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.

Like it or not, with the influx of new media and viral marketing, higher education can no longer control its message or perception. In essence, hardly anyone can control public perception anymore. What organizations can do, however, is try to influence that message and communicate/market in the most strategic/effective way.

After working in higher education myself for over ten years, I think it’s safe to say the means of communication and marketing has changed … an obvious understatement. From marketing the institution to prospective students, to communicating with current students/faculty/staff to engaging with younger and older alumni alike, higher education institutions have had a difficult time embracing new media to attract and sustain communication with their constituents.

Higher education marketing and communication strategies must adapt to stay afloat and compete in today’s economy. How many print brochures do you think the average junior/senior in high school receives from prospective colleges and universities? If you stripped away the college logo and tagline, could you decipher major differences between the marketing materials and what they are trying to “sell?”  How many juniors/seniors in high school read the newspaper … in print?  Remember your audiences and respect how they are communicating in today’s world.

Luanne Lawrence, Vice President of University Advancement at Oregon State University said in response to their new media campaign, “Powered by Orange,”

“It’s scary to relinquish control of your message. But when you build a loyal community, it does your work for you.”

Right now, my two favorite social media campaigns for higher ed are yielding amazing results. Oregon State University’s social media campaign caters more towards prospective students and influencing the reputation of the university by including all constituents. The campaign launched last spring. School enrollment has soared, first-time donations by alumni were up and visits to the OSU website grew exponentially.

Macalaster College happened into a social media frenzy. A seemingly innocent self-parodying video on YouTube, “President’s Day at Macalester College” initially designed to attract and engage alumni, ended up reaching over 55,000 viewers. Annual fund donations spiked. The self-proclaimed non-technology savvy college president had a change of heart. President Brian Rosenberg of Macalester College had never blogged, tweeted, and he wasn’t on Facebook. He learned first-hand how new forms of social media “have more potential to connect audiences across both generational and geographic boundaries than do virtually all previous forms of communication.”

This isn’t a sales pitch. It’s reality. Pay attention to your audiences. Embrace new media … and accept the fact that the old adage of “controlling your message” is obsolete.

- Heather (@hmillar13)

Foursquare Launches Location Layers

Some of you may remember me crowing over augmented reality in the last year, and certainly everyone has heard my emphasis on the concept of place and location… as predicted, these are all converging and in some really remarkable (read: cool) ways.  Take a look.

-Dean (@dbrowell)

This very change, as small and undramatic as it has been incorporated, provides a fantastic look into the future of search and the contextual web. Consider how the open display of credibility and validation will change how we find information. We already see the results of that, in theory, in how search already plays out. We assume that the relevance determined by the wizard behind the Google curtain with every click of a “search” button.

Is there an assumed trust that all of those people who find this useful or like something are being sincere and are for real? Certainly, just as we assume when we search now that what appears first is truly relevant (paid ads aside – not that the first unpaid ad hasn’t ostensibly paid to be listed high via optimizing, etc.). AllFacebook.com wonders aloud about “like baiting” as well, but in some ways that still feels less nefarious than engineering a page that has no business showing up so high in a ranking to appear first, even if it actually has no relevance– a practice that happens every day in our typical search.

But then imagine how the actual display of the relevance, such as number of likes, incorporates the, “Is This Review Useful”-ization of the web. In some ways it’s fundementally taking the algorithm away from tinkerers and into the hands of motivated consumers — for good or ill. (And I’m not saying this is a good or bad thing, just fascinated that and how it’s happening.) Facebook wants to create a “social semantic search engine” that essentially runs off of the interactions of people as relevance fuel, not meta data tricks. This very urge and their platform and critical mass of interactions in which to try it means we will have a lot to chew on in the near future as the underpinnings of information display in search give way to new supports.

Google’s caching Tweets and displaying in some first searches. Facebook is listing by Like. Where will we be next year as sentiment creeps not just into our results, but into the algorithm itself?

-Dean (@dbrowell)