Have you followed @PrezKaler?

Guest blogger: Elizabeth Giorgi ( egiorgi at umn.edu )

Elizabeth Giorgi (Liz), social and multimedia coordinator in University Relations, has some words of wisdom about the whimsical world of social media. Liz manages the U's Facebook page, YouTube channel, and the recently launched @PrezKaler Twitter account. In her free time, she also blogs about social media, Internet culture, and general geekiness at beinggeekchic.com. Her conclusion here may seem intuitive: ask yourself the most important question of all: Would I read this? But the road to a good Twitter post and indeed much social media is fraught with the perils of tedium.

Here's what Liz has to say:

You may have noticed that our 16th President has a beard. Did you know that he is the first since U president William Watts Folwell? It's these kind of quirky details that we hope to capture with the @PrezKaler Twitter account.

People are already starting to ask me what my goals for our social media accounts will be in 2012. The introduction of the @PrezKaler account is a huge part of what I see as the future of social media at the U. Here's why: we tend to pay attention to and share the things that we see from friendly faces. As a large entity, we're not always effective in doing that.

When you break down the walls of academia and focus on one voice, you can make the conversation more personal and more impactful. So, how does the beard come in? One of the ideas we're playing with for November is to have people tweet their pictures of their "Novembeards" to @PrezKaler as a sign of solidarity. Who would you be more likely to send a photo of yourself to? A nameless face acting as a large department? Or a guy you see on TV or in the halls? We're betting on the latter.

Getting Twitty with it
In a nutshell: We need to be sassier, more personal, more risky, and more ever-present.
 
As for the larger accounts that do represent us as a whole, aka the University of Minnesota page on Facebook, the U's page needs to find a way to more clearly distinguish ourselves from other information on your news feed. That's where sassiness comes into play. We recently posted a photo album on Facebook with some autumnal scenes. One caption reads: "The Lilly Plaza is a little-known study spot. Oops, did we just let out the secret?!"

When you look to establish your goals for social media this coming year, think about what you can do to distinguish yourself and use a more personal voice. And ask yourself the most important question of all: Would I read this?

Duluth Forum program hit the mark

by Karen Kloser, program associate, Institute for New Media Studies.

After four years working for the Institute for New Media Studies research center in the U's School of Journalism, I have yet to meet someone who understands all the social media tools and is maximizing all the platforms and their potential.
Over the years I have looked to the Forum programs to expose me to the missing pieces.

The Forum's first program of the year, held in Duluth, did just that with guest speaker Marty Weintraub, the frenetic owner of AimClear. Weintraub, along with one of his bright, young staffers and blogger Manny Rivas for Search Engine Watch wowed attendees with their energy and command of social media and especially their work in search engine optimization (SEO).

My interest in attending this program was piqued when I read the words "reputation monitoring" in the promotion copy. Straight up, there was so much to cover in one hour that Weintraub didn't even touch upon this topic. However, I was not disappointed.

He opened the presentation with the apropos analogy comparing their agency's online marketing efforts to an ecosystem: Like nature, all social media is intertwined and interdependent, with Google as mother earth. Although Rivas was careful to remind us that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world.

Weintraub also delineated online marketing into two types: free (or organic) and paid. It sounds simple enough. But as he dove deeper into their practice and strategy for search engine ranking, driving traffic, creating content, engaging communities, and harvesting high quality inbound links, I knew he was way over my head.

I didn't expect to come away from the program as a social media scholar; however, I did pick up a few tidbits to share:

• Social media dovetails nicely with customer service

• There is stunning micro-demographic diversity in FaceBook, Twitter, YouTube to be mined

• Play with Facebook's amazing advertising reach-- add some off the wall likes and interests, or change your political or religious views, and watch what appears in that right hand column of ads on your page

• Don't rule out B2B marketing, there are tons of Facebook social segments in it

• Try Facebook advertising.

Finally, the best part of Forum programs is the networking. Afterwards, Weintraub and Rivas mingled with us during the reception. Weintraub may be a wiz at what he does, but he was very approachable and came across as just a regular Midwesterner.

Poll: How Networked Are You?

We've been discussing the importance of social networking related to work, but I'm curious how networked you are personally?  How important is your online social community to you?  Have you made friendships that started online, but now exist in "real life"?