twitter” an online social presence application?

During the May 2008 e-State Conference when groups of people got together to talk about how to build an e-state – community kept coming up. We also had two “live-bloggers” and one “micro-blogger” there.

• Cathy Resmer from 7day's Blurt: http://7d.blogs.com/blurt/2008/05/live-blogging-t.html and
• Bill Simmon from Candleblog: http://candleboy.com/candleblog/article.php/20080529082000963 and
• yours truly via my blog AND twitter: http://champlainprofessor.blogspot.com/2008/05/conference-posting-vermonts-e-state.html and my Twitter (before I figured out the whole TWEME thing!)

So did all of our blogging and writing help to create community?

Here are some current live examples of ways in which communities are forming using tools that are easy and simple for the user.

Examples of social networking websites that build/are helping to build community:

• Local Vermont Community Website: http://www.frontporchforum.com/
• Here’s a video intro: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwL5YevWDFE
• Website for teachers thinking about Web2.0 in their classrooms: http://www.classroom20.com/
• Another for educators and administrators: http://www.schoolnet.com/default.aspx

Examples of tools you could use to create a site that builds community:

• http://www.i-neighbors.org/
• http://www.ning.com/

So now…take some time to figure out how you would link your “community” together using these tools. What value will you provide? What need will you fulfill? How will you build trust? How will you get them there…and keep them?

More in the news

Well the news keeps on a roll'n! Yesterday, September 6th, yours truly was LIVE on Vermont Public Radio's noon Vermont Edition with Jane Lindholm. The topic? Social Networking of course! Jane and the production team at Vermont Edition interviewed Marketing major Dan Bergeron (of the Seven Days story) on campus the evening before and kicked off the show with him talking about how students are using Facebook to communicate and stay connected.

Then it was my turn! It's been a long time since I've been in the studio -- and this was a lot of fun! Jane did a great job and I enjoyed the conversation. The other guest speaker was the Director of Student Life from Lyndon State College, Jonathan Davis.

Listen to it HERE.

By the way...if you are around checking out the South End Art Hop this Sunday I'll be on a panel of local experts at the Digital Tools for Artists discussion sponsored by Last Monday [interactive]. We'll be over at the held at the Vermont Community Access Media studios at 208 Flynn Avenue from 1 - 3. The goal is to provide artists with information about how to use digital media tools in different ways...and I'll be addressing MARKETING and Online Visibilty and Social Networking. Hope to see you there!

Zoho Office on Facebook

I just "Dugg" a blog post from Zoli Erdos an entreprenuer and startup advisor out of California about a new application for Facebook that allows for word processing, spreadsheets and presentation documents to be created online and shared with your friends in facebook. read more digg story

I added the application just a little while ago and selected a few folks to invite to it. It looks very interesting and is yet another way to utilize these Facebook Aps outside of the "social" norms of who is hot and what is not.

My summer experiment with Facebook as a courseroom support system for several independent studies seems to be going well. The addition of this application moves the possibilities even further! Students can collaborate online with word processing documents, spreadsheets and presentations. I'm going to have to teach them how. We are going to have to learn the best ways to use these applications and the most appropriate times to work with them -- but it looks like I have my work cut out for me this coming fall! I might use this for one class and see how it goes.

Media feeding frenzy...a quick follow-up

A very quick follow-up to yesterdays post...

Yep...digg (or would that be Diggers?) have Dugg articles about danah boyd's observations -- the fact that the one story has 1735 diggs is interesting...the comments that follow it from the diggers are even more interesting.

What I like even better? Today's post from danah on her blog:

June 27, 2007
Dear esteemed members of the press,
Dear esteemed members of the press, I am in the field collecting data and then will be attending a conference. I am not able to respond right now. Do not call my house phone. Do not pester my department. And do *NOT* hound my subletter. All press inquiries should be sent to press [at] danah.org. When I can, I respond. When I can't, I don't. Do not use other email addresses - I check the press one from my phone and answer them in order when I have spare cycles. Other requests are typically ignored. The BBC coverage of my blog essay is hugely problematic. If you want to discuss what I've written, please read the essay itself. This is not a formal report. This is a blog essay based on observations from the field. And this is not a 6-month study; it is a 4-year study with a tide shift that I've noticed in the last 6 months. Again, read the essay. At some point, I will turn this into a formal article, but this is not that. Cover it as you see fit, but do not call it a report.

Thank you, THE MANAGEMENT

You go girl! Fancy that. Asking the media to READ something before they report on it. But ... there is no guarantee that they will full comprehend what they are reading and there in lies the challenge in posting "information" that is somewhat controversial on the web in an open forum.

What a great story this will be for my classes in the fall!

News and News...What is News? Or...Pitfalls of "Wondering" on the Web

Have you been paying attention today? I got my first inkling from the Chronicle of Higher Ed in the Wired Campus Blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education: there may be a digitial divide in social networking sites -- Facebook is for the well-to-do, upper middle class while MySpace is for the lower income, immigrants and non-college bound.

The observations actually come from danah boyd, a PhD student who is studying the implications of social networking and she dropped this little social/class bomb in a posting on her blog on the 24th of June. (she blogged today about the reactions that's she's received -- both good and bad).

It's an interesting observation that she makes here but as she says, it is but an observation and her blog essay about it shows that she's still trying to understand if there is something there or not. She provides a brief history and really more of a discussion about the evolution of the two social networking sites. Interesting that in the military, soldiers on on MySpace and officers are on Facebook -- hmm....but actually...this isn't my point about posting this information here.

Rather, I'm really interested in how information gets picked up and spread around on the web and what is NEWS. Where Danah is looking at Social Networking and Teens, my marketing interest is really about "getting the word out".

Two days ago she posts this thoughtful, questioning observation piece, which is more of a "Wondering" than anything else...and she even writes in her blog from the 24th that:

Over the last six months, i've noticed an increasing number of press articles about how high school teens are leaving MySpace for Facebook. That's only partially true. There is indeed a change taking place, but it's not a shift so much as a fragmentation. Until recently, American teenagers were flocking to MySpace. The picture is now being blurred. Some teens are flocking to MySpace. And some teens are flocking to Facebook. Which go where gets kinda sticky, because it seems to primarily have to do with socio-economic class.

In the blog essay she further points out:

I have been reticent about writing about this dynamic even though I've been tracking it for a good six months now. I don't have the language for what I'm seeing and I'm concerned about how it's going to be interpreted. I can just see the logic: if society's "good" kids are going to Facebook and the "bad" kids are going to MySpace, clearly MySpace is the devil, right? ::shudder:: It's so not that easy. Given a lack of language for talking about this, my choice of "hegemonic" and "subaltern" was intended to at least insinuate a different way of looking at this split.

And today, June 26th ...well here are just some of the news sources who have picked this one up -- and they are referencing her research. Interesting. She says herself this is but an observation and a question and she's trying to figure it out. So here's the listing, and some of the quotes from what they are writing about...I expect we'll see this on the nightly news very soon...

• Information Week: "MySpace and Facebook have come to reflect class divisions in American society, according to an informal research project. Since Facebook opened up last September, ongoing press coverage of MySpace as a dangerous place and Facebook's positioning as a home for those with elite aspirations have help create a socioeconomic divide between the two sites, argues Danah Boyd, a Ph.D. student at the School of Information Sciences at University of California at Berkeley. " <-- a least they got it close to right!
• TechNews World, e-Commerce Times: "Social networking sites MySpace and Facebook may seem fairly similar from the outside, but the two sites are increasingly splitting along class lines, according to a new report."
  
• Hindu News, The Age in Australia, The Guardian: "In a paper this week, Ms Boyd said typical Facebook users "tend to come from families who emphasise education and going to college. They are primarily white, but not exclusively". MySpace, meanwhile, "is still home for Latino and Hispanic teens, immigrant teens" as well as "other kids who didn't play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm".
  
• GameShout: "MySpace and Facebook are more and more splitting along class lines according to some U.S. academics. ... Boyd submitted a paper this week ..."
  
• CRN Channel Web: "New research into social networking sites claims to have uncovered sharp online class divisions. The college educated turn more to Facebook, according to the report, while MySpace caters largely for those who leave school early. A preliminary report from a six-month research project by the School of Information Sciences at UC Berkeley carried out by PhD student Danah Boyd found the class divide between popular social networking sites MySpace and Facebook.
  
• BBC News: "Fans of MySpace and Facebook are divided by much more than which music they like, suggests a study. A six-month research project has revealed a sharp division along class lines among the American teenagers flocking to the social network sites.
  The research suggests those using Facebook come from wealthier homes and are more likely to attend college. "

These are just some of them...of course the headlines range from the sublime to the ridiculous such as:

• Facebook for "goodie two shoes", MySpace for "burnouts"
• Still using MySpace? You low-rent good for nothing loser...
• Are Facebook Members Higher Achievers?
• MySpace is Las Vegas, Facebook is IKEA
• Why MySpace is for freaks and Facebook is for preps
• Class war hits social networking sites
• MySpace Is Bart, Facebook Is Lisa

So how does one go from posting a simple observational paper meant to provoke conversation -- and possibly insight among a fairly small group of people to a "published paper" that is a "preliminary report of research findings" or the "result of a 6 month study". Well I guess you start by being a prolific blogger who is seen as an "expert" and then you post your thoughts...sit back and wait... Then watch and see as this is picked up...not just in your backyard but all over the country! and...the World. From New York, to California, to the UK, Australia and India, from websites and blogs to news sites. Of course these stories are also being DUGG....

Does ANYONE check the original source anymore? Do people who are writing actually COMPREHEND what they are reading BEFORE they post?

Danah...good luck. I think this is but the begining of the tide.

Making Connections

Today I've been experimenting more with Facebook Applications and Digg. My big discovery today is how I can interconnect different parts of my social network -- and it actually works!

So I've Dugg some stories and then from Digg, posted them directly to my Blog (see the stories below), which I can then post on Facebook. Oh...and I read an article at another Blog site which allowed me to "Twit" it...so a link was posted on my Twitter!

Lov'n the social connected world!

Wow!

Champlain College Online Marketing Bootcamp: Final Post

Digg

Delicious

Twitter

VOX

Blogger

Second Life

MySpace

Squidoo

Facebook

YouTube

Technorati

Feedburner

FlickR

RSS

CoComment

Twitterific

LinkedIn

BeBo

iTunes

-------------------------------------------------------
Um...get all that? And yes, I know, they should be linked, but then that would ruin the pretty colors and I am certainly NOT going to break into the code to figure it out!

So that was my day today. A total immersion into the world of Social Networking and Online Visibility.

I LOVED IT!

Of course, I teach it ... so this was a unique experience for me to be the student. Think I might have over-stepped a few times (bad me) in the class room (sorry Dave and Dan!) around some of the things...but the best part was the things that I learned today. Great context of Social Networking and Online Visibility and some good connections.

Let's get to it (before I do a faceplant on the keyboard -- gee whiz I'm tired).

As I mentioned earlier, Dave Winslow from EpikOne kicked us off this morning. Besides the whirlwind overview and the hands on with LinkedIn and Blogger, Dave provided a great list of:

Steps for Planning a Social Networking Campaign

1. State your goal, identify your target and know what your success
2. Determine how much money and time you will invest
3. Based on the budget, create a plan – just like any other marketing plan
4. Identify what mediums you will be using – ie video, text, etc.
5. Choose which networks you will allocate your budget too
6. Align your resources internally or find a good outsource
7. Execute the plan and please make sure to track your initiatives

While I like the list and will use it in my Social Networking class there is ONE thing missing and that is making sure to INTEGRATE whatever you do with your current marketing messages and branding. It's a very important step because with this medium, if people really "Digg" it (smile) you need to be ready and it (whatever it is) better match your brand identity.

We moved into this afternoon with a great presentation on Social Networking -- with a focus on Blogging and Facebook (my favorite!) from Daniel Schutzsmith (linkedin) (twitter) who is the editor of GraphicDefine, an eZine for graphic designers and business. Check it out at: http://www.graphicdefine.org.

I won't bore you all with the in-depth details but there are a few things I wanted to address.

So what makes a Social Networking "Expert" anyway? To hear Dan tell it, it's a mix of pure chance, passion and a healthy dash of insanity.

Disclaimer -- remember, I'm a college professor, so when Dan said that he didn't use his PR degree right off, um, I had to wonder because...well...Dan, all of this that you are doing it's um..PR!

Anyway...here's Dan's "Story" (as told by me -- my sense is that I've boiled down the past 15 years of his life into well...a few short lines)

History of Dan

PR major in College
Graduated
Tried different jobs in business and design, businesses tanked…he kept on moving
(note dot.com bomb here somewhere I'm sure)
Started posting in forums and link pages and discussions providing advice and comments which led to a...
call from Chopping Block
so he started working with them in Biz Development where...
they didn't do any advertising they just...
went to forums
submitted links
send info to Ad Week
and Clients evolved from the virtual word of mouth they generated
(um, I think there was good design work too!)

Which got him pretty much involved with business side of design
which evolved into graphicdefine magazine – an eZine
which moved from his solo postings...
to other people/multiple contributors on the site
and then some
teaching at school of visual arts – at NYU
and of course
speaking Gigs on Social Networking and Online Visibility!
(um, Public Relations I'm think'n!)

Both Dan and Dave said these posts were supposed to be short...but...well...it wouldn't be fun if I didn't break the rules!

Big take aways?

Gotta have passion to do this. What else? Well here are some tips that make a lot of sense to me:

First, build a personality. One that goes with you and is consistent through all your social networking gigs whether it is MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, or whatever.

What do people want to see?

• Remove the Bullshit
• No Sales Speak
• Stay Consistent
• Make it easy to link to

Keeping followers and credibility

• Update Consistently
• Quality Content
• Remain Humble
• Be Truthful
• Own up and admit mistakes
• Correct the mistake
• Don’t Censor
• Listen
• Implement and Compliment Feedback

Handling Criticism

• Evaluate
• Address it
• Correct it
• Follow up

What not to do

• Hide
• Attack
• Counter-criticize
• Sue
• Slander

And finally...Dan's Tips for overall success:

1. Stick with it.
2. It takes hard work
3. Focus on the message
4. Encourage participation
5. Be serious about not being too serious
6. Have fun

So what did I think overall? It was a great session. The full day worked very well together and even though I walked in with my own blog and an UBER Facebook presence and a well developed LinkedIn Profile, I still came away with a continuing appreciation for what is happening in the OnlineVis space and that there are others out there like me who find this not only interesting but revolutionary.

Dan calls himself an "Evangelist". Easy to do that in the business world -- especially in NYC and especially when you are a "creative". Much more difficult to do in Higher Education with curriculum -- but I'm working on it! (insert evangelical exclamations here!)

Read on over the rest of the summer as I take what I've learned and what I continue to learn in the blogging world and use it to update and improve the classes I teach in Internet Marketing, Online Visibility and Social Networking.

Now...I have GOT to get to bed.

Champlain College Online Marketing Bootcamp Day 4: Social Networking

First I should note that last nights reception at the Firehouse Art space was GREAT. Now, it wasn't the Magic Hat (really!) that made it the best...although that was quite nice (and they were a sponsor), but the opportunity to continue to network with individuals I already know, but also those who I haven't had a chance to get to know. These Web Analytics Wednesdays are GREAT!

On to today....

Today's post will be broken up a bit, as our focus is Social Networking and in todays second half of the morning session we'll be all getting LinkedIn profiles and setting up blogs...well I already have both, so I'll be concentrating on the optimization of them.

In the mean time today's morning overview has been very good. A great intro to Social Networking by Dave Winslow from EpikOne. In the spirit of all of this...here is Dave's Linked In profile.

Some highlights included the history of Social Networking (yep there's a history!) and the current day context. The interesting part has to do with where we've been, where we are and where we are going:

Early stages
1. IM
2. Message Boards
3. Webinars

Current Platforms
1. Blogs
2. Wikis
3. Online Communities

Next evolution
1. 3-d Virtual Worlds
2. Peer-to-peer
3. Virtual Tradeshow

Um...Dave's Back...time to get hands on with LinkedIn! Be back later!

Social Networking in the Classroom

There is a lot of debate right now within academic circles about social networking. In the K-12 world it's about allowing access and in the higher education world it's about the legal ramifications of the things that students will put up.

In my world, there's more.

I teach a course in Social Networking here at Champlain College and my challenge is, within this world of fast moving change, how do I keep up and continue to show students how Social Networking is changing how we will do business.

The first challenge, of course, is that students believe they already know everything there is to know about Social Networking. They have MySpace and Facebook. What more is there to know? A lot, actually. Consider the following sites that are changing the way we do business and connect:

• LinkedIn: You can see my LinkedIn profile here on this Blog. LinkedIn is social networking in the business world and it is having a big impact on how I connect with experts in the field, stay connected with businesspeople I know and garner internships for students!
• SixDegrees.org: This new website created by Kevin Bacon (ever played the game, sixdegrees of Bacon? I'm one degree removed because I know Kathryn Blume who met and worked with Kevin Bacon on her Lysistrata Project several years ago!) and it's goal is to use SOCIAL NETWORKING to fundraise for causes.
• MySpace.com: Yeah, I know. We all know about MySpace. But...what about the fact that they are working with eBay to create an opportunity for individuals on MySpace to sell stuff to their friends using the eBay auction engine? They are calling it PEER COMMERCE! The WSJ had an article in the paper on Thursday, Feb. 8th that addressed this along with challenges they are facing with Google and Advertising.
• YouTube: The non-profit group, Public Citizen is highlighting the dangers of new birth control pills -- using YouTube to get the word out. They are bypassing the traditional e-alerts and PSA's on TV to reach their audience. This is a new way for advocates ... and it's social networking! They've created website as well: notmypill.org.

There's more. But isn't this enough? Advocacy comes to social networking. PEER Commerce comes to social networking. Mobile is moving fast. Social networking isn't just about seeing what your friends did at their party last night. There's a lot more to it.

Well...I've got to get to class.