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Shanan Sorochynski
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- Regina, Saskatchewan
- Canada
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Shanan Sorochynski's Discussions
Do you have a great university news blog?
3 Replies
Started this discussion. Last reply by Lacy Sep 3.
Shanan Sorochynski's Page
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We have several print pieces with full online versions -- all of them have been built in wordpress. It's really flexible, easily templated, and easy to use. Unfortunately - we weren't able to get wordpress MU to work on our university servers -- s...
Here is our News Center page I developed in Wordpress.
http://www.sandiego.edu/insideusd/
Also our alumni magazine:
http://www.sandiego.edu/usdmag
Let me know if you have any questions,
Mike
Hola,
I think our news blog (based in Wordpress) has very successfully served us in two ways:
1) It allows us to re-purpose magazine content and feed news about our departments to their websites, which means their sites always have fresh content...
I’m drafting a proposal to reallocate the resources from our internal print publication to a blog. What I’m looking for are examples of great university news blog. Also, if you write one, could you tell me a little about your experience with that?...
Shanan-
There is an app built by a third party in FB called polldaddy that you can use on a fan page. You could create a fan page for the overall school and then poll student or all involved through the fan page and keep the parking group as a di...
I'd echo the advice given by everyone so far, particularly Mark's comments on the importance of focusing on the relationships and not the technology, as well as the need to nurture the community.
Our Alumni office has worked through a couple atte...
UPDATE:
-Parking Services wants to start a Facebook group.
-The internal relations manager wants some kind of guarantee that the university won't be liablefor comments made on the site.
My understanding is since its a Facebook site and not a Un...
I just got out of my parking meeting and wanted to update the group . . . .
It went REALLY well. They are interested in creating a more involved, long-term dialogue with the campus community. They want to hear peoples’ ideas, answer their questio...
Rachel, you bring up a good point. Dialogue isn’t one-way.
I’m meeting with the people in charge of parking later in the week. So, I’m going to see if there is potential to take this beyond simply garnering input for a survey. (A great first step...
Based on what you wrote about the University's current use of social media, I would suggest something narrow but dedicated to parking services so a Facebook U of R Parking Services fan page sounds like a good idea to me. Then you can still "Ask th...
They have a company that is developing survey questions for them. I think what they are hoping social media can do is drive students to that survey. . . . which I'm assuming will be available through the Parking Services website.
The University i...
As big of a fan as I am for using social media in the right circumstances, I don't know if this is the best application for that. Social media is about building communities and relationships. While the parking office may want to seem more approach...
Just to clarify . . . we wouldn't just use social media. It would be part of a greater communications plan.
#1 & #2 could be effective, but are there a majority of students on FB such that you would get truly relevant results? I second Carolyn's idea of using Survey Monkey, linking to the survey from your school website as well as your Facebook (or othe...
I agree. I like 1&2 but 3 and 4 might be too small of a target.
Maybe use the FB already in place to survey and see how it goes. Depending on the response, perhaps determine if its the best way to target students.
Profile Information
- Employer?
- University of Regina
- Website:
- http://www.uregina.ca/
- Personal Website:
- http://twitter.com/Shanan_S
- List three areas of expertise or specialization.
- Communications, journalism, co-ordinating
- What department or office are you in?
- External Relations
- Primary Job Responsibility
- I write and co-ordinate the material for the University's faculty and staff newspaper - U of R Report. We are just beginning to look at how social media can be used to engage our various audiences.
- Number of students at your institution
- Approx. 11,000
Comment Wall (4 comments)
- At 4:40pm on March 17, 2009,
DJ Turner said… - It's my pleasure. Glad I could help! :-)
- At 4:18pm on March 17, 2009,
DJ Turner said…
- Our website's CMS is Ekklesia360 from Monk Development (www.monkdev.com).
Our Campus Intranet CMS is Jenzabar's system called JICS that we have branded as MyDenSem.
Our email blast service provider is Informz, though we have student emails through GMail, which will allow us to create distribution lists to students in our Exchange Server without having to go through Informz. I will still send emergency announcements through Informz, however, as many staff and faculty signed up for the list to go to their personal email address.
It's not a perfect system, since each system, including SchoolDispatch, is completely separate. I will have to manually update and create announcements for each of these venues, but they are all extremely easy to use, so I should be able to create something in Word and post them pretty quickly.
With the exception of MyDenSem and the student email distribution lists, all of the CMS systems are Internet-based, so we are not dependent on internal systems to get the communication out, which is also nice. We will likely even import the student email lists into Informz at least once per quarter to ensure that we have a way to get emergency emails to students should our internal systems go down.
- At 12:00pm on March 17, 2009,
DJ Turner said…
- I guess I should also mention that emergency notifications are multi-pronged. The text messaging is just a portion of it. We also have in our plan to post message on our website, our campus intranet, and Facebook, to send an email, and a variety of other, on-campus communications methods as the emergency warrants. (We are not currently using Twitter, as we discovered in a recent survey that only a tiny fraction of our constituents and students are on it.)
- At 11:32am on March 17, 2009,
DJ Turner said…
- Hi Shanan,
We were actually approached by a company called VadoMedia who began offering free text messaging services to college campuses after Virginia Tech. They system they created for it is called SchoolDispatch. All text messages sent through the system are free (and they do have a pretty powerful system), though non-emergency messages include a very brief ad by a sponsor who actually pays for the text messages. The sponsors vary by region. All emergency messages, which they define as "life-threatening," are sent without the sponsor information and free of charge. We have opted to only use the system for weather-related closure messages and emergencies.
The only challenge that I've found with the system so far is that there's no way for us to update contact information. Because the system is completely opt-in, only subscribers can manage and update their information...
If you want to learn more, visit their website: http://www.vadomedia.com/products/schooldispatch.aspx
Hope this helps. :-)
Elsewhere
Latest Activity
Employment Opportunities is one of the 12 main navigation links in the header of our Web site template. Therefore, it appears not only on the home page, but on almost every page of our site.
I just opened my account jfduguid (at) googlewave
Off topic, but the hide/show social media icon bar on your site is very well done.
Global footer that says "We're Hiring". It is one of our top visited pages.
Thanks for the feedback - the backstory here is that our HR office has requested to be on the homepage, but the college's Web Advisory committee has been refusing the request. I thought a link in the global footer would be a nice solution, so I'm ...
"Employment at SJC" is a link in our footer that is on every page, including the homepage. We also have a prominent link in the navigation one level down under our "About Us" section.
It's one of our top hits also.
Share your experiences using OmniUpdate CMS
We have an Employment link in the footer of every page, including our home page.
OmniUpdate’s CMS business is booming and we are looking for several Web Services Technicians. Help us grow our team.
Yes, we list it on the homepage. Our HR person requested this as part of our redesign about a year ago and I thought it made sense.
We have a "Jobs" link in our global footer.
We do have a link at the bottom of the home page in the footer. We have gone one step further however, because the footer is a common include used across everyone of our pages that is in our new template. We have about 75% of our pages using it. I...
hello uwebd!
we're hiring a developer here @ Rensselaer's Experimental Media & Performing Arts Center in Troy, NY. www.empac.rpi.edu. We started this search last year but then went into a hiring freeze, and now have a window where we're quickly tr...
I can tell you how we do it-
I work in marketing on the web team. We control the front page. I'm the content person, so I make a lot of those judgment calls.
For our specific design (www.oc.edu), there are a few guiding principles.
For the top ...
joleflow @ googlewave.com
What is the editorial process for your university homepage? Specifically, I'm curious about:
- what type of content gets featured (news, events, blogs, social media, contests, etc.)
- number of people making decisions about what content gets feat...
It is a link on our homepage and is one of our top hits as well.
We don't, but it is one of the first menu items from the top drop down menu. I would say it is worth it, especially if you are a large school. We're a small school (for example at this time we have 5 only openings on campus), but that page is one ...
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