about.me pages

I've been meaning to blog about this (and a lot of other things besides) for a while. If you've not yet got an about.me page I think you should. My first reaction when I saw it was "why would I need one of those?", but having used it for a while I think it's really useful. I've had mine for about a year now and I started putting it on my work signature about 6 months ago. I used to put my blog URL on my signature but since I've been blogging less that was looking a little redundant. I know colleagues that put their twitter address (bit risky) or their LinkedIn address (bit boring) on their signatures, but about.me seems like a good alternative. You can create a good looking page very easily (not that mine's great yet) pulling together all your social networks into one place. You can see mine here, and if I wasn't using a dynamic views template on Blogger I could embed it in this post or on a page or in the layout. There's a really good iPhone app too (hurry up with the Android one!).

I really like the way you can pull in loads of different pages into one space and get a really neat preview on the page (although does anyone else find that the Twitter and Blogger previews aren't quite up to date?). I've not added my Facebook page because it says "Adding Facebook will allow visitors to your about.me page to see all of your recent friends, photos, and status updates, even if they have limited access on Facebook". Which I don't want, but I have added Twitter, Blogger, Instagram, LinkedIn and Google+ (although you do need to be a bit careful about bringing everything together in one place).

I was reminded about all this yesterday when I (along with every other user on the planet) got an email update about them going independant again (AOL bought them out a few years ago) In the email they describe their commitment to be "the best personal identity service on the web", which they may well be.

Stuart Johnson
Deputy Director
Career Development Service
University of Leicester
www.le.ac.uk/careers
http://about.me/stujohnson

The Guardian's social media guidelines

I just saw on a retweet from Richard Hall that The Guardian have just released some social media guidelines for its journalists. You can read them in full here but the main points are:

1. Participate in conversations about our content, and take responsibility for the conversations you start.
2. Focus on the constructive by recognising and rewarding intelligent contributions.
3. Don't reward disruptive behaviour with attention, but report it when you find it.
4. Link to sources for facts or statements you reference, and encourage others to do likewise.
5. Declare personal interest when applicable. Be transparent about your affiliations, perspectives or previous coverage of a particular topic or individual.
6. Be careful about blurring fact and opinion and consider carefully how your words could be (mis)interpreted or (mis)represented.
7. Encourage readers to contribute perspective, additional knowledge and expertise. Acknowledge their additions.
8. Exemplify our community standards in your contributions above and below the line.

Which seems like very good guidance to me.

Our post-hootsuite options

Since my post Thinking about alternatives to Hootsuite I've been mulling over what other services we could use to manage our social media for Student Development. I don't mind paying a bit, we just can't afford (and I object to anyway) paying what Hootsuite are charging. I had thought to put up a blog post asking if Hootsuite had plans for an educational licence, but I've just noticed on their blog that they are offering a 20% discount for not-for-profits. I guess this is a start but a) it's not enough for us given we'd still need to pay more than $79 per month and b) as an University we're not CIC registered so we wouldn't be eligible anyway

Alan pointed out this helpful article to me on Top 5 alternatives to Hootsuite, which suggests the following:

• Tweetdeck
• Seesmic
• CoTweet
• Brizzzly
• Buzzom

You'll  notice, if you scroll down the comments in that link that someone also suggested MediaFunnel.

There are a number of things I need a service to allow me to do, the main criteria are as follows:

• Support multiple Twitter accounts
• Support Facebook pages
• Allow multiple users to post to the accounts
• Shorten URLs
• Allow scheduled posts
• Allow attachments (especially images)
• Have a reasonable charging model

So, I've been having a bit of a look at the options and here's a summary of how they match up to the above criteria (as far as I can tell).

Notes

1. I gave up with Brizzly because it kept asking me if I wanted to 'create a picnic'. Very annoying!
2. Buzzom will be including a URL shortener soon - see. Also see comment on this post from the Deep Sherchan from the Buzzom team re premium version.
3. MediaFunnel will be going Freemium but I'm assured there will be no bad surprises. Rumour has it it will be two users and two social media accounts for free., then each additional user/channel pack will be $4.95/month. This is much more realistic than Hootsuite.

Other features that would be good too are workflow, roles and co-tags. MediaFunnel has all of these.

So we'll be trying out MediaFunnel in the next few weeks and I'll let you know how we get on. So far it's looking extremely promising :)

Draft social media guidelines for UoL

On Thursday last week Alan, Brendan, Emma, Richard and Michelle had a really useful meeting with our Marketing and Communications team to  talk about blogs, blogging and branding at the University of Leicester. We talked mostly about institutional blogs but also about staff blogs and all agreed that Wordpress was the platform of choice. I mentioned that Joss Winn, at the University of Lincoln, had set up http://blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/

Your chance to contribute

At the end we also touched on the draft social media policy that Marketing and Communications are working on. Helen's kindly given me permission to put the policy on digress.it so people can comment on it (at the paragraph level). So here's the link to the draft policy on digress.it for you to comment on. Thanks to Marketing and Communications for letting us comment on the policy in this way. I hope that it proves to be a really useful way of developing policy.

By  Matt Hamm