I’ve been keeping tabs on John Bell’s Digital Influence Mapping Project, which focuses on innovations in the PR and marketing space… innovations that lead to more genuine connections between a brand and its constituents. John is Executive Creative Director and Managing Director of Oglivy PR’s 360° Digital Influence program.

Earlier today, I received his latest email, which talked about WOMMA, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association. WOMMA recently released their Influencer Handbook, which provides practitioners of word of mouth marketing with the following information:

• Definition of an influencer and influencer marketing
• Types of influencers
• Methods to engage and thank influencers
• Guidelines for influencer self-regulation
• Bibliography of influencer communication research and practice

The Influencer Handbook is full of good advice and definitely worth the read if your job is to figure out how to enhance your level of engagement with your school’s various constituent groups. We’re all having to learn how to accomplish more within a limited budget, so improving our word of mouth marketing skills can only help.

I came across the essay in Wired magazine entitled “Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004″ through a higher ed blog.  Wired makes the case that blogs were initially effective because amateur writers’ voices were heard, while now posts never make the top page of a Google search.  Now the space is crowded with multimedia and with professionals like Huffington Post.

What I’ve found about blogging (in three short months) is that within your community, your posts and the discussions still matter, clearly due to shared interests. There is a tangible community of bloggers in the higher ed community that still read and debate and learn new things from each other.  Maybe higher ed is a little slow on the draw since many are just now adopting blogs (ahem, Stein). I know I have been a regular Facebook user since 2004 and am just now in 2008 coming around to the blogosphere.  My reaction was confirmed by the comments at the end of Andrew Careaga’s post about the Wired article, all who doubt Wired’s announcement of blogs’ pending expiration date. I got a kick out of the comment that we have to consider the source of this: Wired is a printed magazine found at newsstands and in mailboxes. Remember them?

I started using Twitter a few months ago as a self-imposed research assignment, to try to get a handle on what someone would really get out of it. When I first heard folks talking about it, it sounded like a great tool if you were out and about a lot, trying to meet up with friends, letting friends know where you are and where you’re planning to go. But for those of us who don’t have many evening outings anymore (bar-hopping is quite a thing of the past for me, with 10 month old twins now the focus of my nights), it didn’t seem like something useful.

I confess, my view of Twitter was rather short sighted. Since joining, I’ve discovered that Twitter IS another way to remain connected, but not necessarily with just your friends and people you already know. Your list of who you are following and who’s following you seems to grow organically, as it does with other social media. But if it’s a dialogue, it’s a different kind of dialogue. It’s really an information exchange – real-time postings from an event you’re attending, news items, humorous observations, or just how you happen to be feeling at that moment or what mundane task you might be engaged in. It’s a wonderful mix of all of these things, and as you “follow” someone on Twitter, an image of them begins to take shape, pieced together from the many comments they’ve made and information they’ve shared. It’s pretty cool.

Now that I’ve become more familiar with how Twitter works, I’ve started reading up on how it applies to secondary and higher ed. In August, the blog .eduGuru offered up a smart take on how the higher education community should approach using Twitter. In her post, Karlyn Morissette, Web Producer for Dartmouth, suggested that rather than looking at how other schools might be using Twitter, instead look at how other industries are using it to communicate with their audiences. She references organizations running the gamut from Home Depot to NASA to the American Cancer Society. After you study how other varied industries are using Twitter, it’s pretty easy to begin seeing how it might be utilized by secondary and higher ed.  Athletics updates. Campus visit events. Application deadlines. Performance announcements. Alumni events. Links to audio or video of important lectures. Links to news items featuring your institution (think media momentum as mentioned in my last post). Appropriate audiences? Current students, prospective students, parents, alumni… anyone with a vested interest in learning about what’s going on at your institution.

With the number of Twitter apps exploding, and the number of individuals and organizations participating in the Twitter-verse growing by the minute, it looks like Twitter is here to stay, at least for a while. If you haven’t jumped in already, it’s time. If you already tweet, add Stein to your list.

Peter Schilling, Amherst College’s director of information technology, put together the numbers on the use of technology by this year’s incoming class of 438 students. Here are some of the stats:

• Percentage of first-year applicants who applied online in 2003: 33%
• Percentage of applicants who did last year: 89%
• By the end of August 2008 the total number of members and posts at the Amherst College Class of 2012 Facebook group: 432 members and 3,225 posts
• Students in the class of 2012 who registered computers, IPhones, game consoles, etc. on the campus networks: 370 students registered 443 devices.
• Number of students in the class of 2012 who brought desktop computers to campus: 14
• Number that brought iPhones/iTouches: 93
• Likelihood that a student with an iPhone/iTouch is in the class of 2012: approximately 1 in 2
• Total number of students on campus this year that have landline phone service: 5

Schilling wanted “to tell the story of the changes occurring here and now in the life of the College.” I’m sure a similar story is being repeated at colleges and universities across the country.

More: IT Index

The Global Language Monitor has ranked colleges and universities based on their appearance on the internet, the blogosphere, global print and electronic media. I read about it for the first time in a recent broadcast email from my alma mater’s Alumni Affairs office. They mentioned it because Vanderbilt topped the list in ‘media momentum’, meaning they demonstrated the largest positive change in number of citations across all media studied.

In the general university rankings, Harvard, not surprisingly, ranked the highest in the overall number of citations, rounding out the top five with Columbia, University of Michigan, University of California – Berkley, and Stanford. As for the college rankings, Colorado College scored the highest, with Williams, University of Richmond, Middlebury and Wellesley making the top five list.

As for universities with ‘media momentum’, after Vanderbilt, the top five included University of Virginia, Emory, Rice and University of Texas – Austin. The college top five included Hamilton, Pomona, Skidmore, Bard and Gettysburg. Our neighbors, University of the South – Sewanee and Furman, followed closely at #6 and #7. Interesting stuff.

Thinking about conducting research?

Sam Ladner has been discussing the differences between qualitative and quantitative research on her blog, Design Research, and has added a nice, succinct post that gets at the fundamental benefits of qualitative research, viz. that it’s empathetic–the researcher identifies with the user’s experience more fully and can therefore understand what the user is thinking.

Sam is talking specifically about research for technology designers, but everything she says is equally applicable and critical for a process as fraught with emotion and uncertainty as choosing a school.