What is Pinterest? Can I use it to market my School?

What is Pinterest?
Pinterest is a virtual pin board of items that people find on the web and upload to share. It's sort of like a visual social bookmarking site combined with brainstorming ideas. If you read the articles and want to share them this is the place. Right now it's growing most among young women, but it is one of the newest/fastest growing social networks. If you are interested in wedding planning, fashion, or recipes there is definitely something for you. If you're a classroom teacher or homeschooler there are many posters on Pinterest that are all about pinning lesson plan ideas. Ideas on how to mark the 100th day of school. The opportunities are really endless.

How does it work?
You basically create a topic area which is called a board and you find links to share or pictures to upload about a topic. Then you either find a site you want to share or upload a photo you want to share. The most annoying thing I find is that when you create a broad topic sometimes you want to narrow the board down later and there is not an easy way to move from one board to another without having to go individually into every board. I created recipes when I was first exploring Pinterest, but now I might want to have Cakes, Pies, etc. and I might want to have another one that is Meat Dishes. I wish I could drag an drop to my new board, but unless someone knows some easier way, I don't think there is.

How does it impact your school or organization?
One interesting article is from Mashable on how Pinterest is changing web design. http://mashable.com/2012/02/07/pinterest-web-design/. But what you post in a news article or a page on your website is also important. It means that postings need to have some type of visual.

How can you use Pinterest?
Heidi Miller posts how brands are using Pinterest and there are some excellent examples.

As she notes Drake is using it with the purpose of featuring student life. The boards allow a school to feature so many different aspects of the school and the purpose could be all over the place. One board could be to feature student work for the whole school or each grade could have a separate board. Another way is for Admissions to feature a "virtual tour" of the campus. Pretty easy to upload a bunch of photos of the school and then link them back to different features throughout the website. College Counseling could show off the places that students have gone to. Alumni could be featured there linking to news articles posted or blogs and websites about Alumni. The possibilities are endless.

Is your school using Pinterest? How is it using Pinterest?



Find me:
http://pinterest.com/ali254

My inbox is exploding, stop sending so many email messages!

Too much email is the complaint I have heard often from both our parents and teachers, but the problem is that so many people have something to say. Today's technology allows us to click on a button and send an email, but does your school or organization really have a plan for who gets to send out communications and when they go out? Does anyone take the time to test what these email messages will look at?

Problem 1- too many colors

As a school with use Microsoft Outlook and there are many problems with the different versions, especially Outlook on the Macintosh. We go back and forth on some email messages and sometimes because screens aren't calibrated correctly we don't notice that words throughout the message are a dark blue and then the rest of the message is black. The end result is as an organization we look bad. 

Problem 2- graphic emails

We've moved into an age where we don't send as many flyers home in backpacks and want to be green. So instead the solution in the minds of most people is let's just embed what we would have sent as a flyer into our emails for our parents to look at. Has anyone taken a look at the analytics of your website or emails. Ours has proven that over 60% of the population is viewing the emails on a mobile device, with the majority being an Apple Operating System. And they aren't necessarily showing the images. So it means when they open the email, unless the subject lines is amazing they have no clue what your message is about. And they may have just received 15 other emails that day that really had no importance at all.

Problem 3-big, bold, beautiful, and exclamation marks!!!!

So the senders of the email don't always know what is appropriate and what is not appropriate. Not every single lines needs and exclamation mark because it's really not all important. Emails that have every other word bold are actually much harder to read then ones that break up paragraph around a subject. In general 4 or more colors is probably too many colors to use for fonts in an email that is not designed for that purpose. The simpler the email is, the easier it is to read.

These are just a few of the problems I have run into in the last couple weeks. What kinds of problems do you have with your emails?

Have you found a successful way to streamline communication to your parents so they aren't receiving an email for the child's teachers, the principals, the head of school, the parent's association, the athletics department, the communications department, the advancement department, and so on?

How to Suggest a Facebook Fan page to Your Friends UPDATE

An easy way to get people to become fans of your Facebook fan page is as the admin for a page share it.

Here's how to do it:

1. Go the Fan Page
2. Go to the top right side of the Screen and press Invite Friend.

3. Once you are done with that, a list of your friends will show up and you can select friends to send the message to by clicking on their names. If your friend is already a fan you won't be able to suggest the page to them. Or if they have already been invited even if not by you they will be greyed out.

4. Click Submit and they will receive the request.

This option is no longer available for people who are not admins of the page. They have the option to share the page on the right side.


1. Go to the page you want to suggest
2. Go to the bottom left side of the page and press share. If you have a page you want to link with another page, then an easy way to add it is press "Add to My Page's Favorites".

3. You have several different options on how to share a page besides sharing it on another page. Most people will want to share on their own timeline. This will post it on what used to be know as your wall. And people who are subscribed to you will then see this page. It's a better method to post why you are sharing this page.  Sometimes you just want to share with a specific person, so this might be a better way to send a private Message. 

4. Once you have chosen your method and written something press Share Page.

Today's Filing Cabinets

Everyone is used to old filing cabinets where everyone had their own method of filing. Sometimes it was placed in alpha order by first name or other times it was done by last name. But there was always the exception to the rule. This person was really know by a different name so we'll put it under that name. The problem was when someone went through the files 5 years later when the person who created the system was no longer around, they couldn't find the information they were looking for.

Today's modern filing cabinets are information systems. These databases of information are used in the same ways that those filing cabinets were used. Besides the basic difference of coding from one system to another, they all handle information and records in a different way from another system. Each system thinks they have found the best practice for society, but the programmers do not always meet the users. The users each have their own "system" for filing away information and even within a department the system the system differs.

In 2010, my school moved away from the 30+ spread sheets, information systems, databases that we ran. I can't say we moved to a single system as our requirements could not be served by a single vendor. We did streamline most of the major systems into one system. The most challenging part for us was even though we are a young school in the area, we have been using an formal computer information system in one shape since at least the mid 80s and we have a rich history of 100 years of information that is stored somewhere.

As a school that has used an information system since early information systems existed, we have embraced the technology. When the computer system couldn't keep up with our needs we adopted a method to figure it out and make the system work. We created our own method of filing when we had a problem to solve. When the systems improved to handle this problem, we often did not get new training and had continued to "hack" the system. This left some very messy systems of information.

Twenty+ years latter, we are on a new system, and the next step in the process was cleaning up information. I continue to work on this cleanup and figuring out how we can guarantee the information we have is the best. But the methods to maintaining information that the staff used at the beginning are sometimes beyond me. Perhaps my methods will be beyond whoever fills this role in twenty years, but whenever I do something I try to make sure that someone will understand why it was done that way. When the system changes to the work arounds and hacks we have adopted I try to go back and make sure we update our data.

Our modern day filing cabinet is something that I can access from my phone, computer, or iPad. It lives in a different state and I will never "see" this file space. In many cases, our approach is the same as it was when it was in our same office space and very difficult to adjust in order to maintain an efficient information system.

Multiple Sign ins on Google

Recently Google decided to stream line accounts and have been upgrading Google Apps. I like many other people have multiple Google Accounts and was quickly running out of browsers to sign into in order to be able to look at all of them at one time. I happened to pop on to Account Settings Page and found a link that said Multiple Sign-ins Off. I decided to further investigate and now I can switch between accounts without signing out. It doesn't work for things like Picasa, but otherwise a neat little feature that you might not have realized was there.

Tools for Scheduling Tweets and Facebook Pages

I happen to love Hoot Suite. I have the application on my Android Device, but I really like how easy it is to set up and then manage for a school. The analytics they offer are also really great and useful tools for figuring out timing of when to post and what kinds of things people are actually reading.

A few other tools like this

Tweet Deck
CoTweet

Read a comparison of the features and you choose.

Let me know if you use something else that you find useful and why?

Celebrations for Schools

Our school's centennial is around the corner and I am investigating new outlets for social media in this celebration. My search of the web has so far found schools using of course facebook pages and websites exclusive for the celebration. I have found some blogs and flickr albums that have been used as record keepers for the events. Are there any interesting things your school has done with social media that you could see incorporating into an anniversary celebration?