Bi-Weekly Interview: Jim Ford

Written by Natan Edelsburg
Edited by Sara Saldi

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Jim Ford, talented actor and Chief Web Designer for NYU Steinhardt. Jim has played an essential role in helping the Comm Club begin to re-brand themselves this semester by helping us design a new website. He's also been helping out Steinhardt's Undergraduate Student Government by working with their new social media guru, freshman Jeremiah Malina. More importantly though, Jim was behind Steinhardt's phenomenal new web design, which if you haven't noticed, rolled out this semester. Here's a condensed and edited version of my interview.

How did you start your career as a web developer?

I majored in acting in college. I got my first job as an "HTML Monkey" making travel sites for destinations in the Caribbean.

When did you start working on Steinhardt's Website?

In 2000 the web team consisted of one person. We spent two and a half years building a site for the school. I then left Steinhardt for a bit and went to work for a company called Fractured Atlas, a non-profit that helped provide affordable healthcare for emerging artists, where I served as Director of Member Services. I then ended up coming back to NYU when a new position opened up.

When was the last time the site was redesigned?

We redesigned the site in 2007 when Steinhardt re-branded itself, changing its name to the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. The problem with the original website was that the site was based more on the design and less on the userability. Using a trackpad with the site was horrible. However, we did introduce a great CMS (Content Management System), which allows departments and student organizations to easily create a page with their content.

What are some of the cool features of the new redesign?

When designing the site we used the mega drop-downs with a limitless options-style designed by expert usability consultant Jakob Nielsen. It lets users click where they want to go as quickly as possible. We also have a great video portal with interviews and lectures. Lastly, we launched our News Portal that features new blogs and happenings around Steinhardt.

Many students prefer to use Gmail as supposed to NYU's Messenger and other intranet features. Do you have any insights why NYU hasn't gone Google?

I'm not positive but it probably has to do with FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) that protects academic records. NYU may not want to give Google access to student's private communication with professors and other students. Another concern may be that they don’t want to sell their student’s attention to Google. It’s true that Google is pretty good about ads with their academic suites, but it could still be a potential issue.

My Experience at Bernaise Source’s PR Camp – Go Red Team!

Written by Natan Edelsburg, Communications Club Vice President

Thanks to Danielle Culmone, a former supervisor from Quinn & Co. Public Relations I was invited by Bernaise Source’s principal, Dan Greenfield to be a “Gen-Yer” for PR Camp’s “Talking About the ‘Y’ Generation,” session. When I first read about PR Camp and how it was going to be an “unconference” fueled by a camp-like, marshmallows and bonfire atmosphere I had a social media wet dream. My fondest memories are from my ten consecutive summers being a camper and then counselor at Camp Young Judaea in New Hampshire. Click here for one of my favorite social media blog posts, by David Berkowitz (from MediaPost’s Social Media Insider) describing how being a camp counselor prepares you for social marketing.

I had the pleasure of meeting some extremely impressive professionals throughout the day. Separating into teams (go red team!) really gave us the chance to get to know each other as we discussed, ROI, Gen-Y and new versus old agencies relating to PR and social media. During each session (especially Howard Greenstein’s “Delivering Strategies for Effective ROI”), different ways of using metrics to show results from social media campaigns were brought up. After I got home from PR Camp I was extremely excited to study the conversations that took place during the day. I typed in the official hashtag, “#prcamp,” and copy and pasted the ten-plus pages of tweets just from Friday, into Wordle, the word cloud creator. After removing most of the clutter from my “copy and paste” here is what Wordle designed:

For those unfamiliar with word/tag clouds and Wordle, you can simply copy and paste text into their form and it will show you what words/terms were most prevalent by designing a “beautiful” and customized cloud of words. This word cloud taught me some cool facts about PR Camp – some obvious, some not at all. Here are my top-5:

1. PR Camp, Social Media and Twitter were the biggest most prevalent words, which makes sense since each tweet I copy and pasted contained PR Camp. Also, it’s no surprise that the topics that were most discussed were Social Media and Twitter (plus I probably should have deleted Twitter from the word cloud but couldn’t bring myself to).

2. Ishkahbibel (Donald Schwartz, Imagelink Productions), @Journalistics (a blog about journalism and PR), @MattHurst (Communications Professional and Social Media Savant), and @TonyBerkman (Serial Entreprenuer) appeared to have tweeted the most, simply because their names were most prevalent.

3. UberTwitter has a big shout-out in the cloud leading me to assume that most people (including myself) were tweeting from Uber.

4.Not surprisingly, the word “porn” is pretty noticeable. For everyone who was at PR Camp or watching the conversation we all know it is in reference to JetBlue’s Morgan Johnston’s comment that when he showed TweetDeck to an exec at JetBlue, he exclaimed that it was like “marketing porn.”

5. Smaller, but still noticeable – the word “mobile” dictates the importance of how technology is moving more to our fingertips and less to our desktops – this subject was brought up several times during the Red Team’s discussions.

While my word cloud is far from perfect, it gave me a fun and pretty way to put into context the #prcamp conversations and everything I had taken in from a very fun day at camp. I’ve been waiting for a good excuse to create my first list on Twitter. I created one for the red team in the hope that we could all stay connected and continue to converse. I added everyone I could think of but am obviously still missing people. Here’s a link to the list on Listiorious.com where you can recommend anyone to the list that I left off.

Edited by Sara Saldi

Dean’s Roundtable with Adina Pitt

Thanks to the Dean’s Roundtable I had the chance to hear Adina Pitt, a Steinhardt alumna, speak about her career in television and her position as a VP at Cartoon Network and Boomerang (and, as an extra bonus, they had some great cookies there, too). Ms. Pitt is the VP of Content Acquisitions & Co-Productions and Cartoon Network & Boomerang. She spoke with a diverse group of undergrad and post-grad students who wanted to hear all about the television industry and what steps she took in her career path to get to where she was. I walked away from the roundtable with a lot more knowledge about children’s cable television and how concepts and ideas are now traded globally. Here are the top-five things I took away:

1. The most valuable lesson I learned from Ms. Pitt was how she moved her career forward by essentially creating her own job. When she was an assistant and contracts would pass through her desk she made sure to read and study each one. When her superiors would get ready to go on business trips in markets around the world she would prepare spec sheets of projects to check out.
2. Ms. Pitt was describing to us how the simplest of pitches are the ones that Cartoon Network decides to invest in. The funniest one she mentioned was “a babysitter who happens to be a vampire.” Right after she heard those words, she was sold. The comeback of the vampire continues!
3. She reminded us that “kids are really simple,” they “feel like adults,” but don’t think like them. They want “mindless fun,” which is what you need to think about when you are developing programming for children.
4. “Kids love commercials” – This was a cool and really interesting point she made. She told us that when she offers to fast-forward commercials with her own children they usually tell her not to because they love the commercials. I wonder if this will change as kids start using computers at younger ages.
5. If you are trying to create a concept for a children’s show make sure you’re thinking about your story in 52, 11 minute parts. Cartoon Network mostly needs 26, 22-minute episodes with two 11-minute stories in each (I think we can all vaguely remember that format from our Rugrats days).

Written by Natan Edelsburg

Edited by Sara Saldi

Social Media Society’s Facebook 101 Session

Social Media Society’s first course took place Wednesday, November 11^th at the Yale Club, and Comm Club was really happy to be able to attend. We were able to learn how professionals in the advertising/marketing/communications industry were using Facebook to connect customers to their brands and provide a fun and interactive way to create conversations between them. Here are some of the key takeaways we learned that we thought most college-age Facebook users would not be aware of:

• Have a plan – whether your creating a group or fan page for your student organization think about maximizing your fans engagement by creating a content calendar when you know how often you’ll post and update and what it will be about.

• Utilize FBML to customize your fan page - FBML is Facebook’s simple HTML like code that lets you bold, link, tag and add video/pictures to the page layout. It’s very easy to learn and will make a big difference in what your page looks like

• Use custom tabs – These will allow you to add content specific to what works for your club or organization.

• Ads – Facebook ads are becoming more and more popular. When you create your next event for your student club, notice that there is an option to click “Promote This Event.” You can easily spend a small amount of money to have an ad for your event appear on user’s pages based on age, location and even university.

Special thanks to Persia Tatar, Founder, Social Media Society and Benjamin Weisman, Vice President, Creative Director, MRM Worldwide – Princeton for leading the course and inviting Comm Club to be a part of it.

Twitter 101 is this Thursday and student tickets are only $25!

http://socialmediasocietytwitter.eventbrite.com/

Interested in learning more about the Social Media Society? Email us at nyucommclub@gmail.com

Written by Natan Edelsburg

Edited by Sara Saldi

GlobalQuad: Colleges on Twitter

Attention everybody! There is a new website (www.globalquad.com) to check out! And okay, given the state of the internet today, that fact is not all too surprising. But trust me, this site serves a purpose! Think about it, have you ever wondered what is going at your university? What event one club is having versus another? What the school journalists are covering at any given moment? What events and news is happening around campus? Or perhaps a better question, have you ever wondered how other universities compare to your own? Wouldn’t it be great if you could find the answers to these questions from a primary source rather than hearsay and rumor? Well now you can!

Globalquad.com is here to answer your questions! Launched this past summer, Globalquad.com: Colleges on Twitter is an aggregate site for the range of twitter accounts from different colleges and universities. By bringing all of the schools’ twitter feeds together and organizing them on one host site, GlobalQuad makes it easy to follow exactly what is being tweeted both around your campus as well as your friend’s.

There are already over seventy colleges and universities represented on the site, ranging from lesser known schools like Towson University in Maryland, to Ivy League colleges such as Harvard. True to its name, GlobalQuad spans the globe as it hosts tweets from The University of Oxford and Cambridge University as well. (And of course, NYU is there too!)

The organization and functionality of the site is explained best in an article from the New York Times Blog, “The Choice.” It clearly states that:

Users can filter news by school, viewing all chatter about one place through, for example, the gathered feeds of a single university’s newspaper, alumni magazine, student clubs and sports teams. In addition to those institutional tweets are personal tweets from a range of campus characters, including student newspaper editors, law librarians, football coaches and journalism professors. (http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/a-new-web-site-for-tweets-from-colleges/).

If a tweet is sent out from a school registered on GlobalQuad, it will be easy to find and along with it, you will be able to read other twitter accounts from the same university, or similar accounts from different universities. The New York Times Blog entry also provides more background on the creation of the site and its editor, Natan Edelsburg (In full disclosure, Natan is an NYU Steinhardt Junior/Senior and the Vice President of the Comm Club).

So those are the straight facts about the site. Great. But what is its real value? It’s as simple as this: GlobalQuad is a great example of how social media can be used as a beneficial resource.

First, the site provides a one-stop shop to gather messages streaming out of your university and others. This will be useful to students who want to stay up to date, but perhaps more importantly for high school seniors who want to get a unique perspective on the schools they are considering. In a way, GlobalQuad provides an outpost for the social media enthusiasts at various universities to construct their virtual university. If the twitter feeds from all of the different academic departments, residence halls, clubs, student government, individual students, etc. at one university are collected in one “space” on GlobalQuad, the University, or at least a representation of the University, has essentially been constructed online through its own written and controlled tweets. That’s pretty cool. Current and prospective students, who want to know a school better, now have a new source for up to the minute information. But it gets better.

GlobalQuad is a great and unique resource because of the way it unites universities across the globe, creating, well, a virtual global campus. Lets say UCLA and USC have an upcoming football game. Being the bitter rivals they are, there are sure to be tweets talking about the game and how one team is going to beat the other (or something more exciting, and perhaps from the teams themselves). With the use of GlobalQuad, there is a new forum where those tweets can be viewed simultaneously and the rivalry, in all of its glory, becomes virtual. Though UCLA and USC are physically close to one another, students or alumni who are currently in a farther location can go to GlobalQuad and get a sense of the action happening on campus by its representation on twitter.

Whether one is an avid fan of twitter and social media, or doesn’t know a tweet from a text but wants to have up to the minute information stemming from campus life, GlobalQuad provides a great service.

Check it out! www.globalquad.com

Written by Felicia Shulman