Over the summer, the On-line and Electronic Subcommitee of the Strategic Communication Committee considered official Facebook use. Out of that review, Web Administration worked with UF’s General Counsel to craft a policy that accommodates the new opportunities available with the need to maintain a professional presentation and message.

University of Florida Facebook Page Policy

Posts and other content specifically added by administrators of the University of Florida Facebook page are official University of Florida content. Opinions expressed by other Facebook users do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the University of Florida. User provided content is not screened or evaluated during the submission process.

All content is bound by the UF Acceptable Use Policy. Further, users are expected to abide by applicable laws, regulations, rules and policies including the University Student Code of Conduct, the University’s Sexual Harassment Policy, and other regulations and policies concerning public communications.

We reserve the right to remove content.

We encourage users to report content that violates Facebook’s Code of Conduct by using the official Facebook procedure.

Join the University of Florida Facebook page and show your spirit as part of The Gator Nation!

Card Sorting: Pushing Users Beyond Terminology Matches

Here’s the summary as it appears at the top of the article: “It’s easy to bias study participants, whether in user testing or in card sorting, if they focus on matching stimulus words instead of working on the underlying problem.”

Doctype

A free question-and-answer site for web designers that will allow them to find solutions to their problems.

Twitter Postings: Interative Design

“Summary: We made a timeline message more punchy, credible, and viral through 5 rounds of redesign.”

10 User Interface Design Fundamentals

As @davemcfarland wrote, “Nice, short list of user interface design basics.” Couldn’t agree more!

Ten reasons to learn and use web standards

Like we said on Twitter, an oldie, but a goodie.

250+ Resources to Help You Become a CSS Expert

A great list to check out if you’re really dedicated to becoming a CSS know-it-all.

6 Ways To Improve Your Web Typography

Let’s face it, you can never read too much about typography on the web! You would be surprised how much the right font can spice up a web site.

25 Classic Fonts That Will Last a Whole Design Career

While we’re on that previous note, check out this piece on classic, durable fonts.

Web citizens trying to kill Internet Explorer 6

Former UF Webmaster Mark Trammell was quote in this article about a campaign against IE6.

An Overview of The CSS Summit

If you didn’t get a chance to attend The CSS Summit, catch up with our overview of it here.

Jobs @ Web Administration

UF Web Admin is hiring! Right now, we’re looking for an OPS Web Designer and a student OPS Web Designer. Feel free to pass along the info if you know someone who’s interested.

22 Questions to Ask Before Developing a Website

If you’re a practicing newbie with a direction in mind, don’t forget to have a project plan! Start with these 22 questions.

HTML Dog HTML Beginner’s Guide

Now that you’ve asked all the right questions, you can take a look at this HTML beginner’s guide to get up to speed on proper coding.

Web Developer’s Field Guide

A huge resource for designers and developers, including sections on topics such as design inspiration, AJAX, CSS layout, SEO tools, and much more.

Directory of College & University Facebook Pages

Now that social media is all the buzz, why not review what other schools are doing online. Varsity Outreach has compiled a list of Colleges and Universities with a presence on Facebook, including data on their fans.

Web Content Inventory Spreadsheet

Although not the most exciting, having a clear understanding of your site and how it is structured can certainly help when trying to improve the information architecture. Donna Spencer has developed a spreadsheet that can help you organize your website structure.

If you have run across any web sites that you’d like to share with the rest of us, post in our comments or message us on Twitter.

So far, we’ve seen some success. In the recent study of Facebook fan pages in Higher Education done by BlueFuego, they reported that the University of Florida Facebook page had almost a 2,500% increase in followers within a three-month period, which was the largest increase of any major university.  Of course, we’d like to take credit for that massive increase, but much of that was done prior to our more active management of the page.

Because of all this Facebook attention, it’s important to make our goal to create as much engagement as possible for those people that are already on board. We have started by feeding UF news onto the UF Facebook page. This has increased engagement, but more can be done, in my opinion. This is why our office is researching best practices for management and interactivity that we hope will help all UF units get the most out of social media.

If you have any suggestions or ideas for ways we can use social media to promote UF and expand our reach, we encourage your comments and suggestions. Also, if you manage an official UF social media account, feel free to fill out our online form.

10 High Fliers on Twitter

“On the microblogging service, professors and administrators find work tips and new ways to monitor the world.”

15 Essential Checks Before Launching Your Website

“This article reviews some important and necessary checks that web-sites should be checked against before the official launch — little details are often forgotten or ignored, but – if done in time – may sum up to an overall greater user experience and avoid unnecessary costs after the official site release.”

30 Photoshop Video Tutorials

Learn Photoshop techniques from professional graphic designers with these tutorials.

Build Your Own WordPress Themes the Easy Way

Using “WordPress’s parent and child theme feature is a fast and easy way to start using themes.”

5 Rarely-Used CSS properties

“a list of 5 useful but rarely-used CSS properties that work in all modern browsers.”

Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines

A link to the study cited by Carl Smith of nGen Works during his presentation at Spring of Web.

Special thanks to Prentiss Ladkani (College of Education) and Al Kirby (University Relations) for sharing some of their links.

Intriguing title aside, I thought this would be a great way not only to learn how to leverage social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, but help me articulate the importance of their use by those who are non-technical or unaware.

On the panel was Michael Wilson and Miles Sims of Small World Labs, Peter Kim from Dachis Corporation, Rebecca Caroe from CreativeAgencySecrets.com and Christian Caldwell from the American Heart Association.

Some major takeaways from the event:

• “The man” can be someone with budget authority, but can really be anyone who you must have on board with the use of social media. For someone with budget control, they recommended developing a measurable ROI.
• The biggest and most obviously measurable ROI is reach. Being Web Admin-centric, I considered campus web managers as our target for social media reach. Of course, it’s entirely possible, based on the power of social networking, to extend beyond UF to people like higher education web managers or perhaps even web professionals outside of academia. As a pitch, I would maintain that since our office works to advocate for best practices on the web, better reach means more frequent and meaningful engagement by managers, as well as building our reputation as an authority of such things.
• Fashion your discussion of social media to that particular group. For instance, when talking to someone who is particularly resistant to the idea, find out what his or her goals are and show him or her how social media can align and assist those goals. One speaker marveled that this worked so well that in one instance, a former resister became a staunch advocate of social media at their organization.
• Keep things simple at first. Trying to do too much too soon could be overwhelming. The panelist from the American Heart Association wanted to share video stories about cardiovascular heart disease in women. Once they mentioned this on Facebook, they quickly had over 1000 videos that they then had to review. A success, to be certain, but still daunting.
• Good planning helps to ensure success.  Make sure you know who you want to reach through your social media efforts.
• If “the man” is a communicator, find his or her peer group and show what others are doing. In other words, if one of your implementation hurdles is someone who is responsible for marketing or communications, make sure you use examples of respected people in their field who have succeeded in similar social media work.

For those of you who are considering using social media for your college, department or unit, what are your measurable goals? What challenges have you discovered?

The problem with backchannel communication is the obvious splitting of attention of audience members between the speaker and the online conversation. In addition, there is the concern that someone would highjack the chat and steer the group away from serious discussion.

The good news is that by using Twitter and a free programs like TweetDeck or through the Twitter website search, you can easily create a virtual chatroom by searching for the hashtag. Even better, if someone is a distraction, you can filter them out by using Twitter search operators. For example, if you want to follow conversations about Gator Basketball but want to filter out all of my brilliant commentary, you would enter “#gatorbasketball -brucefloyd”. Simple as that!

We’ll be using #SoW09 as the hashtag for the Spring of Web event, so get ready to fire up Twitter and follow the conversation.

Thanks to Al Kirby, a designer working in University Relations; Prof. Dave Stanton in the College of Journalism and Communications; and Ken Schwencke, a UF journalism senior.

34 Amazing Tumblr Themes, Twitter could never look this good!!!

Thirty-four cool themes for Tumblr.

Typeface Anatomy and Glossary

A glossary of common type terminology.

101 High Quality CSS And XHTML Free Templates And Layouts

A ton of free (and beautiful) templates.

Twitter And (Not) Monetizing The Attention Economy

A piece from Business Week about how a lack of advertising is not smart for Twitter.

Service-Oriented Architecture: Using Our APIs Internally

In Stanton’s words: “NYTimes builds its site by using its own API instead of direct-fed from the CMS. Love this concept of ‘eating your own food.’ Great SxSW panel on this topic.”

On D.C. Streets, the Cellphone as Lifeline: Homeless People Turn to Technology to Track Assistance and Opportunities

An article on how essential some technologies have become.

Atlas: a visual IDE for desktop-like web apps

From the site: “With its Atlas IDE for building web apps in Cappuccino and Objective-J, 280North is set to make web app programming as easy as drag-and-drop. Ars talks with 280North’s Ross Boucher to get the skinny.”

While the site had included a couple of social bookmarking sites since 2007, users were limited in the services they could use directly. For example, if someone wanted to share an article on Facebook, they had to copy the address and navigate to Facebook.

AddThis offers a simpler process. It sends users directly to the site of their choice to save the link. It also presents a simple, expandable interface - we no longer had to limit the site to two services. AddThis even updates the interface with new social bookmarking sites, without requiring updates to the UF News site.

My favorite feature is AddThis’ analytics. You get a dashboard with graphs showing how much people are bookmarking your content, and you can drill down to see what people are bookmarking and what services they are using. Along with general Web statistics, it helps build a better picture of how people find your content.

I recommend you consider using AddThis on sites that change frequently, such as news sites or blogs. It’s a simple matter of adding a small code snippet to your pages.

But I wanted to know what UF’s Web community thought. So being the good journalist I am, I started e-mailing and asking around to get the skinny on social networking.

One of our student managers, Tim Gratil, provided some good insight in an e-mail:

“I think the presence of higher education on social networking sites like Myspace, Facebook and Twitter would boost the visibility of a University’s information, making it easier to communicate alerts/announcements/events to its student body, encouraging students to network among each other, etc. As long as it doesn’t spam my inbox with a ton of messages/notifications, I’m all for it.”

Tim’s opinion made me think of UF’s College of Liberal Arts and Science’s Facebook page, which is a really solid example of how higher ed institutions can use social networking.

As of today, the page has 131 Facebook fans (including me). It keeps consistent updates of CLAS’ latest events and news, along with a list of books written by professors within the college.

I sent an e-mail to Jeff Stevens, CLAS’ Webmaster, who is responsible for managing the page, to ask some questions about it and got some really informative answers:

How old is the page?
We launched the page in spring of last year - I think it was mid-April.

How quickly did students respond to the page, if at all?
Initial interest in the page was not from students, but from invited faculty and staff who were already active in Facebook. Student interest grew when several popular faculty members and administrators became fans of the page. Student interest increased after we posted a series of invitations to the UF Network page. We’ve continued to gain new fans, but the increase is fairly slow.

Has the page had any affect on visitors to the College’s Web site?
We have not seen a decrease in traffic to the college’s home page. There has been some direct traffic from stories on Facebook to the college web site, but these results have been very small.

What would you say is the mission of the page?
The primary mission of the page is to be serve as an alternate communications medium on news and events in the college. We are currently discussing how we can expand on its purpose as an outreach and alumni development tool.

What have visitors responded to?
Visitors respond most to the events section of the page.

How do you measure the page’s success?
We’ve had a triple-fold increase in viewership very recently - in the last three weeks or so - which coincided with a series of updates sent from the page and the promotion of a new lecture that had broad support from several local community organizations. The goal is to increase awareness of the site in the upcoming year and to increase the number of users by 50%. We have anecdotal evidence that the page has encouraged faculty to open Facebook profiles, and that at least one of these faculty members has as a result made contact with a member of a prominent grant-writing board. There is a difficulty in quantifying the building of social bonds, which we have yet to find a way to effectively measure.

Would you recommend creating a page to other colleges?
I would recommend other colleges to maintain a page. It is important to maintain contact with students, alumni, and other invested individuals, and it is necessary for communications personnel to engage them in the media they choose to use, rather than driving them to the media you elect to use.

How do you find the time to keep the page updated?
LOL. Good question.

I’ve made updating it part of my daily routine. I already have a checklist for incoming events and the places where they need to be posted, and I added this as another task to that process. For news articles and announcements, I post the link at the same time I am updating RSS feeds. I could automate the process using an RSS feed for news stories, but doing so only brings in links - I prefer to do it manually as I can add an accompanying photo and a block of text to go with the articles. Overall, I’d say the use of Facebook adds up to about 15-30 minutes on an average day (this, of course, changes depending upon how many events there are to add).

Thanks, Jeff! Very interesting!

This post isn’t all-encompassing, so if anyone wants to share additional info or opinions, go right ahead!

Related links to make you think:

• Social Media Comes Last
• Do we really need a social media strategy?
• AMA Symposium: The DePaul Quad, A Social Networking Website for Parents