RSS Readers: Where Do I Begin?

I am an early adopter of technology, I always have been. Afterall, I was on a computer pretty early in age. Most of my friends didn't even have a computer until they were in high school. Today's kids probably think I lived in the ice age.

By the time I was in elementary school I used to format floppy disks and get paid a quarter per disk. I don't think my kids will ever know what a disk is and what it means to format.

So when it comes to reading blogs, I probably read them in the most backwards way. I subscribe to two main types of blogs. The first kind are informational, news related to schools, life, technology, and social media. These are full of useful resources and often have information I want to share or keep as a resource. The other type I read is what I call mommy blogs. Many of these the only thing informational is a menu plan or recipe. Most of the information is time sensitive with coupons or rewards codes. If I didn't get a chance to read them, then they just aren't worth reading. They are no longer useful information.

So the way I read these blogs is I have them delivered to my aol account. This is my spam/junk mail account. I have my aol mail forwarded to a gmail account because I live on google. Then I have the various blogs I read skip my inbox and arrive into filtered folders, some for an individual blog, some into topic, and some into a folder that is just labeled blogs. When I have time I go through these folders and read the messages. At the end of busy weeks I go through the time sensitive ones and delete the ones from the beginning that I didn't get to read.

Reading a lot more blogs, I decided it was time to look at rss readers. Since I have a droid phone, I of course figured I should begin with google reader. I did a bunch of reading about the various rss readers and many people don't like gReader on droid. Feedly was suggested as an alternative, so I decided i'd try both of these. Pulse was rated higher and some of the tech news I read was already part of this. So over the next couple weeks, I'm going to try them out on my droid and see what I like best. I welcome suggestions.

Implementing New Systems - Pitfall 1

While I was doing my research for my doctoral dissertation, I read a lot about universities implementing Peoplesoft or other student information systems (SISs). One of the biggest pitfalls that all the literature had to say was if you aren't willing to change your process or adapt to the system, then the 1000s of dollars that you invest in the new system will be worthless because within a couple of years you have to begin the process all over again.

I think that this is actually useful insight into any project that a school undertakes, whether it is a student information system, a new website, or adopting social media. The biggest problem that organizations or schools encounter is while they want change they are often unwilling to break from their traditions and unwilling to look at their processes. That said the most important part of implementing any system is finding the best of both worlds. It's important not to have a radical change to your process. This means sometimes having the system make customizations to preserve central processes. But it also means that not everything is a central process.

This is challenge often occurs at ending stages of new systems. It is often hard to plan in the beginning stages for these processes because many organizations, schools, or businesses think that their processes are something that everyone does, but this is not usually the case. There are so many processes that often inherit to that specific place of business that it is often hard for organizations to keep up. They try to cater to the normal and often times your school has at least one process that is not normal.

A new system gives your school the opportunity to evaluate your processes. It allows you to ask your school, your users, and the recipents of the program questions. Are you really doing everything the most efficiently? Is there a better way to do things? And how can we work with our new system better?

The one thing to remember is with any system, there are always growing pains.

Page Timelines on Facebook, What does this Mean?

Yesterday, Facebook introduced the Timeline for Pages. The timeline has already been available for personal profiles for quite some time. Right now you could say it's in beta test mode, it will officially go live at the end of the month (March 30). Right now pages have the option of customizing it and getting used to it.

What's the Facebook Timeline?

The Facebook Timeline is a way of telling a story about your school, organization, or whatever your page is about. The timeline gives you an opportunity to review easily everything you have ever posted on your page and decide what you want to share in this story with the people who like you. The timeline leads with a bold image (the cover) and then has your profile pic.

The Cover

 This is a creative example of what the cover of a page might look like, but not one that is actually created. Image from VitroAgency The cover is a large bold that is your opening photo or introduction to your page. The opportunities for this are endless. And you can constantly change it. A school could feature a winning team (if your policies allow you to feature students on your facebook page) or another day feature student work. Think of the cover as a way to showcase your school and what it has to offer. It should change and tell a story about who you are. Here are a few examples that are interesting, both from personal profiles and also from the few brands who have already launched the new timeline for their page.

Learning from Personal Timeline Examples

The personal profile timeline has been around for a while and so people have had the opportunity to become creative. Here are a few examples that pages might learn from as they grow their develop and create their own timelines.
 
This is an interesting  example with the profile pic as part of the overall picture. I found this image online and thought it was a great example of featuring a team an athlete at the same time. Although this is an individual page, perhaps your school were the champions and you have a sub-story to tell about the highlighted person. The kids made the winning touchdown or has a remarkable story to share.
 Perhaps you have a picture of a Principal or the Head of the School looking out or doing something unique. The "Polaroid" pictures on the side can show other things happening at school or items you want to showcase about the school.

 
  This groups information written nicely on the background and integrates the profile picture into the scheme of the cover picture. What's nice about this personal timeline example is it is a good display of both visual design and information design. You could highlight aspects of our school visually with information about your school. This design gives the opportunity to show a prospective student or employee what your school is all about.

Page Timeline Examples

 The New York Times, features their mark and their office. This page is a who are we. Very simple. Pages will have to think about whether or not their page needs to changes or can this be an evergreen approach.
  This says who they are and shows something unique about them. When you think about the United States Navy, you probably associate ships rather than airplanes. The sea is still captured in this picture, but there is another aspect of the Navy that you might know about. I wonder what the next cover image will be and how long before this picture becomes old. This picture is definitely inviting and tells a story.
 
 A picture can sometimes tell a 1000 words. This definitely depicts exactly what I would expect to see on the Muppets page. It's visually interesting. Right now the Muppets page is all about the movie coming out, but this page could be about other movies or other Muppet related items.

Some examples of Facebook Timeline Covers

10 Examples of Brands (Macys, Manchester United, AT&T, Coca-Cola, Red Bull, Ford, Today Show, LiveStrong, Starbucks, Adobe)
30 Creative Timeline Cover Examples for your Facebook Profile
Facebook Timeline Cover: 40 (Really) Creative Examples.
New Facebook Timeline Famous Brand Pages Cover Designs | Cool Ideas & Examples for Fan pages

Content for Your Timeline

The content changes slightly. Now the content is about the time that something happened. Engaging your audience continues to be an important part and it should still remain an important part of your social media plan. But now it's more about your story and what happened when. On this day you won the championship. Or on this day 100 of your students came to school dressed in the school's mascot. Imagine then featuring an album with all the different renditions of your school mascot.

It's Time to Revisit your Content

When you were first starting out you probably had no clue how to use Facebook. You might still not know really how to use Facebook and what works for your school. Part of technology today is it is changing so fast sometimes it's hard to keep up with. So what you posted at the very beginning might not be the kind of information that you think you would like to post today. The new timeline displays information in a different way and this is your opportunity to look over the story you have told in the past and clean it up. You can easily hide posts that you don't want to share.

New Features

Coupons

A new feature is that now pages will be able to create coupons directly in Facebook and share them on the timeline. Page likers will then be able to share those coupons and then they could become viral. I was trying to think about how this would impact a school or how a school could use a coupon. My first thought was about auxiliary programs. We run a summer camp at our school and I was thinking that we could offer a $50 discount to Facebook Followers. Then I was thinking about the other kinds of programs we run at school and we run a lot of other classes and events and there are so many opportunities to offer a deal or a discount that could then be used in our online registration system.

Communicating Directly with your Followers

This has been one of the things I have always found frustrating. I have not necessarily had a way to communicate with people following us. Now our followers will be able to direct message us from inside Facebook. It does mean yet another place that you'll have to keep up with in the ever growing load of information.

Friend Interactions

This feature definitely caught me off-guard. When a follower views your page, you will be able to see your friend interactions toward the top of the page. When I visited the Navy page, I wouldn't have thought I knew anyone who would have posted a comment there, but I actually had a few friends from Facebook who had posted on the page. It definitely made it a more personal experience.

Other Examples and Information about Facebook Pages

Timeline for Brands: How to Prepare for Your Company’s New Facebook Page
Facebook Timeline for Brands: The Complete Guide
Politicians Using Facebook Timeline
9 Ways to Prepare for Facebook’s Timeline for Business Pages
Facebook Timeline for Brands Coming Later This Month [REPORT]
What PR pros need to know about Facebook Timeline for brands
Facebook Timeline for Brands: What Does This Mean for Marketers?

Pinterest: What's in it for you?

Pinterest started two years ago sort of like a bulletin board for sharing ideas. In the last year, it has become a growing addiction amongst people for sharing ideas and good resources. Newly engaged members are sharing wedding planning ideas, moms/dads are sharing parenting resources and ideas, teachers are using it to brainstorm lesson plans, and corporations are all beginning to take advantage of Pinterest. It's much more visual than other social networks and has all of the elements that many of the other ones do. You can comment on other people's pins, you can re-share their pins, and you can "network" with both people you know and those you don't because of a common interest.

How does Pinterest work?

1. Right now Pinterest is only by invitation. In today's world everything starts that way. Gmail, Facebook, etc. You can request an invite or you can be invited by somebody else. 2. Once you are in the pinning begins.

Pinning & Repinning

• You create boards and then you put pins on those boards.

What's a Board?

• The topics for the boards can be general like food, lesson planning, or adventures. Or they can be very specific like 100th day of school, presidents, etc.

What's a Pin?

• Then comes putting the pins onto the boards. There are three ways you can add pins yourself.

• You can Upload a photo of something you want to share. Perhaps something you have done. Then write a description. There is a character limit of 500 characters, but most things you can stay within that count.
• The other method is putting in a website address (like if you want to link to your blog or another website). It will look for images on that site and then you write a description and pin.
• The other is by adding the pin it button to your bookmark bar and as your are searching the web when you have something to share you can click on that link. Here are directions on how to add it.

Following and Repinning

• The other part is finding people to follow and repinning items.

• • When you find someone you can either follow all of their boards or you can select individual boards to follow.
  • After you have found people you can not only see what they have been pinning, but also can repin items they have shared. When you repin, you'll have the same 500 character count and you can either leave their description or create your own. You can also tag people in a post.

• • You can also like items without repinning. This means that they won't be categorized, but just show up under your likes.
  • If you link your Facebook or Twitter Account with Pinterest then you can find people on those networks to follow.
  • Pinterest is sort of like Social Bookmarking meets Twitter, but visual.

How is Pinterest being used?

Zoomsphere did a look into the top brands using Pinterest.

Examples of Schools using Pinterest

Denver University- College http://pinterest.com/ducollege/ and Graduate School http://pinterest.com/dugrad/

They have created boards to help create collaboration and explore inspiration for their students. They explore showing off faculty accomplishments and research.

George Fox University - http://pinterest.com/gfu/

They have used it to visually show pictures of their campus, tell stories about who they are, feature students, and feature alumni.

Drake University- http://pinterest.com/drakeuniversity/

They use Pinterest to show pictures of bulldogs (their mascot), room decor ideas, and study aboard ideas. They are not only using it to feature the school, but engage their audiences. They provide information for current students like Study aboard ideas, but also take into account the perspective student and what the accomplishments of the school are. It's a hard balancing act of engaging both potential, current, and past constituents. They are following the model that it's not just about who we are, which makes Pinterest so engaging.

What are some of the ways that schools can use Pinterest?

For teachers:

Collaboration

Teachers are beginning to use Pinterest as a way of brainstorming and collaborating ideas for specific topics or ideas. If you wanted an idea of how to celebrate the 100th day of school then there a tons of boards with content about the 100th day. Or perhaps specific topic areas such as the Harlem Renaissance or Colonial America.

With your students

You can also use it as a teaching tool to provide specific information in a visual way or a supplemental resources for projects or topic areas. To Get the ideas flowing: 30 inspiring ideas for teachers 37 ways teachers should use Pinterest

Schools

Think about the kinds of things you are posting. You want it to be engaging to drive people to follow you and repin what you have to post.

Resources

Share helpful information to parents and students. College counseling could share resources to Gap Year Experiences, Applying to Colleges, Colleges Students have been accepted to or Financial Aid. Think about the information that your parents and students might like to see and share that.

News clippings

Share information about your school that you post on your website or if it is posted elsewhere. Pinterest is built on visuals so make sure there is a visual element.

Showcase

Showcase your faculty, staff, students, parents, and alumni. Don't feature all of them, but feature things that make them stand out or are interesting. Pinterest is not about self-promotion, but is rather about sharing ideas. So showcase things you think others would find interesting. Maybe did you knows? or Unknown things about your School.

What are some of the advantages of using Pinterest?

• Engagement with other people
  • As a school you are building relationships with other schools, students, parents. You have the opportunity to build links back to your website and drive traffic. You also have the potential to reach audiences you might not have reached in normal methods.
  • Teachers have the opportunity to meet other teachers who are teaching the same topics or are interesting in the same kinds of things and build collaborations that might not have existed before.
• Recognition
  • Schools can build recognition.

Pinterest is growing in usage everyday. Some say it's just another fad that won't stay very long, but it is the fastest growing social media site. How do you think your school could use it? How can you remain engaging?

What is Pinterest? Can I use it to market my School?

What is Pinterest?
Pinterest is a virtual pin board of items that people find on the web and upload to share. It's sort of like a visual social bookmarking site combined with brainstorming ideas. If you read the articles and want to share them this is the place. Right now it's growing most among young women, but it is one of the newest/fastest growing social networks. If you are interested in wedding planning, fashion, or recipes there is definitely something for you. If you're a classroom teacher or homeschooler there are many posters on Pinterest that are all about pinning lesson plan ideas. Ideas on how to mark the 100th day of school. The opportunities are really endless.

How does it work?
You basically create a topic area which is called a board and you find links to share or pictures to upload about a topic. Then you either find a site you want to share or upload a photo you want to share. The most annoying thing I find is that when you create a broad topic sometimes you want to narrow the board down later and there is not an easy way to move from one board to another without having to go individually into every board. I created recipes when I was first exploring Pinterest, but now I might want to have Cakes, Pies, etc. and I might want to have another one that is Meat Dishes. I wish I could drag an drop to my new board, but unless someone knows some easier way, I don't think there is.

How does it impact your school or organization?
One interesting article is from Mashable on how Pinterest is changing web design. http://mashable.com/2012/02/07/pinterest-web-design/. But what you post in a news article or a page on your website is also important. It means that postings need to have some type of visual.

How can you use Pinterest?
Heidi Miller posts how brands are using Pinterest and there are some excellent examples.

As she notes Drake is using it with the purpose of featuring student life. The boards allow a school to feature so many different aspects of the school and the purpose could be all over the place. One board could be to feature student work for the whole school or each grade could have a separate board. Another way is for Admissions to feature a "virtual tour" of the campus. Pretty easy to upload a bunch of photos of the school and then link them back to different features throughout the website. College Counseling could show off the places that students have gone to. Alumni could be featured there linking to news articles posted or blogs and websites about Alumni. The possibilities are endless.

Is your school using Pinterest? How is it using Pinterest?



Find me:
http://pinterest.com/ali254

My inbox is exploding, stop sending so many email messages!

Too much email is the complaint I have heard often from both our parents and teachers, but the problem is that so many people have something to say. Today's technology allows us to click on a button and send an email, but does your school or organization really have a plan for who gets to send out communications and when they go out? Does anyone take the time to test what these email messages will look at?

Problem 1- too many colors

As a school with use Microsoft Outlook and there are many problems with the different versions, especially Outlook on the Macintosh. We go back and forth on some email messages and sometimes because screens aren't calibrated correctly we don't notice that words throughout the message are a dark blue and then the rest of the message is black. The end result is as an organization we look bad. 

Problem 2- graphic emails

We've moved into an age where we don't send as many flyers home in backpacks and want to be green. So instead the solution in the minds of most people is let's just embed what we would have sent as a flyer into our emails for our parents to look at. Has anyone taken a look at the analytics of your website or emails. Ours has proven that over 60% of the population is viewing the emails on a mobile device, with the majority being an Apple Operating System. And they aren't necessarily showing the images. So it means when they open the email, unless the subject lines is amazing they have no clue what your message is about. And they may have just received 15 other emails that day that really had no importance at all.

Problem 3-big, bold, beautiful, and exclamation marks!!!!

So the senders of the email don't always know what is appropriate and what is not appropriate. Not every single lines needs and exclamation mark because it's really not all important. Emails that have every other word bold are actually much harder to read then ones that break up paragraph around a subject. In general 4 or more colors is probably too many colors to use for fonts in an email that is not designed for that purpose. The simpler the email is, the easier it is to read.

These are just a few of the problems I have run into in the last couple weeks. What kinds of problems do you have with your emails?

Have you found a successful way to streamline communication to your parents so they aren't receiving an email for the child's teachers, the principals, the head of school, the parent's association, the athletics department, the communications department, the advancement department, and so on?

How to Suggest a Facebook Fan page to Your Friends UPDATE

An easy way to get people to become fans of your Facebook fan page is as the admin for a page share it.

Here's how to do it:

1. Go the Fan Page
2. Go to the top right side of the Screen and press Invite Friend.

3. Once you are done with that, a list of your friends will show up and you can select friends to send the message to by clicking on their names. If your friend is already a fan you won't be able to suggest the page to them. Or if they have already been invited even if not by you they will be greyed out.

4. Click Submit and they will receive the request.

This option is no longer available for people who are not admins of the page. They have the option to share the page on the right side.


1. Go to the page you want to suggest
2. Go to the bottom left side of the page and press share. If you have a page you want to link with another page, then an easy way to add it is press "Add to My Page's Favorites".

3. You have several different options on how to share a page besides sharing it on another page. Most people will want to share on their own timeline. This will post it on what used to be know as your wall. And people who are subscribed to you will then see this page. It's a better method to post why you are sharing this page.  Sometimes you just want to share with a specific person, so this might be a better way to send a private Message. 

4. Once you have chosen your method and written something press Share Page.