I know what you might be thinking: “If I hear anything more about college and Facebook I’m going to chop my ears off and go into PR.”

Reality is, Facebook is the new beer. Actually that is an understatement. I’m pretty sure that the top two things that would piss my generation off the most would be the reinstitution of the draft and if someone took away our Facebook.

Hyperbole aside, college newspapers have a built in marketing system in place that ALL of their readers are already a part of, so why not take advantage of it? Here is how:

Create a “business” page.

Although currently limited in its use, the “business” page of Facebook allows “fans” to rate and upload media related to your product. Facebook even gives you a discussion board. I recently just created a page for The Temple News, and am fooling around with ways to use it.

How do I do this?

Well, first go to the “create a business page” erm… page. The rest is filling out fields and uploading pictures. The business page as it stands now is currently a crippled version of the personal profile page. You can rearrange boxes and add applications, however not every application works with the business page.

To know whether an application will work when you go to add it you will see these buttons:

Be sure to hit “Add to Page”, otherwise you will do what I did and have a whole bunch of useless apps on your profile page. I am warning you that the search function for the Page applications is terrible. There is an “App for pages” section but when you try to search for anything specific it searches EVERY app making finding the right app a painful process of opening each one and checking if it has the above button.

The holy grail for the College Newspaper would be an RSS import feature like “Notes” which currently doesn’t work with profiles. So for now we are regulated to simply establishing a presence, manually (!) uploading videos, and trying to foster reader discussion. I still believe that the business page on Facebook needs a little bit more work before it is useful to newspapers though. If anything, it is another way to connect to your readers and community, and thats not bad for a few minutes of setup.

Oh and become a fan of the Temple News

Author RSS import

Speaking of RSS feeds, the most useful thing I have used facebook for is the Notes feature. Using Notes, anybody can import an RSS feed to blast their friends. If you can swing an author RSS feed, have reporters enter their author RSS feed as notes and you will start to see the clicks come poring in from their friends. I don’t have to tell you how this can drastically improve your reach as a newspaper. Plus readers can comment on the note as well as on your site so the author can get semi-private direct feedback.

How do I do this?

The following directions are good if you have a Wordpress blog, which is the only CMS I can think of on the top of my head that college newspapers would use that has author feeds.

1. Find a post you have written on your blog
2. Click your name
3. Look at the URL and add “/feed” to the end. For example: “ http://domain.com/author/username/feed“
4. Copy that URL into Word/Notepad and hold on to it.
5. Go to “http://yournetwork.facebook.com/editnotes.php “
6. You’ll see a text field. Paste the link you put in word which should look like “http://domain.com/author/YOURNAMEHERE/feed “
7. Click “start importing”
8. In the upper right hand corner click “Confirm import”
9. Set it and forget it.

Advertising

Facebook ads are cheap and they work. We used them to launch our blog Broad and Cecil. But I already told you about that…

There are probably other ways to use Facebook, but for now these are the most obvious. I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t do this. The fact that this all takes about 20 minutes of work for such a long term benefit should put this high on your “to do” list tomorrow.

From Thursday to Sunday, Washington D.C. will be play host to all college media types at the National College Media Conference.  Unfortunately, I can only make it Friday.  So right after my Thursday classes I’m going to take the long (and freakin’ expensive) journey down 95 to our nation’s capital.  If any one who reads this blog is going to be there, let me know I’d love to chat.

The reason I made great pains to get down there Friday is that College Publisher is previewing their new CMS.  And if my ears serve me correctly, I’d say many editors believe this is a big moment for them as they have to do a little catch up to other CMS’s.  And, as the Innovation in College Media blog mentioned, knowledge of the upgrade has placed some of our plans on hold.

So, I will definitely be at CP’s presentation on Friday at 12:30 p.m.  And I really would like to catch up with Mr. Curley of the Washington Post (whose contact form never sends me a confirmation e-mail, so I hope this trackback works).

And on a side note: Honestly guys, there are WAY too many acronyms here.   If I have this right, its the ACP/CMA NCMC in DC.  Either way, see you there!

Cons:

• Although CP is free, they take total control over at least half of your ads. With their recent merger with MTV, the CP community has seen some not-so-hot ads sneak their way into the system.
• Image display. For some god forsaken reason the image management with CP is sub par. It automatically converts and resizes all of your uploaded images. Although there are options to turn these features off it would be defeating the purpose of having a CMS as you would have to do it all by hand. All resized images usually come out blurry as all hell.
• Support. The CP team does a great job handling all support questions however I get the sense they are slightly over worked. I have had support questions sit for weeks before getting any response. Every on on the team is amazing at what they do, they are just severely understaffed.
• What you see is what you get. There are no CP plugins or themes. You either have to ask them to do it, or spend your time knee deep in CPML (College Publisher Markup Language). Which brings me to my next point…
• You have to learn a whole new language. While most CMS’s use PHP, CP is using there own markup that makes it a pain in the butt to do anything in the code. In their defense they do provide extensive documentation, but I wish there was some easier way.
• Old content is buried. CP uses an issue system when marking articles. Therefore when you switch to your new issue all old content is relegated to your archives, usually never to be seen again.

Pros

• As stated above when they get the support question back to me, it usually is instantaneous, and everyone over there is easily accessible with a phone call or email.
• There is a vast community of Web Editors that frequent the message boards that usually answer any questions pretty quickly.
• CP (as far as I can see) is the only CMS that is geared specifically toward College Newspapers.
• Its free.
• Its fairly idiot proof. Even if you dont know a lick of HTML the guys at CP can get a site set up for you in no time.