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You can take a lot away from this, but the part I want to focus on is the fact that it was made by students at the university. It was nicely shot, it followed a planned out script and definitely hit home with the intended audience (other college students). Having a student body who produces quality content like this can’t be underestimated. The reach this video has will typically exceed what we are able to muster with university resources.

Videos like this get passed down the chain to prospective high school students who, yes want to get a quality education and meaningful career, but also want to have fun and typically don’t think further into the future than what they are going to do on the weekend. No it doesn’t mention academics, esteem or any of our selling points, but it does create a link, in their brain, between OSU and fun. Outside of mind control this is about as good as it gets for influencing opinion and sentiment in our audiences.

-Kegan

We were also recently ranked 17th nationally in another report that assessed activity levels of 270 colleges and universities. We haven’t read the full report, but an associate from the reporting agency shared the following details about OSU:

It’s Civil War time again and battles of all types have been raging between Oregon State University and the University of Oregon. In the middle of it all the Web Communications department has been waging a war of our own. For the last few months it has been our goal to surpass the number of Duck channel views and subscribers on YouTube. Well what better way to accomplish a goal than to take advantage of a rabid and passionate audience. Because of the incredible support and dedication of Beaver Nation we were able to accomplish our goal (on the actual day of the civil war none the less!).

Much of the success can be attributed to clever cross promotion on our other social networks. Also, we had some real success recently with a couple videos. Even reaching the top 25 videos on YouTube EDU.

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-Kegan

True Beaver Believer Kegan Sims officially joined Web Communications as our Social Media Specialist

Beginning on October 1, Kegan Sims officially joined Web Communications as our full-time Social Media Specialist. Join me in welcoming him aboard.

For the past few months Kegan has been devoting several hours per day to fostering conversation and driving traffic and membership to our various social media groups. He’s sponsored popular contests and earned quite a following. During that time, OSU was recognized by industry outlets and authoritative blogs as an institution to watch in the social media space. This recognition is due in no small part to Kegan’s efforts, as well as those of our Web Writer and Twitter Maven, Celene Carillo.

We’re pleased to have Kegan now devoting a bulk of his efforts to social media initiatives. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us with questions, suggestions and for consultation as you explore this exciting area of communications.

Flickr is loaded with OSU images

We’ve become avid users of the photo sharing service Flickr here at OSU. We go way beyond merely having an official OSU account on the service.  Key content on our main OSU site and top level pages is integrated with our account.

Press releases (like this one) created by our news office use Flickr images. That way the image from the release becomes a searchable part of our Flickr presence. The multimedia page on our News site features a Flickr search and categories that pull from sets in our account. The pages also randomly pulls preview images from these sets right onto the site.

Our Powered by Orange campaign features a Flickr component, too. The Benny on the Move gallery features photos of people who have taken a cutout of our mascot, Benny the Beaver, and photographed him traveling around the world. This is done by merely uploading the photo to Flickr and tagging it with “bennyonthemove.” Our Summer Session program is also running a “Flat Benny” contest.

We originally started using Flickr for one of our student bloggers who traveled to Antarctica on a research project and chronicled his trip with hundreds of amazing images in Transmissions from the Ice Sheet.

OSU Archives is also a member of the Flickr Commons, joining the Library of Congress and the National Galleries of Scotland as the first university to become part of this group that shares archival photos with the world via Flickr.

We also share photos with Facebook and Ning, as well as via a number of other online services. But on the photo side, nothing is quite as extensive as our integration with Flickr. It folds nicely into our own site, and it also moves a lot of our content to a space where it is exposed to an audience searching for strong images. So far, it’s been an effective way to share our photos.

For example, I would have hoped for a larger number of tweeters, but only 5% of our subjects used Twitter regularly.

Still, Twitter is an important communications platform. It’s the first worldwide application streamlined for cell phone use. We get amazing and immediate feedback. And I expect it’s going to grow exponentially as handheld devices and cell phones try to keep up with the iPhone.

It’s never good to ignore data, but sometimes you have to take risks. I will be willing to bet that the number of Twitter users will grow next year.

Daniel Schorr was recently introduced to Twitter (he now tweets), and he used a wonderful analogy, calling it the modern equivalent of the ancient Greek marketplace known as the Agora, where people would gather to share ideas and hear feedback (okay, it was only open to free-born males with property; the ancient Greeks were enlightened, but not that enlightened).

Daniel’s enlightenment moment is shown below. And after you check that out, why not follow the 92-year-old tweeter. And while you’re at it, follow OSU on Twitter as well.

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Social media is exploding, not only from the tight economy, but because it’s unavoidably becoming a mainstream form of communication. You could follow, for example, chatter about the State of the Union Speech on Twitter last week. You could use it to follow the Oscars real time from your phone if you were, say, at an airport in Europe. You can of course follow OSU on Twitter.

2009 will be the year when the pendulum swings from experimentation to accountability.

WineLibraryTV entrepreneur also said it well back in October in his infamous tirade of the importance of ROI in a down economy. It’s even more applicable today.

http://garyvaynerchuk.com/post/78964464/you-down-with-roiyeah-you-know-me

iTunes U allows users to download audio and video to the device of their choice

We’ve quietly gone live as the first public institution in Oregon to have a presence on iTunes U. But I won’t go too far in claiming that we are way ahead of the curve on this one. Other institutions have been up and running for years. Still, it’s an important part of an overall move to expanding our overall Web presence.

iTunes U has a specific function that is different from other online video sharing sites. It is designed to allow users to download audio and video files to a hard drive or device. It’s a different style of video use and programming. For example, a standard iPod comes with an output for television, so files can be played on a large screen. Or some users will take their mp3 player in their car and listen to files during a morning commute or while jogging. Portability is the main difference between this and other video sharing sites.

Another main difference is that iTunes plays in its own client rather than a standard Web browser. While this may be seen as a limitation, the advantage lies in the fact that there are many users who are already using the iTunes client to download their audio. I’ve been using it for years to gather audio for road trips.

One great advantage for iTunes is that it ingests RSS. The upcoming Media Manager tool that CWS is building for collecting and deploying video on our campus Web sites (including Drupal sites) produces RSS that can feed right into iTunes. So you could create an iTunes course and feed it directly by uploading video into the Media Manager tool for your OSU site…you just have one place to upload files.

iTunes U is currently designed for public access. It’s just part of a suite of online video delivery that includes YouTube and the campus Media Manager. But it has paid dividends for other institutions using iTunes. I’ve heard anecdotes about students screening their instructors on iTunes, looking for lecturers that engage them, and thus courses publishing content on iTunes filled up faster. In one case, a generous donor who had been downloading psychology lectures gifted seven figures to the department so that they could put all of their courses online. He was neither an alum or parent, but just someone who was listening to the lectures for his own benefit.

ITunes U is primarily designed for outreach and marketing, a venue for gaining exposure for your content. It can serve a very functional role in allowing you to deliver content effectively to your audience via subscription and an automated download process enabled by the iTunes client. Whatever you need, this service can help you use the Web to make an end-run around traditional media outlets for audio and video, and I’m glad we’re now a player in this space.