DISQUS

I'm sure you could have found some eco/green friendly reasons to list also. Can't beat the price and as you mentioned it really isn't any longer when you factor in all the time. ALSO how about luggage... I bet you can carry as much as you want?

DUDE YOUR ON A FRICKIN' TRAIN! That's the real reason right?!

If we keep the comments like this coming I'm sure they will read this post at some point and seriously consider a paid version for that... because here are some people who would pay for it.

@Paul - I agree the top banner is a little annoying, but I'm 99% sure that is part of their marketing plan and I can't blame them for that. I mean they are offering us this really cool service for free. Also I'm sure it's part of how they gather their analytics data. Maybe at some point they come out w/ a paid version that you can remove the banner? For now it's free so I'm not going to complain too much.

That damn stop button. So important to be who you are, but I will toss this out there. Sometimes it's worth the effort to step it up and be more professional and here's why.

If you don't think your a freakin' rock star and an awesome badass then why is anyone else ever going to believe that you are? You have to believe in yourself before anyone else will. So keep rocking and working harder than everyone else and then you don't have to defend your ways because actions speak louder than words.

@Andrew - did you ever get the exclude subfolder to work? Is that a folder that you simply do not want to track traffic at all? Maybe you could just remove the tracking code from pages in that subdirectory?

@David Brooks - Even w/ a hostname how are you specifying it? Did you make sure to include the forward slash (\) before your . elements? Try setting up a seperate profile to track just this and you might have to tinker w/ something see if it works the next day and tinker again. It can be tricky to get things exactly right.

@Manuel - Look up at number 4 you will need to use click and follow the regular expression link and that should answer your question.

Hey guys, Great discussion going on in the comments here. Social media is tricky because people expect immidiate feedback at all times. I think 24hrs is probably more of a realistic window to this instead of 48hrs simply because of the nature of the medium. Of course I'm also more of an advocate of using these social media platforms, specifically facebook, as a landing page with an intro to your instutiton but then driving them back to your site where you engage them in the additional conversation. It's easier to track and you do hold more control over things should they get out of control. No I never want to limit people, but it's good to have it should it come up.

Also just wanted to make sure that it's stated that Social Media Comes Last. I wrote this post right before Christmas and it kind of got buried during the holiday's but I think it's relevant here. If you don't have the rest of your stuff in order then trying to commit the time or resources to Social Media isn't the best use of your time.

@Adam - you definitely have helped us get out there on both StumbleUpon and Digg. THANK YOU!

@Nancy - That's great! Any chance you could convince any of them to add the feed to their RSS and become regular readers? ;)

@Brad Kleinman - it's a blog... so you kind of have to expect a high bounce rate. People come consume the post and leave. Especially if they are dedicated readers because they already know your archive so what's the point of them digging? As for the spikes those are posts that did well in social media. My post last week w/ the Top 10 Posts of 2008 can give you a better idea of what those posts were.

@Karine, Brad, & Andrew - I owe so much to you guys it's not even funny. It has been a pleasure to get to know you and blog in this industry together over the last year. Let the good times roll as we all move into 2009!

You say it's not complete, but this is a heck of an extensive list. Like the list for Rock Stars.

GOOGLE DOCS! Also I love Dropbox, I'm easily able to share documents and they stay backed up in the clouds even if my computer were to get fried. I am totally with you here though. Email as an attachement gets cluttered and then you have 5 versions of a document floating around and you are forced to spend the next hour figuring out which one is the most updated or splicing them together to make a completely updated doc.

We did some test a while back and I believe that links that were bold got a 20% higher click through rate. Something that simple to help it stand out. Now imagine if you made bold all your links not just in email, but on your site and on other sites linking back to you. How would you like to increase engagement, traffic, etc 20%? I wish I had some more of the research, but yeah something that simple does make a HUGE difference.

@Stephen - For a good base I would look at your email marketing campaigns. If your open rates are around 25% then I would say that is a fairly safe goal to shoot for.

@Rachel - it comes down to ROI. How much time have you spent developing this site? What is a student applying to your school worth? What about scheduling a visit? You need to set the same for a student joining a social media site. Budget cruches are a HUGE concern right? So how much time and money is put into this project so far? Once you know that and have come up with an actual value of what a member is worth then you can actually begin looking at value dollars. Remember time is money and although the ning group is fairly inexpensive to setup and run with it has obviously cost you some time that could have been spent doing other things.

Basically you need your monetary justification that this is worth doing and if each member of cafe is worth $100 and you have 165 members well that's $16,500 worth of value to the school. So how do you assign this sort of value? Well go back to thinking about how much a student coming to your school is worth... if your school costs $20,000/yr and your a four year institution and have a discount average of $5,000 for financial aid with a 80% of students completing school in four years than every lead is potentially worth ($20,000-$15,000)*4*.8 or $48,000. Honestly this could be a whole series of posts talking about this.

LOVE the fact that your building relationships and the real life snippets your sharing. As we talked about this weekend I want to hear more about your goals going in and expectations so far. I know that it's "exceeded your wildest expectation", but that is because you really didn't set any expectation. You sent out 1,300 invites and are closing in on 15%. What was you goal of this group in the first week, month? Do you have any other plans for marketing the group besides that Ning email?

Seriously awesome stuff, I'm just playing a little of devil's advocate. ;)

I've always been on the side of the open links off site in a new window, as anyone that has read any of my posts here will know. For me it comes down to the marketing and not wanting them to leave the site. I'm totally about the user experience and letting users choose, but I guess I still believe that people aren't to the point where they don't need hand holding yet. The audience of this blog probably doesn't need hand holding, but then it comes back to the marketing reasons.

Like everyone else here I think there really isn't a perfect solution for this and we will be debating it for years to come.

Fienen I do really like that instead of just readdressing the issue you present possible solutions and alternatives and there is definitely a lot of value in that. This is really interested maybe it's something we would want to tinker with on this blog?

Great idea. I think this is something each of us could do. Work goals are great, but personal goals are also really important.

@Trevor & Issacson - I did read that Meebo had updated but this post had actually been sitting around in the queue for a month and didn't spend the time to go update it. Doing that now. Thanks.

@Nick & Justin - Pidgin is definitely the most versatile with lots of customizable skins, plugins, etc. I will give you that. Problem is that it takes time and still not the best eye candy of interface. Digsby was just so clean and quick coming right out of the box. I also really liked the email notifications right out of the box also. I also don't spend any time in Linux and limited time in OS X so other reasons why Digsby wins for me.

Also Justin make sure you give me the link to your followup and I'll add it to this post.

@Dan O. - Definitely check out Digsby. I really think you will be quite satisfied.

@Mike & Brendan - You have me thinking... there could probably be a whole post or series of posts just on defining and establishing goals around the web. It really is such an important piece of the puzzle. Also so much of goals is fully understanding what all is possible which is multiple other discussions.

@Brad - Thanx for your kind words. I'm glad that you enjoyed the post.

Andrew,
I guess the books are just ones that have been reviewed on the site, but if you have some reading suggestions your thoughts are always welcome! Haven't really done one in a while, but it's come up in discussion that we should be doing more of them.

Thanks guys. I have a whole month before I have to go to work in another office. Sure doesn't seem like time off though...

@Jeremy - As I suggested above have you tried using student workers to handle the little nitpicky day-to-day stuff so YOU can focus more on the big projects? I mean just being able to pass on all the little minor edits and checking on site things can consume a whole day. Make a list of all the small five minute things that need to be done weekly and have students work on those things not your major projects. If they do turn out to be reliable and you keep them long term then you can begin to entrust them with larger projects. I never give a large project to a fresh student worker. I might give them a piece of a project but play small ball with the students and you free up your time.

@Natalie - geez. That is a slap in the face for sure. I'm sure your Student body will jump on board to killing them for that. Really... an IT dept doesn't have antivirus in place to handle a little Facebook virus?

Black hat tip would be a proxy server. Just google "proxy facebook" there are plenty of them out there that will give you access to facebook through their attempts to block the site.

@Fienen - Thanks I knew I forgot something. I added the links to the post and surveys to the top of the post.

@D.W. - Thanks for the link. I updated the post to include it.

@Andrew - If you can make Freshman work for you all the better! You have them for four years.

@Brad - After 911 and getting laid off at the local IT shop as a bench tech I was fortunate enough to stumble into a campus job working with professors on websites and web initiatives for a year and half before moving back to IT for a few more years. Great to give back and get them excited.

These are great tips. You have me thinking now because all these were part of the decision process and might be worth a followup post. Plus I've been kind of "building my personal brand" pretty hard core the last year and can definitely give some advice about how to do that.

Kyle James is a little more popular name that I've been battling w/ some actor on IMDB and some teenagers on MySpace for a while.

Genius! Quit simple, but incredibly effective. Of course you have to do some extra work in GA to get your filters and profiles setup properly, but talk about a whole new wave of premium intelligence.

I'd recommend setting up a profile that filters out the "outgoing" subdirectory.