Emergency Alert Notification System

In light of the NIU tragedy on February 14th, I wanted to give coverage to UIS’ Emergency Alert Notification System. Andrew Careaga posted a link to the CNN news story on his blog yesterday just after we both posted it on Twitter virtually at the same time. What’s crazy is that I heard from a student that something had happened at NIU, but it wasn’t until an hour later that I read anything about it anywhere, and Andrew was one of the first. Just goes to show you the power of blogs.

I was just talking about our emergency alert notification system with our Director of Marketing the other day. We both thought it was interesting how a Springfield news station aired a report about our larger sister campus unveiling their new emergency alert notification system the other night. Funny thing is that they unveiled that system around last September…funnier yet, my campus, the one located in Springfield has never been mentioned for implementing our own notification system. Anywho…just a little rant with a lack of coverage from our own hometown news station.

My main point is to express to people to sign up for our alerts. UIS is a very safe campus and I have never felt as if I was in any harm or danger. I have been in contact with our Web Team and they assured me that an extensive plan is in place.  Here is what the NIU homepage looked like.

Regardless of how safe any campus feels, they should have a Notification system in place. Details of the UIS policy can be found here. Do yourselves a favor and sign up. The tornado season is coming, and that is covered under the policy as well.

 

Keywords search

This morning I have spent some time looking into what people search for when they view websites. I decided to review some hits my blog has received and how they got there. If you aren’t using Google Analytics, you really should be! It’s easy to set up and easy to use. The data you get is fantastic!

Anyway, I found some interesting things while reviewing the keywords and these are some that popped up:

“wow uis”
“‘my car bounces’”
“mobster art”
“real deal cheap broadway tickets”
“shuttle from spi to bmi”
“uis rims”

Those are just a few of the ones I found interesting. My friend Brad J Ward over at SquaredPeg posted a topic about Google Alerts this morning. As with just about everything that google does, I tried it out. Already got one alert from Nicholas’ Blog! Nice to see it works. I’ll review Google Alerts later after I play with it some more.