Indispensable Web 2.0 and Social MediaTools

National School Public Relations Association Conference -- July 2010

credit: wellingtongray.net

There are a million social media tools we could use as school PR people. This so-called periodic table shows just a sampling of what's out there. How many of you now maintain FB fan pages for your districts? Twitter feeds?

How many of you feel behind the Web 2.0 curve? You can't be behind, it's a curve. Do just two things here -- and everyone you work with will think you're a genius.

Since I'm sure most of you know there are zillions of Web 2.0 tools out there on the web, I've tried o just give you a Whitman's Sampler of Web 2.0 tools that can help you out as school PR people and those I've used myself regularly or have a good track record.

Because I've presented here before on the topic of using Facebook and Twitter to push out your news, I'm pretty much moving beyond FB and Twitter, although I'll touch on how to enhance yoru FB fan pages and Twitter feeds a bit.

Caveat: Don't do more than two of these at once. Use a couple of sites, test them out yourself, even with a persona account, before running them by the boss.

I am guilty of the Shiny object Syndrome, but you should avoid that. Use established tools first.

Jumping the firewall. I won't be talking about that here, but certainly speak to me later if you want some advice.

This presentation is available online at www.slideshare.net/evelynmccormack

You can find my presentation on slideshare, an example of Web 2.0 technology.Remember that the links and videos embedded in this presentation will also be live for them to use on slideshare.

Are you still resisting the pull of social media?

Credit: Gary Hayes, Personalize Media Blog

If you are, you might want to jump on the bandwagon. . This is Gary Hayes' blog and Gary Hayes keeps track of Internet actvity. So let's go out to the web and see his latest numbers.

“I think the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to have been very, very modest.” Tony Hayward, BP CEO

Need I say more? Think about what we would have known about the BP oil spill without the web, live feeds 5,000 feet below the sea level. This feed, which has been posted everywhere, is now commonplace and burned into our psyches. This is one of the places where I'm going slightly off topic because I'm always completely amazed by technology today.

ROVs -- Remotely Operated Underwater Vehicles

A completely amazing and current look at how social media and the web have changed the way we view and share in current event:HaitiUS Airways Miracle on the HudsonWorld CupAmerican Idol

Digital Life Management

iGoogle

Tabs you can customize

Google gives you ideas

Let's begin with your life, and let's begin with your morning routine.Other than Starbucks, you might want to think about using digital dashboards and feed aggregators like iGoogle and Netvibes. You are, after all, news junkies, I would be willing to bet. You need to be organized, and there's no better way than being organized digitally and online. This means that all your important information -- FB feeds, Twtiter feeds, news sources, maps, time and date, even your emails -- can be found in one place at the beginning or your day. And it's all online, which means you can get to this information from any computer, anywhere in the world at any time of the day. These sites -- iGoogle and Netvibes being probably the most well-known -- are also called dashboards and start pages. You can start your day with either. And if we go to my iGoogle page, I can show you around. Hae to open a Google account for this.

Netvibes

Netvibes is beginning to grow on me. It is a bit more colorful, but doesn't offer quite as many feeds as iGoogle.

But it works pretty much the same as igoogle works.

Tracking Your Online Presence & Avoiding Surprises

Google Alerts

If there are two things every PR person should try and do, it's create a morning news feed dashboard like the ones I just showed you, and get Google Alerts. Google Alerts is a free service that will track mentions anywhere out on the web universe by terms, titles, names of school districts, etc.Google then emails you every time that term is mentioned, including in online new stories.

What you're looking at is an email I received when one of my districts won the NY state baseball championships. This is the news story that was published.

This is critical for anyone who needs to follow the news, blog mentions, and Twitter mentions of your school district, maybe to keep the news from getting out of hand or to be able to point to something great that was published.

Temple University story.

Trackle Alerts

NSPRA conversations taking place between members, including me, @nylady, @kirby310 (Nicole Kirby), and others.

Trackle Analyticsprovides a summary of conversations, too.

Here, I tried out Trackle, which is similar to Google Alerts and you get to enter up to 10 different terms that they will track and alert you to, on a daily or weekly basis. I entered NSPRA just because, and I receive this alert last week that School Messenger was holding a party for NSPRA folks on Monday night. Awesome.At the bottom of the alert, which was sent to me by email, it shows that school messenger sent a twett on Twitter about the party.

Beyond Facebook and Twitter: Integration

The Facebook to Twitter Tool: http://www.facebook.com/twitter/Lists my fan pages Just click on "Link to

Twitter" and you're connected.

Now onto Facebook and Twittter for a bit, since I'm sure they're also a part of your daily life now.If you're handling several Facebook fan pages and Twitter feeds at once, you can integrate both so that each time you post to FB, the exact same message is posted to Twiter.

Easy to do. Go to the link you see here.. FB will list your FB fan pages and you simply press the "Link to Twitter" button. Just keep in mind that this works on way: FB to Twitter.

Posting Twitter Updates to Facebook1. Go to the FB apps page at http://www.facebook.com/editapps/php 2. Click on Twitter's Edit Settings button.3. When you get there, go to Additional Permissions and check "Publish Content to My Wall."*If you're maintaining more than one FB page under he same user ID, this won't work.

Facebook Insights

You can find Insights on any fan page in the left hand margin. See the red arrow.

Facebook Insights

FB Insights is a handy tool that provides you with weekly updates about your fan pages.

HOw many new fans that week, how many post views, whether you hae comments/feedback, etc.

Email Updates

Facebook will also send you weekly summaries of any FB pages you're maintaining. Here you can see an email I received recently about the FB pages I maiintain. The update lists how many new fans your page has, how many posts you'ce made , how many comments were made, and how many visits your page has received.

Enhance Your Fan Page with Apps

The Poll app: http://apps.facebook.com/opinionpolls/create_poll.php?

ref=nf

You can go to the link you see at the bottom of this page to find the FB poll application. It simply allows you to conduct a simple poll of your fans.

Facebook Poll App

Here's a screenshot of how the poll looks on the White Plains schools Facebook page.

Polls & Surveys

www.99polls.com

99 polls can enhance your Facebook account (or if you have a glo) by conducting periodic polls on your fan page. Here, we just ran a simple poll asking people who they planned to spend their summer vacation in one of our districts.The red arrow shows you where you can share the poll -- on FB, Twitter and elsewhere. There's also a URL you can cut and paste onto your website or the embed code for your website. These sites are making it much easier to use in conjunction with social media sites like FB and Twitter.

I use both the 99 polls tool and the Facebook Poll tool, just depending on what mood I'm in. And I like to experiment with a couple while I'm still in the beta stage of learning about this stuff, because often you don't find out about a glitch in a tool until you've used it for a while.

Blending Your Social Media

This is the NMH Book, a special page on the private school's website where all of their social media presence is aggregated.

So you can see their Facebook update, with links.

You can see their blog postings, with links.

At bottom right, you can see their Twitter feed, with links.

Center, their photos on their Flickr account.

Under that, their YouTube feed of videos.

All in one place and the home page at NMH promotes this.

You can set up a page that accepts all these feeds seamlessly, or you can ask your website developer about this.

NASA's Buzzroom

Here is a version of the same idea, except from NASA.

Enhancing Twitter & Handling Multiple Feeds

CoTweet

CoTweet does require you to register an account with them, but it’s for a good reason. You can link your CoTweet account with up to 5 of your Twitter accounts and manage them all from one place. This saves a lot of time and lets you schedule tweets for multiple accounts from one place. Besides scheduling tweets, CoTweet will save all incoming and sent messages for you to view later if needed. One of its more unique features is the ability to assign a tweet to a friend, coworker, or someone else to follow up on. This can be very useful for businesses.

Trottr

You can record a message, get the URL and post on Twitter.

This is the coolest thing ever and might be one of those few items that falls into the category of Shony New objects. But what the heck. I'm lazy, so this is perfect for me. I literally go to Trottr and it lets me records a Twitter update. I'm only using it on my personal Twitter page right now, but maybe in 2010-11, I'll ask my cool superintendents if I can use it on their District fan pages. And by then, maybe Trottr will have gone out of business.

Twitterlists

This Twiter list is called @schoolpr/12schools. Add your district to the list if you're on Twitter. Lists are gteat ways to network with other people who do the same thing, and to steal ideas on how districts use Twitter. There are 247 schools on this list, just to give you an idea.

Listorious(lists of Twitter feeds by occupation, interests)

Listorious is great because you can look up great sources by occupation and interests, in case there are people you want to follow or get ideafrom.

TweetML

This is TweetML, which is similar to Twitter Lists by aggregating lists of similar people together. I highly recommend thar you look this list to see how schoool administrators around the country are using Twitter. Things have definitely changed!

For Newbies & Vets: Mashable Guides

Facebook Guidebook

Twitter Guidebook

These arw absolutely the best guides around for using and enhancing your Twitter and Facebook pages.

Photo Editing and Sharing Picnik

Picnik is free and allows you to simply upload any photo you want to edit. You can resize it, lighten it up, and pretty much do most of the things you would normally do with it on Photoshop.But this is easy and gives you instant gratification. You can save the edited photo to your hard drive, email it to someone, or post it on Picasa, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc.

Use it in a Flickr slideshow.

Picnik integrates with Picasa Web Albums, Flickr, Facebook, Photobucket

The great thing about these tools is that they often are integrated. For example, with Picnik the photo editing site, you can upload your photos, edit them, and then store them on Picasa, Flickr or Photobucket, then turn them into slideshows later on.

You can also post the photos directly onto your Facebook fan page.

Turning Photos into SlideshowsPicasa

My staff uses several different Web 2.0 tools to create slideshows, including Picasa, Photobucket and others. Using a slideshow tool is GREAT when you have tons of photos from one large event and doesn't limit you to choosing just one photo.

See our example from our website.

Photobucket

How it looks on a website.

Photobucket allows you to upload photos and create a slide show. Here’s how one of those slide shows looks on our website, along with a news item.

Press the "Share This" button when you're done uploading, and you'll get a choice. Choose the embed code (html code) and paste that right onto your content management tool where you post your web story.

FixRedEyes

Sharing Presentations, Newsletters and Other Docs

Issuu

We use tools to turn our boring PDF newsletters into "interactive" newsletters, where you can turn the pages and zoom in and out when viewing the newseltters.The tool we pretty much exclusively use is called Ilssuu. Again, you will want to upload your PDF document right onto the Issuu website, which converts it for you.The, like the photo slideshow sites, Issuu gives you a snippet of html coding called an embed code, which you paste into your website contentn management tool and voila -- the publication appears.

This is what my Issuu "bookshelf" looks like. Issuu stores all the docs you uploaded on this site for future reference.

You can see the "upload" button at the top of the page.

Click on White Plains color publication and show the embed code and way to post to Facebook.

How it Looks on Your Website

Issuu Stats

Issuu statistis just provides you with a look at how many people have viewed your documents, etc.

Scribd

Upload publications to this website. Read by 50 million every month, 50,000 documents uploaded every day

Slideshare

Upload and share presentations; view others', steal ideas, start groups

Prezi(an awesome tool I don't know how to use -- yet!

Social Media Aggregators/Dashboards

TweetdeckTwitter Facebook

Tweetdeck is a free tool you can use to aggregate your Twittter accounts and your Facebook fan pages, and keep track of them all at once. You will be asked to download the Tweetdeck tool onto your hard drive, so that you can choose when to have it running simulatneously while you're online.

Hootsuite

The thing that's great about Hootsuite is the ability in the far right column to schedule updates on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.So I scheduled an update for my Twiter for 2 p.m. today, Tuesday.

Networking, Learning and Growth

Ning social networking

Ning is a social networking site. You would have to make the commitment to do this financially, since Ning just recently changed its terms and no longer offers a free version.

Sounds just like Hulu!

The New York School PR Association just decided to keep its Ning because it took us so long to get people to sign on, both literally and figuratively, to the idea that you can share information without having to send a mass email. We are currently bewixt and between in that regard.

Facebook Groups

NCSPRA Facebook Page

Here's the North Carolina School PR Association's Facebook group or fan page. At the time, they had 10 members. We can check and see how many they have now. The page was created on July 13th.This is a great way to network with like-minded people, share best practices, links, ask questions, all the same kinds of things you can do on the Ning.

Shane Haggerty's #schoolprchatVisual CV -- Your Life Visually

Resume infoUpload your work

LinkedIn

This is usually the firstplace adults go to put their toes in the water through social media. At this point, if you're a professional, you should be on LinkedIn.LinkedIn has come a long way over the years, and now includes Groups and Jobs. See the red arrows.

You can join all kinds of groups, to network with people in similar jobs, and you can go to Jobs to just -- you know -- browse.

You can also write references for people, if they ask, and vice versa.

Meetups and Webinars

Mashable Meetups

If you're a social media beginner or just someone who wants to learn more about this technology, you can join a free"virtual meetup" online or sign in to a webinar and listen in anonymously. I've got several recommendations for this .

Mashable, a great site for the latest in social media news, is holding "meetups" for anyone who'd like to learn more about social media and to hold conversations. They're holding meetups around the country and there is one in NYC on Aug. 9th that I hope to get to. These don't cost an arm and a leg. The NYC event is $30.

EdSocialMedia

And how about a social media boot camp for school PR people? Has anyone here ever held one? I'd be willing to help organize one! My hand is officiallly raised!

Thios is EdSocial Media's website, which is maintained by a group of private school administrators including PR people. They have tons of webinars and boot camps. A friend of mine, on a snow day last February, decided we would spend the day in our respective homes, attending a social media webinar held by this group and I learned a lot from them. and have kept in touch with their executive director.

The Seattle Boot Camp event in September is

MediaBistro Classes

Share the Wealth

For you social media mavens out there:This is a blog posting by Racehl Graveline at Worcester Academy who decided that she would hold lunches for staff members on using social media tools. Share the wealth, if you're someone who knows a bit about Social Media.

emccormack@swboces.orgFacebook           LinkedIn   Blog: School Communications 2.0 Twitter: @nylady

Thank You!

Werner Schnell, "Thank You," via Flickr Creative Commons License

Other Thingys(Cool Resources)

Matt Hamm, "Social Media Bandwagon", via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution

Social Media Policies:Thinking Machine Wiki: Social Media Policies for Schools Social Media Guidelines for Educators Facebook PageSocial Media Today: 100 Social Media Policies Online Document Sharing:Google DocsScribusWritewith.com (group writing/editing)Piconote -- online note-takingHelipad -- online document and notes toolWritewith -- cooperative document editing

Newsletter Creation & Tools:Letterpop (create newsletters for free. A bit clunky.)Issuu (free-post any print document, email, embed, etc.)

Photo Editing:Snipshot (edit your photos online/alternative to Photoshop)FixRedEyes -- fix red eye on photos online

show the grandview library blog.

Wikis:Wetpaint Wikis Wikispaces Blog Platforms:WordpressBloggerEdublogs

Organization:30 Boxes (online calendar)Remember the Milk (online to-do list and task management)Evernote (clipping favorite websites and saving online)

Writing:Save the Words -- Vocabulary builder (hilarious and fun)FreeDictionaryGramlee (site that checks your grammar--not free) Twitter tools:Grouptweet – send private messages to specific groups using TwitterMytweetmap – shows where tweets are coming from on a mapTwitter Search – search for terms and people on TwitterTwitpic – Post photo links on Twitter

Twitter tools:Twitter 101/A Special Guide Make Use Of's The Complete Guide to Twitter

Miscellaneous Web 2.0:VisualCV – Create a visual resume onlineThe Common Craft Show (video how-tos) A-Z Glossary of Web 2.0 TermsNSPRA Facebook PageKansas State University's Mediated Cultures WebsiteBig Think100 Google TricksEdSocialMedia's "Is Your School Afraid of Facebook?" Common Craft VideosShane Haggerty's "10 Ways to Use Foursquare in Educational Marketing