After working in the education sector in Canada for the last decade, I was interested in finding out which Canadian universities were using WordPress, and how they use it. In future blog posts I hope to focus solely on one institution that uses WordPress to blog, talking about what they’re doing, how they do it, and any other information I can dig up about the blogs.

I’m always looking to discover new areas of higher education that are using WordPress in their web environment, whether it be blogging or as a CMS, so if you know of others that are not mentioned below, please leave me a comment.

Here’s an overview of five Canadian universities using WordPress to power their blogs.

Carleton University

The Carleton University Web Services team runs a blog that is focused on providing information, tips and tutorials for the users of their custom content management system. Posts are made weekly and cover such topics as analytics, cms tutorials, search engine optimization, social media and more.

Visit the Carleton University CMS blog »

Dalhousie University

Dalhousie University has a wide variety of blog for departments, faculties and offices across campus. Currently active blogs provide information and news to faculty, staff and students from areas such as career services, community health, computer science, human resources and many more.

Visit Dalhousie Universities blogs »

Ivey MBA

The Richard Ivey School of Business (a part of the University of Western Ontario) offers an informational blog focused on their MBA program, as well as the Ivey admissions process. The admissions team also use the blog to share experiences and insight during their recruitment travels.

Visit the Ivey MBA Recruiting and Admissions blog »

Sheridan College

Sheridan College presents Sheridan 3D, a blog focused on providing information on various activities both on-campus and off-campus. In additions to blogging recent news, the site also features videos and photo galleries from a variety of events and activities.

Visit the Sheridan 3D site »

University of British Columbia

The University of British Columbia offers more than just blogs, they have created a university oriented social network by allowing the community to create their own members profile and participate in groups, forums or blog discussions, whether they be public or private.

Visit the University of British Columbia blogs »

Once you have gained this mass amount of fans, what do you do with them?

You may be pressed with the feeling that you have to post each day, or that your fans are going to expect daily updates.

Realistically, the average facebook users will log in once every two days, meaning they get updates from their 130 friends and 80 pages. Unless your brand is something they want to see each time they login, you don’t need to be there every day.

A slippery slope on facebook is inundating your users with messaging. If users start to see your brand too much, and aren’t interacting with it, you won’t appear in their news feeds, due to the patented Facebook algorithm. Worse yet, users may just unsubscribe (goodbye ROI). The more interactions occur with your messages, the more likely you are to appear in a fan’s news feed.

Within your Facebook insights you have some powerful measures that can be used as Key Performance Indicators. Following these measures is actually seeing if your messaging is working. You may have 4,000 fans, but only be seen in 40 news feeds (it would be great if we had this information).

Here are some readily accessible performance indicators for your page.

• Monthly Active Users
• Unique Page Views (daily quotient)
• Post Quality ( a function of interactions per post on a weekly basis)

Keep in mind that unless your page is a location where users will seek out information on a regular basis, your messages to news feeds are your only real connection to users. Grouping posts, condensing messaging as well as creating baiting posts (subject of next blog) will help with this.

What are your challenges with managing a Facebook page?

-JP

As a business user, the iPhone Facebook application is a great tool for anyone who has a Facebook Page – but doesn’t have any other properties (i.e. Twitter). Once you add Twitter, Hootsuite becomes a great tool but if Facebook is all you work with, then Facebook for iPhone gets the job done quick and easy.

The key is adding your pages to your favourites screen within the application.

Add Your Pages to Favourites

1. Open the app
2. Click the grid icon in the upper left corner
   
3. Swipe to the left to get to your Favourites page
   
4. Click the “+” plus icon in the upper right corner
5. Click Pages in the bottom right
6. Select the page you would like to add from the list
7. Done!

Updating Your Facebook Page

1. Open the app
2. Click the grid icon in the upper left corner
3. Swipe to the left to get to your Favourites page
4. Click on the page you would like to update
5. For a status update, go ahead and enter into the What’s on your mind? box
6. For a photo upload, click the camera icon to the left of the What’s on your mind? box

Huge thanks to @jjloa for this great tip at #pseweb last May!

We had a lot of support & energy and the community definitely made it possible, but we ended up with a small handful of people putting in 60+ hours a week between February to May in order to handle the explosion. This isn’t something we can ask volunteers to take on again for year two.

I debated with a long time with a few people how to do the 2011 event – should it remain a community committee but pay a salary to an event organizer, should it go for profit, should we “sell” it to a vendor that would be motivated to keep it going?

PSEWEB is now a “business”

There’s no clear right answer, but what we’ve gone with is registering the event as a business, having me (Melissa) as the sole proprietor, and I’m making the commitment to run everything by an advisory board and the community as the event is planned.  It’s the same as last year, except that if the event is profitable, I will earn a little bit for my time.

The original goals of the conference (keeping reg cost low, being in Canada, offering affordable accommodations) are still in place, and my additional goals this year are to waive 100% of registration fees for speakers, bring in at least one very well-known keynote, and possibly subsidize the costs for long-distance attendees (people flying in from BC, etc) and offering a few scholarships for people who do not have the resources to attend at full price.  All of which make the chances of making significant profit pretty slim, but I wanted to be as transparent as possible – possibly too transparent?

What do you think? What was your reaction to the news? I’m fairly uncomfortable with money, and am more comfortable in a non-profit environment (I’ve ran non-profits in the past), but it seems like this is the right direction to me.

Thank you to everyone who was part of PSEWEB 2010, Thank you to our awesome advisory board who I will announce shortly, and Thank you to everyone in advance for having faith in the new structure of the event – 2011 will benefit from 12 months of attention and careful planning and I have very high goals for the final result next May.

As always, please join the advisory board and myself on our LinkedIn Discussion Group – which will be consulted throughout the year as the event evolves.

Cheers,

Melissa Cheater

info@pseweb.ca / @mmbc

Visit for slides & additional resources: http://www.markgr.com/pseweb/

Abstract:

It’s a new dawn. The next generation of the Web is here. A Web that is accessed by mobile devices—anytime, anywhere. Where it is just as easy to create content as it is to consume it. A web that is redefining time. A Web connected through syndication rather than links, and where more and more, the user is in control.

Completely updated for 2010, this award winning presentation will focus on the (r)evolution of the web and the implications for higher education web professionals. The goal is to have the audience take a step back and think long term about the social and cultural changes, and the new opportunities for communicating and providing services to our constituents.

To download a great map of campus showing our building, as well as the residence and parking: Campus Map 2010.

Registration will be from 5pm to 9pm on Tuesday May 25th (in Earp residence), and again at 8am to 9am on Wednesday May 26th in Academic South.

• Ideas #1
• Ideas #2
• Ideas #3

Click a session name in order to see the speaker details and presentation abstract:

• YouTube and the University Community
• Design & Style in the Canadian PSE Webspace
• Social Media & ROI
• Confessions of a Social Media Sophmore: Ivey MBA’s Venture Into Web 2.0
• Risk Management on Facebook
• Videos & U: YouTube, iTunes & uStream
• Flirting with Facebook
• The Do's and Don'ts of Webcasting for Recruitment
• Website Redesign: Bringing the Dragon to Its Knees
• Going for Gold: The University of Saskatchewan's use of social media at the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games
• Mobile Marketing & U
• MyUNB: Re-imagining the Internal Web
• Making Better Decisions with Web Analytics
• Content Strategy: The Key to Effective Web Content
• Keep the baby, lose the bath water: Integrating the old web with the new for higher ed admissions
• Formulating Web & Social Media Strategy for India
• HEC Montréal's Website Redesign
• Students need to be part of the community
• Students: Your Secret Weapons for Social Media Success
• University Affairs: How Canada’s national magazine for universities is building an online community.