College admissions can be one of the most difficult times in anyone’s life. It’s a process that offers little control and a lot of chance or dumb luck. Sure, you can work heard to earn good grades, participate in extracurricular activities and do well on the standardized tests, but when admissions staff is going through tens of thousands of submissions, there are a lot of people that may be equally as accomplished. The decision to accept one person over another can seem almost random, and many well-qualified people can be rejected from colleges that their peers are accepted into.
That is why Tufts University’s new policy of accepting YouTube videos is a blast of fresh air. For the first time, applicants can now share their personality, creativity and passions with admissions staff without the stress and nervousness of a sit-down interview. While some people are good writers (and are able to share in the personal essay), other people need different methods of showing who they are. Tufts use of social media is refreshing, especially in a process that can involve so much stress.
Hopefully more colleges will adopt Tufts’ policy and allow applicants the opportunity to demonstrate their abilities through multiple social media platforms that have become such a large part of our lives today. Of course, students must also be careful about what they upload to these sites, as every time of video and picture is available for admissions staff to see.
Below is one video that Tufts included on their admissions page as a demonstration of what they’re looking for.
According to new data released by Nielsen today, global users spent more than five and a half hours on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter in December 2009, an 82% increase from the same time last year.
Facebook continues to show the most global engagement with users spending an average of nearly six hours on the site for December 2009. Twitter on the other hand, wrapped up the calendar year with 579% growth in unique views (UV’s). However, UV’s for the site dropped 5% from November 2009; a possible sign that the company’s hockey stick growth may have peaked.
Looking closer to home, U.S. social media users are also spending more of their free time on social networks with total minutes increasing 210% year-over-year and the average time per person increasing 143% year-over-year in December 2009.
At least it seems to have happened to Rolling Stone. It could be a DNS server issue as Mashable notes, but it does look very similar to the generic hosting service page you get when your site in unpaid.
The site is now updated to an error message, but still no content. Being down for the full day won’t help with Web traffic for the magazine’s Website, which has steadily decreased over the last six months.
It’s safe to say that Kevin Smith, the well known director and producer of cult-classics such as Clerks, is not nuts about Southwest. If you’ve been hiding under a rock and missed last weekend’s (turned this week’s) PR fire drill for SouthWest; Smith was asked off of a Southwest plane with the airline citing their two-seat rule for passengers who don’t safely fit in two seats. Smith, who is also a new media media influencer in every essence of the word, took to social media after that, giving his side of the story.
In a slew of Tweets following the incident, Smith detailed his take on the Southwest policy. Ever since then (now nearly a week after the incident), it has been “he said,” “she said,” between Southwest and a man with 1.6 million Twitter followers.
Such is corporate communications life in the world of new influencers. No matter how social media savvy your PR department and company is (Southwest is pretty savvy), Smith and others don’t walk around with Twitter badges on.
But a funny thing happened as this incident transpired. Southwest did a lot of things to make the bad situation better. They noted to their Twitter followers that they’d be contacting Smith by phone (code: offline). They posted an “apology” on their blog and updated it after talking with Smith (who voiced issues with the language in the post). They did a lot of things right. Smith even took hits from media members noting the incident was hurting his brand more than Southwest’s brand.
What can be learned from the incident? This won’t be the last time a high-profile person (with a large social media platform) is “wronged” by a company. Mistakes will happen and the Twitter-storm will follow. However, if you take the time to gather facts, take the conversation off-line, address it personally, don’t treat the person with the platform any different than another customer and mean what you’re saying – it can be handled.
Earlier this week New York Times business reporter Zachery Kouwe resigned following a plagiarism debacle. While attention was originally drawn to an article that appeared exceptionally similar to a story in The Wall Street Journal, an investigation found that additional articles by Kouwe appear to have been plagiarized from various other media outlets.
Kouwe’s job was focused on writing for the Times‘ DealBook section and blog, which requires relatively short posts and articles about the large amount of business-related news.
While I was not in Kouwe’s position, I’d imagine that he spent most of his days browsing through press releases and news to identify topics for the blog, and used these releases and article as sources for information. Yes, he should have been more diligent in writing this information in his own words, but I don’t think this is entirely his fault – there is a problem with the system.
As blogs and breaking news reporting have taken over our news cycle, reporters have begun using other media outlets as sources more regularly. It’s easy to simply throw in a boxed quote onto a blog post – and enables you to get the information to your readers more efficiently and quickly then re-writing it yourself. However, if Kouwe simple posted large amounts of Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek content into his articles, the Times’ would suddenly look like the Business Insider – which they definitely don’t want.
While only Kouwe knows if his plagiarism debacle was intentional or not, it’s clear that his job was to produce a lot of content daily through news announcements and articles, because there was no way he had enough time to actually investigate news like in the past. Is it his fault that he wrote his articles a little too carelessly or the Times’ fault for putting him in this position to begin with?
Yesterday afternoon, Ryan Seacrest, the host of FOX’s reality television singing competition American Idol announced via his blog that FOX would allow the recently cast Top 24 contestants to use Facebook, Twitter and MySpace during the competition.
He wrote, “In a testament to the undeniable influence of social media in today’s day in age, American Idol producers and network executives, after nine seasons have finally agreed to allow contestants to maintain social networking profiles on Twitter, Facebook and Myspace. In previous seasons, all social networking was banned, and any pre-existing profiles were deleted prior to the start of live shows. While we’re still unaware of the exact ‘rules of engagement’ for these profiles, considering they were all custom-made by FOX, we can imagine producers have established ground rules for what’s kosher to be discussed on Twitter and elsewhere.”
While it is unclear what exactly the ground rules are, FOX has created each contestant’s social media profile themselves, taking control before the contestants even begin pushing out information into the social media universe.
While I respect FOX’s attempt to keep up with the demand for a social media presence, creating profiles for the contestants and providing guidelines for what they can discuss seems to defeat the purpose of following their personal accounts. Why not just have a general American Idol profile and push out general, non-spoiler updates?
When the phone lines are open, I’d like to cast a vote for authenticity, please.
Chat with a producer, beat writer or editor these days about what they’re interested in and the first word you’ll likely hear is “exclusives.” The “background” conversation usually goes something like this:
Executive or PR Guy: So what are you really following these days; any ideas what you may be looking at in the near future?
Pay-by-exclusives Reporter: What I’m really interested in right now is exclusives.
Executive or PR Guy: Great, yeah, I’ve seen a few of yours. You following the high speed Internet race?
Pay-by-exclusives Reporter: You have exclusive information there?
Executive or PR Guy: No, no inside information here or anything to announce, but what Google is doing will certainly shake-up things.
Pay-by-exclusives Reporter: “Google planning to shake-up telecom industry,” I may run with that on wire. You haven’t shared with others right?
Executive or PR Guy: Umm
Pay-by-exclusives Reporter: Don’t worry, you can trust me, how do you think I get all these exclusives? Going to chat with some other folks now before I file, thanks. (more…)
Via the guys at PRNewser, here’s a video of AP planning editor Jon Resnick and Associated Press Editor Donna Cassata talking about what it takes to pitch a news story to the AP.
