As a social media strategist, I tend to get excited about new products that can have a big impact within the social media landscape.  It is with this excitement that CUnet announces the launch of SocialThumb, a new social media management tool that allows schools to easily engage both current and prospective students across multiple social media presences, whether it is for specific departments, campuses or individual users.

So, just what is it about SocialThumb that gets a social media strategist excited?  Well, it connects to and cross-publishes on more than a dozen different types of social media sites. It monitors and tracks conversations people are having with your brand. It allows you to schedule both the publishing of content as well as assign new content to your team. It even generates nifty reports that allow you to examine your social media success at both an aggregate and specific level! (For those technically inclined, it interfaces with myriad social software and provides workflow management solutions to streamline the publishing process, as well as a robust analytics platform to track social engagement and reach to demonstrable return on investment.)

And, in addition to all that, it saves me about three hours of tedious logging in to multiple accounts, republishing the same piece of content across multiple pages, and other time-consuming tasks.

SocialThumb is not only impressive, but definitely passes my “Toy I Want to Play With” test, because it manages the publishing process from the initial calendaring of when content should be published through the assigning and submission of content and even to making sure that content is approved by key stakeholders, it relieves much of the annoyance of managing large social media presences.  And, I’m also proud to say, does it for a fraction of the cost of something like the enterprise-level solutions offered by Hootsuite or CoTweet.

The official press release about the software is located here and we’ll be following up with some posts examining some of its features, but for anyone who absolutely can’t wait and must try today, please feel free to contact us and ask for a demonstration.

It’s just about a month into 2011 and students are really optimistic towards higher education this year, at least according to education-related New Year’s resolutions published through social media.

Between December 25 and January 8, CUnet’s social media department combed Facebook, Twitter, message boards and online comments look for New Year’s resolutions focused on enrolling and finishing some type of higher education. For content that could be identified as a relating to a specific degree field (“HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! Resolution is to become a nurse at the end of summer!” for example), we segmented the posts into specific categories of Healthcare, Criminal Justice, Massage Therapy, Cosmetology, Automotive, Art & Design, Online, MBA and Culinary. In total, we reviewed nearly 1,100 pieces of content.

This was a pretty exciting study to do. At the most practical level, being able to look through a window into how people are talking about higher education allows marketing messages to be refined and tailored better – the truth, better told, as it were.

Color me a romantic, though. I think the real value here is in being able to see the actual words that people are writing. In any industry, it’s possible to lose sight of the very real people that make up your target audience, largely because you spend so much time talking about them as numbers. If you want to work in social media, though, that’s a death sentence. The resolutions we examined provide a very real, very human reminder of that point.

Our press release about the research is located here, but check out a full version of our Wordle word cloud beneath the jump.

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Last week, the writers behind Syfy’s Eureka went public on their blog about a bizarre hostage situation that had been going on in their office. Between random notes glued together with letters cut from magazines and threats of teddy bear torture, the Eureka staff managed to craft together a nearly perfect post illuminating the kind of corporate culture they have in their office.

As with many such situations, this one began with a puzzle – literally. See, the Eureka writers had taken to doing jigsaw puzzles when they needed to think about something else besides writing. While attempting a particularly daunting 1,500 piece map of the night sky, they discovered that a key piece, part of the galactic equator, had been kidnapped. This set in motion a sordid tale that involves both sides taking hostages – on one side, the aforementioned puzzle piece. On the other, two teddy bears that were blindfolded and threatened with execution unless the piece was returned.

The whole thing is documented on their blog, complete with pictures of the escalating ransom notes, and it’s worth a read, if only for a laugh. What I find most entertaining about this, though, is that it makes a pretty clear statement about their office culture without ever specifically talking about it.

Many people distrust declaratory statements about a company’s culture made by the company itself and, as it turns out, with good reason. According to much academic research, people tend to be pretty bad self-evaluators, often being more forgiving in their assessments of their own personalities. Discrepancies between self-perception and others’ perceptions are nothing new and psychological research has been discussing this for almost half a century. There’s even research specifically on self-presentational theory (that is, how we talk about ourselves) that suggests we present ourselves in ways designed to create a favorable impression and avoid looking foolish or inconsistent.

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Yesterday, I delivered two webinars discussing the social media space and potential uses in the higher education market. It probably doesn’t come as a shock to most people that social media is on the rise. Right now, three-quarters of adult internet users communicate through social media. To continue reaching potential students, colleges and universities need to include social media in their marketing strategy.

In yesterday’s webinar, we reviewed current market trends and discussed how colleges and universities can interact with current and potential students through social media venues. For anyone who didn’t have the opportunity to attend, I’m embedding the presentation here for you to see it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t include any of the wonderful questions we received from participants, but for anyone interested, we’ll be giving another social media webinar in July. We’d love to see you there.