CASE Awards of Excellence 2010: Report for Category 12, Best in Social Media

This year, CASE created a new category, Best in Social Media, in its Awards of Excellence Program. I led the judging for social media, which was held in conjunction with the judging for websites at George School in Newtown, PA, in early April. [Here’s a blog post containing results, comments, and a downloadable version of the Judges’ Report for Category 11, Websites.]

Eight of us judged the social media category. Judges represented American colleges, schools, and universities, both public and private. The panel included people with experience in design, web strategy, web content development, admissions, student recruitment, social media, web technology, and marketing. Some members of the panel have considerable exposure on social media, including significant number of Twitter followers.

According to CASE,

Gold, Silver, and Bronze awards may be given in each subcategory to recognize best practices using social media within new and established programming. One overall category Grand Gold award may also be awarded for superior work. Eligible programs may come from any area of institutional advancement. Programs may be on-going or new in 2009 but must have been in place long enough to have produced well-documented results. You may also enter best uses of social media in the following categories: Alumni Relations Programs: Creative Use of Technology and New Media and Fundraising Programs: Technology Applications and Creative Use of New Media.

So there may be awards for social media coming from entries in these other categories: stay tuned.

Results

Here are the number of entries in each subcategory and the awards given:

12a. Best Uses of Social Media in Alumni Programming: 12 entries, no awards

12b. Best Uses of Social Media in Fundraising: 5 entries, one award
Silver: Children’s Hospital Trust Boston Social Media Portfolio: Facebook (English); Facebook (Spanish)]; YouTube (English); YouTube (Spanish); Twitter: @helpkids

12c. Best Uses of Social Media in Student Recruitment and Marketing: 19 entries, 2 awards
Silver: Northfield Mount Hermon School NMHBook
Bronze: Brock University Both Sides of the Brain [url=http://apps.facebook.com/
bothsidesofthebrain]Facebook Application[/url]

12d. Other Uses of Social Media: 25 entries, 3 awards
Gold: College of William and Mary Mascot Search
Gold: Oregon State University, Powered by Orange: Facebook page; Twitter: @poweredbyorange; YouTube; LinkedIn; Flickr.
Bronze: Tufts University, The Beelzebubs on NBC’s The Sing Off: news package and chat.

Comments and Trends

Social media is new enough that there aren’t a whole lot of precedents for great uses of social media. But there are some. Last year, for example, several initiatives that used social media won in various categories, including Flight of the Flyers from Nazareth College and Emory University’s Blue Pig campaign, both of which won awards. [I wrote blog posts about Flight of the Flyers and the Blue Pig.]

So before we began viewing the entries, we agreed that just having a Facebook page or a Twitter account—or even both of them along with a LinkedIn presence—wasn’t enough for an entry to qualify for an award. We wanted to see strategic goals set—and accomplished through the use of social media along with, perhaps, other channels. We wanted to see some evidence of engagement on the part of a target audience—blog comments, retweets, wall posts. And we wanted to see something that was new or different, not something that every other college or university was doing.

Honestly, we didn’t know what to expect and in general, we were relatively disappointed in the submissions. We did see a number of institutions that thought having a Facebook page or a Twitter presence was significant. It isn’t, not today.

From the award-winners, we gain an emerging sense that “best practices” in social media do involve multiple channels. Sometimes these are multiple social media or online channels. Northfield Mount Hermon’s NMHBook mashup is an example of this approach: it aggregates social media feeds into the school’s website. Powered By Orange, OSU’s impressive awareness campaign, mashes up social media with many other channels, including banners, signage, and face-to-face events. [Powered By Orange is an awesome campaign; here’s a blog post I wrote about it last year.] The College of William & Mary used multiple online channels in its search for a new mascot and did it brilliantly.

These are great examples of the kinds of social media-focused programs that institutions should emulate.

In judging social media, as in judging websites, written submissions are essential. Comments in the submissions help us to put what we’re seeing on-screen in context. A well-articulated strategy, supported by results, helps us to understand that social media can achieve institutional objectives. We’re keenly aware that these award winners will serve as models for other institutions and can help to convince reluctant administrators that social media is a safe channel to advance institutional goals. In this context, results are essential.

Here’s a copy of the complete judge’s report for this category, with comments about each of the award winners.

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CASE Awards of Excellence 2010: Winners, Comments, Judges’ Report for Category 11, Websites

The best professional development event I attend every year is the judging for the CASE Circle of Excellence Awards for websites, which I’ve led since the 1990s. At this year’s judging, held in early April at George School, we judged Category 11: Websites and Category 12: Best Use of Social Media. [There are comments and a downloadable Judge’s Report from the social media category here.]

What this means is locking oneself in a room for two days with more than a dozen smart, informed, opinionated people; looking at more than two hundred websites and social media sites; and arguing about which sites are good enough to get a award. It’s incredibly stimulating—and sometimes frustrating—to have strongly held opinions strongly challenged. No one knows where we’ll end up when we compile the final list of award winners.

For the record, as you scan the lists below, there are several sites that would never appear on my own list. And it’s safe to say that each of the other judges this year, as in years past, would say the same thing. But we all stand by the final list of award winners.

This year, the judges represented American and Canadian schools, colleges, and universities, both public and private. The panel included people with experience in design, web strategy, web content development, admissions, fundraising, student recruitment, social media, web technology, and marketing. Several of the judges work for institutions that have won national CASE Awards of Excellence for their websites. Two representatives from CASE attended the judging.

Results: Category 11

There were 54 complete institutional sites entered in Category 11A [Complete Institutional Websites] and 106 sites entered in Category 11B [Individual Sub-Websites]. Here are the winners:

Category 11a: Complete Institutional Websites
Gold: Fashion Institute of Technology
Silver: Northfield Mount Hermon School
Bronze:: Duke University; University of Puget Sound

Category 11b: Individual Sub-websites
Gold:: King’s College London, Online Prospectus; University of Michigan, University Housing
Silver: University of Toronto, U of T Magazine
Bronze:: Boston University, 2009 Annual Report; Columbia College Chicago, This is Columbia’s Moment Media Production Center; Hobart and William Smith Colleges, 3-D Web site; University of Iowa, Annual Report
Honorable Mention: University of Missouri-Columbia, Illumination

Observations and Trends

Each year, we begin this judging with a discussion of what makes an award-winning institutional website. Here were some of the important elements we identified this year:

• a sound strategy;


• sound information architecture, navigability, usability and search;


• valid, accurate, timely, and relevant content, effectively deployed across the site, including both text and images;


• the quality of resources-content assets, staff, and budgets-and how they were used on the site;


• a clear identity that is appropriate to the organization;


• an appropriate level of innovation—in other words, we want designers to push the envelope but we still expect information to be findable, content to be readable (or viewable), and the site to be well-designed. Cutting edge for the sake of being cutting edge didn’t persuade the judges to award anything.


• standardization of interface across the site;


• accessibility of the code; appropriate use of technology and adherence to standards (We awarded extra points for sites that had considered how they would display on a mobile device.);


• metrics; evaluation plans; results;


• and, new this year, a connection to the ecosystem of the web, which is particularly significant as the social web assumes a greater importance.

We asked ourselves repeatedly what each site does that’s unusual or innovative. Though we are tasked with judging the sites that are entered in this category and, to some extent, we must compare them with each other, we can’t ignore other sites we’ve seen. For example, we considered it legitimate to reject a site that was a collection of student blogs designed to recruit students. While it was well-designed, there was nothing about it that distinguished it from many similar sites nor did it do anything different than Ball State University’s student blog site has been doing for five years.

We were underwhelmed at what we saw this year. Sites entered for an award were missing basic elements like a sense of where an institution was located. And there were a lot of bland sites.

Some trends we noticed this year:

• People are trying to break out of the mold of what a traditional site looks like and are trying some radically different things that don’t seem to work or are very hard to understand from a user’s point of view. If they’ve tested these innovations and found that they are working, they haven’t shared any usability testing results or data that backs up the success of their risk taking.


• Perhaps because of a desire to be “different,” many sites had identity issues and did not provide us with a strong sense of what the institution was, what it stood for, or how it was truly differentiated from its competitors—and, therefore, why anyone would want to go there. The winners all did this well.


• It’s still hard to find calls to action on many websites. One judge recounted the difficulty of finding information about how to apply, much less an “apply now” button on a website he viewed.


• We saw many attempts to connect a website to the larger web through Facebook and Twitter badges and other devices, but often saw “share this” buttons in unexpected places where they appear to have been added as a afterthought, not baked into the design of the site.


• While .edu websites are much better organized and easier to navigate than they used to be, we still saw sites with “layers and layers of navigation all over the place,” which made them very confusing to navigate. This is particularly challenging on sites that don’t have a clear design hierarchy for pages or where choices are clearly dictated by internal politics rather than a sense of what a visitor to the site might want to do.


• On many sites, the space is just not well used. For example, pages about curriculum choices carried a big header and large images. What value does that have to a visitor to these pages? And related to this, while a big, splashy something may be suitable for a first-time visitor, what happens when repeated visitors tire of it and just want to reach the information they’re seeking?


• While we did see good content on some sites, some of it was buried on the site and hard to find. And some was good, but overused—like a site that featured profiles of six people that showed up everywhere. Another point that is often overlooked is that images, too, need to be refreshed and updated, especially when they depict events that happened some time ago.


• Some of the special-purpose sites, especially annual reports and some of the magazines, were totally devoid of interactivity and even links. I can’t stress too much how important the written submission for this category is—and how crucial it is to provide data about how effective the site is.

A last word about how important the written submissions for this category are. Comments in the submissions that outlined how much testing had been done or how successful the sites were convinced us to give awards to several sites that we might otherwise have passed over.

Likewise, some sites might have fared better if they had demonstrated that the unorthodox choices made by their designers were supported by usability testing rather than whim. One of the judges remarked: “It’s not just about the numbers, even if you have them. It’s about providing context for your content and trying to serve your customers. Posting content is no longer enough—you have to think about providing a service and include a task-based perspective; that’s where analytics shine.”

In terms of context, we paid a lot of attention to the organizational work and cross-campus cooperation that went into building the backbone of some of these sites.

Finally, knowing that sites were created in-house or with in-house solutions was also a plus.

Here’s a copy of the complete judge’s report for this category, with more details about the judging and comments about each of the award winners.

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Recipes for Success: Independent schools break the mold when it comes to social media

My article “Recipes for Success: Independent schools break the mold when it comes to social media,” appears in the print edition of January’s CASE Currents and on CASE’s website [though a login is required to read it].

Here are some key takeaways:

• Because of their small scale and relative lack of bureaucracy, it’s often easier for schools to experiment with social media.


• Aside from embrace of social media-with some encouraging results at places like Baylor School and Beaver Country Day School-there’s some really innovative work going on. Northfield Mount Hermon has merged social media feeds into its website and Worcester Academy’s mashup brings the voices of many members of the school to WAMash.

CASE has generously given us permission to distribute a reprint of “Recipes for Success.” [Thank you, Currents staff!]

And I wrote up interview notes from some of the people I talked to as a series of case studies:

• Baylor School, Small Staff, Smart Choices Yield Social Media Success So Far for Baylor School


• Beaver Country Day School, Social Media in Action at Beaver Country Day School


• Northfield Mount Hermon School, Northfield Mount Hermon: Social Media Done Right


• Proctor Academy, Innovator: Chuck Will, The Longest-Running Blogger in Education?


• Worcester Academy, Living Institutional Life Online at Worcester Academy

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Redeveloping Your Website: Asking the Right Questions, Finding the Right Partner

How do you know when you need to do something about your website?

Maybe you’ve heard from your admissions team that the site doesn’t stack up against your peer or competitor institutions. Maybe faculty members have spoken up about much-needed services. Incoming freshman may have pointed out holes in the information they were searching for last spring. Maybe visitors aren’t using the site the way you want them to. Or maybe the site is just dated and ready for attention.

For many of our colleagues in education, deciding that it’s time for a website redesign isn’t hard. The challenge is figuring out how to get started. A successful website redesign requires funding, executive-level support, campus-wide buy-in, and thousands of hours of involvement from faculty, staff, and students from throughout the community. For the small group or individual charged with getting the ball rolling, the hurdles can seem impossibly high, even if your institution is a small and close-knit independent or professional school.

mStoner has completed hundreds of web development projects with schools, colleges, and universities of all sizes, and we’re the first to admit that there’s no single, magic solution.

To help clarify some of the basic decisions you need to make-and to help you know where to go from there-we wrote “Redeveloping Your Website: Asking the Right Questions, Finding the Right Partner.” Our white paper lays out some of the questions you need to ask about your needs and how you might begin to approach them. Some projects don’t need help from outside vendors or consultants, but if yours does, the white paper suggests how you can find the right partner to meet your needs.

For a copy of this white paper, contact Katie Jennings (katie.jennings(at)mStoner.com) and she’ll be happy to send you one.

And if you’ve read “Redeveloping Your Website: Asking the Right Questions, Finding the Right Partner,” please contribute your thoughts and comments about the issues it addresses in the comments to this post.

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Innovators: Roger Johnson, Founder of Newswise

Thom Canalichio (left: that’s @newswise to his followers on Twitter) and Roger Johnson.

Last week, Jeremiah Owyang tweeted a query to his followers, asking about the first social network that they had used. Jeremiah followed up his tweet with a blog post, in which he asserted:

People often make the mistake that Friendster, Tribes, or some early social site was the first social network. People also make the mistake that Facebook is the largest social network to date, in reality, the largest social networks are email. Let’s run the numbers: ... Hotmail has 375 million active accounts worldwide, Yahoo mail is reported at 280mm, and Facebook only has 200 million but growing. Email is the first-and largest-digital social network and will likely continue this path of domination, and hey, that’s coming from me, a social technology analyst.

I really appreciate Jeremiah’s perspective. I’m keenly aware of how email enhanced my own ability to network. [And in some ways, I could argue, email was a more effective bond for social networks than many of today’s options. But that’s the subject of another post.]

Roger Johnson, the founder and currently president and creative co-director of Newswise, is someone who appreciated early-on how powerful email and online forums could be. Before many people used the Internet-and even before Mosaic enabled people outside of a tiny community of researchers to use the Web-proprietary online services like Compuserve and Prodigy provided online communications (and social networking) through email, bulletin boards, and forums.

Roger, who was trained as a scientist, recognized how powerful these tools could be and founded Newswise to allow researchers; PR people from colleges, universities, and other nonprofit organizations; and news media to communicate with each other. According to the Newswise website:

Journalists look to Newswise as a trusted resource for knowledge-based news, embargoed research results, and expert contacts from the world’s leading research institutions: universities, colleges, laboratories, professional organizations, governmental agencies, and private research groups active in the fields of medicine, science, business, and the humanities. Newswise maintains a comprehensive database of current news, searchable archives, subscription wire services, and advanced information-management tools to enhance the value and efficiency of research-based news delivery for both journalists and source institutions.

Newswise also sponsors PIONet, a listserv (and social network!) for public information officers at colleges, universities, and other research organizations.

We asked Roger to respond to a series of questions about his experience founding Newswise and his observations about how the world of online communications has changed-and remained the same-since its founding.

What experience did you have in higher education before Newswise?
I earned a BS in chemistry from the University of Florida and a PhD in biochemistry from the University of Illinois Medical Center, Chicago. Then I was a postdoctoral fellow at both the University of Texas, Southwestern in Dallas, and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. While at Wisconsin, I changed careers from science research to journalism and participated in a science writers training program and courses in communication and writing.

I also later wrote for the National Institutes of Health, which is sort of a higher education institution, and worked for a scientific society (Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology) whose members were scientists at universities throughout the US. I wrote about their research and coordinated my work with theirs.

What gave you the idea for Newswise? How did you get started?
Since buying my first personal computer in 1980 (Osborne with 5-inch screen and CP/M operating system) I was keen on using computers to improve my effectiveness. In the early days of bulletin board services (1990), I came up with the idea of creating an online, comprehensive source for digital information about science and medical research and started the first such service in 1992 on CompuServe’s Journalism Forum.

This was before the Internet was widely used by academics, much less journalists, and before Mosaic was released [Mosaic, released in 1993, was the first web browser and made broader use of the web possible.]

What were some of the big challenges you faced in getting Newswise off the ground?
When I started Newswise, there was no demand and little perceived need among higher education news offices for digital information or delivery. Few people had email addresses. University news offices were mailing news releases; some were playing around with faxing. I gave our service away for three years because they were unwilling to pay for it.

What are some of the major changes Newswise has made to respond to changes in technology?
There have been many changes, including many operating systems and the move from CompuServe to the web. Now everyone in the profession, both PIOs and journalists, is online and has email. The introduction of video to the web has been big. Probably the most important improvement to the web has been the development of search engines, such as Google.

The media industry is changing; how will Newswise change in response?
The downsizing of major news media will not, in itself, change our service. Journalists are still important and providing the best technology for accessing them with research news by the most state-of-the-art technology will remain a major objective.

However, the decline of news media is correlated to the rise of the “new media,” and that presents a major new opportunity. This is bringing to fruition the goal of taking higher education information directly to the public. Newswise has embraced that new opportunity for helping our clients access a more diverse user base. We’re in the midst of working with clients to reach those users with a variety of social media tools and platforms, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs, etc.

What technologies are you tracking as you think about the future of Newswise?
It’s not so much the technologies as the strategies that are important right now. For example, you could say that Twitter is a technology, and most people in our profession have not even begun to try it, much less understand how it could be useful or made to be useful.

At Newswise, we’re pursuing a hypothesis for how Twitter would be useful—how could we create a broadcast channel? It involves two major problems: How do you create the content for the Twitter frame (140 character limit and ephemeral info) and how do you create an audience? These are the cutting-edge issues at this time with Twitter, which is the rave but clearly has unproven value. We are using Twitter to drive users to our clients’ research news on Newswise, and it is working. (Follow @newswise on Twitter.)

What key lessons have you learned from your experience in creating and running Newswise?
This is a tough question. Looking at the issue of relationship, it seems that the critical lesson is that our clients are really two groups with somewhat different-and sometimes even competinginterests. We have to maintain a balance between serving both those clients who pay us to deliver the info, and the journalists who read it. That is occasionally a delicate balance. It requires creativity, and that’s where the fun derives-to maintain the balance while being innovative. Similarly, a lesson is to always listen to feedback, even criticism, as if it were a contribution and the core of an idea for improving. The goal is to create partnership relationships. That is what makes work rewarding. It’s not much fun being categorized as a vendor.

When it comes to the technology part, summing it up seems too early-there’s too much happening right now. But one lesson is that with all of the changes in the medium, delivery, packaging, and platforms communication remains a separate thing, like the difference between brain and mind. For example, with the recent swine flu epidemic and the experience in the news media and the new media, I take a very positive view. It looks like collectivelythe news media, new media, government, and public-handled it very well. With the exception of the slaughter of pigs in Egypt (and I’m not sure that wasn’t an urban myth) there were no horrible outcomes.

Technology has improved communication. It has democratized the process and brought more people into the process. Guy Kawasaki (the Twitter maniac) says he uses information “as a weapon.” I don’t take that view. It can be a weapon, but with public involvement in a responsible system, it brings us all to a higher level of participation, and we’ve passed a threshold where the system has developed learning mechanisms and is behaving like an intelligent entity.

What’s the next big thing that advancement/marketing/PR folks in higher ed need to pay attention to?
Clearly the social media/new media is the big sea change right now. (Maybe this is the cause of the melting Antarctic ice cap?) It’s evolving so rapidly that it is difficult to settle on a plan, so the plan needs to be more of an experiment and rapidly responding system. It is also complex and diverse. Just to use Twitter effectively, for example, requires using at least eight applications. I just read a blog that suggested monitoring your brand with 13 different apps. Relating to bloggers is far more complicated than relating to journalists. Social media is like the web before Google.

What I’m hearing from the majority of higher ed PIOs is that they are novices at social media. Most don’t have a plan to utilize it. What’s more, most don’t understand how to begin to create a strategy or have an idea for what is possible or what they should be trying to achieve. Some are starting a Twitter feed, but they are unclear who is the audience, how to recruit that audience, and what content they provide that audience. I’m not critical—it’s hard to have a plan when the landscape is changing so rapidly and the best approach might be to experiment or even play around. But allocating time to playing around doesn’t seem to resonate well, because people feel pressured to jump in and don’t have time to play around.

We’re in the early days of social media, and just as in the early days of the web, Newswise is trying to provide leadership by creating a strategy based on a collaborative model. I hypothesize that one university by itself would have difficulty creating a content channel that would interest national journalists or thought leaders or knowledge workers. Newswise can add value by gathering the content into a collaborative channel that creates more interest among these users.

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Teens to Advertisers: We Don’t Want Your Texts (and Other Insights from YPulse Mashup)

I’m attending the YPulse Youth Marketing mashup in San Francisco, hoping to learn how top brands among teens and tweens manage to be successful in marketing to this incredibly discriminating audience. [You can follow #ypulse09 on Twitter if you’re interested.]

One of the best panels I’ve heard so far was a presentation by Bill Carter, a partner in Fuse Marketing, who talked about a study that Fuse did in conjunction with the University of Massachusetts on brand advertising aimed at teens. The survey-done with teens in “Sarah Palin’s America” (e.g. not just teens from the coasts and big cities)-aimed at whether advertising was memorable and presented in a channel that appealed to teens.

Carter emphasized the disconnects between what marketers believe is true about the power of various channels and what teens and tweens think, using these examples:

• TV is not dead to teens: 75% prefer and/or believe it’s appropriate for brands to reach them via TV ads.


• Teens are not interested in interacting with brands on social networks-at least the way brands represent themselves currently. Teens use social networking sites to connect with friends and do things that are fun-they don’t relate to brands online. Only 30% of teens have “friended a brand” on a social network.


• Official company websites aren’t dead: 80% of teens have gone to a official company’s product site and used them to make purchase decisions.


• Only 10% of teens approve of advertising in video games—teens just don’t believe that having advertisers in a game makes it more realistic. Carter said that ads for Burton snow boards in a videogame about snowboarding could make sense, but only because they’re in context.


• Teens aren’t interested in or receptive to ads in text messages: only 10% of teens approve of texting by advertisers; this ranked dead last in approval ratings by teens in what was acceptable in communications. Carter said that he believes this is mostly due to the way that current advertisers are using the medium, but it’s currently the case.


• Teens still read magazines: magazine ads receive high approvals and are the second-most-effective medium in reaching them.


• Teens say that the most effective advertising includes “people who look like me.” Only 20% prefer ads with celebrities or athletes as endorsers. The most memorable ad among teens was Verizon’s “can you hear me now” guy, Carter said.

In the Fuse study, 83% of those surveyed were average or heavy users of the Internet; 80% were average or heavy users of TV; 63% were average or heavy users of email; and 47% were average or heavy users of social networks.

Of the 80% of those surveyed who visited an official product website, 80% somewhat or strongly agreed that the site was valuable.

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Happy Birthday to You…

And I regret to say that my weekend guests caused me to miss another milestone: Saturday marked the second anniversary of Alumni Futures. Congratulations, Andy: thanks for the many insights you’ve shared.

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How Reporters Use Blogs and Social Media

The survey includes responses from 2,386 journalists; 48% were editors or editorial staff and 34% reporters or writers.

Some valuable insights:

• Half of journalists report visiting a corporate website or online newsroom at least once a week; they complain about not being able to find contact information for a media representative or to find contact information for those representatives.


• Journalists use blogs, with almost 75% saying that they read “one or more blogs to keep up with the subject matter they cover.” About 29% read five or more blogs to keep up with their beat.


• About three-fourths of journalists use social media to research stories. “Almost 38% of journalists now say they visit a social media site at least once a week as part of their reporting. Only 25% say they don’t use social media.


• “An overwhelming majority of journalists—74.8%—prefer to receive information about corporate, not-for-profit and government news by email. Commercial newswires were a distant second choice, with only 8.1% of respondents indicating that preference.”

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Surviving and Thriving During a Website Relaunch

Nancy presented a fairly detailed description of the project (as detailed as you can get in a 1.25-hour session!), talked about why Ball State needed to move forward with a website relaunch, and talked about the process they used to take apart-and rebuild-their site. Here’s a handout for the session. [This is a PDF of Nancy’s slides.]

From my own standpoint, just a few observations about Nancy’s presentation.

One of the key success factors for a major project like this is support from University leadership. Not only did the senior staff at Ball State support the relaunch, but President Jo Ann Gora was a major backer. That helps to clear political hurdles and alerts people across campus about how important the project is.

I couldn’t count the number of times Nancy mentioned the words “conversation” and “meeting.” Make no mistake—the more engagement there is with stakeholders in a project like this one, the more successful the outcome.

As I was listening to Nancy talk, I was aware of how many people contributed to the success of this project: from Ball State’s developers, to writers in the marketing office, to members of our own team. But one of the most important people in the mix was Nancy herself. Having a project leader who is a skilled communicator and who understands what kind of communications (emails, blogs, meetings) are necessary; whom to communicate with; and when to communicate is essential to the long-term success of the project. Nancy also has an ability to see the big picture and to dive into the details. Just the kind of skills that you want in someone leading a long-term, complicated project with many potential snags.

Michael’s Ten Essentials for a Successful Website Relaunch

As for my part of the session, I talked about a number of ways in which Ball State’s paid attention to essential elements that I believe are key to the success of a project like this one. These are in the PDF handout, but I’m adding them here because the sub-points don’t appear there.

1. Achieve clarity first.

• about what you need to do to the site: site redesign or site redevelopment?


• set the right goals


• be realistic about technology needs

2. Focus on audience needs.

• who is the audience?


• what do they want to learn? what do they want to do?


• what do you want them to know


• what actions do you want them to take?

3. Recruit the right allies.

• funders


• enthusiasts


• people whose pain you can alleviate


• people who can make things happen


• your president and his/her senior staff

4. Educate friend and foe.

• involve your campus in the process


• establish stakeholder groups from day 1

5. Be realistic about your timeline and budget.

• two of three: “fast/cheap/good”


• critical investment in your most important communications channel


• critical technology infrastructure investment

6. Begin with content.
7. Communicate, communicate, communicate.

• establish clear communications with stakeholders from the outset


• email, blog, meetings & presentations

8. Test, test, test.

• usability tests


• concept tests


• ongoing tests & research

9. Work starts when the site launches.

• don’t do anything you can’t sustain.

10. Go back to point 1.

Other Resources

I added some other resources to the handout, but in case you want them now, here they are:

College of William & Mary [ur=http://www.wm.edu/reweb]re.web blog[/url]
Karine Joly: “10 Tips to a Successful Website Redesign”
Michael Stoner: “Redesign or Redevelopment? Be Clear What Your Site Needs Before You Start Work”
Michael Stoner: “Mistakes Institutions Make in Website Redesigns”

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Blog Coverage of AMA Symposium on the Marketing of Higher Ed

Karlyn Morrisette covered many sessions at the conference, as well as presenting a well-received session on email marketing. Her posts are here.

Karine Joly also covered sessions at the conference on CollegeWebEditor.

This year, there were quite a number of bloggers covering conference sessions. Karine aggregates blog posts from the conference here. There was quite a bit of Twittering going on during the conference as well so people who were following Karine or other members of the Twitterati could have a sense of what was going on at the conference.

And as an amusing historical note, as far as I can tell, I was the first person to blog about the AMA conference, posting several posts about the 2006 event: Blogs for Prospective Students Work in Surprising Ways, Ball State Finds; Understanding Website Usage in Undergraduate and Graduate School Research; and Why Traditional Communications Strategies No Longer Work With Boys.

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