PR and the Web 101 - Karine Joly’s latest UB column

Teens Frequent Online Video Users (Podcasting News via MicroPersuasion)

Google Co-op - Creating customized search engines for education (screencast) by Jean-Claude Bradley. A great how-to on leveraging Google Co-op to create custom search engines for education on a particular knowledge domain. (This is a pretty awesome tool - I’ve created a bunch of these searches myself and was delighted to see JC’s screencast. - DK)

University of Florida’s business school is taking a shot at podcasting. “Tuesdays with Tosi” is available in both audio and video format. The first episode came out 12/5.

Macquarie University has a new multimedia site (reviewed nicely at Animatty.com) called MQtv.

There is a lot to praise about this effort, and Animatty.com has covered the points well. Individual pages are easy to read - lots of white space. The videos, based on multi-camera shoots, are crisp and nicely produced - far better than the fare you see on YouTube these days. The range of content should make the PR department’s job easier far as it illustrates the gamut academic and research achievements.

I guess in general I find it a bit too “multi-media” oriented (is that an outdated term, or is it just me?), which is to say, too focused on the media itself, while — perhaps — in need of ways to help new audiences access the content. I would love to see them add RSS feeds for videos and mp3s, perhaps organized into topical channels so that people could subscribe based on individual interests, e.g. Admissions, Athletics, Business Management. More and more journalists are finding story ideas via RSS - so why not make it easy for them? (Regular readers of this blog know that how insistent I am; if I can’t add your site to my RSS reader, chances are I won’t visit it again!) From an SEO perspective, I would also suggest unique HTML page titles and URLs containing keywords found in the content of the page. Google and other search engines sometimes treat pages with the same page titles as the same page - even if the URL is different - meaning the site won’t be as well represented in search engines as it could be.

Anyway, this is, of course, just my 2 U.S. cents on improving a site that’s very much headed in the right direction and will serve its audience well, to be sure. I’ve already enjoyed a number of the videos and mp3s. This is very much the kind of diverse, pointed, and quality content we’ll begin seeing from universities globe-wide. If you’re a university PR director interested in some of these new forms, this is a site to study in depth.

(Via Animatty.com)

Great post from Karine about how your university can prepare to handle crises connected video and video sharing sites like YouTube. We both got the same email from one of our readers that prompted her post, but Karine managed to turn it into an artful, actionable recommendation.

Charlie Melichar, Colgate University VP for Communications, appeared on Beet.TV yesterday talking about student-generated media. See Dan Forbush’s comments on the new ProfNet Post blog. Charlie is a former ProfNet employee and is also volunteering on the ProfNet 3.0 launch team, which, by the way, is inviting new members.

Time to share an update.

Yes, Peterson’s is now a Nelnet company, no longer Thomson Peterson’s.

Yes, I’ll still be blogging here on SHE. Same voice, perhaps with a new wrapper.

You bet, video is on my mind. It’s kinda like I’m speaking through video these days. As I mentioned to EducationPR blogger Paul Baker recently, I haven’t had any video to share, thus light blogging. But the good news is that I caught up with some attendees at EduWeb earlier this week and I’ll be sharing that video here over the coming days. In fact, after a Quicktime finishes burning on machine B, I’m going to get started on editing that footage.

There was a lot of talk about video at EduWeb; indeed, the entire Higher Ed community seems to be buzzing about the possibilities of video on the web. The days of routine campus tour videos are coming rapidly to an end as the tools of high quality production come within reach, and web video sharing platforms mature.

To this point, I agree with Charlie Melichar: You should be watching Beet.TV. Charlie introduced me to its producer, Andy Plesser, and we fast became buds during some exciting times at SF’s recent Vloggercon, where Andy broke the story about Robert Scoble leaving Microsoft for Bay Area startup PodTech. It was a treat to share in Andy’s excitement at seeing Beet.TV zoom up like a jet.

You may not be surprised to learn that Andy’s also got a stake in academe. He’s the guy behind the incredibly innovative LawClinic.TV, which features interviews with participants in Fordham University’s clinical legal education program.

More on the week of EduWeb and admissions blogging….

I was very pleased with the response to the EduWeb discussion on admissions blogging Rob Pongsajapan and I led. It was exciting to share 2 months’ worth of accumulated research and get feedback, and the small group/lunch format was a perfect place not only for that, but also to make some great new acquiantainces, among them Nina Sossen, who was kind enough to blog our session for Collegewebeditor.com. Nina politely took issue with my use of the term “admissions blogging program,” and I’m committed to explaning what I mean by that more fully, if not for Nina only, then for the rest of you as well.

I was reminded that many are still very new to blogging, and the questions abound. In fact, this week the Uwebd list is alight again with questions about blogging. And much of the advice there validates our findings–for example the importance of selecting the right student bloggers and the idea of selecting student bloggers from among students who already have a relationship with the admissions department. (Think student ambassadors.)

Of course, the session would not have been a success were it not for the generosity of the institutions participating in the study; they’re listed on this page along with the items we covered in our discussion on Monday in Baltimore.

Been visiting Collegewebeditor.com lately? You’ll find a treasure trove of blog coverage from the EduWeb conference there. Karine did a smashing job in recruiting attendees to blog “almost live” for Collegewebeditor. Kudos to Karine; a resourceful and audience-aware blogger she.

Well, that’s all for now. I bid you a wonderful weekend. Next time you visit, an interview with Nina Sossen from UMass Amherst, talking about blogging efforts there, will greet you.

I’ll be at EduWeb in Baltimore for a brief time on Monday around lunch time. I’ll have my video camera, of course. I’ll be looking for a few people who would like to appear on camera and share their thoughts about new media and higher ed marketing, to be posted on this blog and possibly elsewhere. If you’re interested, please contact me at dan dot karleen at thomson dot com.

See you Monday!

The practice of sharing video online is really taking off. As Karine Joly mentioned recently, institutions are beginning to have a presence in places like YouTube, a free video sharing site that’s similar to the popular photo sharing site Flickr, but for video. Some, like Multnomah, have been at it for a while.

Last week I had a conversation about video sharing with Allegheny College’s Mike Richwalsky via IM. Mike shared that he’s experimenting with ways to use video sharing platforms as a place to establish a presence for Allegheny.

Says Mike, “It’s nice to be on there with something official if someone searches for Allegheny on Google Video or YouTube.” Allegheny recently posted video from their Senior Project Celebration to Google and YouTube. The video was loaded onto YouTube May 25, 2006, and already it’s been viewed almost 80 times.

Both Google Video and YouTube provide a snippet of code you can use to embed a Flash movie in your web page, as I’ve done with Allegheny’s video from YouTube in this post.