Archive for November, 2009

Over the weekend, Facebook introduced a new way to entice your advertising audience: use their friends. Now, when you create an ad for a fan page or group on Facebook, you can select “Target users whose friends are connected to: _____.”

How is this helpful? Of course, the effects are yet to be seen, but the supposition is that targeting friends of fans will lead to better conversion and more effective use of advertising dollars. The key to this change is that when “Friends of connections” is added, the ad will appear to a prospective fan, followed by the name of their friend who is already a fan. The ad plus the friend’s name will encourage them to become a fan out of admiration or peer pressure from their core relationships. Here’s an example of how it works.

Over the weekend, the ACU fan page awareness ad was updated to target friends of connections to the ACU fan page. Now, the ad will be ACU alumni, but not already fans of ACU). They will see this ad:

Not only does the ad show the original message that I created, but it also attaches “Scott Kilmer is a fan,” which will obviously make all 53 people rush to their desks, laptops and phones to join this glorious community! The referral system is completely automated. The only difference is that now our ad is targeted to friends of the 8,446 fans.

The numbers for this new feature are a little troubling. When I activated this feature, Facebook estimated that only 980 people fit this category (alumni non-fans whose friends are fans of ACU), while there are close to 15,000 disconnected ACU alumni on Facebook. I hope this number will rise significantly as the new feature rolls out across Facebook’s servers.

New way-finding signage has begun appearing on campus this fall to help visitors become more quickly familiar with ACU. Large purple signs now mark major entrances, and smaller purple signs help direct pedestrians to specific locations. University planners will continue to determine the location and information for both sizes of signs, and more will be installed as funds become available.

Colleges, departments and offices interested in helping accelerate the funding of way-finding signage for their visitors should contact Creative Services for more information.

A big “thank you” is due to Creative Services’ senior designer Greg Golden for developing these, and engineering them to be produced with the help of a local vendor, which saved the university thousands of dollars on each sign.

The exterior signage design also complements ACU’s interior signage program, which satisfies all requirements of the federal Americans with Disabilities Act and presents a consistent look across campus for these important tools in helping inform visitors. There are four styles of ACU signs to designate interior rooms, each featuring Braille and molded letters/numbers raised from the sign surface. These customized interior signs must be ordered through Creative Services, where other samples also are available. Note that old-style “blade” signs above or near the top of doors are not ADA-compliant. Watch for more info about that to come.

Faculty have been using Class Blogs since the beginning of the Fall semester. Now Campus Blogs are available for offices, departments, groups and individuals. Find out more at blogs.acu.edu. Click on the Class Blogs or Campus Blogs button for more information. The ACU Blog Guidelines will answer most of your questions.

To request a blog, visit blogs.acu.edu/request.

Tomorrow, I will present to the American Assoc of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers Strategic Enrollment Management conference or AACRAO SEM for short.  I’ve been asked to join the panel on social media by Khori Whitaker of Inside Track, by recommendation of Brad Ward.  Joining Brad and I will be Billy Adams from OU and Andrew Meyers of Hope College (Holland, MI).

While Billy, Brad and Andrew talk about recruiting and admissions strategy, I am excited to share with the attendees something I believe is very unique to our efforts – retention.  Since early this semester I have been working with Hayley Webb, Director of Student Retention and Services, on how to use the data we gather from students (tweets, blog posts, pictures posted, links referenced) to identify if they are “at-risk” of leaving the university.  Let me be clear, my task here is not to make any judgment on the content that pours through the social networks, instead I see myself as a router of that information to the appropriate offices established on campus to handle these types of situations.

You@ACU! - YouTube

Other points to share will be the great success of the You@ACU! campaign that was created by Hayley and the student team.  Since the program launched in late August, we have had over 200 user generated content (UGC) posts of dorm life, campus activities, football games, alumni reunions and only a few were removed before being broadcast publicly on campus or at Shotwell stadium.  This is a great program and one that I hope to really focus on in coming months so that we can be better prepared for data collection and review in 2010-11.

Last, in the spring of 2010, I am planning a pet project to aggregate all social media onto a single microsite.  PutOnYourPurple.com is the domain I’ve chosen (available – pending purchase).  This site is planned to be more of the human interest or community-in-action side of New Media with content aggregated from social networks, submitted by our alumni, students, faculty and staff showing how they are changing the world.  A great example of this concept is Oregon State’s Powered by Orange.

ACU Videos

The Web Communication video production team has produced several videos that may peak your interest. You can check out the ACU YouTube channel to see videos as soon as they are uploaded. Here are a few we don’t want you to miss. Many of these are embedded on the ACU website as well.

• Teacher Education videos showcase Summer Institute
• President, Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc., Jim Lenz, at COBA Distinguished Speaker Luncheon
• Summit ’09 – Flying Faith (part 1) Katy Coldwell, ACU alum from Southwest Airlines. Search for all the Summit ’09 videos. Watch other Summit videos.
  

We promise.

ACU is a vibrant, innovative, Christ-centered community that engages students in authentic spiritual and intellectual growth, equipping them to make a real difference in the world.

Robin Saylor, our Web editor extraordinaire, has been busy finding out just how students, faculty, alumni and programs are making a real difference. You may have seen these stories rotating on the ACU Homepage about exceptional, innovative and real people and programs. We call them “Promise Stories.”

You can read these unique stories on ACU’s website at www.acu.edu/promise. Be sure to visit the Archives page too.