Category: Follow Friday

#highered Follow Friday: Meet Our Sponsors Edition

Every year our wonderful sponsors provide real value to our attendees through the services and content they provide during the conference, while defraying the costs of the conference and helping us keep our registration fees reasonable. And on top of all that, they’re pretty fun folks, too!

Get to know them before the conference. And remember to bring some raffle-friendly business cards along — these guys LOVE to give stuff away!

  • OmniUpdate (@omniupdate)
    A leading Web content management system provider for colleges and universities.
  • Terminal Four (@TERMINALFOUR)
    An enterprise content management system provider for education, public sector, and commercial institutions .
  • Active Data Exchange (@activedatax)
    Provides web-based calendaring solutions to the education, government, non profit, healthcare and corporate markets.
  • Dell (@edu4u)
    Dell’s Edu4u initiative seeks to harness the power of technology to enhance teaching and learning
  • Event Management Systems (@EMSxDEA)
    EMS offers a full suite of room scheduling, meeting and event management, and academic scheduling solutions
  • Hannon Hill (@hannon_hill)
    Hannon Hill’s Cascade Server CMS powers sites for eduction, healthcare, and government clients.
  • Innersync Studio (@innersyncstudio)
    Innersync’s Campusuite Web CMS is designed expressly for schools and higher education.
  • Jadu (@jaducms)
    Jadu specializes in the design and development of enterprise scale web and information architectures – websites, intranets and extranets.
  • Imodules (@iModules)
    Encompass from iModules helps higher ed clients integrate all their online engagement activities in one place.
  • Academic Oatmeal
    This community of academic marketing experts share their insights, experiences, and opinions.
  • SiteImprove
    SiteImprove’s wide portfolio of tools will help with everything from quality control to server monitoring

 

#highered Follow Friday: Thumbs Up Edition

This week’s follow Friday recommendations have definitely earned their seal of approval!

@IUEast
Indiana University East keeps up a steady flow of conversation on its Twitter feed, and makes great use of Twitter lists to point people to IU-related twitter-ers. And this week, the school’s homepage won the eduStyle “People’s Choice” award for best integration of social media.

@huffpostcollege
The Huffington Posts regularly points to news-you-can-use for prospective students and parents, plus creates its own fun features like “Ten Party Schools that Pay Off” and “The Worst College Fashion Trends.” Worth following to see if your school makes it onto one of their lists, for good or for ill.

@ebertchicago
And in the celebrity Twitter category, the nominees are — Mr. Roger Ebert! I confess I’m an Ebert fan from way back (did you notice the title of this post?) Siskel & Ebert At the Movies was appointment viewing for me as a kid. Nowadays, Ebert is a Twitter rockstar. I think there are a lot of lessons to learn from how Ebert uses this tool: he’s very obviously a person; he has an area of expertness, but he doesn’t limit himself to just tweeting out his opinions on film; and he engages his fans in new and creative ways. I’ve referred to his “Twingo” feature (where he randomly retweets two or three tweets from his followers at midnight) several times to folks around campus, as in, “Hey, you never know! You may come up with a new way to use Twitter that no one’s thought of before!” Two thumbs up, Mr. Ebert.

 

#highered Follow Friday

This week’s installment features more great #highered Twitter profiles to follow and learn from.

@TuftsUniversity
Tufts does an especially good job of collating all the various Twitter profiles that represent the school, particularly through its use of Twitter lists.

@butleru
I like how Butler University doesn’t just post news about themselves, but also shares news about their city of Indianapolis with its followers.

And for fun (and in time for Sunday’s premiere) the Mad Men tweeps: @don_draper, @PeggyOlson, @ken_cosgrove, @Sal_Romano, etc. It looks like these were originally created by fans and then removed at AMC’s boneheaded request, then quickly restored. Besides being a hoot, they do illustrate how important it is to let your biggest fans help spread the love, and also point to an interesting spin on the “be a person” exhortation for institutional Twitter users. Would you rather follow @amcnews or @JoanHolloway?

 

#highered Follow Friday

This week we’d like to start recommending a few interesting Twitter accounts for higher ed folks to follow and learn from. If you have additional suggestions to add each Friday, we’d love to hear from you in the comments.

@IthacaCollege
Super-responsive to both new students and alumni. Presents a peek into day-to-day life on campus with a tone that is both fun and informative.

@JohnsHopkins
A bit more news-y (and news release-y) than Ithaca, but I don’t mean that in a bad way at all. It does a great job collecting and re-tweeting news of interest to the Johns Hopkins community, a great service for such a huge, disperse institution.

@Braves
As @TimNekritz wrote recently, the Braves provide a great example of both buy-in from a huge organization and personalized contact with its many fans. A great example of how an institution can behave like a person.

And, what the hell, @oldspice. Talk about personalized contact! The new videos from this manly marketing man may have ended, but it’s still fairly early in the admiration-analysis-imitation-parody-backlash cycle.