Information Management in Today's Digital Age

Creating Tabs on Facebook

noreply@blogger.com (Ali) — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 03:11:00 +0000

If you haven't done an audit of your Facebook page, it's important to do this every couple of months. Facebook is constantly changing it's algorithms and with the new graph search being launched, it will be important to focus on checking the SEO of the page. For this post, I'm going to focus on the tabs on Facebook.

Last year when the Timeline was released there were a lot of changes to the Facebook page. The main parts were the two column layout, the cover photo, and the Profile Photo. Most posts concentrated on these parts of the page and customizing them.

One thing that is missing is the Tabs and how to customize them. The dimensions for the tab 111 x 74. The first one is always Photos. But the next three you can customize, so you don't have to show just likes, map, and event.

Here are some examples:

The tabs can also be just plain and simple and have a call to action. If you do not have access to photo editing software, you can easily create the below tabs in Paint.

How to Adjust Your Tabs on Facebook

noreply@blogger.com (Ali) — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 06:21:00 +0000

Facebook keeps changing their layouts and there will probably be more changes in the next couple months with the designs of Facebook timelines for organizations. Although things keep changing, it's really important that you continue to look at the design and feel of the page. I often forget how to adjust the tabs on my page, but it is actually quite easy.

1. Put your mouse over the tab and click on the pencil.

2. Click on swap position with on the item you want to move the above icon.

You're done.

A quick note about designing tabs.
Now that more people are viewing Facebook on their phones, make sure that if you use text for your tab, that it is clear and easy to read. I would probably recommend about 18pt font.

The size of the tab is 111px x 74px.

What kinds of Books do you read when fundraising?

noreply@blogger.com (Ali) — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 19:05:00 +0000

I'm trying to put together a list of books to read if you want to learn more about working with boards and fundraising. Here are a few that I have heard are the essentials, but what would you add?

Governance as Leadership: Reframing the Work of Nonprofit Boards

The Networked Nonprofit: Connecting with Social Media to Drive Change

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

Asking: A 59-minute Guide to Everything Board Members, Volunteers, and Staff Must Know to Secure the Gift

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Tools for Scheduling Posts: Hoot Suite

noreply@blogger.com (Ali) — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 19:07:00 +0000

There are so many different tools out there for scheduling posts. I have been using Hoot Suite for a few years and it's a great basic tool. I am able to schedule posts ahead of time, this way I don't forget to post information as we get closer to an event or so I can figure out best timing for end-of-year fundraising.

The professional version is an expense that might be worth looking into if you have numerous people working on your social media campaign. You are also not limited by the amount of social media accounts that you can maintain and manage. Here's a link to a Free 30 Day Trial of HootSuite Pro to check it out for yourself. An advantage of the Professional version is you can then get analytics for your Facebook account, which is not available in the free version.

Another feature I like about HootSuite that my husband pointed out is you can actually have your RSS feed automatically generate posts into hoot suite and then collect analytic about those and generate more posts. This is especially good so you don't forget to go back if you schedule your blog posts for later in the date. It stream lines what you are doing.

The other advantage of using a product like Hootsuite is you get the opportunity to adjust the same post for multiple networks. Your posts on Facebook and Twitter should not be the same, so this is advantageous to be able to add other wording on a Facebook post that you had to shorten for your Twitter post.

Question for Discussion: What are your Facebook Policies? Do you enforce them?

noreply@blogger.com (Ali) — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Creating a Facebook Policy or Guidelines for an organization can prove to sometimes be difficult. Mashable has a great article from 2009 about creating a Facebook Policy and has all the typical general ideas about strategy and how your staff should or should not use social media. They have recently updated it with some ways to update your policy. These are good practical suggestions for the policy. The clif notes version of their articles are keep it short and sweet, engage your audience, and protect your brand.

In an ideal world, you have two main objectives in your policy. I am going to focus on the Protect your Brand. In order to do this it is essential that your employees do not share on their social media outlets anything about your organization's business plans that are not available to public consumption. It is also essential that your staff does not speak poorly about your organization as that can speak poorly about your brand.

I often see my friends trash talk about their jobs and their places of business as being dirty, gross, or awful to work at. I am also not surprised when I see these same people get let go later on and not really understand why.

What kinds of policies/guidelines do you feel are essential to your company? How do you enforce these policies/guidelines?

Messaging on Facebook and Twitter

noreply@blogger.com (Ali) — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 14:44:00 +0000

I saw a terrible post today on Facebook. One of the pages I follow, said thanks @blahblah and @meme for the follow. I don't really want my Facebook feed to be clogged down with a Twitter Post like this. Something like this is really meant for Twitter not Facebook.

If you have linked your Twitter Account with your Facebook Page, then you should probably undo this. I would suggest using a scheduler like HootSuite, Buffer, etc. that allows you to compose messages for all of your social networks and customize them per network. This way your viewers on Facebook aren't bothered by irrelevant twitter chatter and continue to follow you.

Have you paid attention to who you are following on Twitter and Who is Following you Back?

noreply@blogger.com (Ali) — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 17:10:00 +0000

If you haven't yet built up your following on twitter, then you should know that Twitter has limitations on the amount of people you can follow. Once you hit 2000 people you cannot follow any more people until more people are following you. So if you are following 1900 people, but only 300 are following you back, then you need to clean up who you are following.

A good way to do this is by looking at who is not following you back. There are a lot of paid services that will help you do this, but I like Friend or Follow. This site will look at all the people who are not following you back.

I usually begin by going to all of the egg pictures. These people are usually ones who created an account and never really followed up on it.

Then I sort the friends by people who have not posted in a while. I start unfollowing them. This is how I do my cleanup on Twitter, what about you? Do you have other free services you use?

IFTTT

noreply@blogger.com (Ali) — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 18:52:00 +0000

Have you heard about this new program IFTTT? It means if this then that. Sort of sounds like one of those word problems from middle school that I never seemed to really understand. I attribute that to my creative way of thinking of situations.

IFTTT is a great way to automate digital tasks. In order to do this you create a "recipe".

Perhaps none of this makes sense to you yet. Start by thinking of all the time you spend on just one blog post. You write it, then you post it to twitter, then you post it to Facebook, and on and on. By doing this with IFTTT, then you can set it up so that every time you post a blog post it will then feed it to your social media outlets.

They have a "recipes" already created, but here are some ideas:
Everytime your tagged in Facebook save the picture to Drop Box
When you make a Blog Post post on Social Media Outlet
When you star a Google Reader item, save to Evernote.

Moving out of a school

noreply@blogger.com (Ali) — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 17:15:00 +0000

We recently moved from Baltimore to New York. As such, I needed to find a new job and am working for a small non-profit in New York City. While I'm no longer working in a school full time, I find that much of what I'm dealing with as the Associate Director of this non-profit is about how we communicate, what our message is, and how we can reach our constituents.

It seems vaguely familiar to what I was doing when I worked in a school. Our life has definitely been turned upside down with trying to figure out commuting, daycare, and creating a new community of friends for our family.

When we put our house up on the market, I really understood how much the way you present yourself really matters. No one wanted to see our messy bedroom, so it meant that the whole house would need to be cleaned up every day before we left for school. If you don't have small children (or maybe this applies to those with older children as well), this is not an easy task. We created routines and figured out how to put our bedrooms on display for those walking in.

While I was really aware of the messaging beforehand, this really influenced how I thought about our house and the way it looked to outsiders. My experience working through a database conversion and then a major overhaul of our website, I began to realize how important it is on how you present things both internally and externally.

With the experience of Student Information System, Point of Sale, and Website Projects, I began consulting with independent schools and non-profit organizations in across the country about how to think about their internal structure and systems in order to deal with their external message. While I no longer work in an independent school, I am very familiar with the issues that independent schools and non-profits face. It is the reason I began consulting, so I could help schools and non-profits make better and more informed decisions.

Listening to Stakeholders

noreply@blogger.com (Ali) — Wed, 16 May 2012 18:33:00 +0000

One of the most important parts of managing a project is making sure that all of the stakeholders buy in or are at least supportive of the project. The problem is Stakeholders change often and the people making decisions may not be the same people sitting in the room when you finish the project. In fact, no one may be left when you finish from initial group of stakeholders.

As the person coordinating the project the most important thing is to listen to everyone even before you get everyone to sit together in a room. If one of the stakeholders hasn't been listened to early enough you could face adoption problems later one. You could also face thousands of additional costs related to customizations that could have been addressed earlier in the process.

Here is one strategy to engage stakeholders and help them support you through the lifecycle of the project.

1. Meet with each stakeholder individually
Ask them questions, learn about their processes, learn about their work arounds.

2. Meet with users of the systems even if they aren't making the decisions
They often understand the systems better

3. Find a product that will meet as many of the needs possible.

4. When presenting options for the decision
Present both what the systems do and address the needs that are not going to be met. Address how you plan on addressing those needs or why that need will no longer be relevant with the new system in place.

What I have learned about RSS Readers

noreply@blogger.com (Ali) — Thu, 10 May 2012 14:57:00 +0000

I'm an android phone user. So I figured it would be easy to figure out what kind of rss reader to use, but that was not the case. There are ones that are visually very appealing, but only have a pre-set list of major feeds and there are other ones that are rather clunky. I tried a bunch of different readers and I think the one I like best is Google Reader. It's not very fancy, but there are some nice features.

It's a pretty basic reader and allows you to stream all of your messages in one place. I can star articles I like and go back to them later on. It also is great that I can read articles on my computer, my phone, or my tablet. I love the suggestions of feeds to read. What I don't like is on the phone if I click that I read them all, there's no quick undo.

The biggest benefit over using an RSS reader is it's on in one place and doesn't require me to have a cluttered inbox with blogs that I may or may not have time to read. It also doesn't require me to remember which blogs I want to go back to and read.

RSS Readers: Where Do I Begin?

noreply@blogger.com (Ali) — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 16:16:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Ali) — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 17:21:00 +0000

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?

noreply@blogger.com (Ali) — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 18:17:00 +0000

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?

noreply@blogger.com (Ali) — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 04:00:00 +0000

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?

noreply@blogger.com (Ali) — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 17:30:00 +0000

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!

noreply@blogger.com (Ali) — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 03:22:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Ali) — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 17:00:00 +0000

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.

Today's Filing Cabinets

noreply@blogger.com (Ali) — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 13:30:00 +0000

Everyone is used to old filing cabinets where everyone had their own method of filing. Sometimes it was placed in alpha order by first name or other times it was done by last name. But there was always the exception to the rule. This person was really know by a different name so we'll put it under that name. The problem was when someone went through the files 5 years later when the person who created the system was no longer around, they couldn't find the information they were looking for.

Today's modern filing cabinets are information systems. These databases of information are used in the same ways that those filing cabinets were used. Besides the basic difference of coding from one system to another, they all handle information and records in a different way from another system. Each system thinks they have found the best practice for society, but the programmers do not always meet the users. The users each have their own "system" for filing away information and even within a department the system the system differs.

In 2010, my school moved away from the 30+ spread sheets, information systems, databases that we ran. I can't say we moved to a single system as our requirements could not be served by a single vendor. We did streamline most of the major systems into one system. The most challenging part for us was even though we are a young school in the area, we have been using an formal computer information system in one shape since at least the mid 80s and we have a rich history of 100 years of information that is stored somewhere.

As a school that has used an information system since early information systems existed, we have embraced the technology. When the computer system couldn't keep up with our needs we adopted a method to figure it out and make the system work. We created our own method of filing when we had a problem to solve. When the systems improved to handle this problem, we often did not get new training and had continued to "hack" the system. This left some very messy systems of information.

Twenty+ years latter, we are on a new system, and the next step in the process was cleaning up information. I continue to work on this cleanup and figuring out how we can guarantee the information we have is the best. But the methods to maintaining information that the staff used at the beginning are sometimes beyond me. Perhaps my methods will be beyond whoever fills this role in twenty years, but whenever I do something I try to make sure that someone will understand why it was done that way. When the system changes to the work arounds and hacks we have adopted I try to go back and make sure we update our data.

Our modern day filing cabinet is something that I can access from my phone, computer, or iPad. It lives in a different state and I will never "see" this file space. In many cases, our approach is the same as it was when it was in our same office space and very difficult to adjust in order to maintain an efficient information system.

Multiple Sign ins on Google

noreply@blogger.com (Ali) — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 02:31:00 +0000

Recently Google decided to stream line accounts and have been upgrading Google Apps. I like many other people have multiple Google Accounts and was quickly running out of browsers to sign into in order to be able to look at all of them at one time. I happened to pop on to Account Settings Page and found a link that said Multiple Sign-ins Off. I decided to further investigate and now I can switch between accounts without signing out. It doesn't work for things like Picasa, but otherwise a neat little feature that you might not have realized was there.

Tools for Scheduling Tweets and Facebook Pages

noreply@blogger.com (Ali) — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 15:52:00 +0000

I happen to love Hoot Suite. I have the application on my Android Device, but I really like how easy it is to set up and then manage for a school. The analytics they offer are also really great and useful tools for figuring out timing of when to post and what kinds of things people are actually reading.

A few other tools like this

Tweet Deck
CoTweet

Read a comparison of the features and you choose.

Let me know if you use something else that you find useful and why?

Celebrations for Schools

noreply@blogger.com (Ali) — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 15:52:00 +0000

Our school's centennial is around the corner and I am investigating new outlets for social media in this celebration. My search of the web has so far found schools using of course facebook pages and websites exclusive for the celebration. I have found some blogs and flickr albums that have been used as record keepers for the events. Are there any interesting things your school has done with social media that you could see incorporating into an anniversary celebration?

Back to things

noreply@blogger.com (Ali) — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 14:26:00 +0000

A intense year of finishing my writing and managing movement from many different systems has prevented me from doing much writing.

Thinking about Privacy

To begin with I decided to talk a little bit about privacy and social media. Too many times we take people's personal privacy for granted because using technology is so easy to do. When we post a picture on facebook of our child, we don't take a moment to think what about the other children in the picture, are the parents ok with it? We don't think about who can see that picture. As a parent, you might be ok with publicizing the picture to the whole world to see, but the other parents might not. Your child might look great, but there might be something mortifying in the background that you just notice. The types of pictures that are posted online differ and the captions or tags that are posted also differ. One parent may decide to tag every child without thinking about the potential of predator who might encounter that picture and then be able to identify kids if they ran into them on the street.

What about the naked baby picture that we post online. We want to share a cute bath time photo, but in some cases today it's being argued that is child pornography.

Another complication to this is teachers and staff who post pictures of their students. They are excited to share their "portfolio" in a sense of what's going on in the classroom, but in many cases forget to ask the permission of their students' parents.

While privacy is something that many do not think about when posting pictures, there are also many advantages to the technology. Today we can share more pictures with many more people and keep them apprised of what is going on in real time.

How to invite people to an event?

noreply@blogger.com (Ali) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 13:59:00 +0000

Here's a quick guide for your invitees to help with getting the word out about an event that you think others might interest other people.

Step 1: You should go to the event page. You can get there by clicking on a link for that event or pressing the events button at the bottom of the page. And then scrolling down until you find the event.

Step 2: On the right side of the page under the picture it click on the link that says "Invite People to Come."

Step 3: Click on Friends you would like to invite.

Step 4 (Optional): Send a personal message about why you are sending them this invitation.

Step 5: Click on Send Invitations.

Back to School

noreply@blogger.com (Ali) — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 15:06:00 +0000

My busiest time of the year is from June until a few weeks after school starts. I spend my summer updating information and trying to get other people to also help me update information. This summer I also spent time thinking about the social networking that we had done over the first part of the year. From January - June, we mainly just played around and tried to figure out how to use it for our school and how people were interacting with it.

This summer I also spent time trying to figure out the best ways to connect and use social networking. I spent time connecting with alumni, parents, grandparents, and other constituents on Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin. I posed questions on my profile to see answers to questions were are continuing to discuss as we develop our our social media policies and marketing plans. Some of the answers I got left me to follow up for more information.

It's not surprising that some people accepted my friend requests and others did not. I didn't really expect everyone to do so. But what was surprising was the amount of people who not only accepted, but have begun to message me through these various networks and allowed me to connect with them on a personal level. I am still amazed by the amount of Facebook messages I receive from constituents asking for more information or thanking me for posting something. Yet another way we can connect and transmit the information.

Another big break through this summer was Facebook directly connecting Facebook Fan Pages with Twitter. So as soon as I post something on Facebook it automatically links with my twitter page. And you can link multiple Facebook pages with a single Twitter Account. Then I have twitter post directly to my personal profile on Facebook. If the message doesn't pop up when you get to your facebook fan page to connect directly with Twitter, try going to www.Facebook.com/twitter. You should be able to link Facebook with Twitter.

We have a school page and an alumni page, but only one Twitter account. Our Alumni director monitors the Alumni page and I monitor our school page, but now I don't have to remember everytime she posts something to update Twitter also. Magically her updates automatically do it on the twitter page and then my profile.

Are you still trying to decide whether or not Twittering and Facebook is really worth it? I am going to suggest you try out HootSuite. By setting up an account and using their shortening for really long urls or any urls (http://ow.ly/url/shorten-url) then you can get real time stats about how many people are clicking on your links, where they are clicking them from (twitter or facebook), where the person is located, and much more. It's worth signing up for to see how it's doing. I don't use HootSuite to update twitter, I am doing that in Facebook, but I am using the shortener to condense the urls that I post to Facebook.

Did you take the summer off of all of this? Well, now is the time to get back into the swing of things.
Here are a few ideas to get you started on what to post:

Information about what Alumni are doing? Are their news articles to link to? Or perhaps events or videos? Have your alumni share with you what is going on in their lives that they wouldn't mind sharing with everyone else?

I would suggest leaving personal information off of this, there are better places for that.

Post pictures from Alumni or Parent events and let Alumni and Parents tag themselves.

I would suggest coming up with a policy about posting pictures online of minors. Make sure you have written consent from any parent allowing you to specifically post pictures on Facebook if you are going to do that. Also remind parents not to post pictures of other students without consent from parents. Most people are OK with it, but it's better to err on the side of caution.

Post important event date reminders like Admission Events, Parents Association Events, Back to School Nights, Donor Events, Alumni Events, etc.
Talk about what's going on in your school and current student accomplishments
Link back to your website!
Talk about accomplishments of your school or awards your school has received.
Talk about the accomplishments of your staff and faculty? What's going on in their personal/professional lives that might be interesting to note. For instance is your music teacher performing in a concert that people can go see. Was a teacher recognized for their dedication to something.
Welcome people back to school.

Those are a few to get started. I would love to hear more about what you are doing to get your year started.