What Does Your Unit Do Best?

Venue change for Nov 30 event! Maximizing Your Social Media Influence

Expert Insights: Maximizing Your Social Media Influence

November 30, 3 p.m
Akerman Hall, Room 319 McNamara Alumni Center, Room 235
Presenters are Jennifer Kane and Kary Delaria of Kane Consulting

Jen and Kary are social media
consultants with an impressive client list. They will talk about how to
set goals and measure success in social media beyond return on
investment. For those of you who haven't heard them speak -- they are
insightful and entertaining. Heavy appetizers will be served.

Shoestring Events

I stumbled across this piece on planning budgetary-conscious events at the U. I would venture to guess that budget dictates most, if not all, events here on campus, so any tips are always helpful. I especially like the free tools to get the word out on campus, and the emphasis on collaboration. While it may not be ground-breaking, it's a nice reminder that we're all in the same boat- working with a little to create so much more.

Poll: Paying for online content

The Star Tribune recently announced that they will start charging for their online content. The New York Times did the same earlier this year with much media coverage and public debate. MinnPost operates on a reader-supported model.

As more and more communications channels are moving to a paid-service model, we're curious: do you pay for online content?

Link Roundup: Photography

Mastering photography is an elusive art. But, practice makes perfect and building photographic skills is an enjoyable hobby.

Here's an edition of link roundup on getting good at taking pictures.

-- 14 Ways to Improve Your Photography in a Few Days
-- 90+ Online Photography Tools and Resources
-- How to Stay Up Late and Make an HDR Image
-- How To: Master Smartphone Photography 
-- iPhone Photography + Social Networking = Instagram
-- The Washington Post Wants Your Instagram Photos to Illustrate Health of U.S. Economy

The drive behind the Driven to Discover student campaign

Guest blogger: Drew Swain, U Relations marketing coordinator, manages the University's overall brand and assists in the development of the yearly Driven to Discover campaigns. Swain says the focus of this phase of the campaign is on students, and gives some insight at how that came about, and what's coming next.

Here's Drew:

You've seen professors explain mind control. Professors growing hearts. Professors teaching classes from the Arctic. Professors even lecturing on what makes Superman faster than bullets. So what about the students? Where do they fit into the University's mission to discover?

That's the focus of the new iteration Driven to Discover, the Driven to Discover Student Campaign, which was just released. You might have already seen some of the TV spots.

The inception of the campaign was really a confluence of factors. We wanted to take an uncharted path to further the Driven to Discover brand and one of President Kaler's incoming initiatives centered on students. Meanwhile, the U of M Foundation was starting its new scholarship drive. It was a natural fit to make students the campaign's "heroes."

As higher education communications pros, when you look at Discover Student, you should notice its unique approach. While student related campaigns of other schools are direct recruiting tools, we're telling our audiences how the student experience at the U is unbeatable. There's nowhere else in the state and most of the region where students can be paired up with elite faculty like Andy Van de Ven, one of the world's top minds in managing innovation. Nowhere they have such an array of opportunities to discover their passion and profession through partnerships like the Guthrie BFA Program. And nowhere they can be exposed to such distinct student-related experiences (hello, Sheep, Goat, and Lama Club).

The next step in the student campaign will make it even more focused on students, when it asks them to directly participate in a scholarship video contest. Students will be asked to submit 30-second videos of themselves explaining what they have discovered at the U. Winners will be chosen based on "Likes" on the U's Facebook page, so stay tuned in mid-December when voting begins!

Buzzword (BS) Bingo

My office, U Relations, had a meeting this morning, and our new chief passed out bingo cards with some overused words on them. Words like, "Value-added, Win-win, Think outside the box, At the end of the day," etc... She encouraged us to call her out if she used any of them. Refreshing.

The concept, if you're unfamiliar, is to prepare bingo cards with buzzwords and tick them off when they're said during a meeting or speech until you "win-win."

The moral to the game is that the listener feels that the speaker, through the subterfuge of an infinite echoing of trite terminology, is masking a lack of actual knowledge and just spouting off a bunch of buzzwords rather than providing information or ideas of actual value. In other words, our chief was saying, "I actually know what I'm talking about. Feel free to question me on it." Refreshing...because it's actual, mutual communication. 

Just look at what one recent winner said about the game:

"Thanks Bingo creator for thinking outside the box and proactively creating this value-added knowledgebase that is a strategic fit with my core competencies and current client focused mindset. I can leverage our existing process and exploit the inherent synergies to expand the knowledgebase to cater to our result driven folks who will work 24/7 to put it on a fast-track. This cascading game-plan is what I call a truly win-win situation."

I'm happy to say that no one "won" the game today.