Book Review: Digital Leader by @equalman

Many people read author Erik Qualman's (@equalman) first book, Socialnomics. If not, you may have viewed one of his videos on YouTube regarding the social media revolution such as this one:

 

Qualman has aided several companies in building leading digital strategies, focusing heavily on the use of social media.

His latest book is Digital Leader. In it, Qualman provides an easily digestible (if not necessarily easily launchable) strategy for individuals to maximize their leadership potential in the social media/digital space.

Digital Leader breaks down into five main parts, each set around what Qualman sees as a truth that will help you develop your own digital STAMP. They are: Simple, True, Act, Map and People.

I personally enjoyed reading Digital Leader. Qualman writes with a style that is both conversational and motivational. Professionals who have spent time trying to articulate a vision for social media to supervisors and colleagues will find several "a-ha" moments in the ways that Qualman distills transformative technology into parallels with the non-digital world.

Qualman uses the book to challenge the reader to assess who they are currently in the digital world and to recognize the potential of who they could be in that same space. His suggestions are also quite realistic. Although Qualman wants people to take full advantage of the full spectrum of social media possibilities, he does recognize the need to power down and go offline. In fact, he recommends committing to checking email only twice a day. This is welcome advice for those of us who check our email with the fervor of Pavlovian dogs.

I have only two criticisms of the book. The first is that Qualman appears to implore people to use the digital space for only “big” moments. In parts of the book, he shows impatience for using time to talk about the TV show you watched as opposed to spending it creating content for a blog about changing the world.  He does this because he feels that every step we take in the digital universe leaves a lasting footprint—with the theory that we would want our footprints to stand out.  I agree with this to a point.  However, if our digital persona and our "IRL" (in real life) persona are indeed one and the same, authenticity only comes when we share all of ourselves. I think Qualman underestimates the long-term value of future generations knowing some of the day-to-day things that we found interesting in the present day.  For purposes of future research, we are all now primary sources. 

My second quibble is that at times he tends to remind the reader about some of the famous people he has shared the stage with or worked with.  His ideas are strong enough to stand on their own without him needing to seek an imprimatur from a well-known CEO or world leader.

This book is full of great ideas without being dense. It is the perfect read for an airplane trip (although I recommend the hard copy so you do not have to power down below 10,000 feet).

Qualman is on Twitter @equalman, and he interacts often with readers and answers questions.

If anyone else has read Digital Leader, I would be curious to know what your own assessment of this book is in the comments.

A Resurgence of Tumblove

Ma'ayan Plaut is the social media coordinator at Oberlin College.

After spending the better part of a year observing the wonders of Tumblr from a close range, I decided that Oberlin should try and cultivate a following on our college Tumblr. Summer was the perfect time to do this: Most students are away from Oberlin (and missing it desperately); recent graduates are only realizing how much they miss the place they called home for four years; and rising high school seniors are gearing up in their college searches.

Tumblr's simple microblogging setup is reminiscent of Twitter. Both microblogging platforms offer users the ability to appreciate posts (on Twitter, you can “favorite” tweets by clicking a star icon; on Tumblr, you can “like” posts using a heart icon) and repost or “reblog” them quickly to a personal account.

In three months, we gained almost 200 followers—more than one a day. Better yet, these new followers were interacting with us with “likes” and reblogs galore. It's likely that someone who saw one of these liked posts or reposts would trace back to the original poster (us!) and start following us, too. Win-win.

So, how do you build an audience on Tumblr?

• Observe. What's your audience doing? Start by creating some tracked tags on your Tumblr and listen. Read what people are saying, what they're posting and what gets reposted. Become familar with the language your audience is using, then you can hop in.
• Give them what they want. There are particular kinds of content that tend to tumble well: images, videos, quotes and sometimes short, punchy, original writing. I've been expanding from just posting photos via Flickr's Tumblr plugin to pulling out compelling teasers from student blogs and Oberlin news stories (and of course, linking to the original content as the source).
• Tagging is king. Users search Tumblr using tags, and much like Flickr, you can use tags to find similar content that you’ve posted in the past. A well-tagged post might go viral based entirely on the tags and the people tracking it.
• Share the love. If someone else is talking about your institution, show them some love. Like a post if it mentions you kindly, reblog it if you think it's relevant to the rest of your audience. When people reblog, occasionally they'll comment too, and reblogging their content back allows for an actual conversation. In both of these scenarios, your Tumblr username will be associated with that post, which is great for getting your account's name out there.

So, you've got a Tumblr. You're figuring out your audience. How do you keep them tuned in?

• Ask questions. If you end your post with a question mark, you will be offered a “let people answer” option before publishing. This means exactly what you think: Tumblr will enable a little answer box right below your question post, which will show up as a recorded answer with that post forever. It's similar to a reblog, but without the additional bits of information (only the username and answer will be displayed).
• Enable the ask box. While we have many means by which an incoming student can ask questions, Tumblr provides us with one more: the ask box. And although Tumblr is not strictly anonymous, it doesn't tie students to their personal Facebook or email account. After receiving an "ask" in your Tumblr inbox, you can choose to answer publicly or privately—an option you can decide upon when answering. If you choose to enable anonymous questions, you can even connect with non-Tumblr users who find your blog—particularly important since the non-traditional blogging form of Tumblr does not allow for comments unless one is a user.
• Capture your students’ voices. Since Tumblr has a built-in younger audience, it works well with students. As I mentioned in my previous post, Tumblr is a quick and dirty way to make a website. A number of student orgs at Oberlin have picked up on this and use the platform as a way to promote sponsored events and connect with students. Reblogging these posts are a great way to project an already present student voice.
• Capitalize on procrastination. During finals, when I knew that many students would be taking "Tumblr breaks" as often as "Facebook breaks," I asked students what they were eating, what they were listening to, where they were working and what other websites were serving as a distraction.

Are your students on Tumblr? What are they sharing?

The World Has Gone Viral: Get Busy Tweeting

Matthew Herek (@mherek) currently serves as the associate director of young alumni engagement in the office of alumni relations and development at Northwestern University. He works to integrate social media in ways that increase engagement and participation in the alumni community.

OK, perhaps that title is a little dramatic. I suppose it would be something if the plot of Contagion 2 centered on the one Twitter holdout who could retweet the cure for an awful disease, but instead destroys the world.

Now that it’s 2012, and five years since Twitter came on the scene, it’s safe to say the platform is way beyond the "early adopter" stage and has grown past its awkward "what everyone had for lunch" years. Twitter has become a national treasure. It can be used to topple political regimes, gauge reaction to major events and force telephone service providers to reverse course on fees. Many companies employ people to monitor Twitter and respond to questions and complaints.

With all of these functions, surely there must be a way for alumni and development professionals to use it. I offer the following observations:

1. You don’t have to be on Twitter to use Twitter:  Twitter is a very open resource and the search functionality alone makes it worth a visit. Go there and search for hashtags, like #casesmc or #higheredlive. Perhaps you’re a prospect manager heading into a huge meeting with a big shot from United Airlines—use Twitter search to see what people are saying about his/her company (if nothing else, you might know what kind of mood they’ll be in). This has potential for career services shops as well. Using Twitter search, you could teach job-seeking alumni how to research potential employers.

2. Growing Your Network: Would you ever think that following a presenter from a conference would lead to great restaurant recommendations? Is that even useful? Sure it is! As an alumni professional, you would be amazed at how connecting with professionals on Twitter can help you when you need a personal recommendation for the perfect place in a far-off city to take a prospect for dinner. Remember: Research shows we are far more likely to listen to recommendations from our friends than from strangers. This makes Twitter more useful than Yelp.

3. I sense much anger in this one: Do we even need Jedi knights anymore? Telepathy is not necessary to gauge the mood of your alumni base after big news hits. Just check in on Twitter after any major news event for your institution and there will likely be a dedicated base of promoters who are making statements about it. My feeling is that these raw 140-character primal screams are more of a mood indicator than one alum’s well-thought-out email sent five days later. You have to be on top of this.

4.    Filters are so 1990:  Remember when institutions relied on press releases and university communications were carefully crafted to “control the message”? Those days are dwindling. Arizona’s athletic director tweeted the announcement of the institution’s new football coach. Popular student athletes like Kirk Cousins at Michigan State and Alexander Netter at Northwestern are offering opinions on the events of the day without going through sports information directors. University presidents are developing dedicated fan clubs on Twitter talking about everything but the university.

As an alumni professional, you need to decide if you want your alumni to be more informed about the university than you are. If you want to wait until news is properly disseminated through your communications office, you may have to spend extra time addressing the rumors, false information and unconfirmed reports that have already piled up online.

If you have not used Twitter before, try it now. If you have some other ways professionals can use it, share them in the comments section.

Using New Media Tools to Promote Faculty Research

Jen Doak is the online communications specialist at CASE.

Most media professionals are now familiar with some online tools—if they don’t at least read blogs or participate in social networks, then they have had articles or press releases published on their institution’s website. But how can new media like blogs and content-sharing sites help advancement folks with an issue as old as parchment and quill pens: getting a general audience excited about academic research?

Menachem Wecker, formerly a writer and editor for George Washington Today, The George Washington University’s online news site, is now an education reporter with the U.S. News and World Report. He is also the conference chair for CASE's Annual Conference for Media Professionals, which will be held in Washington, D.C., next month. While there, Menachem will be moderating a panel on using new media to translate faculty work for a broader audience. He was gracious enough to answer several questions on the topic.

What are the common challenges for media relations professionals in promoting faculty research?

I'd say the primary challenge is that there isn't necessarily a common language. Many faculty members speak a language called "academic," which may be foreign to media relations professionals.

On the faculty side of things, if you've devoted your entire career to studying something narrow, like the sociology of Elizabethan cutlery, the chances are very good that you are going to resist having to collapse the research in your magnum opus to small sound bites that work well for reporters. Even if the media relations professional is well versed in a particular academic discipline, she or he is increasingly called upon to be a generalist as well, and how many people can follow a scholarly conversation in law, medicine, business and the arts?

There's also another issue, which is one of scope. New research--under certain conditions--can be newsworthy, but it also might be too technical or too focused for many journalism outlets. It becomes the media relations professional's task to find a way to make that research more accessible and more relevant to larger audiences.

What advantages do new media tools have over traditional media approaches to these challenges?

One topic that we are going to address on the [Media Relations Conference] panel is the potential of blogging. Many professors' email boxes are goldmines of information. One professor I used to work with--a former U.S. ambassador to Ethiopia and Burkina Faso--used to exchange thousands of words over email with reporters covering East Africa and the Horn. We started publishing those email exchanges on the blog, and just by repackaging existing content and posting it to the [publication sharing] site Scribd.com, we got tens of thousands of fresh eyeballs.

The only investment many "new" (though they're hardly new!) media tools require is time; many of them are free. Professors—if they write accessibly, blog regularly and construct their sites properly and strategically--can sometimes achieve digital followings that overshadow many of the reporters that they used to pitch.

What new media tools or platforms work best for promoting faculty research?

With the caveat that I'm on the payroll of none of these companies, I'd say the following tools/platforms are essential, in descending order of importance:

1. Scribd (for posting transcripts and then embedding them in other sites)

2. Twitter (for driving traffic to your site or as a microblogging platform if you don't have a site)

3. WordPress, Blogger or another blogging platform

4. Facebook/Google+/Tumblr (if you've got the time)

5. BlogTalkRadio or any of the other web-based radio stations.  

How can media relations professionals collaborate with faculty, either using new or traditional media approaches, to ensure accurate translation and effective promotion?

When I worked at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs, I was charged with raising the profile of 300 faculty members (about half were full-time and half were part-time). Of course, that was too many to actually collaborate with. My thought was that I would start with the ones who really wanted to be engaged in social media and to connect with reporters, and in the unlikely event that I actually could help all those professors, I would then resort to begging/bribing/threatening/or in any other way cajoling the others to enlist.

Needless to say, I more than had my hands full with the ones who were already excited about social media—and it turns out they were the ones who were willing to work hard at building online presences and audiences. That'd be my advice to media relations professionals: Work with the folks who are already interested in the power of social media. And don't be surprised if those who used to be nay-sayers change their minds when they see their colleagues' success.

 

How do you use new media to promote faculty achievements? (You can also use the hashtag #casemrp to discuss these and other advancement and media relations issues.)

SCVNGR Treks Augment Admission Events

Michael Stoner is the president of mStoner (mStoner.com), a marketing firm that works with education institutions.

Soon, prospective students staring at their mobile phones on your campus may not be texting their BFFs, but participating in a game that's designed to introduce them to the college—and increase their interest in applying to and attending your institution.

Early adopters in admission offices across the country are experimenting with SCVNGR, a mobile gaming platform, for a variety of admissions-related purposes. Their experience suggest that teens—and parents—enjoy a challenge while they're visiting campus and participating in other activities.

SCVNGR is used by more than 400 colleges and universities around the United States, museums like the Smithsonian, art galleries and businesses like Dunkin’ Donuts. Participants in a SCVNGR trek take part in challenges (e.g. take a picture of the library clock and upload the image), earning points for each challenge. SCVNGR can be played on any mobile device via text message or by using a free iPhone or Android app.

A trek consists of a number of linked challenges. Participants can play casually by taking part in a couple of challenges or they can play more seriously, competing with each other to accumulate points, often in order to win prizes.

Colleges and universities develop SCVNGR treks for many purposes, including alumni engagement. Given the teen penchant for video games, it’s unsurprising that admissions offices are looking closely at it. Here are some ways in which admission offices are using SCVNGR.

Complementing In-Person Events

Both Clarkson University and Penn State University created SCVNGR treks to give attendees at admissions events something to do that's less structured than the typical agenda.

“At Clarkson, our goal was to teach participants things that they wouldn’t hear on a campus tour or learn throughout the rest of the day.” said Jessica McPherson, a staff member in marketing and external relations. “We had approximately 600 students and their families on campus for a jam-packed day of events. Knowing the schedule, we decided that if we were going to have a SCVNGR trek on such a busy day, it would have to coincide with event locations and stay quite simple." The trek had five challenges in three different buildings.

At least 60 people participated. "We thought that was great! We even had parents playing. We were surprised that so many participants played via text message instead of with the app." McPherson added, "People loved the prizes and the idea that they learned something that others might not know."

[Learn more about SCVNGR Treks at Clarkson and see SCVNGR's case study about the Clarkson trek.]

Penn State developed a series of treks to supplement its summer visit event. Jenna Spinelle, an admissions counselor, explained, "Penn State undergraduate admissions used SCVNGR for 'Spend a Summer Day.' We bring almost 10,000 students and families to our University Park campus over six days in July and August to learn more about what Penn State has to offer. Our trek included challenges at some of our landmark locations around campus (the Nittany Lion Shrine, University Creamery) and other areas that we wanted to highlight (e.g. campus computer store, information fair with student organizations). Several hundred people participated over the course of six days, representing about 10 percent of total attendees."

[Spinelle wrote about the university’s experience in “Spending a Summer Day with SCVNGR.”]

Augmenting (or Replacing) In-Person Tours

At Dartmouth College, SCVNGR treks are being used to augment in-person campus tours. The admissions office at Dartmouth created seven SCVNGR treks, highlighting different aspects of campus life so that visitors have something to do when campus tours aren't operating.

In a post on the Wired Campus blog, Josh Keller observed that Dartmouth tours simply can't accommodate the more than 20,000 campus visitors each year. Using SCVNGR, Dartmouth develops treks around special-interests like sustainability in addition to highlighting campus landmarks like the library.

Additionally, John Beck Jr., senior assistant director of admissions at Dartmouth, noted, "Many low-income teens are more likely to access the Internet over their phones than high-income teens, so we’re not shutting out a part of our population by socioeconomic means.”

Other institutions, like the University of California Santa Barbara, offer links to SCVNGR right from their campus tours website.

Keys to Success: Swag, Marketing & Mobile Access

Both McPherson and Spinelle commented on the importance of awarding prizes for playing SCVNGR. Clarkson University erected a booth in the student center to distribute prizes to players, handing out a variety of Clarkson items such as Frisbees, coffee mugs, bumper stickers and pen sets. Penn State gave a small prize to anyone who stopped by its social media table and showed that they had completed at least one challenge. Each day, it picked one person from the competitors to receive a gift bag of Penn State and SCVNGR t-shirts, water bottles, sunglasses and other swag.

Advance publicity and on-site help with how to use SCVNGR boost participation rates. Penn State started promoting its trek a few weeks before the actual visit day using Facebook, Twitter and an email reminder that went to students who’d registered. Both Penn State and Clarkson produced small flyers explaining the trek and how to participate.

But on-site, in-person promotion could help too. McPherson notes, "We missed an opportunity to educate potential participants on SCVNGR. The accepted students had between one and two hours of downtime depending on when they arrived and registered on campus. Having a table set up next to the registration table would have been ideal to fill that void in activities and to teach students and families about SCVNGR."

Both Penn State and Clarkson plan to expand their use of SCVNGR next year. For those who are thinking about initiating a SCVNGR trek, McPherson advises, "Have some goals in mind, both for the outcome of the trek (were people glad they played?) and for the trek itself (what should a participant get out of playing?). Starting out, qualitative goals are equally as important as quantitative. We tried to get a lot of feedback so that we can continue to improve our treks and challenges."

She also noted one particular issue faced by her rural campus—not all mobile phones work in Potsdam, N.Y. "We did not anticipate that we would have a lot of students who were unable to receive mobile coverage and therefore unable to use their phones at all." Resourceful Clarkson students saved the day for users who wanted to play SCVNGR but did not have cell phone service, writing the challenges down and posting the answers for them. "The people they helped were especially grateful and we learned a valuable lesson—next time we will print out a few challenge sheets in case this happens again."

The Jury’s Out on QR Codes

Theresa Walker is a senior editor at CURRENTS. She covers the communications and marketing beat for the magazine.

I began thinking about the need to include a CURRENTS article about QR codes after I started seeing them pop up more frequently last year in the catalogs I received in the mail, on tourism ads in Washington, D.C., metro stations and in the pages of The Washington Post. (This Poynter Institute article about using QR codes to drive traffic to newspaper content offers useful tips for anyone looking into using QR codes.)

I came across some interesting and not very user-friendly examples. Sears ran one in TV commercials during its holiday ad campaign last December and is, to my mind at least, still the most notably useless example. I paused my TV and tried several times, unsuccessfully, to scan the code. I don’t know how many other people made an attempt, but I can’t imagine that there were too many.

A couple of months later, I saw an interesting newspaper ad for a Picasso exhibit at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. A portrait of the artist was rendered entirely in QR codes. It was a cool concept, but it wasn’t as easy to scan as I thought it would be. And once the code successfully scanned, it was a bit of a letdown because it took me to the VMFA’s regular website rather than a mobile website or video. I felt kind of like Ralphie in the movie “A Christmas Story” after he successfully decoded the message with his new Little Orphan Annie decoder ring.

These and other experiences with QR codes led to the article “QR Codes: Use Them … or Lose Them?” in the October Issue of CURRENTS. The article offers two points of view on the topic.

Pro—Chuck Cunningham outlines the experiences of the University of Guelph, one of the first institutions in Canada to use the codes in student recruitment. He explains how, through the use of QR codes, the university successfully created a media buzz designed to raise the university's profile and, ultimately, increase the number of applicants to Guelph.

Con—Cassie Dull of the Park Tudor School in Indiana, on the other hand, believes that while QR codes have great potential, they currently aren’t that valuable because they:

• are too much work for users and don’t provide enough value.
• need a strong message behind them to make them effective; they are just a tool and require a strong communications plan.
• are trendy but there’s no real proof that they make a difference.

With so many available methods for generating free QR codes, it’s easy and inexpensive to test whether they will work for your institution’s marketing efforts or campaign before deciding to go the route of having a QR code specially designed for your campus.

Is your institution considering using QR codes? How have you already used them? Let us know how you’re using—or thinking about using—QR codes and whether you think they’re here to stay (or not) by posting a comment.

Villains, Ducks and Flash Mobs: Four Ways YouTube Can Go Beyond the Brochure

Jennifer Doak is the online communications specialist at CASE.

We all know your institution has amazing faculty, first-class students and a meaningful piano soundtrack—but what makes it compelling? Let’s take a look at some creative (and not necessarily high-budget) uses of online video.

1. Tell stories.

  

Valencia College, “Dear Valencia”: This promotional video centers on students writing letters to the school, the faculty and eventually the community, thanking Valencia for believing in their abilities. It’s a simple concept, but the editing and content are incredibly well-done—and the cast outtakes give it a real human touch.

University of West Georgia, “Go West”: These three promotional videos for the University of West Georgia use a great slogan, “Go West,” to its advantage. Proactive students head to campus on different roads, using various vehicles, to find their own way to success. Simple, effective and beautifully done.

2. Create intrigue.

 

Park Tudor School, “Founder’s Day 2011: A mystery’s a-brewing on campus”:  I just love this Founder’s Day mystery. A team of two students travel across campus trying to find the president’s backpack, solving clues that use trivia about the school’s history. The video features a cackling villain, “Yackety Sax,” and karate-chopping staff members. It may not be the most viral video out there, but it’s a great way to build community—and I bet alumni loved it.

Whitworth University, “The Quest for the Golden Pinecone”: The pirate mascot’s choose-your-own-adventure-style journey was featured in The Chronicle of Higher Education earlier this summer, and for good reason. Admitted students were invited to watch the video and then choose what would happen next – progressive videos were then linked to the Class of 2015 Facebook page.

3. Find out what’s hot.

 

Online content is all about creating, sharing and paying homage to memes—why not join in?

University of Oregon, “Call Me a Duck”: Oregon’s Office of Admissions is lucky enough to have a catchy custom-made song from On the Rocks, an a cappella group that’s pretty good at going viral.

Oberlin College’s Friday parody: Rebecca Black’s infamous earworm gets the commencement treatment for the Class of 2011.

Murray State Flash Mob: Flash mobs have become a huge trend on campuses in the past year, but I think Murray State’s got some amazing choreography here. I’m also a sucker for 90s dance tunes, school mascots and presidents riding the train. C & C Music Factory, anyone?

(Honorable flash-mob mentions go to the University of Minnesota’ s celebration of the College of Science and Engineering’s 75^th anniversary and Brigham Young University’s improvement on the wave. )

4. Show that you’re listening.

You may remember a previous blog post on Florida International University’s “Betsy Reads Your Comments” videos. But it’s not the only institution out there responding to their audience through YouTube. 

Aberystwyth University’s social media team answers frequently (or infrequently) asked questions, taken from its Facebook page, and puts them on an interactive YouTube menu. I love its top 10 tips: “Don’t get too attached to kitchen utensils” is advice we should all pay attention to, in my opinion.

 

Do you have numbers to add to the list? Other fantastically creative ways institutions are using YouTube? Post ‘em in the comments!

 

 

Why Google+ Will Work for Higher Ed

Patrick Powers is an interactive media manager at Webster University.

If I’ve learned anything from two weeks spent playing around in Google+, it’s that when it becomes available, this service can work for higher education.

Google+ features a social environment where it is easy to build connections, focus on specific interests and keep track of who sees what. It’s a recipe ripe for success when it comes to promoting higher education. It’s only a matter of time before a Google+ page becomes a key component for quality communication. If our audience is there, we should be there, too.

To date, Google has discouraged colleges and universities—along with every other business out there—from setting up official accounts in the fledgling social network. Google developers say they’re working on a space for business, but that space has yet to materialize. When Google opens the door for businesses, colleges and universities should be aware of the potential behind Google+. Get in there, play around and see the benefits yourself.

There are a handful of features that stand out in Google+ and should warrant our attention:

1. Robust Search

Both Facebook and Google+ encourage users to enter information about where they went to school. The difference is that this information is public and searchable inside Google+. Basically, this means one could search for XYX university and find scores of people identifying themselves as alumni. Without "friending" every fan out there, this information is difficult to track through Facebook.

2. Targeted Audiences

A benefit of the Facebook status update is that one can send the update to select users based on geography. Google+ ups the ante. A post in Google+ can be sent to select circles, meaning there can be circles for alumni, donors, current students and prospective students, and each can receive targeted messaging. It all depends on which circles you place people in.

3. Privacy Protection

The same "circles" feature that allows for targeted messaging also makes privacy easier to understand. There is no need for multiple profiles. Every item shared on Google+ allows you to choose with whom you wish to share it.

4. Hanging Out Made Easy

Open houses and information sessions are great, but with the growing popularity of online classes, who has time to drive to campus anymore, especially when the campus may be hundreds of miles away? Hangouts in Google+ provide group video chat capabilities and can be a great way to start a dialogue without leaving home.

5. Topics of Conversation

The "sparks" feature is great for aggregating news, posts and information around a single topic—think business education, fundraising or higher education in general. While it may not be designed to foster personal connection, it’s a great resource and access is convenient. Information, available as a spark feed, can be shared within circles with a click of the mouse.

Have you found your own favorite feature in Google+? Please share it in the comments below.

Storify Your Institution

Jen Doak is the online communications specialist at CASE.

There's been a lot of buzz on Storify lately, so I thought I'd try it out to demonstrate how it can be used for advancement:

Why I Still Like Facebook Check-In Deals

Patrick Powers is an interactive media manager at Webster University.

It could be easy to get glum on the future of Facebook check-in deals — so few businesses seem to take the time to set them up and, in return, so few people use the service to claim them.

So why am I still keen on the idea of setting them up in higher education?

Facebook check-in deals are easy to establish, help a location stand out from the crowd and reward people for telling others about a business. They may never be “the next big thing,” but they’re still worth the minimal effort it takes to get them up and running.

Here’s the basic rundown on the four types of Facebook deals:

• Individual deals. Check in at the university film series and gets a free bag of popcorn.
• Friend deals. Get five friends to attend a lecture, check in, tag each other and they all get copy of the lecturer’s latest book.
• Loyalty deals. Reach a set number of check-ins at a specific university cafeteria and earn a free meal.
• Charitable donations. For every check in at the “Local Big Business” lecture hall, the “Local Big Business” donates $1 to fund university scholarships.

Establishing a Facebook check-in deal is easy. If a Facebook page includes an address, it’s already a “place” in Facebook and should be available to launch a deal. Choose the deal type, define the offer, specify run dates and promote it across Facebook. It takes about as much time as it did to read this sentence.

It is important to remember, however, that while a deal can be created in minutes, the goals and strategy behind the deal may take some time to flush out. These important details are worth spending some time on.

Check-in deals help a location stand out. It may be subtle but the little yellow icon that floats next to a location plays a role in drawing users’ attention. If users know that little yellow icon can unlock value, they’re more likely to investigate.

It’s an icon that begs the question, “What does that location have going on that others don’t?” And who wouldn’t want inquiring minds taking the time to see what else is out there?

Deals reward people for telling others. When a person checks in to claim a deal, it pops up in the news feed of all his or her friends, becoming a link to the location’s Facebook page. The average user on Facebook accumulates 130 friends.

Check-in deals, therefore, can be a great way to build brand awareness those friends of friends.