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How to become Missouri State homepage famous

October 21, 2013 by

Media hub

In this post I would like to do a quick review of how the media hub and activity stream on the Missouri State homepage function, as well as some general rules and suggestions for getting your content to appear on the homepage.

Overall homepage rules

  • Content must be relevant to at least two audiences
  • Audiences include prospective students, current students, faculty and staff, alumni, parents and family, community members

Media hub

The media hub consists of four content tabs: photos, videos, athletics, and Go Maroon! Typically, content in the media hub only appears during the week it is relevant.

Media hub

Photos

  • Consists of photos highlighting that week’s events
  • Is the default tab on Sunday, Monday, Thursday and Saturday
  • Changes weekly

Videos

  • Consists of 3 videos; 1 main video and 2 smaller videos
  • Is the default tab on Tuesday
  • Changes weekly

Athletics

  • Consists of the most recent scores, an athletics calendar, and athletics news
  • Is never the default tab
  • Content is automatically generated from MissouriStateBears.com

Go Maroon!

  • Highlights something ‘social’
  • This tab changes to BearWear Friday photos on Friday
  • Ts the default tab on Wednesday and Friday
  • Changes weekly

Activity streamStream

Activity streams are present on high level pages such as the homepage, Current Students, Public Affairs, and President’s site. All of these activity streams pull sources and content from a single database, though the content and sources pulled onto each stream varies.

  • Streams pull content from Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, blogs and RSS feeds
  • A group consists of a department or University unit
    • A group can have multiple sources feeding the stream (ex: COB Facebook and COB Twitter accounts)
  • Only one item per group is pulled every 30 minutes
    • If two items are posted within 30 minutes, the second item will never display
  • The stream removes duplicate links
    • If two different items point to the same link, only the first item will display in the stream
  • Only status updates and photos pull from Facebook

Other options

Promo buttons and posting to the master calendar are additional methods to get your content on the homepage.

Promo buttons

Promo buttons are used to advertise short-term items on the University homepage or applicable audience pages. The purpose of promo buttons is to promote any initiative/event to your intended audiences. The promo buttons appear on the left of the activity stream on the homepage.

Master calendar

The calendar of events is intended to provide complete information regarding Missouri State events to the campus community and the general public, and serves as the single source for all University web calendars. The calendar appears on the right of the activity stream on the homepage.

Filed Under: web strategy and development Tagged With: calendar, content, homepage, media hub, promo buttons, promotion, Social Media, stream

Homepage Survival Guide – HighEdWeb 2011

October 24, 2011 by

Homepage Survival Guide
Homepage Survival Guide
View the presentation slides

On Oct. 24, Sara Clark and I presented at HighEdWeb 2011 in Austin, Tx.

We showcased how we used our braaaains to bring content from many different sources to life by adding an institutional lifestream to our homepage. This stream combines Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Foursquare, Flickr, blog and RSS items from multiple accounts into one listing. We created a stronghold with food, water and basic supplies (bring your weapon of choice) and discussed how we became infected with the idea, developed a solution to manage the hordes and found immunizations to keep the content plague from spreading out of control.

Filed Under: Redesign, web strategy and development Tagged With: content, heweb11, HighEdWeb, presentation, Social Media, stream, zombies

Activity Streams

September 2, 2010 by

Activity Stream

One of the key components of the Missouri State website redesign is the new Activity Stream. It’s featured on both the Missouri State homepage and Current Students page. The activity stream combines content feeds from various campus providers – University Relations, Public Affairs, SGA, Athletics, SAC and the Bookstore to name just a few.

Not only does it pull in content from many different providers, it also pulls in content from different services such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Delicious and various RSS feeds. This makes for a very dynamic and constantly changing stream of information.

Activity Stream

Here’s how it works:

  • Only one item is pulled per source every 30 minutes. This is to ensure that one content provider doesn’t overload the stream by posting a lot of content in a very short amount of time.
  • If content is posted on multiple sites it will only show the first entry. For example, if a link is posted on the Missouri State Facebook page and then the Missouri State Twitter account, only the first post from Facebook will show on the stream. This helps to reduce duplicated entries.
  • Only the 15 most recent items appear on the homepage (the 13 most recent appear on the current students page), but older items can be viewed by visiting the Full Stream, which shows the 100 most recent items.
  • From Facebook, only manual updates are pulled into the stream; this means that anything posted by an application (like Notes, RSS Graffiti, Twitter, etc.) does not appear. For content posted to Twitter, the stream ignores any items posted from Facebook, Twitterfeed and the Twitter Tools plugin on Missouri State blogs.

Some best practices you should be following when posting your content:

  • Don’t post a lot of content at once. There’s no need to post six months worth of events in the span of five minutes. Not only is this an ineffective way to promote your content, it also has the potential to alienate your followers, who will relate such activity with spam. Space out your content postings as much as you can, and if you do have more than one piece of content you need to post at the same time, wait at least 30 minutes to do so to ensure that all of the items appear on the activity stream.
  • Use tools that minimize copying and pasting your content into different sources. You should only need to post your update in one place, and then by setting up the correct tools, your content will disseminate automatically to your other accounts. Some great examples of these tools are the Facebook to Twitter option available to Facebook page administrators, or Twitterfeed for Twitter users. Last fall I presented on RSS and Social Media Coordination, and if you would like to see more of these tools in action I suggest you watch this video presentation. Not only does this coordination between your sites make the workload easier on you, it also streamlines how that content comes into the activity stream and helps reduce the possibilities of content duplication.
  • Similarly with blogs, take advantage of having notifications of new blog posts sent automatically to Facebook, using an application like Notes or RSS Graffiti, and Twitter using the Twitter Tools plugin available on Missouri State blogs.
  • When retweeting others’ content on Twitter, use the new retweet feature and do not put “RT” in front of the tweet. This will ensure that if you are retweeting content from another provider on the activity stream, that tweet will not be duplicated.

Features to be added in the future:

  • We will be adding an RSS feed of all the content from the activity stream, so users can subscribe to the feed and keep up to date with everything happening on campus without having to visit the website to see all the content from the activity stream.
  • We will be integrating a Like button on all activity stream content sourced from Facebook. At present you can see how many people like Facebook content, but once this button is added users will be able to like content without leaving the Missouri State website.
  • The full stream page will eventually go away and will be replaced with an expanding homepage that will show older content on the same page – similar to how the news stream works on Facebook. This will allow users to see older content without going to a different page.
  • There will be a button added that allows others in the campus community to submit their content sources to be added to the stream. For content to be considered for the homepage, it must have at least two audiences. For content to be considered for the current student page, the content must be relevant to current students.

Filed Under: Redesign, Social media, web strategy and development Tagged With: activity stream, content, events, facebook, flickr, homepage, News, Redesign, rss, Social Media, stream, Twitter, YouTube

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