Just a few updates. I’m taking some time off from Twitter/Facebook, or at least on a severe social networking diet currently. I’ve found that I waste a lot of time on these sites, compulsively refreshing, retweeting, etc. to avoid doing any actual work. Instead of reading books, writing posts, taking pictures, editing videos, and building websites I F5 Twitter for hours a day. No more, I say. No more!
I just got a new lens for my DSLR, and as soon as it stops snowing I’m going to go out and take some pictures. In the mean time, check out the new Photography page. I’m excited to get out and take some shots. I’ve been kind of a shut in lately, with all the snow and whatnot.
I’m in my last semester of school and I already have a job. I need to turn on the afterburners and power through my thesis and remaining coursework. I’m excited for the big changes that are coming.
So, I was just starting to celebrate the end of the Fall 2009 semester with my roommate Ben Mingle when I noticed something peculiar.
TWITTER GOT DEFACED, ZOMG. Hacked by the Iranian Cyber Army.
Screen caps…
While the defacement didn’t load all the way [many broken images] and now Twitter.com simply doesn’t resolve, a quick google search showed that the “Iranian Cyber Army” has defaced many pages, and the intended defacement can be seen below.
Things have been kind of dead here, but sometimes that’s a good thing. I’ve been keeping really busy.
I’m making some upgrades to the site (note the new Twitter widget on the right sidebar), and feeling kind of creative. I’m just in the mood to work on my own projects, rather than school stuff, right now.
Not going to make this a lengthy post, but I also should mention that I was fortunate enough to receive an internship offer from Deloitte for this summer. The interview process was somewhat grueling, and I didn’t think I did great, but things worked out in my favor.
To anyone looking to obtain an internship with Deloitte: I highly recommend doing some research on the company’s website. While I wasn’t asked many questions at all about Deloitte (which surprised me, since most companies ask “What do you know about us?” or something similar), I did find that many of the interview preparation materials on the Deloitte website were VERY helpful to me.
Among my many responsibilities at the College of Information Sciences and Technology, I am the Media Director of IST2U. In a nutshell, this means I’m the guy that gets e-mails about upcoming events from all the folks in the offices at IST, which I then condense into short blurbs that contain the essential information (date, time, location, a sentence or two summarizing the event.) The purpose of IST2U is to be the official source of information about events and opportunities happening within the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State.
In my previous semester as the media director, I focused primarily on keeping the wheels spinning. The transition from the previous director was a tad bumpy (due to no one’s fault in particular, just the nature of the beast), and so my main efforts were spent meeting folks around the office and processing updates as they came in. However, towards the middle of the semester I began to get a bit more experimental. First, I added Google Analytics tracking into the Drupal installation that runs the site. With the help of one of the IST system administrators, the analytics results exclude any traffic from inside the IST Building (since many of the workstations there have IST2U as their homepage). This greatly reduced the number of “false hits.”
I also setup a Twitter account for IST2U. This was my first stab at “real” marketing for the site. While I have given brief talks at student government meetings, in classes, and so on, I had never really actively “pushed” IST2U to people. By integrating IST2U with the Twitter social network, I took the first steps towards giving students the opportunity to select from a variety of content delivery mechanisms. My predecessors used e-mail campaigns, essentially carpet bombing all-student mailing lists with a weekly digest of news and events. However, students often begrudged this approach and would create spam filters, or simply delete the messages without reading them.
The best thing about the Twitter account for IST2U (for me) is that it is fully automated. Using the TwitterFeed service, the RSS of the page is checked every half hour and updates are automatically posted to the Twitter account. This is a great payoff, as it takes only a few minutes to configure, and after that you can just let it do it’s thing. My ideal marketing solution is the passive “trickling” of data to different outputs, from which the userbase can choose their preferred method of content retrieval. This will leave me free to compose new posts, analyze traffic and advertising results and develop new campaigns based on these results, and improve the site by adding new features.
I believe that RSS is highly underutilized within the college demographic. I know very few people that use any sort of RSS reader, and even fewer that are “up to date” on the articles they subscribe to. Therefore, having the website and an RSS feed as the only mechanisms for content delivery is, in my opinion, a terrible strategy. For this reason, I am trying to extend IST2U into more social networks that I know are utilized by college students.
Tonight I setup a Facebook “Page” for IST2U. On it, I have created a discussion board where students can post feedback, feature requests, etc. that I will evaluate and hopefully implement during the re-launch of IST2U. My goal is to have IST2U fully migrated to WordPress (I find it to be considerably less “clunky” than Drupal) by Monday, January 26th. It is my hope that through these improvements and renovations, IST2U can finally become what it was always intended to be: a useful, viable web resource for IST and SRA students.
I am currently in the process of drafting a traffic report, in which I’m conducting an analysis of the data I currently have on IST2U, as gathered by Google Analytics over the past several months. This will be the baseline upon which we compare the success or failure of IST2U in the future.
I haven’t posted any news here for some time, so I thought I’d post a brief update.
Classes start tomorrow. I’m extremely excited for IST 402: eMarketing / The Google Online Marketing Challenge. I hope to learn a lot about using AdWords and online marketing in general in the class.
My holiday break was enjoyable, but uneventful. I did get some reading done, including the excellent Managing Humans, which everyone should check out.
I’ve started a small personal project to teach myself jQuery and improve my PHP skills. The beginnings of it can be found here.
