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I've just joined the LitLiberation Challenge at DonorsChoose.org. (see the nifty image to the right?)
DonorsChoose.org is a website that allows teachers to post their classroom needs along with the cost of fulfilling those needs. Then individuals who wish to help that teacher can donate money to support the children and the teacher in the classroom.
LitLiberation is a Challenge Group created by and populated by some of the top bloggers in the field -- and their goal is to raise $1 million dollars for school projects all over the country. You can read more about that part of it here!
My personal challenge is closer to home. I believe that rural schools face a unique set of challenges and here in Vermont, we have a lot of rural schools who need our help. My challenge is "Go Green Mountains" for our Vermont schools. My hope is to do TWO things.
Vermonters helping Vermonters. Every little bit helps and as we focus in this state with shifting demographic realities and tighter budgets, we'll need to support our schools even more.
So take a minute and donate to the FOUR teachers who need your help to get:
Know a teacher who needs help in their classroom? Pass the word and let them know to create a proposal on DonorsChoose.org so they can get their projects funded too!
Social Media Analysis: Rep. Duncan Hunter (R)
Duncan Hunter has the following:
Website: The campaign website for Hunter is interesting in that it took me a good bit of time to find the email sign up! They’ve got the right hand “action” area to contribute, volunteer, tell a friend and become a member of the eLeader Team and the email sign up blends in the top right hand corner. Or…it could just be me! The eLeader Team is about joining the campaign…not just getting email updates. There doesn’t seem to be a blog anywhere, but the campaign is doing a nice daily audio update from the candidate himself – today’s was on work he was doing on the house floor. They have virtual HQ set up for Iowa, South Carolina, Nevada and New Hampshire (early primary/caucus states) and links to several social media. The campaign is clearly using a lot of YouTube and is porting in video all over the site. They are also using a cute email a yard sign application that takes you out of the site, but allows you to send of a post card via email to a friend about the campaign. Down sides to this site include poor updating. First thing that I was greeted with was a poll about whether or not Columbia University should allow the Iranian President to speak. That is over and should be pulled from the site. Also, in the virtual HQ areas, upcoming events were from AUGUST! Not good at all. Overall the site provides basic information. The layout of the home page is clean, but unstructured with no clear organization. It seems quite haphazard.
YouTube: Clean and neat layout. Nothing out of place. Video that is running is not a personal message from the candidate – it’s a segment from CNN Lou Dobbs on a boarder issue the candidate was working on. Without context or a date, it is confusing and certainly not worth watching. Most of the videos here are segments from debates and news shows. Only a few personal messages from several months ago, and most videos were added more than 2 months ago, hard to tell how recent the CNN piece is – sorry, I’m not up on that particular type of current event. So, overall, nothing outstanding here. 686 subscribers.
MySpace: Not much going on here – the one good thing is that the campaign has ported in a lot of the YouTube videos through MySpace TV so they are actually taking advantage of the social media in a way that complements each other. There are links to the Facebook, the campaign site, YouTube and the meetup sites (although MeetUp was NOT listed on the official site). Overall, nothing impressive. 6973 friends.
Facebook: Initial tries to get into the Hunter Facebook site failed. The direct link from the website doesn’t seem to work – taking me first to the login screen of death and then once I login, taking me to my network home page – nothing having to do with Hunter. The link from the MySpace page, however, does work but takes you directly to the official group for Duncan Hunter. What’s nice about this is the campaign is leveraging the group option in Facebook, which I think candidates in general are under utilizing. The group has 709 members. The Facebook profile page, however is set to private, so I have added him to my friends (the first candidate I’ve had to do that with in order to access the Facebook profile) so will have to do an update on that part of Facebook – and we will see how long it takes for them to accept me as a friend. I’m not sure what the rationale is for having a public group, but a private profile – seems to miss the whole point of a social network! 330 friends.
MeetUp: The link to the MeetUp site from Facebook brings you to the Florida group supporting the Candidate. Interesting choice of linking! At the main MeetUp page for Hunter, there’s a list of upcoming events and who will attend. Not a lot of activity here. Great idea though…they should link from their main website and I’m surprised that they aren’t doing that.
Search Results: With a name like “Hunter” organic search is going to be tough. I would expect the campaign to realize this and go for the CPC/sponsorship ads on the major sites in order to augment the organic challenge. A first pass through Google shows, however, that this is not the case. Using “Hunter”, the official campaign website is “below the fold” at #8. It’s actually a better showing than I expected. At the same time there are NO sponsored ads or AdWords at all. Over at Yahoo! the results are worse – nothing at all and no ads either. At Live, the site comes in at #7, and again, no ads. So, ok…Hunter is very common so it would be fair to put in his first name too. Results for “Duncan Hunter” revealed: Google: Bang! Pop! We have a WINNER! All candidate…all the time! Campaign site, WikiPedia.com, congressional site, MySpace, congressional campaign site (oops!—DIFFERENT Duncan Hunter – actually it is Hunter Jr.! my bad), several other relevant sites and the YouTube site as well. Yahoo! search provides similar results with Hunter Jr. showing up in the mix as well. Over at Live similar results, although no Hunter Jr. The issue, of course, is that people may not know the candidate’s first name, so as with misspellings, the team should be prepared. I am very surprised that there are no keyword buys on “Hunter”. If the ad was written carefully the CPC would probably be fairly low, since people who are looking for Hunting, or Hunter College, etc. probably would not click on a campaign website.
Recommendations: Here’s another underdog who is missing an opportunity. While they haven’t spread themselves so thin on social media that they can’t possibly keep up, the campaign isn’t even keeping the main website up to date! There are linking issues and some confusion over how to sign up for emails. At the same time, the use of social media tools is small enough – YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and MeetUp – that they should be able to keep them up to date. If the campaign can go to the trouble of posting daily audio on the main site, they should run a video of the same thing and post it on YouTube and MySpace. They need to manage their links better and should have engaged in some CPC on the name in the search engines. Overall, nothing too impressive here – and lack of funds doesn’t really explain it either, it really is a lack of attention to the small details. I’m surprised that there is no blog. There is also no RSS feed either. This Campaign is clearly not fully committed to the use of social media.
Just checked my RSS feed at NetVibes and saw that Cathy Resmer over at Seven Days has posted her BlogRoll for the day.
There's a link to my earlier post from this morning! I've already posted it in the course room for the Online Visibility students.
Now THAT'S what I'm TALK'N ABOUT!
SWEET!
As always...Thanks Cathy!
It is no secret that I'm a college professor who teaches a series of classes in e-Business Management and Marketing at Champlain College. One of the classes I'm currently teaching is an online course that lasts for five weeks. Online Visibility is the subject. Here's the "official" course description:
Creating online visibility for a business, service or product is becoming more complex as more and more tools become available. Moving outside the realm of advertising and building websites, this course will provide students with hands-on experience in using the web to disseminate information about their product or service in this examination of PR-oriented online tactics. E-mail marketing, RSS feeds, news release distribution, viral marketing, and referrals will all be explored and utilized as students disseminate information utilizing online tools.
One of the key components of the course is setting up blogs so that students can explore the use of RSS Feeds, subscription and the effect of linking and tracking key words in order to measure online visibility.
Students create blogs for their business, organization, business idea and even a hobby. Part of the work is learning how to write for the blog, link, track success, and see what happens when others subscribe and mention their blogs.
So this post, besides setting the context for what we are doing and why, is part of the assignment I gave the class. Today I have successfully signed up for almost everyone's blogs and they are ported into my NetVibes. And now I'm doing part two of the assignment, which is to write about each blog and see what gets picked up!
The first blog to get picked up in my Google News Alert for "Champlain College" was Welton Mountain Tech. This blog emphasizes the challenges facing web security. In one of the posts, the blog linked to Champlain College and mentioned one of our faculty, Gary Kessler.
Another blog in the class features a tribute to the Red Sox -- I believe they are a soccer team, right? This blog, aptly entitled Just another Red Sox Fan, portrays the interests and links that one who follows the Red Sox might care about -- the post that provides links to other sites might be useful to some.
Vermont UnBoxed is a blog that supports a business idea of one of the students to have a website where people can order and learn about vermont-made products. While the website is still an idea, the blog is "real" and this post on a local farm stand is one way to highlight Vermont at its finest.
If you are interested in BMW's then the this blog from our resident BMW Ethusiast provides some questions about where to find parts and the experiences the blogger has had with rebuilding and updating the cars.
Another business idea for creating more opportunities for people to find their favorite movies can be found at K Movies. The idea behind this blog is to link it with a website and drive people to purchase movies. While there isn't a website yet, this experiement will surely reveal some of the opportunities and challenges that come with linking e-commerce to blogs.
The world of Online Education is examined in the Continue Your Education blog from Champlain College's own Division of Continuing Professional Studies. One post highlights some student work at the South End Art Hop from several weeks back!
Another addresses the use of Web Analytics -- and links people to one of our other one credit classes in..Web Analytics!Advice on Online Visiblity comes in many forms. In How to Acheive Online Visibility for your Business the focus is on advice for highly specialized business to business clients so they can augment their personal selling with a push from the web. It's a tough nut to crack for B2C -- imagine the challenges with B2B! Branding is important no matter what, so this post should resonate with many!
What an amazing array of options -- don't you just love the Blogsphere?
I interrupt the social media analysis on presidential candidates for some important side notes.
I would like to take this moment to declare to the entire blogosphere in an unabashed, proud and down right enthusiastic "voice" that I am a member of the CULT OF THE AMATEUR!
Ok, well...maybe not. Perhaps I fit into that elite group of experts who so carefully monitor and dole out snippets of information that is easily digestible by the masses of people with little to no intelligence who need the big companies to tell us what to think and when to think it.
What IS she talking about, you may wonder.
Here it is in a nutshell. Many thanks to PBS and the News Hour with Jim Lehrer this evening for the interview they conducted with author, blogger, and former silicon valley exec Andrew Keen on his book: The cult of the amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture. I caught just a piece of the interview, but then HAD to check it out online. A Google search revealed a blog by Andrew Keen which he is using to promote the book where he is writing about his interview experiences and other musings. I'm getting the book. I think I'm actually going to use excerpts in a class I'm developing for the spring semester. The excerpt I read on the website and the interview I heard have revealed to me that Keen clearly is a capitalist at heart. He likes the status quo where "experts" get paid to be experts, and where information is pushed out to the masses by trusted gate keepers like news editors, music executives and others we can trust who are paid by advertising revenue that supports jobs and, well the economy. He also clearly finds the concept of consumer generated content to be a threat to the well-ordered way it has always been and that information created by the masses (read amateur) to be read by the masses is creating a culture where truth no longer exists and it's a great big free for all. Welcome to the chaotic world of Web 2.0!
Bloggers and YouTubers and Social Networkers beware! You are a blight on society. You are killing our culture with your opinions, anonymity, and lack of expertise.
This is as far as I have gotten. When I get the book and read it I am sure I will enjoy it even more. It will fit perfectly into my course here at Champlain College, which is tentatively titled Technological Innovation, Cyberculture and Identity. I've been told the title needs to be jazzed up. Anyway, we'll be exploring the points of view of many individuals who have written about technological innovation and how they see it affecting our culture, society and individual identity. From Mumford and Zuboff and Vinge and Birkerts and now Keen -- what a rich and diverse group of perspectives. It will be fascinating to explore and adding a point of view like Keens will make this even more fun and provocative.
By the way, for more information you should check out Keen's blog! I suppose his blog is ok, since he is an expert and all. Certainly isn't one of the masses engaging in mindless blogging for no reason except to get his name out there and "publish" his opinions.
Now...on to making new friends...
One of the blogs I do follow every day is written by Rohit Bhargava, Vice President, Interactive Marketing at Ogilvy Public Relations. His blog, Influential Marketing provides great insight into the social media space that is unfolding every day. It's a moving target that I'm trying to keep up on and translate for my students and his blog helps me do that. Well I popped on to the blog today and saw that he has a facebook profile now! So, on a whim, I send him a FB message. Not to long after that he responded. I'm now "friends" with Rohit and I'm really psyched! He just posted that he is trying to figure out Twitter, so I am now following him there as well.
He's in the process of writing a book about social media and he's interested in what professors of marketing are doing in their classes. Well, it will be very interesting to correspond with him and to continue to watch and read as he makes progress on that book!
In the mean time, I've got to finish up these social media analysis before the election!
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!
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