Sometime during the Winter Olympics, CollegeSurfing.com decided to host some winter games of its own and came up with the Web 2.0 College Olympics to identify the most social media-savvy campuses for prospective students. But instead of limiting their competition to single gold, silver and bronze medalists, the CollegeSurfing.com folks listed their top “50 social media innovators in higher education.” Here are the top five from that list, with links to their Twitter feeds. If you’re looking for examples of how to do social media in higher ed, these are the top of the top — the gold standard.
- Tufts University gets kudos for its twittering dining halls, vibrant Facebook group and my favorite, Spark, a site devoted to the campus’s social media tools.
- Johns Hopkins University is cited for its “prolific” Twitter feed and “gets props for letting the Twitterverse in on its tongue-in-cheek swine flu lexicon.” (After these Olympics, Johns Hopkins earned my further admiration by pulling off the cleverest and most elaborate university April Fool’s prank of 2010.)
- Ithaca College is lauded for a lighthearted approach to Twitter “and more than a dozen blogs are easily accessible from the school’s home page.”
- Butler University. “Kudos to Butler for letting its mascot, an adorable bulldog, run his own Twitter account.” ‘Nuff said.
- Case Western Reserve University’s Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing. The only school within a university to earn gold medal status, this school earned notice for live-Tweeting a disaster drill for flight nursing camp students and for their own YouTube channel.
Special thanks to Georgy Cohen (@radiofreegeorgy), who first pointed this out several weeks back.
Higher Ed Marketing 
Thanks for mentioning Blue2’s page! He is the best mascot of any college in my opinion. At Butler, we enjoy having fun and clever pictures/posts from and of our mascot, students, alumni and more!