I am counting down the days until the public release of Google Wave.

…but that’s irrelevant.

I am still out of a job at the end of September, so if you know anyone hiring a web and social media strategist, please put in a good word for me.

…but that’s kind of irrelevant too.

My only regret from the past 14 months with Terry College is that I haven’t been given the opportunity to do anything really big and awesome with social media beyond just establishing a presence for interactions.

My supervisors will occasionally send an email out to my department, a FWD from the Dean that says “Look at the creative ways these other universities are using social media! This might give you some ideas for how we can direct our efforts.” It kind of sounds like they wish we could do these things, and almost like they want us to do these things. But the truth of the matter is that I have been trained to understand how we’re “too busy” and have “higher priorities” than to develop a marketing strategy that is custom-built for leveraging social media.

I have ideas, but the response to sharing them would go something like this: “I agree, it would be great if we had time to develop something like that, but unfortunately right now we just have so many other things that we need to get done before we can commit resources to that kind of thing.” So we can do these things. I can do these things. But my ideas are too often brushed off as “non-mission-critical”. Which I feel is a mission-critical mistake. After all, when was the last time we ever ran out of stuff to do in higher education? It will never happen, so eventually you have to make a sacrifice.

This lack of innovation will stunt our ability to adapt to trends in the future and since we are already lagging on these social media trends, I would say that the future is now. One day Terry College will need to be more engaged with social media. At that point, I will be long gone because my job expires in a month and two weeks. I’m just a temp employee. Which sucks because I would very much like to take them further into this era of new media.

OK, so it’s not fraud EXACTLY… but it’s darn close and it is the single most aggravating thing in the [Facebook] world to me. Fraudulent representation of Fan Pages.

Chick-fil-A has an official Fan Page on Facebook. They advertise it on their website, so you know it’s legit.

Look at their fan count. As of this being written, 582,871 people have become fans of Chick-fil-A. Is that all? Apparently, yes. Actually, no. There is another Fan Page claiming the same title, just with the “F” being capitalized [incorrectly]. This page has an additional 405,618 fans at the time this article is being written. That is a combined total of 988,489 fans of Chick-fil-A. Account for Facebook users that are probably fans of both pages (why would you do that?!), and Chick-fil-A should still have well over 800,00 fans.

Now… Facebook has in place the option to report fan pages. One of the valid reasons for reporting, as listed in the dropdown menu of choices, is “Fake page.” I urge everyone reading this to go to the fake page, report it as such, remove your fan status, and become a fan of the real page. If you love Chick-fil-A, you’ll do this. Benefit from coupon giveaways, store opening announcements, and avoid the lame status updates from the fake page like this one: “Chick-Fil-A wants to wish everyone a HAPPY DAY!” posted May 12 at 8:18pm. GAG.

Many organizations simply ignore the proper ways of interacting before they introduce their brand to social media. They are quick to jump in because it’s trendy and popular, but just having accounts on various popular sites does not guarantee a positive return. In fact, Twitter can harm as easily as it can help if you’re not properly prepared.

The most common mistake of new Twitterers is letting their account become stale after only a few days. Ideally, you’ll want to “tweet” at least two-three times a day so that each time someone looks at your page, there is something new for them to see. Often I see pages from institutions that only update once a week or perhaps haven’t updated in over a month. Rarely do I give them the benefit of a doubt that “well maybe they’re just busy lately. I’ll check back next week.” This is common behavior for social users: if it isn’t appealing the first time, they don’t come back a second.

Another frequent mistake from organizations is that they use Twitter only to post events and announcements. While this is acceptable if you have a large following (which means that people are already interested in what you are doing and can therefore get away with it), it is not an effective strategy for gaining followers initially (going back to the significance of the first impression).

I have recommended to my team here in web services to tweet at least twice a day. Additionally, we all have separate personal accounts that we use frequently to keep focused on the true purpose of Twitter: interaction. On Terry College’s official Twitter (@TerryCollege), we try to keep the verbiage casual and social. We only announce a few events each week, and we offer several direct, personalized messages to individual followers (students and alumni, mostly) that keep the friendly interactions rolling.

We have not even advertised our own Twitter/Facebook/YouTube accounts on the website yet because we’re still tweaking and synchronizing our brand’s personality on each. We have been now since late last year.