Fuzzy Content

I did a presentation this week regarding Social Media in Higher Ed i thought I might as well post it. I think it is a pretty good primer to give to beginner to intermediate level people about social media in higher ed. I gave the presentation to a group of communications and marketing people on campus and they were very receptive and had lots of questions. People are still following up with me regarding it, so maybe we will get more going here on campus.

-Matt Herzberger 

Social content on the internet has reached a blistering pace. My head spins, but my eyes twinkle at the possibilities. For example:

For all of you who enjoy regular podcasts, you now have your favorites. I listen to about 4 or 5 podcasters on a regular basis. Some have daily podcasts, but others are for less frequent. For those everyday podcasts, I find it hard to catch up. But a service has been out there for a few months that caught my eye. Pluggd has Hear Here, which allows you to search podcasts for appropriate content. So, let’s say you are listening to Chris Pirillo, but find his hour-long daily program too much. You just want to know more about the new ChaCha search engine. Type in ChaCha, or “search engine” and it will show you where in the hour-long program that may be discussed. Brilliant! I’m not supporting their service, but if you use it and like it, let me know.

How does this relate to you? It is now more important than ever to expand your walls of the .edu site. If there are no services that push people to your site (besides standard Google searches), you are missing the boat. Your podcasts, blogs, and events need to be found in aggregators, microformat searches, and blog searches.

It’s a crowded marketplace…your content needs to rise to the top.

One thing I think that lots of bloggers may be missing out on is readers who don’t use a feed reader. I think you need to access who your audience is. For example if you have a tech blog you might go with the assumption that most of your readers probably have a feed reader. However, if you do a student blog there are decent chances that your audience might consist of parents, administrators, friends, etc. These people might not all have readers. So they are missing out on the benefits of RSS.

How do we help them?
Here is what I suggest. Use a service that will turn your feed into an email. So they will get the full benefits of RSS without having to have a feed reader(something that I think is definitely not mainstream). Here are a few options

• Feedblitz
  Sign up, add your feed to account, then get the code and add to your site.
• Feedburner
  Burn your feed then on your account page, go to the publicize tab, then to email subscriptions. Then copy the code and add to your blog

There are also wordpress plugins for this. I am having trouble hunting them down in my del.icio.us, if I hunt it down I will add to comments.

So I think the benefit of this is that you can turn a casual non-techie browser into a regular reader like people who use feed readers with very little effort.

So as the title suggests, Feed me, but don’t forget my email.

-Matt Herzberger 

I made an aggreagated feed for all the higher ed web development sites I could think of

http://feed.kickrss.com/uwebfeed

Or you can view as a page

http://www.kickrss.com/uwebfeed

Please let me know if there are any that need to be added or that you feel shouldn’t be there.

Here are the sites in the feed currently:

Bob Johnson’s Blog on Internet Marketing
CogDogBlog
collegewebeditor.com: web, marketing & PR in higher ed
EducationPR
erelevant: electronic marketing for higher education
Fuzzy Content
Higher Ed Webs
Institutional Knowledge
Interllectual.com - coffee
Intermedia
mStoner Blog
Syndication for Higher Ed
templatedata
The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog
U B r a n d e r
U Marketing Guru
University web marketing and usability
Weblogg-ed