Let’s flash back to senior year of high school. Homecoming football game. Prom king and queen. SATs and the overwhelming college applications. Aside from the stress of hoping to be accepted into your top school, nothing was worse than the daunting college essays. George Mason University has taken a colossal jump into social media and has allowed students to submit YouTube videos about themselves in lieu of an essay. Mason is one of the first universities to fully embrace social media in the application process and provide an alternative to the grueling application process. Creativity, at its finest. I may be a little biased since Mason is my alma mater; however, it’s great to see institutions of higher education think about integrating social media into their existing processes. For an example, see below:
As a student, would you prefer the new alternative? Surely, I can bet that admissions counselors are loving the fact they can put their reading glasses down, kick up their feet, and enjoy the creativity and passion that prospective students are putting into their college application. For the full story, please click here.
Since I’ve been snowed in over the past week, I’ve found myself using my iPhone more frequently while I sit around with cabin fever. To my surprise, I saw the Google buzz icon when doing a search, along with a new search interface on my phone. Never having seen that before, I click on it, did some more research, and came to find out about a new Google product….without having read about it in hyped up articles months before the rollout – unheard of! Contrast this with the Google Wave rollout, which was hyped as a game changer, and “the new face of email for the future”. Well, who knows if Google Wave will eventually catch on, but just from my personal experience (and my fellow Google Wave friends), it was all hype and not much value. On the other hand, I actually like Google buzz, a lot. I’ll admit I’m not the Twitter-er type, finding it time consuming and a bit self absorbed to constantly update people on “my status”, but I think I’ll actually use Google buzz. It makes perfect sense to me to include it as a part of Gmail, where I do most of my personal and work communication, through email and chat. I think Google buzz fills a gap where it may be a topic of thread that isn’t email worthy, i.e. “I’m excited about all of this snow, here are some pictures”, but allows you to be more casual as you would in a chat, with a large group of people. I’ll have to keep playing with it a bit more and see if the value holds up in the long term, but so far so good. Maybe Google should take a cue from this roll-out and not hype up the next product prematurely!
This is definitely a first for us, but we are proud to have one of our clients receive presidential recognition! Last month, Sara Coleman introduced President Obama at a town hall meeting in her home town of Raleigh, NC. Sara is the owner of The Cupcake Shoppe in Raleigh, and was chosen to introduce President Obama to highlight entrepreneurship in the local economy.
We have been working with Sara for a few weeks on a redesign of her site – which is officially live now – http://www.thecupcakeshopperaleigh.com/, and can say without exaggeration she has been one of our favorite clients.
Her enthusiasm for the project, coupled with her good natured personality made it a joy to work with her, so it’s no wonder she was chosen for such an honor!
Unfortunately she was unable to give Obama a box of her cupcakes to take on the road, as giving food to the President can be a difficult thing to do, but she has assured us he won’t get away empty handed; she is sending him a box of her bakery’s T-shirts…here’s hoping Obama visits her website to place an order!
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