Connecting with the audience

The obvious question is how does this communicate with the department’s key audiences?

1. Prospective students/current students/alumni
2. The community
3. The media

How do we make this part of a reporter’s routine?

Your friend, Flickr

Flickr hosts your photographs, but data storage is the smallest of the site’s selling points. Flickr provides a myriad number of sub-communities through their tagging system and can connect you with other people shooting the same subjects through comments, pool projects or any of their many fun gadgets

There are several Alabama, Birmingham and other locally relevant communities on Flickr and a great potential for a thriving UAB community. Just a short look at the site shows there are many talented shutterbugs around town, and with their help and careful cultivation many ancillary communities could grow.

From the perspective of the University’s desire to improve upon the collegial atmosphere at UAB the online world is an excellent place to to concentrate because that audience — the students — are already there. Flickr is an easy starting point because of the ubiquity of digital cameras and camera phones. Perhaps some of the student social organizations could create contests as incentives to help insure that photos on flickr get the all-important UAB tag.

About YouTube

How powerful is YouTube? TV networks and advertisers fear emerging competition. As well they should, a recent Harris Interactive poll showed that out of 2,309 U.S. adults, some 363 of them were avid YouTube watchers. 32 percent said it took away from their TV time.

One of the most popular sites

Facebook reportedly has about 1.5 billion page views a day, up from about 1 billion daily views last month.
Emarketer.com cites Facebook as the overwhelming number one website for both males and females ages 17-25.

Jobster, and Facebook are joining forces to create a career site featuring video resumes. At least three other sites have already started that process and powerhouse YouTube isn’t far behind. If you search for resume on youtube today you’ll earn more than 5,000 returns. From an employers perspective, a hiring manager can view the clips immediately online, saving time and money by eliminating the first round of in-person interviews.

There are university side applications here as well. This is likely a few years off, but it isn’t difficult to envision a day when the 2.0 generation makes it from the high school through the lecture halls and into the workforce with this becoming a more common practice.

What is social media?

Social media is a term used when discussing any number of online technologies or practices used by people to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other. It takes many forms: text, images, audio, and video. Popular mediums include include blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis, and vlogs, or video logs.

Using blogs as recruitment tools

College recruiters now use bloggers, from Ball State, to Dickinson College to MIT to Colgate and Texas, in an effort to reach prospective students with the voice of their peers.

Some of the student bloggers are even paid nominal fees for their efforts. Some schools hold some editorial control, but others have given the students a free run, believing that the voice must be authentic.

Meanwhile, Technorati numbers show around 15.5 million active blogs.