For the past year we have been present on quite a few social networks. We started out with Twitter last year then moved to Facebook and beyond. We made it a point to not promote our presence on these sites and see how fast they grew organically.

Recently I have been going around campus talking with various groups and administration about new communication tools and how was are using them to reach further and more personal than ever before. These tools are key to that new communication strategy.

Why we decided to put them on the homepage

We decided to link to them from the homepage for two reasons.

1. After a year we had a pretty constant growth rate and we wanted to start sharing this space with people who have not stumbled upon us yet.
2. Second is that we now have an extended network of students who just started blogging for the university. We have not officially announced them yet but soon enough we will, we snuck them in on the homepage RSS button if you want to get a preview.

We didn’t want to give the buttons too much attention since they are not one of the primary goals of the homepage. We placed them in the bottom right corner and grayed them out. We also put a “What are these?” help link for someone who is not already familiar with these icons.

Go ahead and check them out and start following if you find us interesting. If you don’t like how we are promoting our extended web presence let us know why, we would love to hear about it.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 4th, 2009 at 9:51 am and is filed under launch, social, update. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.