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Notes From Jan’s UT Social Media Collective

Posted by  on Friday, January 29th 2010     

Paul Walker

Here are a few of the points I want to remember from this week’s meeting by Paul Walker.

  • Texas pride is off the charts! Better than any brand Paul’s worked with. In the 90-95% range for positive discussion.
  • Don’t forget forums! A lot of conversation still goes on in forums, but we frequently overlook them.
  • We need to engage alumni in a mutually beneficial relationship by adding value. A great first way to engage is always to ask for their ideas.
  • Our SocMed efforts would benefit greatly from cross campus consistency and cross-promotion. Look for things to share coming out of other units.
  • Establish a conversation calendar to keep your team on track, your efforts focused, and your readers able to easily follow.
  • All the big stuff: strategy, goals, req’d resources, analytics and tracking, KPI’s (key performance indicators)…
category: Community, Social Media

Using WordPress To Publish A Magazine

Posted by  on Thursday, October 8th 2009     

Tracy Mueller, with whom I published the Texas Magazine, gathered a brown-bag lunch recently for people around campus interested in how we put a magazine online using WordPress. We had at least a dozen people and a bunch of questions so she followed it up with some blog posts of her own elaborating on the process.

Thanks to Tracy for all of this information sharing and community support. I’ll publish some tech FAQs next week. Here are two excerpts from Tracy’s articles with links to the full posts at her blog.

Using WordPress to Publish an Online Magazine – Part I

As managing editor of the University of Texas McCombs School of Business alumni magazine, it’s my job to generate story ideas, interview sources, do background research, brainstorm art options, write feature articles and profiles, assign stories to our intern, edit copy and proofread layouts before printing.

But the fun doesn’t stop there. Thanks to this phenomenon called the Internet (I think it’s gonna be big), I also oversee the publication of our magazine online. Since it’s nearly all the same content and we’ve already completed the editing and proofreading, it should be no sweat to get the thing online, right?

Wrong. Not having a web team devoted solely to the magazine, it was always a scramble. But for our most recent issue, we changed gears and used the WordPress blogging platform to host and publish the magazine.

I’m happy to say we’re thrilled with the result. I know a lot of print magazine editors are struggling with how to publish online, so I decided to chronicle our process here. This isn’t meant to be an all-encompassing explanation of WordPress-hosted magazines, but simply a case study of our experience. Hopefully it’s helpful to others facing similar issues…read the whole post at TracyMueller.com.

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Using WordPress to Publish an Online Magazine – Part II – FAQ and Resources

Below, I answer some questions that have come up a lot as I’ve shared about the process of using WordPress to host an online magazine. Click here to read Part I, where I chronicled that experience and compared it to using a traditional Web site.

What are your readership stats?
Our print circulation is 85,000. Some stats on the new online version: (since we launched in July 2009)

4, 536 visits
8,489 pageviews
3,262 unique visitors
7 comments

35.95 % of visits are from direct traffic
37.87 % from referring sites (918 from McCombs home page, 188 from Twitter, 131 from Facebook; #5 refererrer: images.google.com)
26.12 % from search engines (1, 185 visits from 877 keywords)

Note: Unfortunately we did not have analytics running on the old site, so I don’t have a benchmark to compare these to.

How long did this take, and what staff members were involved? What other responsibilites do they have?
From the time I sent inspiration sites to our web editor to the day we went live was 6.5 weeks…read the whole post at TracyMueller.com.

category: Blogs, Community, Tips and Tricks

Whurley

Posted by  on Wednesday, August 26th 2009     

We (Dave Wenger for the Communications team) brought ‘evil genius’ Whurley in to speak with us at our weekly staff meeting today. Whurley -William Hurley- does, what he calls, risk management for largescale community building based on his own system theory (that allows him to know what NOT to do). Confused? You know, crowd sourcing, flash mobs…after almost two hours, we didn’t know exactly what he does either except for have lots of great energetic ideas and projects revolving around how to make community driven projects work on both the strategic and technology levels.

Here are my notes of what he said.

  • people buy the shovel, but they want the hole
  • technology acquisitions are almost never about technology
  • with community and open source, it has to be premeditated
  • community is the product. success depends on participation.
  • first problem: community builders don’t realize the difference btwn control and influence
  • if the game is to build the McCombs brand, you don’t want the publish model. you want to be aggregators. managers of managers. publishers of publishers.
  • your job is to make everyone a celebrity in the McCombs community
  • Autopoiesis – self-monitoring, self-governing systems
  • your community needs to be self-selecting. you don’t need 5k people. you need the right 5.
  • focus on giving people a voice
  • fail fast and big
  • for McCombs: start social enterprise projects
  • for McCombs: do a gap analysis of where we’ve come in 50 years. then where we’ll go in the next 50.
  • to let the community lead, the goal is to not have a goal but to collect ideas.
  • define: who is the real competition that takes our money and talent?
  • sites, stuff to check out:
category: Community, Wisdom

McCombs TODAY

Posted by  on Thursday, August 28th 2008     

We have launched our first official blog, McCombs TODAY: http://blogs.mccombs.utexas.edu/mccombs-today/. Check it out. Comment away. Send news.

category: Community

Michael Brandl's Macro Updates

Posted by  on Monday, April 28th 2008     

Finance Professor Michael Brandl has been blogging his Macroeconomic Updates since 2003. Recently he’s been getting major hits by posting YouTube videos of himself addressing current economic issues like this one on “Defining a Recession:”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiqw2Wxi6oc&hl=en]

As of this post, Brandl’s last five videos, all posted in the last month, have been viewed 4896 times! This is a perfect example of how to cross-promote a blog.

category: Community
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