The Week in Links

• BEST. NEWS. EVER. You can now edit Facebook posts!!!!!!! Words can't describe happy this makes me.

• A perfect article to go along with my ham-fisted fundraising week here on the blog - a great article titled "Why Crowdfunding is Not a Social Media Strategy" by Jessica Krywosa. It does a wonderful job of pointing out that crowdfunding in higher ed will absolutely not be successful just because it uses social media. Smart decisions considering affinity giving need to be made, and a lot of legwork needs to be done getting alumni willing to donate and share on board prior to launching.

• My most popular post this week is one I didn't even write - it was by Kate Post of Chico State, talking about her great school pride photos project. This tells me something. Sigh. 

• A bit of a horror show article by Jennifer Howard in the Chronicle of Higher Ed about colleges monitoring social media use - not for students, but for semi-official university-affiliated pages run by faculty/staff. Reading things like this makes me 1) appreciate my wonderful boss and 2) shake my head at what happens when non-marketing people think they know best about marketing. Seriously, why does everyone think they know how to do marketing and communications? Have realistic conversations with people across campus about whether or not they can accomplish their goals using social media? Of course. Teach people best practices and work with them to use social media correctly? Absolutely! Make them freaking fill out spreadsheets tabulating positive/negative/neutral comments and taking screen shots and submitting made up "metrics" every month? Horrible, horrible, horrible.

• A good rundown of what LinkedIn University Pages are all about by Noelle Schuck on .eduGuru. I have set up a page for UP, but I haven't done anything with it yet. I'll get there... some day.

• Speaking of which... Kevin Grubb has a very helpful list of three ideas for your LinkedIn page on social@edu. Perfect timing! 

• Another week, another CASE Twitter chat I didn't take part in. It's getting to be a tradition 'round these parts. This one is about social media and recruitment. As always, it's great. 

• A nice article by Susan Evans on the mStoner blog about communicating with parents on social media. One of the things I enjoy about Facebook's new insights tool is how it shows demographic data in such a clean and user-friendly way, both in percentage of overall followers and in percentage of engagement. The data I see confirms what I intuitively knew: parents engage at much higher rates than students. 

OK folks... that's it! A very love weekend to you, and you, and you and you and you! I leave you with a beautiful song by one of my absolute all-time favorites, the incomparable, ethereal, wonderful Innocence Mission. Enjoy!