When Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks – his reply was ‘That’s where the money is? So for universities that want to communicate with their students – Facebook might be the place to go - because that’s where the students are.

It seems obvious – but a quick look at several universities have reminded me how hard this is for many of them – they have to give up control of the channel.

I first went to my old alma mater Oxford - they have a large following with over 60,000 “Friends” but I noticed one big thing – the site is filled with spam. So I looked to see if my college Christ Church had a Facebook site – no. The Choir has a private site but there is nothing at the College level where real life at Oxford takes place.

The ideal Facebook site that I have found  that shows a very good interaction – is at Dalhousie in Halifax Nova Scotia. They have 4,666 fans and the site is very healthy. I have noticed that as soon as a question is asked – the moderator is there with the best answer . They are topical and on time too – when Hurricane earl dropped by the other day – much of Halifax and Dal lost power – the Moderator had a real time response to the breaking news.

My sense is that the quality of the moderation is the secret to a healthy site . The Oxford site seems to have little or no moderation and makes announcements but does not reply to questions.

This is just a toe in the water post – please tell me more about what other universities are doing with Facebook.

On July 9, the PM announced on a video with Mark Zuckerberg that the UK government will use social media to get connected to the British people. Well it has started with an ideal sector – travel!

Here the Foreign Office and the citizen connect and in time will create I think an unbeatable site where all you need to know can be found out – and where when bad things happen immediate action can be taken.

I think that we are seeing a new future for governments. Until now government sites had been slow, hard to use and dull. Until now governments had often banned the use of social media inside. But this model offers governments of all types the ability to  be fast – easy to use and effective. Also to be very cost effective!

The barrier of course is culture. But with HM Gov in the lead it will be hard to say that “we can’t do this”.

What area would you like to see where government uses social media like this?

The interview is staged – but the meaning is really important – no going back now.

I see no excuse anymore for government not to explore the use of social media to engage better with the public

I have been writing about some of the interesting Retreveo studies (see last year’s Study of Social Media Addiction from Retrevo). The latest Retrevo Gadgetology study asked people whether or not they found it too tempting to spy on someone else’s email. They discovered that 38% those under 25, in a dating relationship have “snooped” on their boyfriends or girlfriends messages. Unfortunately, 10% of that age group who “snooped” discovered that the other person was unfaithful and ended up breaking off the relationship. When they expand the group to include everyone, the percentage of email snoopers goes down to 28%.

While couples in a dating relationship snoop slightly more than married couples, 36% of couples in a committed relationship (spouses and partners) indicated they check emails or call histories without their significant other’s knowledge. Compared to the 10% of dating couples who discovered infidelities only 3% of this group in committed relationships discovered they were being cheated on, still not a good result.

Is this high level of personal spying a reflection of a lack of trust or the tempting curiosity facilitated by the ease of checking things out?  Is it related to the social media addiction I wrote about before?  What would you do?

Do things shift when you move into the enterprise? What should your company do? Does company security and compliance issues warrant looking at employee emails?

Once again – social media such as Twitter are ahead of all other sources.

Here is how the man, Andy Carvin, behind NPR’s brilliant use of these tools is harvesting the last 3 years of work to build the system so that it can help so much.

NPR has always been ahead of the curve when it comes to using social media to do great reporting. So when we saw that they’d created a Twitter list of people tweeting from Haiti, we wanted to know: How’d you figure out those folks were legit?

In the following interview, NPR’s social media strategist Andy Carvin tells us not only how the network is using Twitter and Facebook to find compelling angles and new sources for stories (like this one and this one), but also why you can’t just jump on a social network after disaster strikes and expect it to pay dividends.

BayNewser: When did you decide to create this list and how did you figure out who to include on it?

Andy Carvin, Senior Strategist, NPR Social Media Desk: This isn’t the first time we’ve done this in response to a disaster. In the days and hours leading up to Hurricane Ida last fall, people were concerned it was going to be a bit of a mess, so I quickly put together a Twitter list of local bloggers, local news sources, local broadcasters and others, just as a way of monitoring what theywere talking about. None of us had a sense of where the storm was going to go and how bad it was going to be, but at least this was a handy list both for NPR staff as well as the public at large.

An hour or two after the earthquake in Haiti was reported, I decided to do exactly the same thing again. It wasn’t a big topic of debate. It was just a natural step in helping our reporters and producers do research on Twitter.

The full interview is here

A few weeks ago I posted about a clever campaign launched by Ikea using fans and a competition. Now I hear that the rules have been changed to prevent this. I post in full a status report from “Inside Facebook”. Sorry about being late on this. Hats off to @jmorris106 for the tip

Three weeks ago, Facebook announcedsignificant updates to its promo/sweepstakes policies for Facebook Pages that have very practical impact for marketers on Facebook. For a deeper dive on the rule changes, see our analysis. But essentially, the new rules:

1. Require all marketers to get explicit permission from Facebook at least 7 days before administering any promotion inside Facebook.
2. Prohibit running any contests or promotions that require users to become a fan, interact with a feed story, or do anything else outside an application tab or canvas page in order to enter.

This means that “become a fan” contests, “status update” contests, “photo upload” contests, and any other kind of contest that requires commenting on or responding to items in the News Feed are no longer allowed. Rather, Pages must send users to a custom application tab to enter contests. This is good news for companies building Facebook Page tools for marketers.

Now, agencies and marketers are trying to understand whether these policies are being actively enforced, as many businesses and organizations have been experimenting with different types of contests to drive traffic and engagement on their Facebook Page over recent months, and several promotions that seem to violate the policies have continued to appear lately.

For example, a few weeks ago, an Ikea store in Sweden ran a promotion on their Facebook Page in which users who tagged photos of furniture with their names first won the items as prizes.  A Facebook spokesperson told us today that the promotion was indeed in violation of the new policies and would not be allowed to run today.

And last week, Gillette, one of the biggest brands in the US, announced a promotion on its Facebook Page, saying, “Become a fan today and you’ll be entered to win a free Fusion MVP,” a clear violation of the new policies. Gilette is also redirecting members from a sweepstakes tab to a signup form on Gillette.com to enter the contest, but the status update still exists on its Page, and is confusing to multiple marketers we’ve heard from. A Facebook spokesperson said he was not able to comment on individual campaigns beyond the Ikea case when we asked earlier today.

Source CNET

My colleague over at Insurance Networking, Pat Speer, has just published an account of a major health insurance company that is employing social networking to communicate with its members/customers.

For starters, Pat reports that Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Wisconsin is piloting a program which employs Twitter to “identify members who may have questions or concerns about their health benefits.” The use of Twitter enables the insurer “to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, real-time conversation, and respond to each tweet about Anthem.”

Anthem is also using its Twitter channel to help members with healthy lifestyle choices such as weight loss programs. If that isn’t enough, Pat reports that Anthem has also formed a Facebook channel and a YouTube channel to promote wellness and member interaction.

As Kate Quinn, VP of corporate marketing for Anthem, puts it: “Social media provide a great opportunity for us to engage our members, listen to them and be more responsive.”

At a time when the viability and future direction of the health insurance industry is under debate, social networking is providing a means for insurance companies to reach on on a very personal level to their customers. The perception of “big, bad, greedy insurance companies,” however rightly or wrongly earned, has been part of the discourse for years, and came about because of the sense of impersonalization that created a very high wall between the companies and their constituents.  Social networking may be just the right tool to tear down this wall.

I’ve just been watching an interesting new component of CNN prime-time news, wherein Rick Sanchez, one of the current anchors, flashes cherry-picked items from Twitter (Rick’s Twitter Feedback) and from Facebook (Rick’s Facebook Feedback) in order to counter or reinforce the story he has just introduced.

I’m (still) all for Web 2.0 and listening to the voices of the great unwashed, but there are key aspects of using this approach that leave me skeptical or cold.  He and his colleagues get to pick which items they want to use add emphasis or colour an issue.

Nevertheless, I applaud CNN for actually paying attention to what is happening on the Web.

Mashable has more.

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Facebook and MySpace are the world’s most popular Social Networking sites, but are they the best model for bringing these web 2.0 concepts into the enterprise?

My view is trustedplaces is perhaps a better model to use as a reference. Its a collaborative site primarily for reviewing restaurants, clubs and pubs. The community effectively has jobs, and their social network forms as a by-product of the work that they do. It can still be a social network on its own, but you probably wouldn’t go there unless you were interested in the outcome.

Building the “bottom up approach”

Trusted Places does some particularly interesting things:

• Featuring contributors on the front page
• Providing “award points” for contributions
• You can interactively build your tastes
• Providing recommendations for new connections based on common interests
  

Combined with a great UI, I’m a big fan of what this team is doing.

Yes, Facebook has Applications

The lines are, of course, a bit greyer than I have painted them. Facebook applications can be used to find other people with common interests and help people build new connections. The Facebook platform can be used to build any functionality that TrustedPlaces has, and more. But since Facebook is so large and completely open in scope, I find it more difficult to relate to a work context. Facebook and MySpace may be more fun, but work, alas, is not always fun. And while there are plenty of focused product review sites, I’ve yet to see any that form social networks better than trustedplaces.

What public site do you think provides a good model for explaining Enterprise 2.0?