So, I'm Michael...

By now, many of you are aware of the Facebookgate Redux. This is a continuation of the issue Brad Ward discovered back in 2008. And of course, we saw it for the class of 2014 as well. Companies are creating fake Facebook groups posing as institutions to market services to the students that join. The thing is, this is a problem we are likely to be stuck with for some time. If it isn’t housing, it’ll just be some other angle.  Trying to stop it is like crushing cockroaches. But, there are some things we can do to arm ourselves and protect our students. What’s more important to mention is that just because we are seeing this on Facebook, it is hardly limited to just that environment. What I’d like to go over are a handful of strategies to handle these problems.

Attack!

Of course, the most obvious strategy is to go on the offensive. In the case of RoomSurf, you can complain to Facebook on a couple issues. In some cases, it can be a violation of the TOS, since fake accounts are sometimes used to create the pages. That isn’t universally true, but you can investigate. You can also complain about copyright and trademark infringement, as they frequently appear to be using official logos and imagery.

Sidebar: A particular point that pissed me off about the logo usage was that the punk running RoomSurf had the audacity to say:

When informed that several of the colleges — including Tufts, Northwestern and Oswego — told a New York Times reporter on Tuesday they did not authorize the use of their logos on his groups, he said he would gladly substitute a campus photo, “if they just want to send me a message.”

Say it with me: It’s still infringement whether or not someone notifies you. Personally, that sort of willful disregard makes me hope some schools get together and file a lawsuit against him. But that’s vindictive thinking, and I digress.

The problem with the attack strategy is that it doesn’t work. They came back last year, and they came back this year. They pay random people on Craigslist to make the groups if they have to. It’s a game of whack-a-mole that ultimately distracts us from better solutions.

Fill the Gap

This is simple enough. Make your own groups, make them early, and make them clearly official. Pack them with information, pictures, events, and conversation from your admission folks. The trick is, if people see two Class of 2015 groups, it should be brutally clear which one is the real one. You could even try including a little “Official” banner/insert/watermark in your group image so that when they see them side by side in search results, the visual element helps immediately differentiate the groups. The same goes for group titles as well.

This isn’t a new idea. It was suggested the first time this issue came up. The trick is that you actually have to do it. Don’t just talk about it. Don’t set them up and walk away. Any good strategy involves engagement and cultivation. Maintenance. It will be much harder for the nefarious folks to make headway when you’ve already planted the seeds and prepared the farmland ahead of them.

Trojan Horse

I’ll be honest, I’m not sure how much I like this one. But, it’s an option, so I’ll put it out there. You have student employees, yes? If not, admissions surely does. Have a student or even yourself join the fake group, and politely post a link to the real one, explaining that the fake group is not sanctioned and may not be protecting students’ information. Basically go in and spoil the party.

Why I’m on the fence about this: I hate giving any activity to the fake group at all. Plus, if they pay attention, they can just delete your post and ban you anyway. And while I can’t really explain it, given our other options, this tactic feels a little… dirty, negative. I think that’s ultimately because…

It’s a Teachable Moment

We’re colleges for heaven’s sake. This is the sort of thing we should be good at. Make sure students know which groups are official, and make it easy for them to find the information on your site. Build a gateway page that links to the official groups. Include the links in housing and orientation packets. Take five minutes to explain (in person) the reason to make sure that the group they join is the official one. When students come for campus visits, while trekking between buildings, have ambassadors explain the importance of checking groups you join. Show that you care about their safety. The reason kids join our groups is because they want to get involved and engage with us and their fellow students. They join the wrong ones when they don’t know any better. But their hearts are in the right place, so let’s make sure to help them out.

Your housing and admission offices can also point out that things like roommate finder services offered by third parties are not approved on campus. Let them know you would never ask for money to pair up students. This is a great opportunity to educate our students about how to be vigilant social media citizens and how to protect themselves.

Conclusions

There’s been some talk on the side channel about where we go from here – that blogging about it and getting in the news for it isn’t cutting it. I agree. We need to start putting forth some actual effort to counter the fake group creators. But ineffective or not, what we absolutely cannot do is stop talking about it. This isn’t an issue we can bury our heads in the sand over and ignore. There are always new people in our industry that don’t know these dangers, and veterans that simply need a reminder. This blog isn’t going to fix the problem, neither will any of the dozen others you will read. But you can bet that we’ll still be here, looking for new angles and tactics, keeping the issue visible, until we finally find that magic sauce.

Look, I know a lot of this is no brainer sort of stuff. And yet many of us aren’t doing a lot of it. We’re not going to stop the core problem by trying to cut them off at the knees. If it’s not Justin Gaither and RoomSurf, it’ll be someone else with some other service. The landscape is too big and too insecure to think we can “control” that aspect. What we can do is help people be smart. We can give them good resources. By being good community members ourselves, we’ll be doing our students and supporters the best service that can be expected.

Photo credit: Some rights reserved by isafmedia

Related posts:

1. Facebook Groups Redesign: What It Means For You
2. Protecting your College’s Intellectual Property on Facebook: Learning from the Class of 2014 Groups
3. Social Survey: Facebook

It’s that time of year again. The time of year I hate. I mean it. You aren’t likely to find a bigger grinch than this guy right here. But still, I can appreciate that other people love it. What I question, however, is why people love… e-greetings. E-cards. Call them what you will. This is an extension of an earlier conversation about some of the ridiculous extents some of us (are force to) go through in higher ed to meet the call of the e-greeting, and I suspect we can do something about it.

HYPOTHESIS: E-greetings are effectively a feel good measure with little to no ROI, monetary or otherwise, that reflect a dated view of the web and should be disposed of to make way for more effective goals.

I know that’s a bold statement. I also know some people are going to step into the comments and prove me wrong. But deep down, grinch or not, I’m pretty sure that as a rule of thumb this will hold true. I’m also aware that there are some different uses of this concept: development tool to send to alumni/donors, internal usage, visitor created cards, and message from the president. I’m just kind of dumping these all into a Blend-Tec blender and going crazy from this point forward. Forgive me.

First, let’s consider some arguments.

1. They are a great development resource – No, they aren’t. Are you actually tracking how much money they generate, especially up against other campaigns, or compared to the cost of developing them to begin with? And are those gifts ones that could still be pulled in through other means? I know that last part can be particularly hard to measure, but if people are making this argument to you, ask them about the actual numbers. If you happen to have found the magic sauce that makes people fork over the cash to your school thanks to a holiday e-card, care to share the secret?
2. People appreciate knowing we care – Sure they do, but that’s not what this does. Sending an e-greeting blast to your 100,000 person alumni list doesn’t show caring. It shows that you can hit the send button on a mailing list and swap their name into the first line of text. It’s not personal, it’s personalized, it’s generic, and many times it has a hidden agenda (Merry Christmas! Please give us your money.). And in reality, e-cards actually show how little you care, when compared to sending a personal note. Even my bank and insurance company take the time to send me a personal, hand written card or note this time of year. Sure, they probably send the same message to all their customers, but at least it showed some effort on their part, and that means something. Having someone pick a beauty shot of campus and slap a name and message on it just feels cheaper by comparison.
3. We’re trying to save money/be green – Okay, this one isn’t the worst point they can make. BUT, what I will say is that if the money they are saving not mailing physical cards is going to be that significant to their budget, they must be doing something wrong to begin with. Sure, you don’t want to mail 100,000 greeting cards, but a few dozen to the campus offices and your favorite vendors? Is that really a significant budget issue? Are you really killing so many more trees with the cards than with the normal day-to-day usage of your office printer? Want to be green, buy cards made from recycled paper.
4. We’ve done it in the past, people will miss it if we stop – Really? So, you’re gonna sit there and tell me that Christmas Eve, you’re sitting around the tree with your Brother-in-law Jeb, and Jeb turns to you and says: “Jeepers golly Billy, you know State U didn’t even take the time to send me an e-greeting to my e-mail box this year?” No, you’ve never heard that. And neither has anyone else, because as a rule of thumb, people. Just. Don’t. Care. They care if their grandma doesn’t send them a card, they care when they don’t get their bonus check card from their boss. They don’t care if their inbox is mysteriously missing a poorly crafted video of your president sitting behind a cheese log holding a gingerbread man cookie.

In another situation, you might be asked if you can come up with reasons for or against doing an e-card. I have what I believe is a reasonably good justification for not wanting to do holiday e-greetings (besides the whole molten hatred of Christmas) – most of us can’t do them well enough for it to be really worthwhile. Do you have Flash developers that can rival the staff at Jib-Jab? Do you have on camera talent and writers that would make CoCo jealous? Is your programming staff just sitting idle looking to outdo Hallmark? The line between cheesy and genius is dangerous. Genius gets you all that good stuff that makes my position sound stupid. Cheesy gets you a place on YouTube and a temporary standing as meme of the month. The only really good option is to hire an actual marketing/design firm to do the card for you; can you afford that?

Natasha Lomas wrote a good article on this subject. It’s a little more corporate targeted, but still fairly fitting. I was particularly fond of a couple points she made:

“…make sure it’s seriously good or seriously funny. If you can’t get angelic singing, talking reindeers and tinsel that explodes in festive fireballs don’t bother.

Sending an e-card is the digital equivalent of scraping a barrel and sticking the result in the post. Don’t go there. Seriously. They look terrible, they sound hideous and they smell like malware.”

Think for just a moment how many email scams have been connected with getting people to open e-cards. People have been warned off of them so much, that you have to question even the most legitimate sounding cards, meaning you can expect overall open and clickthrough rates to be substantially lower than your typical email based campaigns.

Here’s the deal, in a way, university holiday e-greetings (especially the video style) are sort of like those letters people send you at the end of the year that tell you how their root canal went and that little Susie is no longer wetting the bed. If we were really your friend, if we were close with you, we’d already know and care about such things. But the plain simple fact is that we avoid you because we don’t want to hear those details. It’s similar for schools. If we haven’t cared about the new buildings, awards, or advancements you’ve made throughout the year, what makes you think we suddenly care because you put it in a cute video with some snow and illustrated Christmas lights around it?

So, here’s my challenge to you. Let’s take a hard look at our e-greeting efforts. As you all get back from breaks, take a look at things like open rates, views, donations, and other meaningful metrics (you are measuring this stuff, right?). Even consider if you just hear positive feedback from recipients. Figure up the base “cost” for the project. Let’s pool our knowledge down in the comments. If you think yours is especially good or creative, or you’ve seen one that made you pause (good or bad) – share it. I figure there are enough variables here that a real survey might not be too fitting, so anecdotal information will go a long way by itself. Let’s see over our campaigns just how good these things really are, see if my hypothesis holds true, and hopefully prepare ourselves for next year to say: “Sure, that’s a neat idea, but…”

(edit: I might be sharing some… special examples… add yours with #heecards)

Related posts:

1. Step away from the computer: When NOT to send a marketing email
2. Borders Email FAIL (and how colleges can avoid the same mistake)
3. There is no “best day” to email

Today let’s take a look at a way of leveraging the CMSUserWebAPI in order to serve custom content to registered users on your site. The basic premise is quite simple: check for certain user roles in a loop, and conditionally pull content into a widget. For the sake of argument, we’ll assume you’re already versed in setting up user registration in dotCMS. This tutorial will be set up around the idea of displaying ads to different users, but you could ultimately use it for any kind or format of content.

To start, we’ll set up a structure for advertising. This could just as easily be Web Page Content, or content that is hard coded into the widget. In this case, by creating the structure, it gives us some control over things like run dates, groupings, etc. This is just a suggestion for such a structure, you might add or remove fields to suit your needs. A couple comments: Ad Groups could be a custom field fed from another structure where you define the individual groups (such as header banner ads, sidebar ads, footer ads, interstitials, etc). You could also add a field for impressions, if you charge for a set number of views on an ad, and compare that against the results of #getNumViews("$identifier") before showing the ad. Both the checkboxes listed are just “Yes” fields that could allow you some control to override functionality.

Ad Structure Configuration

Once you have the structure, toss some ads in to it so you have some content to work with. If you are using ad groups, you’ll need to build those in to your template/container/widget. The ad group set for that area will then be incorporated into your pull for that area. When I say “build the ad group in,” all I mean is setting up the space in your HTML (see example below). Alternatively, you may just pull ads based on size restrictions, or whatever other conditions you want to apply.

View of user roles

With that done, we’ll make some user roles. These will be applied to users based on whatever criteria you deem necessary. Perhaps you have paid accounts, or simply “honor” levels that are earned after a period of time. Under the user role manager, we’ll make a root role call “Ad View Levels” with two children: Level 1 Ads and Level 2 Ads. These will reflect which ads on your site users see. These can be completely arbitrary designations based on what you want. In our case, we’ll define the roles as follows:

• CMS Anonymous –View All Ads
• Level 1 Ads –View Some Ads
• Level 2 Ads –View No Ads

Now, we can start defining our Velocity blocks that will control the ad display. Depending on how you are showing ads (or whatever content) you can selectively make these blocks as complex or simply as necessary.  With three levels like what I’ve listed, some blocks would have a second check, while others don’t, based on what Level 1 is allowed to ignore or not.

To set up your code, we start by seeing if the user is logged in. Then we check the roles, then if necessary, show the ad. To simplify things, we’ll mostly separate the two steps in our code into the logic and the HTML, that way you don’t even get an empty ad block when it’s not included. There would simply be nothing in the DOM from the ads at all. So, here’s the basic logic.

Logic Block:

## DEFAULT DISPLAY SETTINGS
#set($showAds = true)
#set($showNumAds = 2)
## CHECK FOR CHANGES TO DISPLAY DEFAULTS
#if($user)
    #if($cmsuser.isUserRole($user, "Level 2 Ads"))
        ## DISABLE ADS
        #set($showAds = false)
    #elseif($cmsuser.isUserRole($user, "Level 1 Ads"))
        ## REDUCE NUMBER OF ADS SHOWN
        #set($showNumAds = 1)
    #end
#end

First, we assume by default (in other words, for CMS Anonymous users) that we want to show ads. We also say the default is to show two ads. Then, we check to see if a user is logged in and determine which level they are. For Level 2 users, just disable the display block. For Level 1 users, we’ll show them an ad here, but we’ll set it to only show one instead of two.

HTML Block:

#if($showAds)
<div id="adGroup1">
    #foreach($ad in $dotcontent.pull('+structureName:Advertising +Advertising.adGroup:1',$showNumAds,'random'))
    <div id="ad1-${velocityCount}" class="ad">
        <a href="${ad.targetUri}" target="_blank">
            <img src="${ad.adImage.getResizeUri(125,125)}" alt="${ad.advertiser}" height="125" width="125" />
        </a>
    </div>  <!-- ${esc.h}ad1-${velocityCount} .ad -->
    #end
</div>  <!-- ${esc.h}adGroup1 -->
#end

In the display block, the first thing we do is see if $showAds was disabled. If not, start up the HTML. Then do the content pull based on the ad group (in this case, we hard coded group 1 into the query, but it could just as easily be a variable with the whole pulling mechanism done as a macro if you have a lot of ad groups and don’t want to maintain this code everywhere), using the number variable for whether or not to pull one or two ads. From there, show the ad, use the target URI, and push the image through the image resizer to make sure it fits the space right.

There are a number of ways besides ads this could be used. Premium content, special promo codes, sneak peaks at content, or show administrative debug info without being in Edit Mode. Play with different applications, and pay attention to what other tools are available in the user API. If you want to see some other examples, be sure to review our previous post on user accounts.

Spindle sucked. Say it with me. Spindle sucked. As far as search goes, sure, it was better than nothing. The problem was that the Spindle backbone wasn’t very robust as far as search algorithms go, there was no UI for it, and the kind of results you could get were pretty limited. Not to mention development on the Spindle project seems to have ceased. Now, you could have always tied into Google Custom Search with the $googleminiapi viewtool, which was perfectly fine, but that then requires you to be set up in Google, and it takes some control out of your hands.

Nutch was introduced as the solution. Nutch is one of many Apache projects implemented within dotCMS. What makes Nutch powerful is that it is built on top of Lucene and Solr, it includes a crawler engine, and is capable of crawling web pages and documents alike. On top of all that, dotCMS also implemented a portlet to run it from (Technically, Spindle had one, but you had to manually call its URI, and all it did was instantiate it). In summation, you end up with a much nicer tool with a lot more flexibility if you need to add search to your site.

The Site Search Portlet

The Site Search portlet is available under the CMS Admin tab. You can enable or disable it per host if you choose, set up the crawl schedule (using a cron expression), and control exclusions. It’s powerful enough to be useful, but simple enough to not be intimidating. Some people experienced in search might find it a bit limiting, but that’s when you can switch to using Google or an appliance. This is a nice balance to being a tool more powerful than the default search in something like WordPress, and not being something that takes hours to figure out.

You interact with Nutch via the $sitesearch viewtool, which just has a single method to worry about: $sitesearch.search($query, $sortBy, $startNum, $numRows, $request). This will return a DotSearchResults object that has a number of fields serialized in that you can call (assuming we’ve set the viewtool results to a Velocity variable called $results):

• $results.responseType
• $results.query
• $results.lang
• $results.reverse
• $results.start
• $results.rows
• $results.end
• $results.totalHits
• $results.hits
• $results.details
• $results.summaries
• $results.withSummary
• $results.misspellings

Most of these are specifically details related to the search itself, such as the total hits it found, and alternative spelling suggestions. When you go to display the results, you’ll be working specifically with the .details and .summaries fields. For example:

#* PERFORM THE SEARCH FOR THE QUERY, STARTING
AT THE BEGINNING, GETTING 10 RESULTS *#
#set($results = $sitesearch.search($request.getParameter('query'), null, 0, 10, $request))
## PULL OUT THE DETAIL SETS AND RESULT SUMMARIES
#set($details = $results.details)
#set($summaries = $results.summaries)
<ol>
#foreach ($i in [0..$math.sub($results.end,1)])
    <li>
        <strong>$!{details.get($i).getValue('title')}</strong><br />
        $!{summaries.get($i).toHtml(true)}<br />
        <small><a href="$!{details.get($i).getValue('url')}">$!{details.get($i).getValue('url')}</a></small>
    </li>
#end
</ol>

Overall, implementing Nutch isn’t particularly any more difficult or easy than it was to use Spindle, but level of control and improved results are what make the difference. This also shows off a very nice foundation that we can hope is used to develop an even more robust featureset down the road. Below, you can catch Dean’s walkthrough of the tool as well, where he shows how you enable and setup Nutch.

* NOTE: Windows users will need to install CYGWIN in order to use Nutch on Windows based machines and servers, due to the linux tools Nutch uses natively.