Award-winning Chapman University for web and social media hosts Higher Education Web Professionals conference June 2-3, 2013

MEDIA INVITED
ORANGE, CA – University web and social media experts from the Dakotas to the Pacific Ocean will descend upon Chapman University this summer to exchange best practices for web sites, web technologies and social media in higher education. HighEdWeb – the name of the event – takes place June 2 and 3 and will feature topics ranging from creating a responsive web community on campus and maximizing social media conversations to using game theory to survive higher education’s wrap core containment problems.

“We are thrilled to be hosting our university counterparts at Chapman for HighEdWeb,” said David May, director of web and interactive marketing at Chapman. “Over the past two years we have put tremendous resources into revamping our own web and social media presence and are excited to share our successes and challenges in getting to where we are now with http://www.social.chapman.edu/. In the social media hub we created, visitors can find all of Chapman’s social media outlets in one place, including our blogs, negating the need for a visitor to navigate from one web page or app to another to find information.”

Social.Chapman.edu is a live, real-time aggregation of photos, articles and social media posts from the various colleges, departments and organizations at Chapman University. The service was envisioned and developed from the ground up by a team of students and web professionals from the Web & Interactive team in the Strategic Marketing & Communications departments. Using modern, open-source technologies has allowed the team the flexibility and power to create a truly unique and one-of-a-kind product for the University in a way that hasn’t been done before. Social.Chapman.edu has collected more than 4,500 posts, messages and updates from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and WordPress since its launch in January 2013.

In addition to creating the social hub, Chapman embraced revamping its website to make it tablet friendly with mobile optimization, yielding the university several awards, including:

2013 Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE VII) Awards – Silver, Chapman Website
2013 American Web Design Awarrds – winner, Social.Chapman.edu
2013 Annual Educational Advertising Award – Merit Winner, Chapman Website
2012 Educational Advertising Awards – Standard of Excellence Award, Chapman Website
2012 Internet Marketing Association – Best Website Aesthetics Award – Chapman Website
2012 Internet Marketing Association – Best Facebook Customization Award, Chapman Social Media
2012 Internet Marketing Association – Best Blog Award, Happenings Blog
2012 American Graphic Design Awards – Winner, Chapman Website

At the Chapman hosted HighEdWeb Conference, the keynote speaker is Tony Dunn— acknowledged higher education web developer and information technology expert from Chico State. Dunn also designs a cartoon series on web development called “Tales from Redesignland – chronicling “where web developers live and wish they could die.” Dunn will speak about cultural change in higher education and how it is needed in these times of constrained budgets and resources.

HighEdWeb West is a regional conference for web professionals within higher education, encompassing a range of positions from systems and programming to marketing and communications, and anywhere in between. The HighEdWeb organization hosts an annual conference in October, and this is a smaller, shorter conference to attract attendees from the Mountain States, the Southwest, and the West Coast. The HighEdWeb Association’s mission is: “To advance Web professionals, technologies, and standards in higher education.”

Sponsors include: OmniUpdate, Higher Ed Experts, Ingeniux, BarkleyREI, Beacon Technologies, Hannon Hill, Siteimprove, mStoner, Pantheon, nuCloud, and Sodexo.
More information can be found at: http://west.highedweb.org/program/

For questions contact Sheri Lehman at (714) 289-3128 or slehman@chapman.edu

Consistently ranked among the top universities in the West, Chapman University provides a uniquely personalized and interdisciplinary educational experience to highly qualified students. Our programs encourage innovation, creativity and collaboration, and focus on developing global citizen-leaders who are distinctively prepared to improve their community and their world. Visit www.chapman.edu
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On Twitter at: @ChapmanU
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