Higher Education and Social Media Mashups

Mashup: a Web page or application that uses and combines data, presentation or functionality from two or more sources to create new services (See the Wikipedia article).

Put an emphasis on the social media and out comes the SMASHUP. To us, that means: a branded, customized, and high-end social media site to aggregate all of a university social media activity and accounts into one well-designed central hub.

Its main purpose is content aggregation and social media integration. It displays actual feeds on the site - not just a list of 20 Twitter accounts, 30 Facebook pages, 10 blogs, etc. It keeps users on your site longer, and gives them what they want in a way that forces them to do less work to get there.

A SMASHUP streamlines a university's social media accounts, is more user-friendly and best of all, it sets your university apart. It's completely branded to fit with the university's brand. It's fluid and it's always current. You're already tweeting, facebooking, blogging, YouTube-ing, etc., so why not make those accounts more effective? Why not make it easier for yourself to put it in front of your audience, students, alumni?

Read tweets without going to Twitter. Check out Facebook updates without going to Facebook. Watch YouTube videos without going to YouTube. Look at Flickr photos without going to Flickr. That's what a SMASHUP does. It aggregates everything and puts it in front of your audience. You're already updating these accounts frequently. A mashup makes the deployment easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.

Over the next few weeks, we'll be launching four university-wide SMASHUPs. We're really excited about it. And you should be too. Stay tuned!