“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
Category: Collaboration and workplace (Page 45 of 96)
This category is focused on enterprise / workplace collaboration tools and strategies, including office suites, intranets, knowledge management, and enterprise adoption of social networking tools and approaches.
LinkedIn announced a partnership with IBM’s Lotus to integrate LinkedIn’s functionality and networking capabilities with Lotus Notes, Lotus Connections and the just announced LotusLive.com. The companies will work together to provide Lotus customers, including Lotus Notes users, new ways to interact with their trusted professional network. Professionals will be able to start web meetings, add business context to e-mail senders, and learn more about collaborators, colleagues, potential partners and prospects through integrated LinkedIn profiles. LinkedIn plans to integrate with Lotus Notes, Lotus Connections, and LotusLive.com. LotusLive will bring its collaboration capabilities to professionals on LinkedIn. The LinkedIn integration will be available at no additional cost to Lotus users. The partnership is non-exclusive. http://blog.linkedin.com/2009/01/19/linkedin-and-lotus-partner-to-improve-enterprise-software
Forrester Sr. Analyst Jeremiah Owyang discusses the findings of their latest report on community platforms, “Forrester Wave: Community Platforms, Q1 2009” on his blog. He also provides a lot of information about their methodology, including how they reduced the number companies to include from 100 to 9. The full report is only for Forrester clients, but Jeremiah provides a summary which you can read here. Here’s a snip from his post:
What did we find? First of all, this is still a very young market, with the average tenure of a company being just a few years in community. Despite the immaturity, we evaluated nine and were impressed with Jive Software and Telligent Systems who lead the pack because of their strong administrative and platform features and solution offerings.
Next, a group of vendors ranked as strong performers: KickApps and Pluck enable large Web sites to quickly scale with social features. Also in the strong performer category, Awareness, Lithium Technologies, and Mzinga enable brands to build branded communities while LiveWorld offers brands agency-like services. While Leverage Software is not on par with the others in the category, they are ideal for medium-sized businesses and due to their cost-effective platform could have a strong position during this economic downturn.
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.
First, Happy New Year from the Content Globalization team & hope your holiday season included rest and relaxation. Now back to it!
I’m not big on once a year resolutions; I like ongoing “continuations” better – i.e. keep doing what works and throw out what doesn’t. In terms of our education mission, what worked best in 2008 is exactly what we set out to do via our inaugural mandate — talk to practitioners, CIOs, strategists and fellow analysts about our view of the “globalization mandate” and understand how it fits into the “field view.” So in terms of “continuations,” we’re increasing this commitment — because it works.
Our 2008 experiences throughout corporate consulting gigs and Gilbane conferences underscore a simple truth — when folks share, communities gather, and corporate operational champions for multilingual communications band together, “things” happen. And our “thing” is solidifying industry awareness that content is a vital part of web experience, customer satisfaction, and multinational expansion programs. The monolingual “one size fits all” approach? Doesn’t work.
So what’s with my elevator pitch title? It’s an ongoing conversation we’re having with our community about making the business case for content globalization strategies that are funded, valued, measured and successful. Basically, the elevator pitch for multilingual communications in five minutes or less. Here’s one of our favorites, courtesy David Lee from 3M:
It was great to find out for sure last week at Gilbane Boston that the economy has not had too much of an impact on the conference business (we even had attendees from a few financial service companies). While I’m sure there were some people who couldn’t make it because of travel or other budget concerns, our Boston conference was larger than our San Francisco conference last June. Of course most of our attendees are in IT, a sector that has not been hit nearly as hard as most others. Yesterday the Wall Street Journal wrote about a Forrester forecast that “Businesses and other organizations in the U.S. will spend $573 billion on computer software, hardware and services next year, just 1.6% more than they spent in 2008, according to new data out Tuesday from Forrester Research Inc.” Clearly, this is not ideal if you sell enterprise software, but really, for a fresh forecast for 2009, this is not bad. In fact, the content technology areas we cover seem to be rolling along pretty well.
I won’t try and write about all the discussions and activity at the conference here, but there was much a-twitter about Twitter. Our audience seemed to be split on its usefulness, but the animated discussions about it did cause a few people to sign up for a Twitter account. Although I joined Twitter when it first launched, when faced with the “What are you doing now?”, my reaction was “Well, this is silly”. So my first tweet was only a few days before last week’s conference. I’m sure there are other good uses of twitter, but so far I think conference activity is one of the best (http://twitter.com/fgilbane). It was certainly useful to me as a way to monitor what at least one segment of attendees were thinking and doing, but it also looked like it was a useful way for attendees to share info about different presentations, network, and arrange “tweet-ups”. This is not news to all. There are some downsides however – see Amanda Shiga’s thoughtful blog post on the pros and cons of conference twittering.
Here at Gilbane Boston, we just heard from Michael Edson, Director, Web and New Media Strategy, Office of the CIO, Smithsonian Institution. His talk described the Smithsonian Institution’s current Web and New Media strategy process and the cultural, technical, and organizational implications of the vision of a Smithsonian Commons–a critical-mass of content, services, and tools designed to fuel innovation and stimulate engagement with the world’s scientific and cultural knowledge.
Many of the efforts are nascent, but this project on Flickr gives you a nice idea idea of the potential for this kind of effort.
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