Sheri Lehman: Interactive Marketing Specialist, Chapman University

Ben Cole: Web Technology Specialist, Chapman University

Chapman University’s web and interactive marketing team has gotten in the habit of asking big questions: How to give power to the people, and how to use social media API’s to measure the value of good content?

Social media has already transformed how universities connect with students, but team members David May, Sheri Lehman, Ben Cole, Meghan Farrington, and Miles Zimmerman believe these questions can unlock a more engaged experience.

These questions inspired us to create Social.Chapman.edu, a live, real-time feed of more than 50 social media accounts across campus. In just 6 months, our feed has collected more than 10,000 stories from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and WordPress, giving users a true (and accessible) snapshot of life at Chapman. Brendan Mayer of The Lawlor Group tweeted, “This realtime #socialmedia hub is the best I’ve seen in #highered. Beautiful & engaging… Well done @ChapmanU!”

In this session, we will connect theory to practice and talk about where we are going with our interactive marketing strategies. We will talk about our use of social media APIs and open source web technologies such as node.js, MongoDB and HTLM5 web sockets. Lastly, we will connect how these tools help us find and display great content for our audiences.

Notes:

Showing JSON. I totally picked the right session this time.

Grab data from all the APIs: http://www.sharedcount.com/

It’s about the storytelling – not the medium (FB, Twitter, etc…)

Nice blog homepage – featured stories are chosen directly from view/share count

Democratize content. Democratize control.

Tweet Ben Cole @bcole808, cole@chapman.edu to get involved with the plugin.

Great presentation!