First up, the University of Oregon spiced up Welcome Week with an interesting use of Tips, a special school-only badge and a self-guided tour of campus. About Foursquare gives details:

As part of the “Grand Tour,” the Oregon Duck has left tips around campus that will highlight some features of campus that students may not know about…Students who friend the Oregon Duck and check in at all 10 locations with tips on Friday, September 24 can show their checkin history to redeem a real-life InDUCKted badge. The badge is good for 20% on Oregon Ducks sportswear at the Duck Store.

The University of Nebraska at Omaha is using a microsite in conjunction with Foursquare to encourage students to visit alcohol-free businesses in the area. The effort includes special deals for the students checking in and promotional opportunities for the participating local businesses.

This isn’t the first time colleges have embraced Foursquare as a means to encourage students to interact with their environment. Recently Foursquare made custom badges for Harvard to correspond with custom tips, info and of course to allow officials to track participation.

“Harvard is more than classrooms and buildings. It is an interconnected community of people, ideas, and experiences, and we are actively pursuing ways to enhance those connections,” said Perry Hewitt, director of digital communications and communications services for Harvard Public Affairs and Communications.

What better assets to combine than a tech savvy community and a collection of buildings in an educational realm constantly under evolution away from brick-and-mortar. The concept of “place” online helps marry the importance of physical location with the information flow of the virtual space.

Oddly enough, despite the recent debut of Facebook Places, Facebook simply Facebook debuted Facebook Universities, a special Page dedicated for interacting with the facets of your educational community except for Place and dumps you immediately on the “Deals” tab – so you can interact with sponsored brands before you get to your provost. Sigh. We assume there’s more to how colleges can use Places and of course there will be check-ins regardless.

How next Fall will look for colleges and universities, when the hundreds of millions of Facebook check-in and Foursquare and others are only more rampant, will be the true test. How will your institution watch, research, strategize and take advantage of these trends? Throw us a line, we can help.

-Dean (@dbrowell)

P.S. We would like to lift up one of our favorite blogs, “About Foursquare” which is one of the quickest to deliver media sites on Foursquare developments. Check it out.

The sun will come up.

Charles Barkley will say something unintentionally hilarious.

Facebook will emulate what it doesn’t buy.

On the latter point, Wednesday evening Facebook debuted Places. The premise and execution of Facebook Places is remarkably similar to the first two sentences anyone may use to describe any number of check-in applications: It’s a way to share your actual location with others online; it also allows you to observe where others have checked in. Where many other applications seek to go from that starter definition, be it MyTown with games, Foursquare with tips, Gowalla with stickers, or ShopKick with deals, Facebook has simply stopped limply (but maybe effectively) at the first point of entry.

There’s a few other tricks to Facebook Places, and the following video, dripping with a sincerity that suggests they have suddenly figured out something others haven’t, demonstrates them:

Also inevitable is that Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal will be given a test run before most other humans. Unlike his usually predictably estatic review of Apple products (generally done in time for Steve Jobs to use an actual Mossberg quote as a part of his Keynote presentations), Walt was actually a bit matter-of-fact about Facebook Places. Not cold or harsh, just… well, “Meh” would probably be the most effusive meta-adjective I’d use.

This is because what may become the most short-term-advantageous thing about Places is what it does for others, including those other check-in services. The APIs that could come streaming out could hook into and help fuel the growth of any number of companies Facebook as threatened or tried to buy recently, several of whom (Gowalla, Foursquare and Yelp) actually appeared in some form on stage with Facebook for Places’ debut. And yes, businesses can claim their “Place” via a Page as we and others mused months ago.

And what about long-term? Well you can better believe Facebook didn’t debut this to merely dip a toe in. Cross-platform geo-location ads, sacks of data on visitations and total domination of the “place” space is clearly a mid-term goal. Actual quote from Zuckerberg: “…certainly you can imagine these things in the future.”

We have been recently musing on the concept of “place” (including, “How Location Could Change The Future of Pages” last March) insofar as the web toys with tying itself to real-world geographies and the inherent opportunity and fear laden in those watching this wrestling match happen. But one thing we’ve always said about Facebook — their nearest, truest competitor in a spiritual sense was never MySpace, but Windows. They want to be the start, constant and end of the web for many people — the entry point in. And for many, they are. So now marry location ontop of that and you can begin to see how powerful they could become for the general public. For and to the general public, I should say. Being in Facebook, as a valid location that people actually visit in real life as well as “Like” could become the equivalent of having your name and address in the phone book in the 80′s and being a store that’s in the Mall. You want to be “seen” there- and now you can, by friends who aren’t even nearby to see you.

This, of course, begs the privacy question. But if we rest for a moment and assume that this is about who you allow to see your location, we can hopefully still talk about “place” and Facebook’s role in it in a rational fashion. I could choose to not tell a single friend where I was on Facebook and still find it incredibly valuable to know that a restaurant I hear about in Richmond, VA called “Strange Matter” has been visited by several of my friends, I could reference it in a Status Update and get real recommendations of what to eat there and tips such as bringing your own quarters for the vintage arcade games. 3/4 of that scenario already happened pre-Places, but now I could potentially verify that it’s a cool place that several of my less chatty friends have also patronized recently. It becomes an early indicator for me in a single search, allowing me then to pursue more info through other means (Yelp reviews, call-outs for other recommendations on Twitter, etc.).

Facebook Places doesn’t change the game as much as it does solidify it, make it whole and, likely, make it ubiquitous. What it does more than really innovate is fire a cannon in a battle previously fought by slingshots as it brings its half-a-billion active audience into the check-in game. But don’t be distracted by the battle to see whose or what type of check-in system wins. Instead, start to look ahead, with us, at what this will mean for the intersection of real and web location in the years ahead.

-Dean (@dbrowell)

UPDATED August 19, 2010: Not that Facebook Places is available in #RVA just yet. #Fail #FacebookPlaces, #Fail.

One last note: Notice that Places logo? As TechCrunch points out: “It’s a 4. In a Square. Yeah.“

Is there a direct correlation between integrating social media campaigns in higher education and increased quality enrollment and dollars raised?  According to real time success stories and the survey report, “Wondering what works?  The changing marketing mix in higher education” from Lipman Hearne and CASE, the answer is a resounding YES. Institutions that have integrated strategic social media campaigns with traditional marketing/advertising efforts have seen a wide margin of positive results.

Lipman Hearne and CASE partnered together to survey 212 CASE member institutions including liberal arts colleges, master’s level universities, research institutions, community colleges and a number of independent primary and secondary schools.  The research reveals significant data centered around marketing dollars spent and positive ROI when campaigns include social media strategies.

Key findings:

• Investors in research and planning were more likely to deploy more – and more varied – marketing efforts.

The extra effort seems to be paying off:  Of those moderate to heavy investors, 71 percent reported that marketing efforts had a positive impact on the quality of their applicants.

• Print publications aren’t dead

Data reveals that an increase in spending on interactive media (such as web microsites, online tours, student blogs, etc.) does not appear to be coming at the expense of print publications.

• Between FY ’08 and FY ’09, 55 percent of institutions surveyed allocated more to interactive; and 52 percent allocated more to social media

Moderate-to-heavy investors in interactive were more likely than average to report a positive impact on website hits, enrollment yield, quality of applicants, total philanthropic giving and the percentage of alumni who give.

• Those who were putting social media eggs in their basket were not only keeping that basket diversified – they were also bolstering their interactive marketing spending.

The moderate-to-heavy users of social media were actually spending less overall per student on marketing activities.  The moderate-to-heavies spent $83 per student, and the light-to-non-users spent $121 per student.

• When comparing institutions that worked with outside firms on specific activities with institutions that went solo, data revealed that having outside partners made a difference.

Institutions that partnered with outside firms for digital advertising saw more positive results on enrollment yield (88 percent compared to 67 percent) … and positive total giving results (76 percent compared to 49 percent).

For the full report, please click here.

It’s important to note that implementing a “strategic social media campaign” does not equal, “Let’s create a Facebook page and Twitter account and recycle our press releases online.”  First, ask yourself some key questions:  Are your target audiences even on Facebook and Twitter?  How are your target audiences using social medial channels?  What are the institution’s goals in utilizing social media channels?  Is it to improve your image, increase number of enrollments, increase the caliber of applications, increase the number of dollars raised for the annual fund, raise money for a capital campaign?  What about other social media channels, like YouTube and LinkedIn?

A strategic social media campaign should include extensive research to determine appropriate strategies to achieve desired outcomes.

-Heather (@hmillar13)

For example, MOG began in June of 2005 but really hit its stride a year later as an actual social network built on fans and music. My first contact with it was a year later, at Bonnaroo, after which I started a profile and dutifully used the iTunes plug-in that took glimpses of my catalog of songs and my play counts and suggested people with similar interests, artists I didn’t have and critical and fan thought I might like. Instead of “follow” or “like” (now ubiquitous terms for socializing) MOG used a much more forceful and meaningful term for those you cared to read: “Trusted.” If someone visited my profile page, perhaps drawn by a blog post, my music list or any other number of custom lists I had created (at one point detailing all of the tour t-shirts I owned) than they would also see a list of the writer/music-blogger (“MOG’ers”) that I trusted. It was interesting to see how slavish our re-posting was between us. It really was about trust. I discovered more new music in my first year of using MOG than I had at nearly any other point in my life. And it was all music I would come to LOVE. I discovered Arcade Fire, NIN spinoff projects and more.

It was pretty incredible and way before it’s time. When I saw Twitter’s “Who To Follow” space debut earlier this month I thought it was a nice addition but part of me had to laugh– MOG had been doing that for four years and far more accurately.

So cheers to MOG, who may have lost me as a regular contributor (my profile is a bit of a misshapen ghost-town of 2007-8) but gained me as a fan of their other efforts such as their Pandora-like music service (app and all) and now their aggregation of the best music writing on the web.

We here at Feedback love music AND social media. It’s nice when we can get the chocolate in our peanut butter.

-Dean (@dbrowell)