Just a little mini-plug here for some of our social networking efforts that will begin to tie in more directly to our University website. For those of you who haven’t seen them, I invite you to check out the following links to see other areas that EWU is beginning to maintain a presence.
- Flickr (check out the EWU Flickr group to join and contribute EWU photos to the pool!)
- YouTube
- MySpace
- Start Something Big (of course!)
Thanks to John Demke, Kit Frantzich and Sam Buzby for the hard work on getting these up and running and maintaining them. We’ve already had great successes with them and we’re still at the tip of the iceberg!
With the redesign, we’re planning on tying directly into these services to enhance the experience and increase effectiveness of the University website. The goal is to give external audiences (be they future/current students, potential faculty or staff, community members, alumni, etc.) a more holistic picture of the University and the people who make the EWU world go ’round. Look for some of the ideas on how we’ll accomplish this in upcoming posts….
Also, some of you who might be EWU Alumni should check out their new site. The social networking aspect of it is very strong and they have some great functionality around event registration/notification.
We’re also planning on infiltrating the worlds of Wikipedia and Zinch more effectively. We’re considering Twitter as a possibility but we’re not yet sure how effective that will be in this market. If you have any other ideas or suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments!
At some point, a presence on secondlife (http://secondlife.com) could be very interesting.
I have noticed that many institutions are focusing on creating and managing a social networking presence. What I was wondering is how you manage to keep a consistent look/feel, tone, and message between all of the services.
First off, I won’t pretend that social networking isn’t a bit of a “wild west” for institutions like a University. The lack of control over who is there and what they’re saying is a foreign and often uncomfortable feeling for a large public organization such as ours.
Having said that, it is where our many of our audiences “live” on the web. It is becoming an increasingly relevant forum in which we should participate.
As far as maintaining consistent look/feel and messaging, we really are shooting for the “best fit” approach. We realize there will be outliers in our attempts but we’re shooting for the 80/20 rule — the lowest hanging fruit. Examples — making our Flickr icon the red box from our Start Something Big campaign, using the graphics from our main site’s homepage slides on our Facebook page, using the same color red as backgrounds/design elements wherever possible, falling back on the One Day I’ll and Start Something Big themes for messaging, etc. etc.
We’re fortunate to have a strong branding image to stand upon — it gives us all a totem to revolve around when it comes to these efforts as the main grounding element.