Archive for Communication

Richard | January 15, 2012
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You need a really large network

The charities that raise a lot from social media vary widely in size and budgets. But each has an average Facebook following of nearly 100,000, more than 15 times the norm, according to the NSNB report. They also now dedicate lots of staff time to social media and have carefully followed the success of their fund-raising.

Source: The Economist

Is this simply due to the low rate of return on social media fundraising appeals, or does a crowd effect exist, so that individuals are more likely to give because they see their friends give?

Category: Communication | Tags: ,
Richard | October 10, 2011
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New Student Newspapers Online

By coincidence, sister schools Catlin Gabel and Maru-a-Pula just launched their inaugural online issues just a week apart. It’s great to see both schools embracing an online format.

CatlinSpeak: speak.catlin.edu

MAP Voices: mapvoices.org

I worked a bit with the CatlinSpeak staff, and a few thought-provoking questions came up.

What is an “issue” in an online format?

The staff plans to publish four paper issues and some additional number of online issues. To simulate an “issue” on the website, the initially planned to schedule all of the posts to publish on a specific date. In reality, it was too difficult to troubleshoot design and layout without publishing the first batch of articles immediately.

The online format forces some shifts in thinking. When breaking news happens, why not publish it to the site immediately? Major news websites no longer publish issues but rather post articles continuously as they are written. Can a school newspaper generate enough traffic without announcing new issues? Can students devote focused attention to writing and editing amongst their other school commitments?

How can we get students to read more serious articles?

CatlinSpeak had a terrific launch day as measured by site traffic, nearly 2,000 hits in a single day. However, look how steeply traffic dropped off after the home page.

Serious articles about global travel, the presidential election, etc. only received low double-digit hits. How many of those read the articles all the way through?

How much technical website expertise should a journalism class develop?

The CatlinSpeak staff had high standards for layout and design but was not able to take on the CSS customization required to make the necessary changes. Given that the design is likely to stay relatively static now that the site is launched, how important is it for the staff to develop CSS skills, compared to spending time on journalism and publicity skills? Is it okay for adults to do most of the CSS work at the start of this project, to help the staff achieve a good launch?

What collaboration is possible between Maru-a-Pula and Catlin Gabel students?

We have two student newspaper staffs writing serious articles about their schools and communities. How should they collaborate together in ways that will be worth the effort required? What could students learn from the similarities and differences in their journalistic priorities and methods?

What is the role of social media in these online papers?

The Catlin Gabel staff chose Twitter for a very practical reason: the ease of posting links to external news articles and Catlin Gabel sports scores. They are not really using it for networking, but it is effective for presenting updates quickly and concisely.

Journalism and 21st Century Skills

This year, CatlinSpeak changed from a club to a half-credit lunch class. This promotion underscores the legitimacy of a journalism class within a classic academic program. That said, why not fully integrate the class within the English department’s elective or required course of study? Communication, presentation, and global citizenship are key 21st century skills. Why not five them full status in the school curriculum?

Category: Communication, Curricular integration, Teaching and Learning | Tags: , ,
Richard | September 9, 2011
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Visual Website Design

Our admission, website, and communication teams have worked together to reorganize the admission section of the school’s website. Not only did we want to simplify and clarify navigation, but we also wanted to present information in visual ways.

Our website is very text-heavy, much of it written eight years ago and only edited since then. In much of the site, we present all of the important content as text and then add some photos for aesthetic or emotional effect. In today’s media-rich culture, people have a lot of practice consuming information visually. We can actually communicate content, not just feelings, through photographic badges. This also forces us to distill the “landing page” message to three key ideas.

In recent years, affordability has become increasingly important to families. Our website statistics show a rise in page views in the tuition, financial aid, and scholarship pages. We respond by both providing easy access to the information people are seeking and by promoting the response that we wish to convey.

Before


After

Category: Communication, Website Development | Tags: , , ,
Richard | February 14, 2011
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Collectives, Not Communities

Viewing social networks as collectives rather than communities may help us make sense of their place in schools . How can a person have 1,000 friends? Why do students spend so much time on Facebook? What is the nature of membership in a social network?

From Community to Collective: Institution and Agency in the Age of Social Networks (PDF)

Douglas Thomas explores how social network websites act primarily as collectives, not communities. In a collective, the institution is organized to provide individual agency to its members.

In a community, the general motive for participation is belonging, principally, belonging to an institution greater than oneself or even the sum of its members. In a collective, the investment is in participating … without the immediate sense of reciprocity that community entails.

Facebook, Google, Ebay, Amazon are all large institutional structures that have the singular and sole purpose of affording an individual agency.

Sometimes, a collective contains several communities within it. This makes it easy to conflate the two. However, the collective does not depend on the communities within it for its continued existence.

A student may interact with a subset of her social network contacts as a community, exchanging direct messages and commenting on friends’ posts. The entirety of a student’s social network may act as a collective, providing the student with critical information that supports her sense of personal agency, whether or not she posts at all.

If alumni and parents join a school’s Facebook page for reasons of personal agency, not reciprocal interaction, then the purpose of posting to the Facebook page changes considerably. A school would want to consider what content it could provide that would support individual agency.

Viewing social networks as collectives instead of communities has the potential to advance our understanding of their useful purpose in schools.

Photo credit: “Face in a crowd” by vividbreeze

Category: Communication, Community, Social studies | Tags: , , , ,
Richard | November 10, 2010
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Arts Classes Publishing With Flickr

Arts teachers have embedded two Flickr slideshows (1 | 2)  on our public-facing website. I like how students and teachers may contribute to the photo sets, constantly changing what appears on the site. Does a way exist to add a group pool to one’s Flickr favorites without actually joining it?

Category: Communication, Curricular integration, Software/web, Teaching and Learning | Tags: , , , ,
Richard | October 31, 2010
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What Should You Post On Facebook?

A recent study “cracks” Facebook’s algorithms, with implications for school content managers.

http://www.edsocialmedia.com/2010/10/what-should-you-post-on-facebook/

Category: Communication | Tags: , ,
Richard | July 13, 2010
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It’s all about social media, except when it isn’t.

I led a training session the other day to further integrate social media into our admission and development work. We considered a range of new uses: student bloggers, a dedicated Facebook page for applicants, Flickr and YouTube channels. Some potential initiatives were certainly exciting to consider.

Here’s the problem. None of the new ideas made the cut when we listed priority tasks for the upcoming year. I asked what were each department’s primary communication goals for the upcoming year, without presupposing the solution. In all cases, the identified goals suggested changes to our existing website, not our social media strategy.

Why? While we have a successful website, it has more room for improvement than does our social media strategy. The main website receives 3,000 visits each day. Our Facebook fan page has about 500 fans. Improvements to the main website will reach far more people.

Also consider that our main website allows users to more meaningfully transact with the school than does our social media pages. For example, you may sign up to volunteer, make a gift to the school, apply for admission, or comment on a student blog. Our Facebook and Twitter pages primarily push content out to people who may be listening and offer some opportunities for interaction. Our main website may have limited opportunities for social interaction, but it offers more opportunities further up the engagement pyramid.

I am glad that we  developed a social media strategy and voice. A small and growing proportion of our audience maintains contact with the school through that vehicle. It improves our ability to engage in a personal way with constituents. However, we will continue to parcel out our time and effort based on the audience size and quality of interaction with the school. We will be able to adjust these efforts as we track the growth in social media page membership and interactions.

Category: Communication, No category, Strategic Planning | Tags: , , , ,
Richard | July 8, 2010
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Goodbye, Satellite

We are discontinuing our satellite TV subscriptions, which brought French, Spanish, and Japanese television programming into the classroom for the past seven years. Web video has largely replaced the need for live television. A teacher who wants to present students with authentic vocabulary, regional accents, or international current events need only visit a country news website or search for specific content on YouTube.

While this change may seem relatively inconsequential, I find it notable that we are actually discontinuing a technology service on campus. It can often be difficult to convince users of a service that its end has come. When a new technology arrives, often a certain proportion of users adopt the new technology quickly. Penetration increases rapidly enough that it may seem only a matter of time until everyone is using the new technology. In reality, adoption usually plateaus at a certain level, sometimes just a small fraction of all users, sometimes a majority, and in rare occasions nearly everyone.

Most technologies reach peak penetration and then eventually decline, as users lose interest, or the technology does not live up to its initial promise, or a newer technology comes along and takes its place. Still, a certain proportion of users find comfort in continued use of that technology, and this at which point it can be difficult to discontinue a service. Some number of people still rely on that technology and want the school to continue providing it.

With satellite television, peak penetration was fairly low, because the service was limited to foreign language television, and so only the language teachers used it. In addition, only the upper (high) school was cabled for satellite TV in the first place. When use declined, only one or two teachers continued to use TV in the classroom, and they were very gracious in recognizing that it would not be cost-effective to continue subscription and maintenance for just a couple of classrooms.

Contrast this with teacher voicemail extensions. Our current phone system has been in place for seven years. All employees have a phone extension, but most teachers of eighth grade and below do not have a physical phone. They have a voicemail-only extension. Use of voicemail-only extensions has declined sharply, as teachers and parents now communicate mostly by email. However, it will take more work than for satellite TV to consult with a larger user base and reach an informed decision on changing our telephone practice.

Category: Communication, Hardware, No category, Strategic Planning | Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Richard | May 21, 2010
2 comments

How many fan pages do we have now?

As a result of Facebook’s new “Community Page” feature, our school now has two fan pages, one which we control, and one which we do not. Do you think this will confuse users? Why isn’t the community page feature just a tab on our fan page?

Category: Communication, Software/web | Tags: , ,
Richard | May 17, 2010
One comment

The Best Press

Sometimes, we work really hard to get some press coverage. Sometimes, it just happens. This time, credit the terrific accomplishments of these two students.

Category: Communication | Tags: , ,
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