Putting together an effective social media policy

View more presentations from Chris Syme.

Here is a sneak preview of my presentation at the upcoming CoSIDA convention next week on crafting a social media policy. Hope to see you there and let me know if you have any questions for the presentation. I hope to spend the bulk of time in discussion with the group, and that includes you!

Are You One of the Successful 35%?

An interesting piece of research emerged last week in a report from R2integrated. I saw the research referenced on Social Media Examiner--a great site for social media news. The research concluded that only a small amount of marketers are seeing a measurable increase in sales due to social media.

According to the study, "65% of respondents said that their companies have not increased revenue or profited using social media." When asked what their biggest challenge was, 36% responded that lack of valid metrics and data to develop ROI was to blame.

So what are the successful ones doing differently? They were twice as likely to have a social media strategy and twice as likely to have a dedicated person managing the media. They also were more likely to say that social media was valuable to their company and not many believed that time invested was pointless.

The reason I think this is interesting is that it validates a piece of best practice that experts have been clamoring about for a while--you need to have a plan before you jump in, and you should have someone responsible for management. How does that relate to those of us who are one-man communications shops?

Somebody asked me this week if it is necessary to have a social media policy/strategy if you are the only one in the department using it. An emphatic yes. It won't be long and you'll have a coach or two that want to use social media to brand their programs, no matter how small you are. Better to get out ahead of the rush and have your purpose defined and guidelines in order. Besides, I want to be one of the 35% that say social media has a measurable impact on our bottom line, whether it's ticket sales or fan conversions. Defining a plan and setting up some measuring devices will drastically increase the chances that social media will have a positive, measurable effect.

Do you think it's necessary to have a strategy/policy if you are a one-man shop?

Social Media Policy Session at CoSIDA--Need Input

I will be doing a session on the Digital Summit Day at the CoSIDA convention on Wednesday during the 11-1 p.m. session and I'd like your input. I will be presenting on how to put together a social media policy--kinda based on a series of blogs I did a while back.

I'd like to design the session around information that people need--not necessarily info I want to present. If you have any questions or comments you'd like addressed, would you leave them in the comments here? I want to make this session as helpful as it can be. I will be bringing copies of our social media policy for everyone.

Thanks ahead for helping me out! See you in San Fran.

YouTube or Vimeo? Which is Best for You?

In my constant search for new online website services, I started to look at Vimeo, a video hosting service, as an alternative to YouTube. This is a beginner's look.

We have our YouTube channel embedded in our website. This gives our fans access to all our videos without having to leave our website. The only downside is if they want to see archived videos past the last five posted, they will have to go to the channel at YouTube. The good news is that the channel loads in a pop-up window from an icon on our video player, so our website is still in the background. Vimeo does not allow channels to be embedded in a website, just individual videos. To see your channel, a person must go to Vimeo.

YouTube is free (for now). Vimeo is also free in its basic form, but larger download capabilities (over 500MB/week) are only available in Vimeo Plus which costs $58.95/year. It's probably worth it if the service fits your needs.

Vimeo makes it easier to set up a channel, I think. There are however, some limitations--the biggest being no embedding of a channel in a website. So far, it seems to me (as a basic free user), that the options for creating a custom "look" on a Vimeo channel are not as good as YouTube. Vimeo seems less cluttered. According to website comparisons, YouTube currently hosts over 64 million videos compared to Vimeo's one million.

If I were a consultant loading instructional videos or blog-related content on a regular basis, Vimeo might be a good choice. The downside of Vimeo is that not a lot of people are there searching for video content (compared to YouTube), so if you are rely on searches for people to find your content, it might not be the best site right now.  If you are interested in driving people to video from a blog or website for specific content, this might be a good choice.

If the lack of content control on YouTube is a concern, Vimeo's Plus Service lets you redirect viewers to a URL of your choice after watching your video. The lack of commercialization and cross promoting on Vimeo-Plus is good for people who want less "junk" to show up on their channels. Vimeo was created for videographers--YouTube for the general public.

I know there are a lot of features of Vimeo-Plus I am not clear on yet, but as I continue to explore, I'll continue to keep you updated.

Anybody use Vimeo? What do you think? What about other hosting services?

Four Ways to Put the Person in Personal Branding

 A lot is being said these days about personal branding. If you are a social media manager in charge of coaching your peeps to better personal branding, don't be misled by a lot of the info out there about regular branding. Branding a company and branding a person are two different animals. They may be in the same domain, but they aren't the same species. Here are four quick tips to keep in mind:

1. Make sure your personal branding profiles are personal and not corporate.
First, make sure profiles are fully filled out. If you want to brand, you can't worry too much about privacy. Be personable. Information like how many kids you have, hobbies, favorite books and movies, and the normal info that's asked for on most profiles needs to be there. It's such a huge part of what makes you human. Corporates don't have a list of favorite movies.

Also make sure your avatar is a picture of you and not of your organization's logo. Some social media experts recommend using an informal picture, but I really think that informality needs to reflect your brand. If your public perceives you in a suit and tie, maybe a picture like Brian Solis' twitter avatar would work as opposed to you sitting in the boat on the weekend with a fishing pole in your hand.

2. If you use multiple social media accounts, make sure they all have the same look.
You can provide a lot of brand consistency by making sure that your social media accounts that allow custom looks are branded together. Color, graphics, avatars, tag lines,backgrounds, whatever, should be the same on all your social media accounts. Twitter, Facebook (esp. landing pages) blog sites, and YouTube channels all allow you to customize backgrounds. Make the most of that option.

3. Make good use of keywords.
I can honestly say I am not a search engine optimization (SEO) expert but you can learn everything you need to know about the basics online quickly. Just remember that using keywords in a title or first few sentences of a blog post will help you get found by those spiders on Google. There is so much good info out there--no excuse. Start here. I liked this article--"SEO for dummies--eight outstanding tips for newbies." I actually bought the SEO book for Dummies (I am a huge fan of the Dummies books). If you don't have time for a book, try searching the internet. But DO get to know something about SEO!

4. Be accessible online
You can't succeed at personal branding if you don't frequent the media you are using to promote. I know this sounds like a no-brainer, but I have a long list of people I've followed over the years who jumped into the pool and drowned from inactivity. Personal branding is a huge commitment. You can't create the sites and walk away. You have to be willing to write, post, answer questions, curate, broadcast, leave comments on others' blogs and sites. In short, you have to be "out there."

I'll be doing a table topic on personal branding at CoSIDA in July and would love to get some questions or comments ahead. Let me know what you think.

Is There Anybody Out There (With Your Name)?

One of the down sides of social media is that there are basically no rules. If you set up a Facebook page, all you have to do is check a box saying you represent who you say you are and you're good to go. Kind of frightening.

I am in the process right now of helping a local non-profit retrieve their name on Facebook from someone who set up a page representing them with an official logo, address, and everything. Kind of frustrating.

Last summer when we went to set up our Facebook page, we found there was already one out there with thousands of fans. No name in the profile, but our website address, our logo. The problem was one of their profile pics was that standard you see around all the time with a little 5-year old boy in one of our football jerseys giving the camera the finger. OK for fans, maybe, but not for a page pretending to be us. Through a long journey (which included trying to find an email address for Facebook help), I finally got the other page taken down so we could have the name.

My boss loves college baseball. He takes his family on a trip to Omaha every year--it's their vacation. So right now, he is in his glory. He follows the games on his phone when he isn't in front of a TV.

He was at a fundraiser over the weekend while one of the games was on so he was following one of the school's Twitter feeds on the game. At least he thought it was a school feed. The name insinuated it was a school feed.

As the game got intense, so did the tweets. The tweeter was criticizing coaches, ranting on the school when all of a sudden, there was a four-letter word that begins with an "f" in capital letters. The first thing my boss thought was, "uh-oh."

He thought the poster was a school employee because the athletic department logo was used on the Twitter feed's home page. BTW--At the very least, this would be a logo violation unless the school gave permission for someone to use it on a personal Twitter feed, which I doubt.

After we talked about it for a while we came to the conclusion that it is virtually impossible to follow up on all the rogue social media out there using logos, official website addresses and the like. But, I am wondering if we should do a search on Twitter and Facebook every once in a while just to see what's out there. If the school's logos or official contact information is being used, should you contact the administrator and ask them to change it?

Earlier in the year, I found a page on Facebook for our track and field program that wasn't run by our coaches. I asked the coaches to find out who was running it and have them put up a disclaimer that it wasn't us. The person was more than happy to cooperate and never meant to misrepresent their page. Sometime it's just as easy as contacting them and asking them to remove logos or put up a disclaimer.

Anybody out there had any experience with this? What would you do if you found a social media site pretending to be you?

Twitter for the Small(er) Guys

My last post on Twitter this week is an answer to a question from another e-buddy, Jay Stancil at Union College. Jay (like Zack Lassiter) also writes a blog I follow--his is called The Master Juggler. He also hosts a weekly chat on Twitter for sports information directors at #SIDChat on Wednesdays at 2 p.m. Eastern. You should join in. Through people like Jay and Zack, I have found that we SIDs can learn a lot from each other (well, Zack is a marketing guy but that's ok). Folllow Jay on Twitter at "UC_SID".

Jay asked a question I can relate to: Is there much of a need for a small sports info office to have multiple twitter accounts? He and another person manage 23 athletic programs and he was wondering if you have a feed for, say, football, should you have a feed for everything. This question I can answer without any research because I'm only going to speak from experience.

I am an SID at a D-I school with only 17 programs. There are three of us and we are swamped. We do our own media guides, run the website and do all the events. I can't imagine what the workload of two people running 23 programs must be like. But my answer,Jay, is an emphatic "no."

Sometimes I think we feel pressure from other schools, even those our size, to develop a culture we can't really keep up with. I know we are not Duke. We aren't even Colorado (I still can't believe they are in the Pac-whatever now). But when I look at dukeblueplanet, I envy. Then, I snap back to reality.

I can tell you what works for us and we are good with it. I manage one Twitter feed-"msubobcats." That is our department feed. We have a game day feed we can all use called "bobcatgameday" that we tweet events from so we don't clutter the Twitterverse. But, our department "sponsors" 6 other Twitter feeds. They are managed by coaches and other staffers. I keep an eye on these feeds (follow them all) and occasionally ask them to retweet dept. news, but I don't maintain them in any sense.

All our social media account managers will soon be taking training (according to our new social media policy)to be accredited account managers. It isn't training really, just an overview of the department policy and then a sign-off on the policy. I will maintain a list of all our social media sites with administrative passwords in case of an emergency. Other than that, I am not involved in each program's personal branding.

We're going to have a couple sessions on personal branding at CoSIDA in July and I think this is a great topic to explore. Heck no--I am not going to manage 23 Twitter feeds. One is enough.

And Jay--to your other question about keeping people engaged, especially during the summer, I have one answer: editorial calendar. This has been my life saver. I actually use my Outlook because there's no way I'll ever fill up all those 40-plus half-hour slots on there. I make a list (at  coaches' meetings and at staff meetings) of topics and tweets people in-house want to see, then I schedule them on my Outlook. Now using tools like Socialoomph, you can write those ahead of time and schedule them. I see on TweetDeck's newest version, they now have a scheduler as well. I use it--it saves me a lot of time and worry about remembering to tweet. We have tons of camps and golf tournaments over the summer so we have some content. I also schedule tweets of upcoming fall events and news about schedules, what student-athletes and coaches are doing, pics from camps--it just takes some organization. And as busy as people can get with 23 programs, an editorial calendar might be a handy tool.

Thanks for all the great questions. I sure would like to hear some feedback about keeping people engaged on Twitter in the summer. I need help there myself. BTW--I am going to post this as a discussion on LinkedIn as well.

Twitter in a Crisis?

My e-buddy Zack Lassiter from Utah asked how Twitter could be used in crisis communications, and I thought it was a great question. Zach is in charge of corporate sales and tickets at the University of Utah and writes a blog. He developed an in-department ticket staff model based on the principles of good one-on-one customer relations. In a day when many of us outsource our ticket sales, this is a novel idea.

In researching this subject, I couldn't help but reflect on the unfortunate fact that I have had some experience in this area. Crisis communications touches us all, and if it hasn't, it will. The odds are not in your favor. The wisdom is--prepare for what you hope won't happen. Coach firings, student-athletes in trouble, APR penalties, coaches in personal trouble, transportation disasters, venue disasters, NCAA violations, and the list goes on and on. Better be ready. Better plan.

There's a lot of info out there on using social media in a crisis. We've seen Twitter play a huge difference in speed of information dissemination in Katrina, the BP disaster, and many other crises. It can be a force. So what is Twitter's role in a crisis? You can google "Twitter and crisis communications" and find lots of good information, but I thought it might be worthwhile looking at a case study. One of the first things we have to buy into is that social media can actually help alleviate the duration and intensity of a crisis. Companies have done it. Case in point: General Motors.

"Yeah, but that's a car company," you say. "How does that relate to my head football coach getting fired?" You'll see...

In PRSA's recent Strategist, Amy Jacques wrote an insightful article on how Christopher Barger, director of global social media at GM, worked through their Chapter 11 bankruptcy using social media and all the GM employees he could train to use it on a moment's notice. Read it--you'll learn what a lot of companies already know (Dell, Best Buy)--social media is great for enhancing customer relations. GM took a risk (social media is a risk, just ask Nestle) and it paid off.

Normally GM has five people who handle social media relations. The day they announced their bankruptcy, they had 12 people manning their sites. He drew from people all over the company and told them, "You're going to learn Twitter fast. You're going to learn Facebook fast. You're going to get out there, and your job for this week is to do nothing but sit here and communicate with people."  They put senior leadership on live webcasts, posted information on their blogs, and had the CEO specifically working with the Facebook audience. They even had the corporate lawyers sign off on it. They made a commitment to listen. The message: "Here's the progress we're making. Here's what we're going to do."

One of the best observations he made in the article was,

"You cannot overcommunicate in a crisis. Go on every platform, every possible place that somebody might be listening to you--they're looking for information. The audience expects you to be there. This is not something that you do to try to be innovative or ahead of the curve."

They followed what he calls a 20/80 formula--20% was stuff they put out and 80% was answering people's concerns. He also admits one big key was having an "executive champion"--a CEO who backed his plan. Add to that they were already involved in social media before the crisis establishing a presence and listening to their community, something he said is a must.

He also talked about engaging critics, something many of us are afraid of.

"Engaging the critics is important. There are always going to be the idiots who aren't necessarily interested in the genuine conversation. They just want to yell at you. You don't engage with everybody. But if somebody is being constructive, if somebody is giving good thought to their criticism, then you want to engage that person."

And then there's the story about how they handled the graphic post by the CEO's daughter on their Facebook page after her dad was asked to resign. You'll have to read the article to get that insight.

The bottom line: GM was proactive when they were faced with a crisis. They had a plan, good people running the plan who knew what they were doing, and on April 21, new CEO Ed Whitacre, Jr. announced (in a series of commercials I didn't particularly like) that GM had repaid $8.1 billion in loans from U.S. and Canadian governments, They called it a sign that GM was on the road to recovery. Whether you like GM or not is not the question, what they accomplished speaks for itself.

Zack-I hope that got the gears started. I'd like to hear some other thoughts besides my own about using social media in a crisis.

Twitter: The Basic Tools

You've got questions--I can find the answers. Today's question, "What are the best tools and apps for Twitter?" I'll do what my mom said never to do and that's answer a question with a question-- "for what?" There are tools for measuring, tools for scheduling, tools for aggregating, tools for people with less than 500 followers, tools for people with more than 10,000 followers, and so the list goes on.

While looking at aggregate sites and blogs, I found Six Best Twitter Tools for Business, Ten Twitter Tools to Organize Your Tweeps, and even 99 Essential Twitter Tools and Applications. Wow--99 essential tools. Are there enough hours in the day just to manage all those tools for Twitter? Let me just take a Sunday drive through some of this and try and find some good ones and some worthless ones.

1. Schedulers: Rebecca Metz is someone I follow on Twitter. Rebecca tweets a lot--she is a curator, much like myself, who tweets out helpful information to her followers and URLs of posts she runs across. She is an advocate of scheduling tweets--you can compose several when you have time, and then schedule them at intervals so your followers don't get overwhelmed with 6-10 tweets in a row. A lot of people do this with blogs as well. Nifty idea because it releases you from some of that Twitter urgency. But if you're not a curator, I'm not sure you need a Twitter scheduler. If you write a blog, however, a scheduler might help you promote it. Blog tipsters advocate sending out three tweets for each blog post--one early in the morning, one midday and one at night. A scheduler can do this for you. She recommends Socialoomph, as have several others. Check it out if this appeals to you.

2. Aggregators: There seems to be two main aggregators out there: Tweet Deck and HootSuite. These tools allow you to manage (or watch) several aspects of your feed (or multiple feeds) at once on one screen including your running feed, your mentions (@), your direct messages and any hashtag feeds you are following (#). I manage two main Twitter feeds--one for the department and one for myself. An aggregator makes it a lot easier. I use Tweet Deck because I started on Tweet Deck. They are both pretty much the same--you can post to Facebook, LinkedIn and a number of other social media sites from each with multiple accounts. You need one if you manage a feed for an organization or just don't want to be forever switching views on your Twitter home page.

A sidebar about aggregators: There are a lot of webinars or "conversations" going on out there using hashtags (#) and these tools make it easy to monitor them and follow your feed at the same time. Although beware, I am hearing more and more stuff lately about multi-tasking lowering your IQ.

3. Twitter feed embedders: There are a number of different apps out there for embedding your Twitter feed in everything from a blog to a web page to your LinkedIn profile to "you name it." This is a little more space consuming than just adding a Twitter icon to an online location that links to your Twitter feed. Look to the left on my blog and you will see what this looks like. I can set the number of tweets I want my readers to see.

Many social media sites (Facebook, LinkedIn to name a couple) offer a number of embed options just as apps like Tweet Deck offer posting services to a number of social sites. I use these in my personal sites--my blog, my LinkedIn profile, my Netvibes aggregator...but we don't have our department Twitter feed embedded in our website. It takes too much space. But cross promotion is pretty important. Your Twitter home page offers these under the "Goodies" button at the bottom of the page or you can download them from the web as well.

4. Picture Apps: You gotta have one if you want to include pictures in your tweets. If you want to post pics from your phone or collect all your Twitter photos on one site, you need an app like TwitPic.  You'll need an application that assigns a URL to a picture for viewing on Twitter. TwitPic is like Flickr--it's just a hosting site for pictures.

5. Apps I don't get or need: Almost every app in the article above citing 99 essential twitter applications are non-essential in my book. If you are in need of tracking tools for Twitter or tools that can evaluate your bottom line in terms of followers, popularity of your feed and so forth, you will want to look at tools like TweetStats or TwitterGrader. These operate something like Sitemeter or Google Analytics do for a website or blog.

I am going to leave you with a suggestion to check out the article above on 99 essential tools, even after I poked fun at the idea. There might be something there that catches your eye, especially if you are a more serious Twitter user than I am. If I had time to sit on Twitter all day, I might consider 80 or so of them. There are also a number of good Twitter tutorials on YouTube--Pam Dyer gives you her top ten here. You can search and find more than you could watch during the next Celtics-Lakers game.

Got any favorite Twitter tools? Would you mind sharing in the comments?

To Tweet or Not to Tweet--That is the Question

 What to do with Twitter? Many media relations people are still pondering this question.


Some have already jumped in with both feet and don't know why they're there. Some have purposefully added Twitter to their arsenal and know exactly what they're doing. And some are still thinking...

In the next few blog posts, I'd like to explore the use of Twitter in college athletic media relations. Are we different than Starbucks or Snapple, or do the same principles and rules apply to us?

First things first: establish purpose. Whenever anyone asks me if they should be on Twitter, I ask them why they want to be there. Most just say, because everyone else is there. Lesson one: that's not a good reason. Twitter will utterly fail you if you don't know how to use it. And on top of that, it will become a burden.

Our Twitter accounts have a purpose and they're not all the same. We have one main department account that was established to tweet out important news and events that might be of interest to our fan base. Before we established that feed, we set guidelines for it. I looked at the UWBadgersdotcom feed as a prototype. We've used it for contests and to tweet pending web streams for online chats, solicit questions for live chats, remind fans about games, locations of watch parties, and important news stories. We have too many press releases to use it for every story. Basically, our department twitter feed is a broadcaster. Sometimes I tie the tweets to our Facebook feed, but only if they are about something that might solicit comments. We have a lot of followers on that feed but not many repliers.

Quite a few of our teams have twitter feeds and they function basically the same. These accounts are used more for what I would call personal branding. They highlight and build interest around their programs and their student-athletes. They are somewhat aimed at recruits and core fans. We ask them to re-tweet department stuff if it's real important, but they are mostly dedicated to their programs and run by their coaches.

We have another feed called @bobcatgameday that we use to twitter live at events. We've found that our regular twitter fans like it better if we don't clog up their twittersphere with tons of tweets in a three-hour period with live game updates. You could use this feed for anything live--a fundraiser, a scrimmage, live chats, whatever. I find this works better than the hashtag system (#) which some of our fans find cumbersome when they want to reply or ask questions frequently.
Part of your purpose needs to be a commitment to do the actual work needed to keep the twitter feed going. It demands attention. It helps to like Twitter and be using it yourself.

After purpose is agreed upon, get the email accounts established (we use gmail for all twitter accounts) and get a nice custom background made for your twitter page. In the settings menu on your home page, there is a design tab and a place to make your own custom background. We change this seasonally with pics from different sports. If you want the photo to fill the entire background, the size of the image should be at least 1280×1024 pixels in size and preferably larger. Depending on the background and whether or not it can be nicely blended into a solid background color or not the typical size is 1600×1200 and even 2048×1600 for some backgrounds. You'll have to play with this a little because, depending on the browser, you can hide some text or pictures under your feed. There are some real creative ones out there. Ours in here. It looks a little goofy on me home computer (which is a wide screen), but you can play around with yours when you are creating. Twitter limits the file size, so check the specs before you try and upload your jpeg.

Choose a good avatar and don't use the default ghost image--it just says, "I don't care."

Note to Facebook users: If you have a Facebook fan page with more than 25 fans, you can choose a custom username for your Facebook URL. Just type in www.facebook.com/usernameand it will take you take a page where you can change the username. Beware--once it is changed, it is fixed--no undoing. We tried to match our Twitter handles with our Facebook usernames. For instance, our football Facebook page URL is www.facebook.com/msufb. Their twitter account is "msufb". They aren't using it yet because they don't know if they're ready for the commitment, but we have reserved the twitter username for them if they decide to tweet. We tried to do this with all our sports that are on social media. after you log in


These are just a few of the basics about Twitter. Next few blog posts, I'll be answering questions from other SIDs about Twitter. See you then. What do you think of Twitter. Anybody out there still holding out? I'd like to hear your thoughts about Twitter.

Thank You, Coach Wooden

I had a brief career as a high school basketball coach and an even briefer career as a college player. When I first started coaching basketball, I was hungry to learn everything I could about how to be a good coach. I bought books on defensive systems and offensive systems, but my favorite basketball book never had a play in it--Wooden by John Wooden with Steve Jamison. It is a collection of observations about life--a small book with a plain blue cover. My copy is marked up and worn out. Some of Wooden's adages still roll around in my head today--"Champions should act like champions," and "be quick, but don't hurry."

It is so important for college sports to have men like Coach Wooden. Men who can coach (10 national titles and never a losing season in 29 years of coaching) who are also men who exemplify greatness of character. We need more John Woodens, and sadly, we have one less today.

Coach Wooden always said love was the most important word in the English language and balance was second. He loved one woman all his life and after she passed away in 1985 from cancer, he wrote her a  love letter every month on the anniversary of her death.

He was the man who told Bill Walton, "we'll miss you on the team" when Walton told him he didn't want to cut his hair. He was the first man to be inducted into the Naismith Hall of Fame as a coach and player. He coached at one university for 27 years, lived in one city for 62 years, and left a legacy of wisdom and courage we will never forget. He impacted the game of basketball more than any man in the history of the sport. 

Wooden said, "talent is God-given, be humble, fame is man-given, be grateful, conceit is self-given, be careful." Thank you Coach Wooden. You are my hero. I will miss you.

Here's a link to CoSIDA's tribute to Wooden

Online Media Guides: Baby Steps

I have officially started my foray into online media guides. Currently, we are operating on the KICS principle--keep it cheap, stupid. We're a smaller D1 school, so I think we'll be watching what is going on out there for a year and then maybe look at outside software or resources. For now, we are going to stick with simple pdfs for most guides and integrate with our website company, Sidearm, for the four bigger sports we keep StatCrew stats for--football, volleyball, men's and women's basketball. The Sidearm option gives the guide a kicked-up look and interactive feel. View their demo of the Colgate Football guide here.

Even though we are going to use just simple pdfs, there are a few options with pdfs that can significantly put some zip in your digital guide. Start with video links.

• If you use InDesign or other similar design layout software, you should be able to add hyperlinks to your documents. When you export those documents, just be sure you check the box to export all the hyperlinks as well. For InDesign, adding a hyperlink in CS3 or later is under the interactive tab in the Windows pull-down. You basically have to add the hyperlink twice, but it's simple and a quick read in the Help section will get you going.
• The key to using video in your media guide without a special piece of software is being able to hyperlink the video from a URL. If you use YouTube (we have a channel), you can link individual videos to hyperlinks. Add a nice graphic button (instead of a text link) and you have a nice presentation. You can make your own graphic buttons out of thumbnails with an image from the video and they are a little cooler.
• We made several promo videos for track and field for the internet during the year--I also linked to all of these with graphic buttons for each.

Other links:

• In my track and field guide, I linked to season best performance lists, the university website, our special track and field website, and other URLs that I wanted to include in the guide without re-doing all the text. Also, I linked to our historical section on the website instead of reproducing a whole records section in the pdf (which we will reproduce for our real media guide for real media).
• I put links in the guide back to particular news stories we ran during the year in different student-athlete's bios as well. The possibilities are as endless as your imagination and any content you already have online somewhere.

If you take a look at the Colgate football guide by Sidearm, one thing I think you'll notice is that it is laid out as a typical media guide is. One thing I would change about a pdf guide is to make it very visual and interactive with as little text in the first few pages as possible. Just keep in mind what your fans and media will be looking at. Lots of pictures, lots of interactive links.

Also, Colgate is obviously intending on sending this out to recruits, as the guts of this are still black and white. Our track guide is in full color as the coaches have decided not to use it for recruits, but to give to boosters, etc. As long as it is online available to the public, coaches can still direct recruits to the URL but can't give them a copy of the guide. We are going to put some on USB sticks for our boosters.

One last thought: some web browsers are going to treat interactive links like pop-ups so we put an information box the first page explaining how to use the interactive links so fans would know it was okay to "allow" the links to open.

Are you going to use pdfs? Got anything to add? Thoughts?

We haven't made a final decision yet, but I am pretty sure we will print separate media guides for the actual media and have some on site at events. Our media still seems to want paper to work from at games and we need to accommodate that.

The Downside of Pushy People

Woulda, shoulda, coulda. Hindsight is 20-20. Any others you can think of?

I was in the middle of work this morning and the phone rang. I'm working at our farm this week and there is still an actual land line phone here--I forgot how irritatingly interrupting they are. Anyway, on the other end was one of those extended warranty companies pretending to be Pontiac (auto company) warning me that our daughter's car is no longer available for an extended warranty with Pontiac and we had better buy one right now or the car would blow up.

First mistake: When I answered the phone he was gabbing to a co-worker. It took two "hello's" to get his attention. After some posturing about who he was, I finally told him he needed to call back when my husband was home.

Second mistake: He told me I needed to talk to him "now"--code for he was just calling a long list, he works on commission and if I didn't talk to him, somebody else in his company would get my business.

Third mistake: Telling me I wasn't giving him a chance to talk and give his pitch. WHAT? I explained I was in the middle of working at home on a project, and besides I wasn't the decision maker on car warranties.

Fourth mistake: Telling me he had important information I needed to hear now. WHAT? I told him outright he was being pushy and as he was blathering on about how I was missing out, I just hung up. Oh, how I wish I hadn't done that.

Pushy people irritate me. Their behavior interrupts my normal thinking patterns and causes me to go on the defense. Just to get rid of him, I bypassed something I believe strongly in. What I should have done was take a deep breath, ask politely for his name, his company's name, his phone number for customer service and then turned promptly around and called the company to report this guy. But, I was so flustered by his pushy behavior, I just wanted to escape.

The downside of all this is that I didn't leave the situation with a positive outcome. I could have made this a learning experience for the company that might help improve their customer relations, but I didn't. More than the residue of feeling irritated and having to hang up the phone on someone--this left me with a bummed out feeling. I'm just not sure I want him to call back to have to rectify the situation.