The journey project

The UWA Students fan page continues to grow steadily as more friends of fans become fans themselves (viral marketing in action!).  On the admin side I have been struggling with getting my bright ideas to work in reality.

1. Idea – To streamline the creation of Facebook photo albums I could somehow copy over the photos our staff have already uploaded to Flickr.  Staff are happy uploadign to flickr (and I only need to train them in one tool), they would only need to upload photos once (keeps workload low) and I can pick and choose from the Flickr albums which photos to show on Facebook (which means I can control the content on the Facebook page)

2. Problem – the applications that allow you to share Flickr photos on Facebook only work when you want to put the photos on your PERSONAL profile.  Whereas I want to load them onto my fan page and I just can’t make it work.

So near yet so far!  The MyFlickr and Flickr2Facebook applications are both easy to use (each have a couple of limitations such as not loading into an album or only allowing you to copy over photos one at a time) but I could cope with that if only they would link to my fan page.

I spoke in the 6th and final presentation slot and I spoke about the Facebook trial I am running for incoming UWA students.  I covered issues of logistics, content management, evaluation, community building and promotion.

Having come out of a holiday and grant-writing couple of months I am firmly back under the social media heat-lamp.  I have been playing around with a new Fan page for UWA students which is now published at http://facebook.dj/uwastudents.  The idea is to build a link with students much earlier than we have been able to previously (ie students can join the page when they apply or get an offer – previously we didn’t typically start to engage with them until enrolement and orientation time).  The page will start to be promoted to students over the weekend and next week when activities kick into gear.  The page currently looks like this:

Preparation for this pilot into Facebook has invovled creation of a number of scaffolding documents including a Survival Guide for students on how to network effectively in Facebook, a disclaimer text to interface between offical pages and the Facebook page, a new webpage called ‘Student Services guide to Social media’ and the obligatory project plan that includes performance indicators (luckily Facebook insights does most of the work for me).  I’ve also established the ‘Student Services emerging technology advisory group’ which has representatives from the University’s Web office, Legal Services, IT Policy Unit and a Web 2.0 accessibliity researcher – we intend tobrainstorm new developments to ensure all bases are covered!

More on all this as the story unfolds!

I’ve returned to the online world after a few weeks of self-imposed ‘darkness’ (which coincided with an overseas holiday and writing a major grant submission).  Back now with lots of news to post about a new Facebook fan page and a half-day forum I’m hosting next week on emerging technologies.  More to come tomorrow…

Good to be back

Everyone seems to be talking about it – the entire Skittles website has been turned over to social sites.  there is a small widget in the corner for navigation but the main page is their Twitter page, the ‘pics’ page goes to a Flickr album, the video page to YouTube and the friends link goes to Facebook.  There are disclaimers and users have to click that they agree to the T&C but most people seem to be commenting on the amount of spam hitting the pages.  Check it out for yourslf.  I suspect that problems aside for a minute – this is a stroke of genius.

Thigns may have been quiet on the blog but certainly not that way in the real-world of this project.  The implementation phase of the Online Student Journey project is getting into gear which has resulted in this ‘3 points’ concept.  They are:

• Developing example applications of online that I can demonstrate to other teams
• Developing useful applications for the Study Smarter team that can be showcased on their website
• Developing advice for students on how to engage onlien effectively (can’t assume ALL students have the requisite skills!)

Today’s outcome of those lofty goals is a draft guide for students about how to use Facebook.  It’ll join the Survival Guide on how to use RSS for study and research I wrote a while ago and is available from the UWA Study Smarter resources page