How to begin communicating with social media? – Sign up for Social Media Intro Class

Posted on May 2, 2012 by Don Schindler
Social Networks

image courtesy of Matt Weir

Who: Faculty & Staff only
When: May 17 – 3-4:30 pm
Where: HR Training Room – Basement of Grace Hall
What you’ll need: A laptop (no ipads or tablets) and the ability to get online. This is a workshop.

No more spots left…sorry…you can sign up to be on the waiting list.

Sign up for Social Media Intro Course

Social Media Intro Course is divided into two sections.

Defining your Digital Presence: Your Professional Brand vs. Personal Brand
In the past, your professional brand and personal brand would seldom occupy the same space at the same time. You could be the great manager or staff member from nine to five and then go home to transform into a cub scoutmaster, church minister or homework-checking parent. But in this day and age, social media and networking has blurred the line between our professional and private lives and redefined what the term “friend” means.

I’m sure that most of you have seen your Facebook posts or tweets be commented on by friends from your job, your church, your high school or college classmates. In this workshop, you’ll learn what it takes to be successful in social media. You’ll get to work on defining what your digital presence means, learn how to shape it into what you want and how to measure its success.

Social Media Beginner Course
When you first got into social media, you may have been excited about just jumping in and participating in the conversations rather then focusing on how you set up your profile or understanding the basic rules to communicating online.

We are going to go over your basic social media profiles (Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Google+) for proper set-up and get an understanding of the differences between the networks. You’ll also get some basic training with integrating social media into your daily communication with others.
Sign up for Social Media Intro Course

More courses are coming.
We’ll have several Social Media Intermediate Courses.

  • Facebook Intermediate
  • Twitter Intermediate
  • Blogging Intermediate
  • Building your Social Media Presence via YouTube, Photo Sites, Pinterest, Foursquare, etc…
  • Becoming a power user with advanced techniques in Social Media and Blogging.

How do you know what level of user you are of Social Media?

Beginner:
300 or less friends on Facebook
1000 or less tweets on Twitter (personal or professional)
300 or less followers on Twitter
200 or less connections on Linkedin

If you think you are not a beginner at social media, then you should be able to answer these questions without using Google or any other search engine.

  1. What is a personal brand statement? Do I have one?
  2. How do I measure my digital footprint or profile online?
  3. On Facebook, how do you tag someone in a photo?
  4. On Facebook, how do I know if I’m on a secure connection? How do I change that?
  5. On Facebook, how do I make a list of friends?
  6. On Facebook, how do I set up a subscribe button on my profile?
  7. On Linkedin, how do I set up projects on my profile?
  8. On Linkedin, how do I change my vanity URL?
  9. On Twitter, what does RT, OH, and D mean?
  10. On Twitter, how do I set up lists?
  11. On Twitter, what platform should I be using instead of Twitter.com?
  12. On blogging, what are keywords? And why are they important?
  13. On blogging, how often should I blog?
  14. On blogging, what is the call to action?

If you can answer all of these questions without having to look them up, then you’re probably ready to jump into an intermediate course on a specific platform.

Sign up for Social Media Intro Course


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Am I addicted to my mobile phone?

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Don Schindler

infographic via hackcollege.com

I’ve been thinking a lot about mobile recently.

Maybe it was the redesign of nd.edu.

Maybe it was recent 2012 Notre Dame Mobile Summit.

But I think it’s more of the fact that I can’t be anywhere without my cell. Seriously, when it’s on the charger I’m lost. I don’t know what to do.

It’s my email – my constant connection to the office.
It’s my calendar – I don’t know where to go without it.
It’s my weatherman – Who watches TV for the weather, I have my own radar at wunderground.
It’s my tasks for the day – If I forget to put what I told you I would do into my phone, I might as well have lied to you that I would do it.
It’s my notes – Can’t live without evernote.
It’s my music – Pandora is my choice because I’m too lazy to do Spotify.
It’s my money – banking online is my choice. I don’t even remember the last time I had to purchase checks (do they expire?).
It’s my brain – google, wikipedia, npr, espy (which tells me how the Cards and Notre Dame are doing all the time).
It’s my entertainment – Just got Kick the Boss app.
It’s my social network – Facebook mobile sucks. Let’s hope they don’t ruin Instagram.
It’s my alarm clock – It wakes me up and I look at it. I set the alarm at night and look at it one last time.
It’s my connection – phone and text.

BTW, my phone just told me St. Louis is tied with the Cubbies and I have a meeting in 10 minutes and I got three Facebook notifications.

Continue reading →

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Introducing the new ND.edu

Posted on April 2, 2012 by Don Schindler

nd.edu home page“ND.edu doesn’t look Notre Dame enough,” said Lou Nanni, executive vice president of University Relations and my new boss. My group, University Communications, had recently been merged with University Relations after our vice president and associate vice president of Marketing Communications had moved on.

I agreed with him. This was back in January.  Actually, I know it was Jan 11 because I tweeted about it.

Gotta love my tweeted memory

We had just launched a new design that pass July. I understood him. The new nd.edu was great – clean design, dropped the flash carousel, and had a better header story but it wasn’t right for the university.  I was in charge of the dept that built it and I should have said that it wasn’t right back then but now we had another shot at really making it into what it needed to be.

I told him we could do better and Nick Johnson (our new web director in his first meeting with Lou) agreed. We could have a couple of quick fixes in to make the university’s main site better like font choice, color selection, rotate the stories, and maybe add a campus shot but really I wanted to replace it all. The website needed to cause a stir in my alum heart and capture the real beauty of campus that surrounded us every day at work.

We have the best web team that I’ve ever worked with. I’m so proud of this team. BTW, the print team, video team and photographers are the best as well – the talent here at ND is extraordinary especially for how small the group is. And we have won some of the best awards to prove it.

We talked timeline with Lou. He was happy with a couple of weeks for small fixes but he didn’t want to wait a long time for a complete redesign.  When we talked in terms of  months, he wanted weeks. Nick and I walked back to Grace Hall on that cool January day.

“I think he’s thinking April or May,” said one of us. I can’t remember who. I told Nick, “I’m thinking April 1st.”

We knew that was highly aggressive but if we shut down the shop for two months and worked only on ND.edu I bet we could do it. Nick agreed. When we came back to Lou with the timeline, it was exactly in line with what he was thinking. He likes aggressive timeline. He believes they bring out the best in people. I like that thinking as well.

The team got right to work. We broke down the timeline – Feb to April. We cleared our plates of other work and we spoke to all our paying clients (we are internal agency that charges for our labor) that we were going to be on hold for two months. On Feb 1st, we hit the ground running.

Now I’m not going to sugarcoat anything about this build. There were heated discussions, there was passion, there were tons of ideas and brainstorming. Content is always an issue to deal with.  Sometimes it wasn’t very pretty.  But we came together in agreement.  Then we showed the comps to Lou.

He said, “it makes my heart sing.”  That’s all we needed to hear.

I want to give a big hearty thanks to the minds that made this website come alive.

Nick – his leadership was amazing. He pulled the right people together. As creative director for nd.edu, he spent long hours with the designers, content and kept his cool as I beat him up on his ideas, layouts and transitions. He deserves a ton of credit for keeping the shop running while down a web designer and web developer (we only have one designer in house right now so if you are looking for a great gig, hit Nick up).

Philip – being here for not even a year and understanding the level of design that nd.edu required as well as the long hours to put it altogether. What a blessing of a hire you are. Thanks for being Philip you are.

Erik – we would be seriously lost without Erik’s extensive knowledge of responsive design and the magical way he can just make things work. His code is clean and the hours he put in away from his family are priceless. I really appreciate the sacrifice here.

Stephanie – just jumping into the role as project manager and taking on the beast of nd.edu as well as the team. Well, that deserves some serious kudos. Thanks for keeping us on time, Sheriff Stephanie – I mean, Penny (that’s Nick’s joke).

Kate – IA work is never easy and you have some strong opinions to deal with coming from me, Nick and Jane. You kept your cool and helped us figure out how to convert that big old drop-down apron into something very user-friendly and clean.

Jane – Content has always been a challenge and so are we as a team. Your insights helped us make the right choices for the IA and the content. Thanks for keeping us centered on the user and not just delivering cool for cool’s sake.

Mike – writer extraordinary.  Thanks for being available when I need you and not blinking an eye when I describe something without all the information in hand.  Love how you roll with the punches and make the best copy I’ve had the privilege to read.

Finally, the rest of the web team – Ryan, Cristin and Jeremy. Without you guys, the shop would have broken apart while the other half was working on nd.edu.

Ryan – thanks for always delivering and being flexible with everything we throw at you. You never complain and are always willing to help out.

Cristin – thanks for keeping web support up and running. Keeping up on all the requests is a huge job and you do it with a smile on your face. I don’t believe I could do the same.

Jeremy – you finished out the OIT.nd.edu job (a huge website project) and keep our conductor system running well – I can’t tell you how appreciate I am of that and the 340 plus sites in it.

All in all, this web team did an amazing job. The kudos keep coming in and I’m happy to smile and accept the compliments but this team is the one that did it. Credit needs to go where the credit is due. Thanks web team! You’ve made the university proud.

BTW, were we successful? – you’ll have to tell me but some good sources like Karine at Collegewebeditor.com think so.

“While others were having some good April’s Fool fun with their homepage, the University of Notre Dame quietly launched a revolutionary homepage yesterday afternoon.

This could well be the Holy Grail of higher ed website design: a web design based on the mobile first approach that serves content on any devices using a combo of responsive web design techniques and server side detection to reduce the load for mobile.”

Thanks, Karine.

And thanks to all that helped out on ND.edu.

Posted in AgencyND, Online Marketing, Strategic Planning | Tagged , , | 9 Comments

Is SEO dying? Nope, but you better have social as well.

Posted on March 23, 2012 by Don Schindler
Marketing Over Coffee - John Wall and Chris Penn

Marketing Over Coffee - John Wall and Chris Penn

The old way of doing SEO – keywords, meta description, proper URL set-up, etc… which you can find all about on seomoz.org is great and you should be doing it but it’s not enough anymore.

If you listen to the guys at Marketing Over Coffee (Christopher S. Penn and John Wall – love these guys), they are saying it’s not enough anymore. You need to have social as part of the mix. You need a network of people that will spread your message along.

The other interesting tidbit is how Google is changing search for more localization. So if you are national, like we are national, then we might not rank for local searches (which Google is starting to default to).

Continue reading →

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Should my college or school or program be on Linkedin? Yes, it should.

Posted on March 16, 2012 by Don Schindler

LinkedinI recently met with a gentleman from Linkedin who was interested in helping the university advertise on the business social network.

Personally, I’m a big fan of Linkedin. I think it’s how a lot of business networking gets done because you can do it at any time. Instead of cold calling companies, you can reach out through the people you know who might know someone working at the company.

You can also find out a lot about a company. That’s why we have our Linkedin presence for the University of Notre Dame. But the problem is that we can’t list out every great college/school/program that the university has on our profile. Linkedin company pages are built more for companies than universities.

But this is going to change. And soon.

In the meantime, though, the Linkedin salesman said that we should follow the Harvard model on Linkedin. In other words, set up company profiles for each individual school/college and do programs if you want. This Harvard Linkedin Modelway you have a larger digital footprint in Linkedin and you can tie in your social media content and news content to specific pages.

So I’m encouraging you that if you are a main school/college or major program/center/institute, that you should create your own pages and link them up. They aren’t hard to create and you could be up and running and no time.

Then get the word out to your alumni to link up with your profiles so it also displays on their resumes. It’s a great tool to keep in touch with your alumni without a lot of time invested.

Continue reading →

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What’s the right web content management system (CMS) for you?

Posted on March 9, 2012 by Don Schindler

Too Many Choices (courtesy of Pinto and the Bean)This is a tough question for most communicators. Sometimes it’s because they are unfamiliar with the technical aspects of a CMS. Sometimes it’s because there are too many choices out there. At ND, we have tons of different CMSes and it’s difficult to know which one will be the right one to choose. I know because I’ve had to help them make the choice before – for my past clients and for current clients.

So what are some good questions to ask yourself when you are picking your CMS?  I’ve got five questions that you should answer before buying one.

1. How easy is it to use?

This may seem like a silly question but if you want other people than yourself to put content on your website (which you should – there should never be a bottleneck of one content person), the CMS better we crazy easy to use. It should be “log in”, “select the page”, and “type into the content”, then “save” or “publish”. If you make it too hard or give people too many bells and whistles available, they won’t login again and they won’t help you load content.

BTW, if you have a system where only one person in your office can use the system at a time – that’s not good. Make sure the interface is easy and clear for someone who doesn’t play on the internet all day.

2. What are special content needs for my website?

We get this a lot.  People want a website but don’t know exactly what they’ll put in it.  You’ll save yourself and your team a ton of time, money and frustration if you just do some homework and get your content together first.

This way you’ll get a really, really (that’s two reallys) good understanding of what content is for your audiences. If you don’t have a good idea of the content, then you need to stop your CMS buying process and go back to the whiteboard. Laying out all your content will help inform your decision the best.

Well, what if you don’t know what all your content is.  What do you ask yourself to help you find all your content.  Here’s what I do.

Write down all the content you currently have, what it is and where it is. Text, video, photos, audio, pdfs or word documents, etc…  Is digital or in hard copy form?

Once you have it all down, think of how you’ll want to display it.

When it comes to video, do I want to use YouTube and embed it on the page or do I want people to download them and play them locally on their machine (I don’t recommend this)?

When it comes to photos, do I want to have them access to my flickr account? Do I want a photo gallery where they can see all the photos on my website? Do I want to make a slideshow? Or maybe display all photos in a lightbox?  What is best practice for displaying a photo?

Do I want to people to be able to download my presentations or embed them on the page using something like Slideshare or Speakerdeck?

Do I want an automatic news feed so I don’t have to index news items? Do I want it to be shared with other sites on campus? Do I want an RSS feed?

What about events? Do I want events to be auto archived after the event is over? Can calender.nd.edu sync with my website? Do I want it to be easily shared to social media?

Speaking of social media, how will I handle social media pages on my website? Can I get an feed from my twitter? Do I want people to see my Linkedin company profile, etc…

What about forms? How will people contact me through the website? Can they sign up of a newsletter? Do I want to have a newsletter? (Which I recommend)

What we usually find is that people make a selection of a CMS without really looking through the content or structure or audience or any of that. This should be done before you move forward.

3. Is the code up to standards? Continue reading →

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Set up Google Analytics on your ND WordPress Blog

Posted on February 21, 2012 by Don Schindler
Google Analytics

Google Analytics is free!

Lots of people have asked about website analytics on the Notre Dame blog system.  Here’s a quick way to set it up for yourself.  The main thing you need to know is that you’ll need a Google Account first.  So if you don’t have one, set that up first.  Then follow the steps below.

  1. Go to google.com/analytics
  2. Click on Access Analytics
  3. Login using your Google Account email/password
  4. Click on the little gear to the far right.  Check out the image below to see where it is.

    Add New Account to Google Analytics

    You'll see this image after you click the Google Analytics Gear

  5. In the center will be a Add New Account – click that.
  6. Fill out the info like Your Blog Name, the website address, change the time to Eastern, let it share data to other Google products, and check the Terms and Conditions. Continue reading →
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I should have ended up on Ridiculousness after my most recent presentation.

Posted on January 28, 2012 by Don Schindler

Ridiculousness on MTV

Do you guys love Ridiculousness?  I do.  I love watching people bite it when they should have known better than to try it.  But then it happened to me.  In a presentation.  Yeah, I bit it.  Big time.

I did a talk before a group of directors for the Center and Institutes at ND.  It didn’t go as well as I hoped but there were a couple of factors that I didn’t foresee.

First, I didn’t plan well on the time. I thought I had more and I hate rushing through a presentation.

Secondly, I focused on social media but I took it from a personal branding perspective and not from a Center / Institute perspective. That

So if I had it to do over, I wouldn’t go into the nuances of Social Media and talk more about Communication Plan and show an example.  A good example is the Stanford Persuasive Lab.

Here’s how you start:

Continue reading →

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How would you get the word out about an event on the Notre Dame campus?

Posted on January 13, 2012 by Don Schindler

Jell-o Guerrilla Ad via daquellamanera

While I don’t profess to know all of the different ways to reach faculty and students, I will give you a run down on what I would do.

  • You have to put the event somewhere so people would know what’s going on. I would put it on my website with the sign up form. If you want it to look really nice and email you every time someone signs up, use wufoo.com or surveymonkey. If you don’t care about how it looks and you don’t care if it emails you, then use a Google Form and embed it on the website.
  • Next I would put it on the calendar.nd.edu – if you don’t know how, there’s a submit an event button on the bottom left.
  • Then I would make sure The Week email has it. They send out two different versions so you need to specify which ones you want it on. Contact theweek@nd.edu
  • If I was going after students or it was students, faculty and staff, I would do table tents. They are free to put out but you have to provide them. You need to contact Food Services for this and you should speak with Eula Hernandez. She’ll have a form for you to fill out and they will allow them up for three days and then throw them away. BTW, you need to put them up yourselves now that Adworks is no longer around.
  • Posters are a must for all groups and they last longer. I would make them and then put them up. Again, with Adworks being out of commission you’ll have to put them up yourselves.
  • Listservs are great for communicating to specific groups on campus. You can find all the different listservs here and you’ll need to contact the listserv owner to send it out. Each dean has his own listserv as well. A message from the Dean gets read but use it wisely.
  • Inside.nd.edu is another great place to get the word out. I would make some graphics and have the inside.nd.edu team get them into the rotation. Lots of people visit inside.nd.edu every day. You can contact Jack O’Brien to get things moving on this one.
  • The Observer is another great vehicle. I would buy ad space but I would also contact the staff to see if I could get a story about my event done. You never know if they are interested and a good pitch could get you some good earned media placement.
  • Social media is another great place. If you have a Facebook page, then make sure the event is posted to the page via the Event Application. Then share it with as many people as possible.
  • There are lots of other things to do like guerrilla marketing with post-its and giveaways. I originally had sidewalk chalk up this is not permitted on campus.  Thanks to Brian for the correction and link to advertising via the dulac.
  • Having free food and drink is a great attention getter. Just make sure you have the budget. And if the right clearances for the beverages you want to serve.
  • Probably the most effective way to get the word out is to have people pass the invite along. If you and your guests invite other people directly, then you’ll have a big event so encourage those coming to pass the word.

What are your favorite ways to get people to show up at your events?

I wanted to add this because Carol Bradley did a great job of following up on our Linkedin group.  Here’s comments by Carol.

Great post, Don! We have a number of channels for publicizing events:

The calendar: EVERYTHING should be added to the calendar! If you need training in how to use the system, contact Jen Laiber, laiber.1@nd.edu.

The Week: The weekly email blast, covering events on campus for the upcoming week, is emailed to faculty/staff/postdocs at 8 a.m. Monday mornings. There’s a separate version that’s sent to undergraduate/graduate students–it goes out around midnight Sunday night. Items for the week should be sent to theweek@nd.edu by noon of the Thursday before, or click the “Submit an event” link in the email itself. Indicate when you send the information whether it’s intended for fac/staff, students, or both. Events that require tickets or advance registration can run more than once.

InsideND login page: The faculty/staff content is managed by me–I review The Week and look for events of general interest to the campus community to include, but people are welcome to send items to my attention. Events should be of general interest–the page gets 15,000 to 25,000 hits per day, so it’s probably not the venue to promote an event in a room that seats 40! Brian Fremeau handles the student side of the page. Email me at bradley.7@nd.edu, or contact Brian at fremeau.4@nd.edu.

I often include events in the top news block of Today@ND (today.nd.edu), and special events also generate news features (like the Holy Cross Harvest Food Drive). Call or email me with information or submit to today@nd.edu, which forwards to my account.

Major events (the Forum, the food drive, United Way) also are covered in NDWorks, our monthly print newspaper–the publication dates of upcoming issues are Feb. 9, March 22, April 19 and May 24, and I need the information about three weeks before the publication date to ensure we have space to run it.

Today@ND has a Facebook page with an audience that’s growing. I’ve set it up so you can post your events to the page–the vision for the page is to act as a hub for what’s going on around campus. The FB page would also be a great place to post photos of your events and activities. The link is www.facebook.com/today.nd.

The campus-wide listserv is now reserved for major announcements from the administration, emergency notices and such, but many units have developed their own listservs and RSS feeds to reach their audience directly–RecSports, for example.

As always, our job is to facilitate you doing YOUR job, so let us know how we can help! I’m happy to talk any time about how to coordinate publicity between the various news tools.

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What am I most excited about in the new year? We are not alone anymore.

Posted on January 5, 2012 by Don Schindler

iPad Class via Matt Cashore

So I’m a couple months into my second year here at Notre Dame. Let me tell you it’s been great.

There have been challenges and a lot of you have the same challenges I do (resources and time) but I’ve never been as excited as I am right now – well, maybe, my first week on the job. I was pretty excitable back then.

Things look great and let me tell you why.

I feel like lots of people across campus are very interested in helping out communications.

Instead of feeling like we were just a department that was separated away in Grace Hall building posters, brochures, flyers, emails and websites in isolation, now I feel that we are an integrated part of everything here on campus.

We are helping campus communicators build strategic communication plans. We are providing training to you with our Brown Bag Lunch and Learns on Social Media, Photography, Video, Print, etc… If you don’t know about our brown bags, make sure you sign up for the Campus Communicators Listserv and the Linkedin Group.

We are helping guide the Notre Dame brand with onmessage.nd.edu – a website dedicated to the brand guidelines so you can understand how to use the academic mark, the monogram, what are official colors are and how to use them.

And we are still creating videos, photos, print material and websites of the highest quality.

But now, I see there is a new opportunity…it’s not just servicing our campus communicators but helping our entire university – faculty, staff and students. Continue reading →

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