School's started, time to be social

Students are back, time to talk social media again... Super-awesome student Hilary Jones, who works in our office, is working with me on a social media communications plan. She did a ton of research. We need to sit down and form it into some objectives, strategies and tactics. One of the most interesting things she pointed out was Colgate University's use of a student's "tweets" to feed the university homepage. The posts are pretty generic and benign. It's clear powers that be told the designated "student tweeter" to try to name university buildings. The posts are going uncensored to the school's homepage. It's an interesting experiment, if nothing else an innovative way to show a "day in the life." It's just that so far it looks like they could be a day in the life of any student, anywhere. Like the sands through the hours glass, these are the twitter posts of a student at Colgate... Hilary's also done some other cool things. She's working on UO: Uncut, a Facebook page where she's putting a lot of video, mostly stuff she's produced for us. I love her "UO in a Flash: 295 acres in two minutes" campus tour (not crazy about its techno soundtrack, but Hilary defines cool, not me) that she did to augment a video tour professionals put together for us. Her insights about how to reach students and potential students with an authentic UO story without cheesing it up with PR spin are the kinds of things we're going to need to think about even more.

Thoughts on writing for the web?

I'm working on some guidelines (below) to help folks on campus tailor content on their web sites to their audiences. I'd love to get some feedback on it.
--Zack

WRITING FOR THE WEB

Before you sit down and attempt to craft the perfect words for your website, think for a second about how you read highway signs as you cruise up Interstate 5 to Portland.

If you don't follow some fundamentals for writing for the web, visitors to your site may pay about the same attention to your second paragraph -- or even your second sentence -- that you pay to the green and white sign telling you that there are a Newport Bay and McDonald's at the Kuebler Road exit in Salem. Unless you're in Salem and in the mood for a Big Mac or Halibut filet, you cruise right by at 70 mph.

It's up to you to whet your visitors' appetite.

Skim. Breeze. That's what an alarmingly high percentage of visitors to your site will do through the text you so carefully polished. Research shows that more readers than ever, and especially intellectual ones, skim through content at a pace much faster than they can actually read it. It also shows that you have mere seconds to capture their attention before they bounce off to another page.

Sound daunting? Don't be discouraged. It just means that you need to craft your message for the web carefully. Follow a few simple rules and you can slow people down long enough to hold their attention -- or better yet, convince them to pull in for more information.

Think bullet points.

Think quick.

Think concise.

Don't sacrifice accuracy.

Think simple, easy-to-understand sentences.

Think multimedia, video, audio, -- they're easier than you might think -- or even a simple photo.

How will you interact with visitors to your site? Will a blog work? Just asking...

You must be compelling and correct and, when possible, offer links to take visitors deeper into your site and information. The further they go, the more detail you can offer them.

Take, for example, the presentation of research. Rather the come at readers full bore with technical terms and a researcher's life's work, think simple, think about how you'd describe the research to your mother or your cousin, and assume they're not researchers. One suggestion is to pare down and loosen up an abstract. Then, if you want to describe the research in more detail, link to a pdf of a full journal article. That accomplishes two goals: 1) you reach a general audience members without scaring them off and 2) you provide more information for serious readers without making them feel as if you "dumbed down" your material.

Sustainably social

On Monday, we announced that the University of Oregon earned top honors from The Princeton Review, making its Green Rating Honor Roll. We broke out every new toy in our chest for the announcement. We produced a video feature, which we posted on YouTube and embedded with the release. We recorded audio of UO President Dave Frohnmayer, which ended up in a piece by KLCC's Jes Burns. While we had success with traditional media outlets such as the Register Guard, we also told the story in our own words, with a featured piece on the UO homepage, which created a tidy circle by linking back to the video and news release. So yes, we had success with traditional media. But we also used text, video and audio to tell the story ourselves, too.

Get your multimedia program up and running

The recent PRSA teleseminar on tapping the online video boom sparked interest all over campus about diving into video. I love getting ideas from the campus community for video stories. Unfortunately, our office can't handle everything, and not everything is right for a homepage feature -- our main vehicle (we are expanding ways to deliver video in other places, like Facebook). But here's the thing, you can do your own video for your department Web site. This sounds like an infomercial, but we can offer direction that will help elevate your University of Oregon page from an electronic version of a brochure into an interactive, multimedia communications tool. Watch profs in action. Listen to experts. Let students tell their stories. The technical part is surprisingly easy, so much so that strategy can easily be lost amid enthusiasm for diving right in. We can offer both technical (to a point, none of us are video pros) and strategic support. I've met with people from several departments to talk about how to do audio and video NOW. Tiah Linder is spearheading a video program in annual giving and has ordered The Flip for her office. Linda Mears, from the College of Education, dropped by yesterday, and to help get her off the ground we're doing a couple of video features, one with higher ups in the college to help illustrate the impact of a web video program. Now I know, learning how to edit video can be time consuming and frustrating. But compare it to securing approvals on an 800-word letter by committee and, for me at least, the level of attention required isn't much different, while the impact of the product is measurable, especially when you post the video to YouTube and then embed the code on your site. YouTube's analytics, similar to Google Analytics, are improving rapidly, and already we have access to more numbers about a video's impact than that of a fancy, glossy, expensive hard copy brochure. So, given the infomercial tone of this post, I might as well echo a local businessman in concluding it. So, as he says on TV, "Come see me." And we'll work toward integrating social, new and multi-media into your office's Web presence.

Tapping the Online Video Boom -- and cheaply

We're continuing our social media series. You're invited to "Tapping the Online Video Boom", from noon to 1:30 on Tuesday, July 22 in the Ford Lecture Hall at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. It's the latest PRSA Teleseminar brought to you by Office of Communications and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. Bring your lunch and listen up. Just to help us gauge attendance, if you know you can make it, write to me, zbarnett@uoregon.edu. I've pasted more info and a link to even more below. Hope to see you there.

Tapping the Online Video Boom: High impact, low-cost communications

Noon-1:30 p.m. on Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Ford Lecture Hall, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art

Brought to you by the Office of Communications

and

The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art

Tapping the Online Video Boom: High impact, low-cost communications (http://tinyurl.com/5wvxom)

Communications professionals are continually challenged to make the most of their budgets and resources. Yet cutting costs doesn’t have to mean cutting creativity or effectiveness, thanks in part to the online video boom. With a few simple, low- or no-cost tools and a willingness to break new ground, you can propel yourself and your organization into the world of YouTube® and beyond, creating and using video in new, once unthinkable ways to energize the workforce, attract customers, and ensure timely outreach to media
and investors.

Making it fun

Our office's student worker, Hilary Jones, has paid her dues, clipping stories, making lists, updating databases, and doing all the tedious tasks students get saddled with. But lately, she's been speaking up on social media, social networking and video. Her insights have been awesome and her enthusiasm as inspiring as a jolt of Roma's espresso. We're now sending her armed with the Flip to shoot videos to populate a Facebook presence we'll unveil soon. My hope is to ultimately have an army of students, well at least a two or three someday, starting with Hilary, out gathering content, shooting video, blogging and working with our office on strategies that lend authenticity to communication efforts. Students like Hilary don't show up often. When they do, harnessing their insight is invaluable. But more importantly, energy like hers is contagious.

Olympic Trials blogs

The first final of the U.S. Olympic Tack and Field trials came late on Friday. So late, in fact, that many of us in the media tent were told not to anticipate much interest from reporters because the womens 10,000 meters finished well after traditional deadlines at east coast papers. But that didn't stop the news from immediately breaking, and it did so in some poignant ways, like this blog entry from close friends of Amy Begley whose dramatic finish -- two seconds faster than needed -- landed the 30-year-old on the Olympic team. These kind of informal voices tell a personal story of the events. Amy's friend posted the entry after watching the race replayed on cable in the early morning hours...

Microsoft blog training

Had dinner with a guy who's got a real job in market research at Microsoft. When I mentioned that I'd read a lot about the employee blog environment at Microsoft, he scoffed, and said something like, "When they're not revealing company secrets it's a pretty cool program. What they need is a training before they let an employee blog." So, as the UO steps into having psuedo-UO-sanctioned blogs, should we ask non-faculty bloggers to go through a formal training before creating a blog to be linked to from a UO page?

The Flip Ultra or Flip Mino?

Wanna make a video-phile cringe? Talk about the Flip. We've featured a couple blog posts on video, Video on a Shoestring and Healthy Doses at the Mayo. Our office uses the Flip Ultra, a $149, idiot-proof camera that produces clean, quick Web-quality video. (It's so easy that I did forget to push record the other day. It has three buttons, you'd think I could remember to push one of 'em.)

We like our office Flip so much, we're thinking of getting another. Esquire magazine recently named the Flip Mino, the newest generation Flip, as one of the top 21 Father's Day gifts of the year. It's cool enough to hold its own among $150 lawn tools, chic watches and portable satelitte TV gadgets. So I compared specs between the Ultra (our old one) and the Mino (the newest one) and saw no differences, however Zatz Not Funny! blog says that for $30 more, the Flip Mino provides a better microphone. And it's now easier to use with a Mac. Soooo, serious movie-makers might cringe, but we're going to get our second Flip, this time we'll make it Mino. Here's a video we shot with the Flip Ultra.

Social media will change the world

Social Media strategist Chris Heuer argues that social media is the "catalyst that will ultimately transform our world of work, our economy and our entire society," on his blog, "Insytes." Heuer envisions a day when the Chief Social Officer will be as influential as a CFO. Heuer's work helped spawn the Social Media Club, which I'm still checking out.

You're invited to Tuesdays with Social Media on June 17

The third -- and most fun sounding -- installment of Tuesdays with Social Media is slated for noon to 1:30 p.m. on Tuesday, June 17, at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (JSMA).

We'll have a speaker phone set up and power point slides projected in the museum's Cheryl Ramberg Ford Lecture Hall for "Social Media Marketing: Where to Begin?: Put social media to work for you," a teleseminar from the Public Relations Society of America. Stick around for an extra half hour of discussion, which at previous seminars has been as valuable as the actual presentations. I'd be remiss if I didn't say the Office of Public and Media Relations is footing the bill for the teleseminar and the museum is graciously hosting the event gratis. Veteran journalist Paul Gillen will give the presentation. Read his blog posts, "When Getting Started with Social Media, the Biggest Sin Is Inaction" and "Dive In" on PRSA's professional development blog, ComPRehension.

A single bound to the airwaves

Had some fun Friday afternoon after the University of Oregon secured permission to use state-backed bonds for the arena project. KLCC radio reporter Jes Burns, who earned her master's in literary nonfiction at the UO, IM'd me looking for an arena story. We used our new recording equipment to get an audio clip from UO President Dave Frohnmayer, highlighting the board's decision. I posted a two-minute clip for Jes and less than an hour later her story -- complete with a 25-second sound bite from Frohnmayer -- led KLCC's 4 p.m. newscast. Click here to hear the entire two-minute clip we sent Jes.

That's just one of the ways we can use our newly purchased high-end audio equipment. After buying it this spring, we contracted with Jes to show us how to use it. We can now record sound bites, podcasts, and audio for slideshows in broadcast quality. We even recorded a story pitch for the Oregonian not too long ago -- sending a reporter two minutes of a faculty member talking -- just to show how quotable and energetic the prof is.

Getting in the audio game, however, doesn't require a massive investment. In fact, before we bought our gear, we checked out digital recorders from media services, then edited our recordings in Audacity, industry-standard, open-source sound-editing software.

Now that we have nice gear, we're looking for ways to use it. Friday was a great example. Love to hear suggestions from you...

Healthy doses of social media at the Mayo Clinic

Lee Aase, a PR vet and social media guru at the Mayo Clinic, is also the founder of SMUG, Social Media University Global. On his SMUG blog, he recently posted these slides from a recent presentation on social media. Aase has developed a pretty extensive collection of social media tools for folks at the Mayo, many of which we could easily apply at the University of Oregon. The Mayo offers up healthy doses of slideshows, podcasts, blogs and video. (Yes, like our office, the Mayo uses the Flip, an affordable, low-end digital video camera, reviewed here by NY Times tech guy David Pogue).

UPDATED: blogs at UO

We're now listing campus-based, UO-related blogs on the University of Oregon's Public and Media Relations site. We'd love to build on this page. Over the summer we'll be exploring ways to feature these and other blogs. Thanks again to Ron Renchler for jumpstarting the listing.

Good examples of campus social media: UAB

On Sunday afternoon, as most of us kicked back in the sun, Jim Barlow, director of science and research communications, was looking at the University of Alabama-Birmingham's media relations Web site. I know because that's when he sent an e-mail to me talking up UAB's site. More than just a media relations site, it's a clearing house of campus happenings, with blogs on everything from UAB's research in Peru to blogs on choir and opera. They range from those created by UAB's Web communications office to simple ones that use wordpress or blogger, like this one. The office also is posting weekly two-minute news features to the top spot on its YouTube channel -- so the same video doesn't play over and over and over when you visit the channel, and there's something there to entice people to keep coming back. It's obvious this effort was the result of a campus-wide commitment to new and social media -- not a single office pursuing it -- but various people on campus, from scientists to choir teachers asking, "What cool things could we communicate with a blog?" So...