People are considered active users if they have engaged with, viewed, or consumed content generated by the Facebook Page.

• § Users that visit your application’s canvas page
• § Users that view your application tab on a Page
• § Users that published to news feed (stream) through your application
• § Users that “Liked” a stream story form your applications
• § Users that commented on a stream story from your application

The daily (blue) and monthly (red) users illustrates people who have engaged, viewed, or linked and shared content with the Public Affairs page. When looking this graph is illustrates a strong surge at the beginning of the academic year, early August. Since I started on July 19^th, there was an increase in users – this correlates with the increased material and daily posts on the page. When focusing on November, I believe that face increased the means in what considers an active and daily user. In this case we had a strong increase and will continue to have one now that we have a monthly perspective as to how many people actually view the page in a given month. I would conclude that, we have a stead 1,000+ viewers per-month and that will constitute to University activities (daily, weekly, and monthly). In respect to future posts, there should be a strong emphasis on posting about upcoming events, attached with flyers, additional information, and then photos of the event(s) once they have concluded. This creates an online experience that active users can follow and comment upon.

As of December 17th: 885.

Our total “likes” is an interesting diagram to analyze. As I stated before, Facebook is somewhat difficult to know exactly how many people are being exposed to the page. In our case, our monthly users is nearly double our total likes. Many Facebook users will go to our page, but not necessarily “like” it and be a loyal active user. Since the page was created (Spring of 2009), the page had a average following of about 140 people. I started the internship on July 19^th, and started updating the page with photos of the construction on campus, links to the Chico Performance’s page, summer student achievements, and finally the Wild Cat Welcome event. When looking at the graph, one can see a strong increase in total “likes.” This I would correlate with the beginning of the school year and syncing / tagging other Chico State “pages” with the Public Affairs page as the official means of receiving campus news and information. Now that five months have passed, the page is nearing a plateau of total “likes.” This may be to the end of the semester as students limit their interaction, and families become busy for the holidays. On average total “likes” increase by about 2 to 5 per week. However, in respect to other “Chico State” Facebook pages, the total following of is about 18,00 individuals and growing (with overlap).

Total likes as of December 7, 2010:

• Public Affairs and Publications: 417
• California State University, Chico: 10,147
  • Chico State / I Love Chico State: 7,233
  • Chico State Alumni Association: 91
  • Chico State Housing: 516
  • Chico State Parents: 485

Other pages Involving Chico State:

• Chico State WREC: 3,730
• I’m A Chico State Student: 2,425
• Associated Students: 1,213

http://mashable.com/2010/09/16/foursquare-launches-university-outreach-program/

Throughout my time as the “social media intern” I have decided to focus closely on what social media has become. I hope that I can interact with readers through WordPress. We can make some assumptions together.

I should share something about myself. My name is Chris Trudell. I am a 22 year-old male, college student at CSU, Chico (of course), and an English Education and Philosophy major. May seem that an English major isn’t well suited for a Public Affairs / social networking intern position. Shouldn’t it be a sociology major? Or a public relations student? Or someone obsessed with Facebooking, tweeting, stalking, and tagging pictures? However, I am fascinated with the -FACT- that, because of the internet (WEB 2.0 +), people are reading and writing more than any other time in human history. That, to me, is pretty cool. I’m an individual curious of the human element and condition. I can say that I “believe” and have a “faith” that the ability and practice of reading and writing is possibly the most powerful tool known to man. I am not very good at the practice, yet I have ideas. I would say that my primary focus in college has been how technology, or digital medias, have impact the educational world (especially written works). Then there is this entire different cup of tea. There was a YouTube video which struck a serious key with me. Professor Mike Wesch of Kansas State University, studies mediated culture, and successfully brings the ideas of Media Ecology and Cultural Anthropology together. I was shown this video in a Literacy/Writing Theory class focusing on composition tutoring — and realized to be a successful teacher today, one has to embrace the extremely rapid spinning growth of “Media Ecology”. I’ve been growing a perspective that the digital world is becoming incredibly ingrained into our culture and most importantly a part of our education. Now how has or will digital media shape the educational world? HUGE, right? Well it is.

There are three main themes in Media Ecology and education: 1). reading and writing (literacy), 2). digital identity vs. daily identity, and 3). the exchange of information. The reading and writing part is natural. It simply happens because it is the center of the function of the internet (TEXT). Like I said earlier, imagine all of the people who are reading and writing on the internet / video games at this moment. Astronomical and very cool. The exchange of information in an education context is worth studying.  What users (you and me) read and write about is worth learning about. I like to call this the “user generated standard”. Users, by popularity and even emotional reactions, decide what is worth sharing, exchanging, blogging, and tweeting about. In an education context, institutions should embrace what is being read and written about, and develop links or threads to informational and academic discourses. Thanks to the internet the “elite standard” of literacy has started to buckle and crumble. The users are in control. Anyone is a published writer and/or critique of anything on the world wide web (books, food, products, movies, music, etc.). Finally, what is possibly most interesting is the concept of identity. I will leave that topic for any readers:

Is there a difference in digital identities vs. public in-person identities? Does social media system allow for people to create their own image of self? Finally, what are the greater-future impacts of this blurred line of identity?

I read on a number of prominent social media blogs that you must follow everyone who follows you on Twitter. It made sense to me, so when I started the Twitter account @chicostatepa, I made sure to do just that.

And once I started tweeting from the Twitter account @chicostate, which had more than 350 followers before I was given access to it, I spent more than an hour wading through pages and pages of followers.

But it didn’t take long for a follower to tweet his dismay:

I made sure to post a tweet introducing myself as a fellow Chico State student before I started following anyone, but this student seemed to get the wrong impression.

Unfortunately he wasn’t the only follower disturbed by my attempted politeness. While working with other public relations students at the student-run public relations agency on campus, Twitter came up in our conversation. I mentioned that I run the Chico State account and they all agreed that it was weird that the university was following them on Twitter. A few even said they blocked the account.

Even though the advice I received from seasoned professionals backfired, I don’t agree that we should all stop listening to “social media gurus.” Learning from others’ advice, successes and failures can provide guidance and stimulate new ideas. But in the end only your audience can dictate what’s wrong and what’s right.

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What do you think? Am I using social media for Public Affairs the wrong or right way? Please share your thoughts in the comment section; I’d love to get your opinion!

@chicostate was one of the first accounts I followed when I joined Twitter almost a year ago, but it never tweeted a single word until the first day of this semester. I’ve actually been curious about who owned the account for quite awhile. Well, the mystery is finally solved.

The account was set up a while ago by staff at the Enterprise Applications department, which oversees the university’s computing applications like the campus portal. They created the account to make sure the name wasn’t snatched by a scammer, which was a good move that many other organizations have also made or are now wishing they had.

Although the account has been sitting untouched for the majority of its existence, by the time I received the login information it had accumulated a following of more than 350 people. And it continues to grow daily.

Public Affairs’ twitter following is more than 7 times larger than it was just a week ago. But one thing still hasn’t change: I’m still not exactly sure what our followers want.

The first and most obvious clue to telling what followers are interested in is looking at retweets. For the @chicostatepa account, followers were particularly interested in campus achievement stories. Tweets about the university’s latest honors are retweeted by alum almost every time, and they often include remarks on how proud they are to be Chico State grads:

Retweets, however, are not that only way to tell what the people want. While I’ve been using many different URL shortening Web sites, the site bit.ly just became my tool of choice. Not only does it shorten URLs, but it also collects how many unique hits your links receive.

Just by looking at bit.ly statistics, I can see that the news release regarding the awards recently won for Up Til’ Dawn generated 88 hits – the most traffic any of our links have received yet. So my hunch was right;  our Twitter followers are extremely interested in reading about campus honors.

And now I also know that our Twitter followers are in no way interested in becoming our Facebook fans. I posted the link to our Facebook page last week and not a single follower took the bait.

Instead of simply relying on what I think our followers and fans will like, with bit.ly I can actually see what the people want and what they don’t. And I’m looking forward to using this site to help enhance the quality of our posts and tweets.

But just as soon as I logged in for the first time, I had no clue what to do beyond the obvious – answering the question “What are you doing?” I answered the question and immediately thought, “Who cares?”

It took more than three months for me to even attempt using the site again and tweeted sporadically a few more times. But by June something changed. Seven months after I created my Twitter account I finally stopped tweeting because my professors told me I should; I started tweeting for fun.

So what changed? I did some research.

Initially I started looking for blog posts and articles that offered advice for organizations big and small, as well as creative ways others are using the micro-blogging site. Sure enough, everyone who considers them self a social media blogger, journalist, or guru has advice to give, and I absorbed everything I could click on. Various bloggers’ tips gave me insight on the most effective ways to use Twitter for Public Affairs’ page, but also for my personal account. With that being said, I’d like to pass on the most useful tips I found to you:

Tip #1 Quit counting your followers

I know it’s difficult not to keep one eye on your followers at all times. But if you don’t remember anything else from this blog post, remember this: Success isn’t determined by the number of followers, but the number of retweets. When people like your updates, they tend to retweet them, often adding their own two cents to the post. In the Twitter world this is deemed the ultimate form of flattery. Blogger Avinash Kaushik explains it this way: When people retweet your content to their followers, it can add followers to your network who want to connect with you because your updates are important and relevant to them. So, in the beginning stages worry less about who is following you and focus on posting engaging tweets.

Tip #2 Always be linking

So what makes for an update with retweet potential?  Links! I found this advice on social media guru Guy Kawasaki’s blog and it definitely enhanced my tweets. He argues that no one cares about your cat or what you ate for dinner. Instead ABL – “always be linking” – to interesting things you find online. In Public Affairs’ case I’ve found that good news about the university spreads quickly, like this update I sent this morning:

There are a few things to keep in mind when linking and trying to be retweeted. First, don’t just post a link.  Blogger Chris Brogan says you should always set up a link by asking a questions or giving a quick explanation.

Secondly, if your goal is to be retweeted you can’t use all 140 characters. As you can see in the image above, to be retweeted an individual must put RT and @yourusername; plus most people like to add a comment of their own. For example RT @ChicoStatePA takes about 16 characters, so that’s the absolute minimum number of characters I must save in order to be easily retweeted.

I hope these bits of advice help you as much as they did me. And stay tuned; I’m sure there will be many more in the near future. Please let me know what the most useful tips have been for you in the comments section.