Yesterday was a very interesting day for the Internet.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is a U.S. House bill to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods. While the bill has good intentions, it poses a serious threat to emerging startups as well as established websites such as YouTube, Wikipedia and countless others.

To this end, a coordinated day of protest among websites occurred on January 18th, where each company took their own spin on how to let visitors know of the threats that SOPA presents. TechCrunch compiled a list of top onilne SOPA protests, which were particularly extensive and interesting.

While there were some memorable ones and also a few that were very effective in getting the point across, my favorite was done by The Oatmeal. Granted that the comic is a bit immature, you have to admit that it explains the risks that SOPA represents beautifully.

I believe that the best way to get through to most people about important issues is with humor. That is why I watch The Daily Show every day, because they deliver important news through the lens of comedy. It makes me more receptive and wanting to know what is going on in Iraq or what stance Ron Paul is taking on foreign policy.

What is the best SOPA protest website that you saw? Leave a comment below and let me know! 

We are starting a new series of blog posts featuring our fantastic clients to learn more about them and how they use RoomSync. Thanks to Sean Killion, Assistant Director for Assignments & Billing and Temple University Housing and Residential Life, for being our very first interviewee! 

How did you get involved working in higher education, and specifically, Temple Housing?

I went to Philadelphia University for business. I spent 6 years in advertising and marketing then went back to school for long-term career opportunities. I earned my MBA while working in Business Services in the Housing Department at LaSalle University. It was during this time that I switched from the business world to the higher education world. In March 2007, I left LaSalle for Temple University.

What unique things have you done in the past 5 years at Temple?

Residential Management Systems (RMS)

At Temple we had a homegrown system but in past three years, we moved from our IBM Mainframe, implemented an ERP system called Banner, and now use Residential Management Systems. Using the RMS StudentWeb Self-Assign, we can give students more flexibility in choices and inform them about the resources available to them earlier.

Roommates

Three or four years ago we were looking to satisfy our need to inform students about resources and technology for roommate selection. We have been with RoomSync for two years now thanks to their RMS partnership.

Housing on Demand

At Temple University, we’ve created “Housing-On-Demand,” a homegrown internal web application that gives students a user-friendly format to more easily communicate with the Residential Life Department. It consists of about 20 different apps including those specially tailored for students staying over breaks or moving onto campus early.

What does Temple University's Housing and Residential Life's social media presence look like now?

We use RoomSync to ease roommate selection and we have a Facebook fan page. We are mainly a resource for students to provide information about their interests on the fan page, however, in the coming fall semester we are planning to engage more people by running our Annual Room-Decorating Contest through Facebook.

How did you hear about RoomSync?

We were using RMS but were looking for more roommate-matching solutions. RMS recommended RoomSync because you specialize in this area. In addition, your application is integrated into Facebook so students didn’t need to go through a whole new system just for housing. 

What have you found to be the most efficient and effective way to inform students about RoomSync and get them to use the application?

We combine promotional mix strategies to get the word out about RoomSync and the entire housing selection process. We issue publications to provide concise information to students and communicate electronically through links on our Facebook fan page and emails. Specifically at Temple, we have direct marketing opportunities like our open house program where students signing up on campus receive tutorials on our systems.

Would you say there is a time commitment?

From my understanding, the set-up process was very easy with sharing interfaces and it basically manages itself. RoomSync makes my job a lot easier because the students have been given that opportunity to feel good about whom they are matched up with.

Before RoomSync, did you experience a lot of Facebook related calls from students/parents about their roommate assignements?

Yes, we saw The Facebook Effect*!

After the implementation of RoomSync, did you see a change in the number of Facebook-related calls?

RoomSync definitely drastically reduced the amount of calls and complaints. With RoomSync, we provide more information for our students to make them more informed consumers. It also helps to deflect complaint problems. If a student chooses not to use the resource, they should be ok with getting a random roommate.

What percentages of your students currently use or have used RoomSync within the past year?

We only upload our system with people who have made the commitment to live on campus with their housing deposit to target eligible potential roommates. Temple had 806 freshmen users this past year with a total of 25,183 visits (Approximately 31 visits per user to the application).

What shifts have you seen in time spent on and frequency of roommate conflict, room changes, and complaints, etc.?

Roommate conflicts due to random matching at Temple have definitely decreased with the increased use of RoomSync as an information tool.

On a different note, what is your favorite movie? 

I love so many, but if you're going to make me narrow them down, you should at least say favorite per genre! Star Wars, The New Hope”

What is your favorite musical artist? 

Again, so many on my iPod. But I'll go with the Beatles and Eric Clapton.

Additional Resources:

Sean Killion Biography

Temple University Residential Life Fan Page

*The Facebook Effect: Receiving a number of calls from randomly matched roommates dissatisfied after looking at their future Roommate’s Facebook profile 

I love my job for a lot of reasons. For one, our clients are some of the most knowledgeable and passionate people that I have met. They are thought leaders not only in housing but also in higher education.

One example is Amy Jorgensen, Marketing Coordinator at the University of Florida's Department of Housing & Residence Education. Amy does an incredible job with the department’s marketing, branding and social media efforts. You can connect with her on Twitter here. The UF Housing & Residence Education Facebook page experienced phenomenal growth over the past year. Likes increased by over 4,500 and there were nearly 390,000 Facebook page views in just the month of September in 2011. To put that in perspective, that’s almost double the page views their primary website page receives all year!

She recently presented her social media strategies and tactics at the ACUHO-I Business Operations conference in Orlando, FL entitled “Rock out your page – Make the most of your Facebook presence”. 

The presentation was named a "Best Of" at the conference and is full of useful social media statistics and powerful strategies to create an engaging Facebook fan page presence. My favorite statistic, courtesy of Dr. Rey Junco, is that students check Facebook an average of 5.75 times per day.

Check out all the statistics and insights from Amy at the ACUHO-I Online Library, which is full of some other fantastic presentations as well.

Our RoomSync development team has been hard at work developing new features. We've just rolled out 'auto-reminder emails' so that automatic reminders are sent out to users on selected days counting down to the close of your matching network. This is a great way to gently remind users to make their final roommate requests before their network closes.

The feature will allow you to select a maximum of 4 times at which these e-mails are sent out from RoomSync, including 10, 5, 3 and 1 day prior to the close of the matching network.

To modify your e-mail settings, simply login into the RoomSync administration website and click 'View/Modify Network Closing Reminder E-mails' under the Network Administration section.



What do you think of this feature? How can we improve this in the future? Leave a comment!