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 competing—interests. 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 collectively—the 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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Educause Study Explores How Undergrads Use IT

Educause’s Core Data Service Fiscal Year 2007 Summary Report is always fascinating from a management standpoint.

More interesting to me is [url=http://connect.educause.edu/Library/ECAR/TheECARStudyofUndergradua/47485
]The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2008[/url]. I find it fascinating to track the changes in the N-Gen, which are in full display if you read this report.

There’s no doubt that the sample size for this study is impressive: it “analyzes the responses of 27,317 freshmen, seniors, and community colleges students at 98 colleges and universities in the United States,” and includes findings from focus groups.

Some interesting findings:

*More than 80 percent of respondents own laptops and one third own both a laptop and a desktop computer.
*66.1 percent own Internet-capable mobile phones, though many say it’s too expensive, too cumbersome, or too time-consuming to do much browsing with their phones.
*Students spend an average of 19.6 hours a week actively doing online activities for school, work, or recreation.
*85.2 percent of students report using social networking websites. These are sites like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn. Most respondents (55.8 percent) spend 5 hours or less per week on these sites; another 29.6 percent spend between 6-10 hours a week. The 14.8 percent who don’t use theese sites view them as a waste of time.
*Among 18-19 year-olds, 95.1 percent use social networking sites, in contrast to 37 percent of students 30 and older. Not surprisingly, they use social networking sites to say in touch with friends, with 11.6 percent saying that the sites serve their professional needs (job networking, etc.). Only 5.5 percent report using them to communicate with instructors.
*Younger students are also more likely to use text messaging (83.6 percent report texting daily) and IM (73.8 percent use IM daily).
*Students report contributing content to YouTube, Flickr (46.6 percent do this monthly); contributing to wikis (38.2 percent do it monthly); and blogs (34.1% do it monthly).

For those who are interested in learning how students view the use of technology on campus, there’s plenty of material in the report. One tidbit that stood out to me is that 31.8 percent of respondents agreed with the statement “I get more actively involved in courses that use IT.”

Are we a 21st Century campus yet?

And consider this, from a survey conducted by CDW-G. The CDW-G 21st Century Campus Study reports that the number one desired technical capability among students—according to 39 percent of those surveyed—is the ability to chat online with professors. The report says:

Today’s collegians want more than a lecture-hall atmosphere from their college experience – they want regular and immediate communication with faculty. Students rated online chat with professors the tech capability that would be most useful in their studies. Still, just 23% of IT staff say their campus currently offers it.

The actual purppse of the study, according to CDG-W is to learn how close we to achieving the 21st-century campus. CDW-G surveyed more than 1,000 college students, faculty and IT staff members about their perceptions of campus technology.

The key findings:

*Regardless of their major, students say campus technology was a key factor in their school selection - and is critical to their chosen professions
*More than 80 percent of faculty teach at least some of their classes in “smart classrooms,” yet just 42 percent of those faculty use the technology during every class session
*Topping students’ technology wish list is online chat capability with professors; just 23 percent of higher education IT staff say their campus offers it
*Faculty and IT staff agreed that lack of technology knowledge among faculty is the biggest barrier to technology on campus

In short, students want faculty to use technology creatively to engage them. Here are some suggestions:

“Use videos, instructional Web sites, slide shows, online experiments, etc., to better instruct and familiarize students with relevant info”
“Use wikis”
“I know my campus offers training courses for all faculty on how to use the new technology … I would highly recommend that all professors take these courses”
“Get AIM”
“Keep grades updated, send out mass e-mails to students, stop using VHS … it’s called live streaming!”
“Teachers seem to grasp the concept of using technology, but sometimes don’t embrace using it”
“Be creative. I enjoy podcasts as a learning tool”

Get your very own PDF of this report here.

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CASE Web Award Winners 2008

Each year, a group of opinionated and experienced professionals with varied backgrounds gathers to answer this question for the CASE Circle of Excellence Awards Program. I’ve led this judging for the past ten years. This year, I was joined by 14 people representing schools, public and private colleges, and universities in the U.S. and Canada for two intense days spent reviewing the 132 sites entered in CASE’s Category 10. (For the record: 33 complete institutional websites and 99 individual subweb sites, for specific areas like admissions, alumni, etc.) Competition in this category is very rigorous and winning is difficult.

Here are some of the key elements that constituted an award-winning site in 2008, as identified by the judges:

- a well-founded strategy
- sound information architecture, navigability, usability and search
- engaging content, effectively deployed across the site
- effective management of the site
- appropriate look and feel, distinctive to the purpose of the site and consistent within the site
- appropriate use of technology and adherence to standards
- an evaluation plan and convincing results

In our evaluations, we look for sites that do something particularly interesting or unusual, instead of sites that are merely attractive. It’s easy to make a site look good, but is the site great at what it’s designed to do? Even the best-looking site won’t get an award if it isn’t well organized or if it lacks coherent messaging.

Video: This year, we saw that the apparent web-wide absorption with video has reached colleges, universities, and schools. We viewed a significant amount of video on the websites we judged. One reaction to this plethora of video is: so what? Too much of this video, like too much of the writing on college and university websites, seems uninspired. The video equivalent of dull writing involves badly lit and badly shot talking heads saying boring things. But this is really the first efflorescence of video on college and university sites; I expect that we’ll see many changes in the years to come.

Accessibility: We saw an increased awareness of accessibility, with institutions providing transcripts for video and generally paying greater attention to standards across the board.

Social networking: We didn’t see much evidence that social networks or other Web 2.0 features were being used very effectively.

Photography and Content: We saw a significant amount of great still photography this year, but a decided lack of great content. Too much of the writing was characterized by the usual university-language cliches. And excellent content was often buried deep inside the site.

Organization: In general, sites are better organized and there’s more consistency in interface and navigation across a given site, making it easier for visitors to navigate around it. Still, we saw some sites with confusing menus (or too many of them)—a clear step backwards.

Tracking and Assessment: The judges agreed that we’d like to see more evidence that institutions are considering results when they begin to redesign and launch a site and more evidence that they have established a rigorous tracking program. Here’s an observation from the 2006 judges’ report that (still!) bears repeating:

… we still don’t see enough serious attempts at assessing how effective websites are. How can an institution justify spending hundreds of hours of staff time-and thousands or tens of thousands of dollars-on a website and not know how effective it is? Honestly, we don’t care if your site has won other awards or if people say they like it. [Which is not to say that we don’t pay attention to comments and results from usability testing when they make a point relevant to your award entry.] What’s important is that you can demonstrate that you set measurable goals and that your site has met or exceeded them.

Integrated communications: We did see increased evidence that websites are being developed as part of an integrated institutional marketing and communications strategy. The University at Buffalo won two awards this year—a Gold for its Greener Shade of Blue site, which served as a showcase for a semester-long campaign to tell the story of UB’s environmental leadership. The site is a model in every respect, but in particular because it brought resources into a coherent whole that would not have been possible without the Web.

In all, we agreed that, while institutional web design has come a long way, there’s still a long way to go. We look forward to seeing more of what’s to come.

Here’s the Judges’ Report for 2008 with award winners and comments about each of them.

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