Oberlin! F*CK YEAH!
A couple of recent Oberlin alums who now work for the school have taken their passion and turned it into one f*cking great website promoting the college.
Why The Fuck Should I Choose Oberlin is the brainchild of Ma’ayan Plaut, social media coordinator at Oberlin College, and Harris Lapiroff, a Web developer at Oberlin. They graduated in ‘10 and ‘11 respectively. The foul-mouthed take on an admissions site is risky, yes, but also brilliant: it’s earning the school major points on the Internet Cool scale.
Link Contributor Georgy Cohen conducted an interview with Lapiroff and Plaut for her blog, and got them to open up about the daring strategy and what Plaut calls “tacit” approval from their bosses at Oberlin. The site is drawing tons of traffic (400,000 views in 3 days), notice from national press, and alums are submitting their own reasons that people should f*cking go to the Ohio school (more than 2,000 at the time of Georgy’s interview). Reasons include “Because Oberlin is a fuckton of awesome” and “Because if you really want something bad enough, Oberlin will help you make it come true.”
Klout lets some Klout out of your score
In the last few days, Klout’s users found themselves wielding a lot less Klout. The social media influence rater changed its formulas recently and that caused the scores of many Klout devotees to drop. Media Bistro noted that the changes are driven by Klout’s professed desire to be more transparent to users.
“That means showing you exactly how your score of 26 was calculated – which means you will have a better understanding of what you need to do to improve your score and become more influential on Twitter,” Lauren Dugan wrote.
But that transparency meant a lot of scores took a beating overnight, and that left many users grumbling and wondering just exactly where Klout’s promised transparency was. So far though, it doesn’t seem like users are flouting Klout.
Google Plus opens the door to pages
After opening and then closing the doors earlier this summer, Google is letting brands, businesses and institutions create their own pages on Google+. The doors are open and colleges and businesses are creating pages at blinding speed. Mike Petroff at .eduguru has started a list of who is online so far. In the first 48 hours, it looks as if well over 200 insitiutions have made pages. Looking for interesting brand pages? Toyota is one of the first brands in the space. The Muppets are there too. It looks like higher ed institutions are in a hurry to join the virtual land rush. Is Google + going to be useful or just one more social media item to keep track of? Both? Let us know what your school is planning on doing.