The Week in Links

A day late, a dollar short, but hey... who said you can't do a links round up on Monday instead of Friday? There is LOTS of good stuff this week. Really!

• Ack! Stop everything and read this article by Tony Dobies on the Web + Higher Ed Medium site (courtesy of the brilliant Ma'ayan Plaut) about West Virginia University's amazing work integrating social with its holiday video. A little part of me died because I am not doing anything even remotely in the solar system as good as this. 

• Instagram Direct OMG!!! Christina Warren has a great primer on Mashable. I'm very, very interested in utilizing this. Very, very, VERY.

• Nice rundown of 10 colleges that are doing it right on Twitter by Sheri Lehman on Chapman University's blog. 

• Karine Joly has a good piece on College Web Editor about YouTube copyright infringement. With lots of us #hesm folks working on holiday videos this is particularly timely, especially since YouTube just last week flagged a video I posted for UP that featured our student choir singing Silent Night. The tune and lyrics are public domain and I successfully challenged it, but you definitely need to watch out when using Christmas songs.

• Here's a recap of last week's #casesmc chat about Instagram. Special bonus - I actually participated!!! This is big for me, what with my pronounced suckiness at Twitter.

• Cotton Delo has a good piece on Ad Age on how Facebook is now openly admitting that it is continuing to ratchet down organic reach for brand pages and is telling us to just buy ads instead. BOO.

• Love, love, love this article by Chris Syme on her blog about Facebook's review feature. My issues with it so far have been that it is plagued by spam (and no matter how many times I flag a review as spam, it never gets taken down), it doesn't offer the ability to respond to negative reviews, and it can be abused when a university is in the news for a controversial topic - like when Gonzaga's page got absolutely hammered with negative reviews recently after two students were disciplined for having a gun in campus-owned housing.

• Jen Doak-Mathewson put together a nice round-up of higher ed holiday e-greetings on the CASE blog. I was thinking about doing the same thing here, but so many other people are doing it - and much better than I would be able to, naturally - that I think I'm going to just pass the buck on this one.

And let's just go ahead and start this Monday off the right way with a groovin' tune! Take it away, Brian Jonestown Massacre!