Mark Greenfield

Last week I attended my first J. Boye Conference in Philadelphia and it was a great experience. The conference tag line “A knowledge sharing summit for online professionals” was a perfect description.  It combined the best of large conferences (top-notch speakers and experts) with the best of small conferences (networking and personal interaction).  While not specifically a higher education conference, everything that I saw was directly applicable to my job.  The sessions covered a wide range of topics I’m interested in including web governance and management, the user experience and usability, social media, and brand management. (Here is a Google Doc of the j boye 2010 twitter stream.)

The higher ed track featured many people I know including Bob Johnson, Jay Collier, and Mike Richwalsky. I gave a condensed version of my talk on Higher Education: The Toughest Gig in all the Web. All the presentations were well received and generated good discussion throughout the conference.

I was honored to be a part of the Expert Panel Discussion with Tony Byrne, the president of Real Story Group and Barbara Schelkle, the Manager for Knowledge Sharing Systems at the United Nations Development Program. Tony stole the show with his great take on the Ten reasons why web governance is like sex.

Other highlights included:

• A 3 hour workshop with Peter Kim on Making Sense of Social Business. Peter is an expert in all things social first with his work with Forrester, and now with the Dachis Group. His approach is to think about social business strategy rather than social media strategy, an important paradigm shift applicable to higher ed. Most of the workshop explored his process for designing a social business strategy which will be very helpful in my consulting work. He also provided great analysis on when to build and when to join. Peter is an excellent speaker and this was the best social media workshop I’ve attended.
• A 3 hour workshop with Christine Pierpointon on Managing the Web: The Fundamentals of Web Operations Management. Christine has a wealth of experience and shared her approach to web operations management which includes strategy, governance, execution, and measurement.   Web management and web governance is a hot topic in higher ed and was a major theme of the conference. On a related note, I’m particularly interested in the work being done by Stephen Emmott, the Head of Web Services at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His presentation Hand in Gov is excellent and I recommend you follow his blog if you are interested in this topic.
• Thursday’s opening keynote by Eric Karjaluoto called Do You Speak Human? Eric is a great storyteller and his book Speak Human is next up on my reading list. The themes of his speech were reminiscent of “The Cluetrain Manifesto”, my all time favorite book on the web. (The idea behind the Cluetrain is that business is fundamentally human, and markets are conversations.)
• Great back to back sessions from Valeria Maltoni and Mari Luangrath. Valeria is well known in social media circles through her blog Conversation Agent. She gave a great presentation on How to connect with your customers that provided one of my favorite quotes of the conference – “content is your digital body language”. Mari is a dynamic presenter who told the story behind her business Foiled Cupcakes, where 93% of her leads have come from social media. Here is a great list of articles about how she has used social media to build her business. (I’ve got to figure out a way to get Mari to present at the higher ed conferences I’ll be attending in Chicago this year.)
• Two sessions on social media management and policy with Ethan McCarty and Deni Kasrel. Ethan is editor-in-chief of IBM’s global intranet which serves over 400,000 employees across the globe.  I’m hoping Ethan can join us at the Penn State virtual summit on June 8 that will discuss Higher Education, Social Media, and the Law.

I’d like to thank Janus Boye for including me in this great conference. I highly recommend all higher education web professionals consider attending next year.

I am happy to announce that the uwebd social network (http://cuwebd.ning.com) hit a major milestone this month when the 3,000 member mark was reached.  Initially launched in December 2007, UWEBD has seen steady growth during the first two years and is currently growing by about 100 members per month.   The site has a global reach with members from over 50 countries.  Here are some additional stats:

• 3,015 members (as of 2/11/10)
• 1,104 discussions in the forums
• 72 groups
• Approximately 60,000 page views per month
• Approximately 13,000 unique visitors per month

The goal of the uwebd site is to build a community of practice for everyone involved with higher education websites. It is intended to be a place where we can share experiences, ask questions, create community, and leverage the collective intelligence of our members to continually improve our skills.

I am always looking for ways to improve the site. Some current goals include:

• Improving the search function. As the site has grown, the current search does a very poor job.  Improving the search will require getting into the source code and I will be looking for members with PHP experience to help with this task.  Please let me know if you are interested.
• Continue to explore the relationship between forum discussions and group discussions.  It can be confusing on the proper location for a post (main forum or group), and searching for this information is a challenge. Feel free to share your thoughts on the forum posts vs group posts discussion.
• Improved integration with other tools and sites where conversation about the issues facing higher ed web development are taking place, particularly Twitter and individual blogs. One of my goals has been to use the uwebd site to aggregate relevant conversations and content from across the web.  That being said, I think there is much more we could do.

I would like to extend my thanks to all our members, especially those whom have taken the time to contribute. I look forward to the continued growth and evolution of uwebd. I encourage everyone directly involved with higher ed websites to join our network.  And please send along any suggestions on how to improve the site.

I’ve just returned from a long, wonderful day at the 2009 Ride For Roswell.  I was both a participant and an “embedded reporter” using social media to cover the event as it happened. ( see UB to Embed Twitter Reporters at Roswell Ride )

I learned a lot today about using social media to cover an event like this. While I process those thoughts, let me share with you the following video that I shot while riding in the peloton as it reached the finish line at UB, always one of the highlights of the Ride:

Tuesday, June 9, 2009
1:00 pm – 3:00 PM (Eastern)
Originating from the 2009 Penn State Web Conference

HashTag  #smsummit

Come join me at this virtual summit as we explore the challenges and opportunities of social media in higher education. The format will be much different than a typical workshop. Following the principles of an unconference, we will leverage the wisdom of the crowd in an open environment where everyone’s participation is encouraged.

In addition to those attending in person  we will be using Adobe Connect to stream the event live and allow our virtual attendees to participate in the proceedings.  The URL for the summit is http://breeze.psu.edu/psuwebsms.

Update, June 8: You will need to create a “Friends of Penn State Account” and then login in order to participate.  Instructions are available from the main Social Media Summit page at https://breeze.psu.edu/psuwebsms

We will also be utilizing social media to create a backchannel to let people from across the globe participate virtually. For those of you who want to participate on Twitter, delicious, Flickr, etc., the hashtag for the event is #smsummit

Discussion topics will be chosen by participants.  To facilitate conversation both before and after the summit, I have created a group at the uwebd site (http://cuwebd.ning.com/group/socialmediasummit)

I have added an instance for the Social Media Summit at the Harvard’s Live Question Tool:

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/questions/smsummit

Please submit your questions and vote and reply to existing questions. I plan on using the information gathered to drive our live discussion on June 9.

I would like to extend a special thanks to Patti Fantaske and the other conference organizers at Penn State for allowing me to push the envelope.  I was also like to thank Mark Heckel and the technical support staff for the hard work that will go into making the summit available virtually.

I look forward to an interesting afternoon.  Hope to see you there.

(Comments for this post have been turned off.  The discussion will take place at http://cuwebd.ning.com/group/socialmediasummit)

I came across this great SlideShare presentation today by Graeme Wood on the future of social media. It covers a wide range of topics at a high level and references the thoughts and ideas of people like Gorden Moore, Kevin Kelly, Chris Anderson, Tomi Ahonen, and Seth Godin.  Be sure to view the slides and read the accompanying text.

On November 11,  I will be teaching a webinar for Higher Ed Experts as part of the “Social Networks MBA” series. The objective of this series is to help you decide if your institution should launch its own private niche social networking website, and how to nurture and develop a thriving online community around your own social networking website.

My webinar is called “Besides and Beyond Facebook: Do’s and Don’t's for your niche social network” and will borrow many of the concepts from my “Long Tail of Social Networks” workshop. I will explore how niche social networks can meet business objectives and best practices for getting your network off the ground.  In addition, I will share my experiences with launching several niche networks, showing both what did and did not work.

Niche Social Networks are growing exponentially.  On Ning alone there are now over 450,000 sites. Chris Anderson described it best in his blog post Social Networking is a feature, not a destination when he says:

As I think about the current Facebook craze and the notion of it as an all-encompassing platform, sucking in functionality from other sites across the board, I find myself skeptical. With my Long Tail hat on, I think that one-size-fits-all will fail in social networking, just as it has everywhere else (which is why I like Ning, which suppresses its own brand for the sake of those of the microsites it hosts. See this post for more on that.).

Instead, I think focused sites that serve niche communities will extract the best lessons from Facebook and MySpace and offer better social networking tools to the communities they already have. I’m sure huge and generic social networking destinations will continue to do well, but I’m placing my bet on the biggest impact coming when social networking becomes a standard feature on all good sites, bringing community to the granular level where it always works best.

Descriptions of the other two webinars that are part of this series and registertion information is available at the Higher Ed Experts site. If you have any specific topics or questions you would like to see addressed during the webinar, please let me know.