Social Network Principles

I talk with many institutions about how to get involved with social sites. Your audiences are spending a significant amount of time watching YouTube videos, creating friendships, and learning what the first semester of college will be like.

Let’s go over the four basics of a social networking site to understand how to take advantage.

1. Friends. Without relationships, all content on Facebook would be on islands. The success of your participation is determined by how many relevant connections are made. An Alumni Association, for instance, should see a growing number of alums joining a group or RSVPing for an event. And the domino effect applies here, where once one friend joins, all his or her friends will join, and so on, and so on.
2. Groups. Your presence on any of these sites is not as a group, but as an individual. MySpace, YouTube, and Flickr are a little different than Facebook, where they don’t mind if you are an entity or person. What a group gives you is a forum for members to check back to. Flickr allows all members of a group to post images. Facebook allows all members to receive central messages and announcements, along with being alerted of any group members’ relevant activity. By the way, if you want to start a Flickr group for Alabama Football (http://www.flickr.com/groups/38905776@N00/), one already exists…don’t duplicate effort. It splits participation.
3. Content. If you have video, go to YouTube and start a “Channel” to act as a collection. Users can subscribe, comment, and share videos as they see fit. If you have images, a site like Flickr or Facebook (depending on what you want to do with those photos) might be the way to go. Again, people can subscribe, and all photos can become part of a group. Ongoing blogs can be handled through sites like Flickr and Facebook, or they can be handled within MySpace. If you’ve done your work with creating a group, announcements and events can be channeled through the groups to keep every friend in the loop. Then after the event, everyone can share photos and discuss the event. This is where the content grows quickly…we call this ‘user generated content’.
4. Tagging. If people aren’t a member of a group, or you want content searchable within the networks, tagging is the way to go. Every piece of content can be categorized based on an open tagging format. A Homecoming event, for example, may be tagged as “homecoming, football, X University, alumni, City”. Up to about seven tags will keep the keywords relevant. These tags spread the word fairly quickly.

A couple final notes. I will reiterate to join existing groups rather than creating a duplicate…same goes for creating content. Also, a side benefit to social network participation is also the searchable exposure your university has on Google, Yahoo, and Technorati. Because these sites are heavily linked and very relevant, your information gains extra points in the search engine optimization game.

Add comment September 17th, 2007

Microformats, yes they are that easy

Let me be the first to admit that new technologies are at many times daunting for me. I don’t consider myself a programmer. I tend to hack at existing code and somehow string it together with duct tape. I thought microformats would be the same kind of undertaking. But it’s not. To begin, what are microformats? Well you can find a few definitions here . On the microformats.org homepage it says

Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.

Even that is too complicated of a definition, for those of you who do standards based code (as we all should be) are more or less already doing it. You wrap ’s and ’s around data.

It took me awhile to wrap my head around how easy it was. I marked up my college’s directory in microformats in an hour one afternoon. After I was done I was sitting there asking, “Is that really it?”So onto the sell, how does this relate to higher ed? Many of the microformats standards relate to things we do daily.

• hCard
  Do you have a directory listings on your site? Oh you do, me too.
• hCalendar
  Do you have events / cal on your site? I thought so.
• rel-license
  Are there people who need to license their works?
• hResume
  Are there resumes on your site?
• course-catalog (still in development)
  Do you list courses?

Others include citation, collections, directions, grouping, job listing, measurements, and meeting minutes.

I’m sure everyone would be hard pressed not to find a few of these on his or her site.

At microformats.org there is a site / wiki where you can find detailed info on all the specs. There are also creators to help you in the process. The creators are also open to new microformats and provide info on how to contribute on something that may not have been thought of yet. Still don’t get it? Here is a presentation called “What are microformats?” by Tantek Çelik one of the people behind Microformats.

Next question, how do you work with microformats? There is a plugin for Firefox (please tell me you use Firefox) called Operator . Operator leverages microformats that are already available on many web pages to provide new ways to interact with web services. You can export contact info, add google calendar events, find locations on google maps all just because things are marked up in microfomats. If you download and install the plugin and then go to my site there are microformats embedded and you can export my contact info. to your addressbook. So I leave you with:

The microformats principles

• solve a specific problem
• start as simple as possible
• design for human’s first, machines second
• reuse building blocks from widely adopted standards
• modularity / embeddability
• enable and encourage decentralized development, content, services

P.S. my first post “Mobile Web for Higher Ed ” was the 3rd of July so I thought I would mention it in case it got lost in the shuffle.

- Matt Herzberger -July Blogger

3 comments July 9th, 2007