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"Social Media and College Admissions: The First Longitudinal Study" conducted by Dr. Nora Ganim Barnes, Ph.D., Senior Fellow and Research Chair of the Society for New Communications Research and Chancellor Professor of Marketing at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and Eric Mattson, CEO of Financial Insite Inc. was announced. The new study represents one of the first statistically significant, longitudinal studies on the usage of social media by college admissions offices. The study compares adoption of social media between 2007 and 2008 by the admissions offices of all the four-year accredited institutions in the United States. The findings are based on 536 interviews with college admissions officers. Key Findings include: There has been significant growth in familiarity with, adoption of, and importance to mission of social media over one year ago; Adoption has grown by 24% in one year: 61% in 2007 as compared with 85% in 2008. Usage increased for every social media type studied; Adoption is being driven by admissions departments' recognition of the increasingly importance of social media. Colleges and universities are outpacing U.S. corporate adoption of social media tools and technologies (13% of the Fortune 500 and 39% of the Inc. 500 currently have a public blog, while 41% of college admissions departments have blogs); Social networking is the tool most familiar to admissions officers, with 55% of respondents claiming to be "very familiar with it" in the first study and 63% in 2008; A growing number of admissions officers use search engines (23%) and social networks (17%) to research prospective students; In addition to social networks, usage of YouTube has also increased substantially. Video is now being used to deliver virtual tours of campuses, virtual visits to the dorms, and sample lectures from the faculty; 78% of private schools have blogs, versus 28% of public schools, and 50% of schools with undergraduate populations of less than 2,000 have blogs; 40% of institutions not currently using social media plan to start a blog; Nearly 90% of admissions departments feel that social media is "somewhat to very important" to their future strategy. The full executive summary of the study is available for download at:
http://www.umassd.edu/cmr/studiesresearch/mediaandadmissions.cfm, http://www.sncr.org

Systems Alliance, Inc. announced the release of Enhancement Pack 4, a software update for the company's SiteExecutive 4.1 Web content management application. With Enhancement Pack 4, Systems Alliance introduces the SiteExecutive Application Framework, a new mechanism for developing dynamic Web content, along with a blog application, automatic spam reduction capabilities and other improvements. The new Application Framework provides an alternative custom development option for modeling, managing and delivering dynamic or structured content. Content created with the Application Framework can take the form of a Web page, XML feed or virtually any other MIME type. And, the SiteExecutive Application Framework produces search-engine friendly content with human-readable URLs, as well as content-specific browser titles and meta tags. The Blog Application is the first SiteExecutive component developed using the new Application Framework. It enables the provisioning and management of one or many individual blogs, and offers an easy-to-use interface for managing blog posts and comments. Other SiteExecutive blog features include: Scheduling posts for advanced publishing, Generating or consuming RSS feeds, Notification and comment approval workflow, Captcha to eliminate robot-generated comments, Keyword and calendar views, and Viewlets for displaying blog content on other SiteExecutive pages or templates. Enhancement Pack 4 includes a built-in Spam reduction feature which automatically recognizes and rejects robot-generated submissions, saving site owners from the time-wasting task of sorting through junk form submissions. http://www.systemsalliance.com

IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced the availability of Lotus Notes 8.5 collaboration software with social computing features for all Mac OS X Leopard-powered computers. In addition, IBM's free Lotus Symphony document, spreadsheet and presentation software will be available later this month for the Mac. Lotus Notes 8.5 provides significant storage savings over previous versions. Notes has an intelligent storage savings feature that ensures that only one copy of an attachment is kept on the mail server, resulting in an estimated 40 percent space savings. Lotus Notes 8.5 arranges all collaboration tools on one screen in fewer clicks. This screen shows links to team rooms, instant messaging, to do lists, calendar, Internet browsers and other tools. Social characteristics include new integration with Google, Yahoo, and hundreds of other public Internet calendars. IBM also announced new Lotus iNotes 8.5 software, which allows anyone with a Notes user license to access Notes through a Safari browser from anywhere. iNotes allows the user to integrate the Notes calendar with Google calendar and also supports most standard widgets. One example of a widget is the mapping of a street address in an e-mail note. IBM sells Lotus Notes and Domino in a variety of ways, including packaged with hardware for small and medium businesses; via a hosted service, where the software is stored on a server at IBM; and through Passport Advantage on http://www.ibm.com/lotus/notesanddomino.

NewsGator unveiled a new version of Social Sites, its enterprise social computing solution. Social Sites lets companies activate a "Facebook for the Enterprise". Social Sites 2.5 gives organizations new insights into their enterprise social networks in order to fine-tune them. Through a dashboard, administrators can oversee user, group, tag, community and feed activity with the option of drilling all the way down to the article level. A corporate communications manager, for example, can determine exactly how audiences interact with their messages. Each report can be exported as XML to Microsoft Office Excel or any reporting engine. A new On-Boarding Wizard enables users to quickly associate tags (keywords) with themselves based on their roles and professional focus. These tags enable new users to quickly and automatically forge valuable relationships with the right mix of individuals and communities throughout the enterprise. Social Sites 2.5 includes SharePoint webparts that enable organizations to leverage the SharePoint Search Center to discover communities, people, content and tags established within Social Sites. NewsGator Social Sites also interoperates with any search solution based on the Open Search standard. Social Sites 2.5 enhances organizational awareness by giving users a single, unified view for staying updated on colleagues, communities and SharePoint activity. Social Sites 2.5 captures colleagues' activity in real time as they tag themselves or an article, rate content, report their status, or perform over 20 other types of actions. Users can also subscribe to colleagues' external feeds - from a blog, Twitter, Facebook or any designated source - if the originator wishes to offer the feeds to others. Administrators can determine which activities are trackable. NewsGator Social Sites 2.5, which operates on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, enables users to create a community discussion around any article, document, or blog post created in SharePoint. Content can be rated on a five-point scale within Social Sites to enhance discovery by other users. In addition, users can privately tag content to prevent conveying sensitive information. http://www.newsgator.com/

Percussion Software announced the unveiling of its first three Marketing Services - the ORBIT Report, Web 2.0 Competitive Audit and the Web 2.0 Executive Briefing. The services provide the marketer with an understanding of their industry's Web 2.0 landscape, help identify those conversations that have the greatest impact on a brand, and generate metrics that track the progress of their Web 2.0 program. With potentially thousands of conversations occurring around a specific subject, product or service, it can be difficult for marketers to zero in on those Web 2.0 activities that are influencing their brand. Percussion Marketing Services provides structure and focus for Web 2.0 programs, assuring a higher probability that their social media program will generate revenue, memberships or leads. The three Marketing Service products include: ORBIT Report - Identifies the major social media influencers of a brand and/or issue, and creates a map that quantifies the spheres of influence; Web 2.0 Competitive Audit - An in-depth look at competitive and complementary websites and social networking outreach; and Web 2.0 Executive Briefing - An on-site session that covers a client's competitive landscape, how 2.0 is currently impacting a category and brand, and provides five strategies to implement. The ORBIT Report is the result of a partnership between Percussion and SocialSphere Strategies. http://www.percussion.com

Cynapse announced the release of cyn.in - v 2.1. Every space in cyn.in now come pre-fit with application perspectives. Manually creating applications as containers to content is no longer required. Simply create or upload any kind of content (such as a wiki page or an excel sheet) within a space and the content appears in the correct perspectives. Spaces have been the pivotal aspect of cyn.in. Spaces help a group of users to create a secure work area within their cyn.in site and allocate explicit permissions to select users within it. Spaces are vital to most large companies with diverse teams. However, a substantial number of our customers and users felt the need for a simplified central collaboration area, that is accessible to every user of the cyn.in. This gave birth to the concept of the Main space. This is where All users of a cyn.in site can create or edit any content, without worrying about permissions or sharing rights. Commenting, the most used feature in cyn.in just got better. cyn.in v2.1 enables AJAX based discussions providing a live chat kind of user experience. These discussions are contained in all content types in the cyn.in. A comment posted to any content 'bubbles' the content to the top of the activity stream, pushing the content to the relevant audience. Deleting content from an enterprise system is always a concern. Especially for businesses that need to follow compliance regulations. The new cyn.in recycle bin grabs deleted content from across the site, and allows the administrator to process the deleted content as per the compliance requirements. cyn.in is available in a free open source community edition, a supported enterprise edition, as well as cost effective on-demand packages. http://www.cynapse.com/

MindTouch, creators of Deki, an open source enterprise collaboration platform, announced numerous new application and Web service extensions, tools, and features, largely contributed by the MindTouch open source developer community. These new extensions and tools make it easier for users to extend MindTouch Deki by enabling users to create and build mashups. MindTouch also introduces DekiMobile, a new iPhone interface that allows iPhone users to remotely access MindTouch Deki for access and sharing of data. MindTouch Deki allows users to connect teams, business applications, enterprise systems, Web services and Web 2.0 applications. Users can create mashups and integrate popular applications by connecting internal and external applications using existing extensions and DekiScript apps created by MindTouch and its developer community. Writing new applications in MindTouch is done using DekiScript, a light weight programming language. Examples of recently introduced DekiScript apps: Collaborative Calendaring, Threaded Forums, Blogs, and Social Usage Statistics. http://mindtouch.com/

Traction Software announced Live Blog Technology for Traction TeamPage 4.0 is now available Now. Live Blog is a new plug-in for TeamPage 4.0 that's now a standard feature for all TeamPage configurations. The new Live Blog interface works like Twitter or IM. It creates an automatically updating browser window you can park on your desktop (or iPhone). You type a brief note and everyone with access to that Live Blog sees their window update in seconds. But unlike Twitter or IM, Live Blog is backed by Traction's TeamPage platform that provides scalable storage, security, integrated search and all of the other capabilities that make TeamPage the leading best platform for Enterprise 2.0. http://traction.tractionsoftware.com/traction

Crown Partners announced the beta release of RedCarpet, a specialized content migration software utility that manages the move from EMC Documentum eRoom to EMC Documentum CenterStage. As the latest web-based collaborative workspace solution from EMC Corporation, CenterStage is a new client interface and the long-term strategic upgrade path for eRoom customers. Users can now benefit from a collaboration experience that is enhanced with support for Web 2.0 tools such as wikis, blogs and social networking capabilities while their IT colleagues gain the security, compliance and governance controls they require to manage this Web 2.0-generated content. EMC engaged Crown Partners to develop RedCarpet as a content bridge for eRoom customers who migrate to CenterStage. RedCarpet will be available at no extra cost to eRoom customers who are paying for maintenance support. Powered by Crown's Buldoser technology, an extract, transform and load (ETL) product for Documentum, RedCarpet will be synchronized for each CenterStage release until all eRoom features are accommodated. http://www.crownpartners.com/

Lighthouse Seminars announced a reminder that the special "early-bird" discount for the Gilbane Boston conference to be held at the Westin Copley hotel December 2-4, is available through November 4th 7th. See http://gilbaneboston.com/registration_information.html