As soon as the latest greatest web technology takes the web world by storm we in the higher-ed web community are pretty quick to try and figure out how we can use it to reach out to our communities. Pretty soon we have a higher up asking if we have heard of x tool and soon after that we have the marketing folks trying to figure out how we can leverage the tool to drive up recruitment or to reach out to students. Some of these sites are a pretty easy fit for higher-ed. Facebook for example has nice group/page features that allow us to have a presence where our students/prospective students are. YouTube lets us easily create a channel for our videos on the worlds most popular video sharing and freely take advantage of the social features while also using it to post videos to our own site. Digg’s use in higher-ed has been much less obvious to me. Most pages on my college’s site wouldn’t even get a single digg let alone make it to the front page of the site.

I have been a Digg user for several years. When I started thinking back to the college or university pages that have made on to Digg I quickly noticed a pattern. There are really 3 things that get us on to the home page of Digg:

1. Tragedy
2. Controversy
3. Research

The first 2 are obviously not the types of things that we want to do to try an get exposure and they are typically coming from outside sources anyway. The third though, is the piece we should really take notice of (that bolding was no accident). The users of Digg seem to digg the interesting research that is taking place at our schools particularly in the sciences. You can see the results of a search for posts with .edu in the url.

Now your goals with Digg will not be the same as they would be on Facebook, mySpace, or YouTube. You won’t be building very many long term relationships and one story about some groundbreaking, interesting, or often bizarre research project going on at your school will probably not drive a lot of registrations. But it can build awareness and potentially reputation for the school and get your schools name in front of thousands of eyes for free. There are also cases of mainstream media picking up on stories because of their popularity on sites like Digg. So when you are working on those interesting research based features for your homepage or building up a research site from some new grant money, don’t forget to include a “digg this” button. You could be the next gravity lamp or checkers playing computer. Go Digg the latest .edu star on Digg.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 9:32 pm and is filed under Higher-ed on the Web, Social Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.