I've used tinyurl.com and snurl.com for many years and have been happy with their service. But having just read Analysis: Which URL Shortening Service Should You Use?, I think I might rethink this.
First of all, if I still had responsibility for a site or responsibility for a brand, I'd register vanity URLs right away. Yes, some of these services will allow you to choose your own custom path. So if you're using Twitter and frequently using a service to shorten umn.edu/college/departmentname/programname, you could try to obtain UofM-program and always use that.
You can also track traffic from those shortened URLs. TinyURL does not offer this service, but others do. So even though tinyURL has been around since way back when, I think I'll be trying bit.ly now. It's still a memorable name and it offers additional services.
Now to get people to create these for our funds! How, how, how?
I've been playing with Ning, Gather, and other social media sites. You can come join me if you like.
I've added a couple of widgets to my sidebar. Scroll down and you'll see them on the left. They are simply RSS feeds, but made a little more attractive, perhaps.
You can subscribe to a feed for this blog, too. (Not that I ever have time to update it, of course.) If it seems to work, we'll consider adding a similar option to our College's news blog.
MySpace's portal for colleges and universities
(How) Should higher ed institutions use MySpace? Get answers from the higher ed MySpace advocate: Heather Mansfield, Web editor at Drury University
MySpace Best & Worst Practices
When many of us think social media we think Facebook and MySpace and YouTube. It also includes other tools and platforms that allow for interaction. It doesn't only have to be "social" conversation. It includes bookmarking adn content sharing tools such as Delicious and Digg.
Higher education hasn't made the most of this media yet. But here are a few good tips on how to optimize current Web pages for the social media.
I encourage you to read the entries, but here's the synopsis (really not that different from general optimization rules):
1) Increase your linkability
2) Make tagging and bookmarking easy
3) Reward inbound links
4) Help your content travel
5) Encourage the mashup
6) Be a user resource, even if it doesn’t help you
7) Reward helpful and valuable users
8) Participate
9) Know how to target your audience
10) Create content
11) Be real
12) Don’t forget your roots, be humble
13) Don’t be afraid to try new things, stay fresh
14) Develop a SMO strategy
15) Choose your SMO tactics wisely.
16) Make SMO part of your process and best practices
I have to confess that while I've used many social networking sites and visited many others, I rely only on a few. I subscribe to newsfeeds of a few blogs for work and pleasure and I've watched what others in higher education have been doing.
Right now I'm interested in making it easier to share and bookmark our college's research. But I have yet to add the widgets to make that possible from our Web site. Our blog site has the RSS feed and a simple script I found for adding the feed directly into iGoogle. Our internal audience isn't filled with early adopters and many have no idea what an RSS feed even is.