mStoner changes—and stays the same

Have you ever had the experience of something being simultaneously extraordinary and routine? That’s how I feel about mStoner’s recent big news. Last month we completed the acquisition of our long-time technical partner, Global Image.

This acquisition is extraordinary for us because it’s a big change in terms of mStoner’s corporate structure. In essence, our company just doubled in size. OTOH, it doesn’t seem as if anything has changed. To understand why I’m feeling so bipolar at the moment, some history might help.

I first met Rob Cima, Global Image’s (now-former!) CEO, in 1997 when GI acquired ArachNet, the company that had provided technical support on some of my first web projects. Shortly after that acquisition, ArachNet’s principals moved on to other things, leaving Rob and me to figure things out. We have worked together ever since, with his team providing software development and a variety of technical services for every web project I’ve done, either in my former practice or at mStoner.

For me, one of the interesting aspects of our partnership was that Global worked in businesses outside of education, giving me exposure to new horizons. For instance, they launched an inventory system for a startup that used PalmPilots and the web to sync orders for small retail stores: at the time, a very innovative project.

Also, GI’s work with banks, health care institutions, and other kinds of businesses brought them into contact with tools that hadn’t yet come on the radar of our .edu clients. Excited about what we were learning in these other venues, we attempted to bring some of those advancements to our clients in education. Some of these attempts didn’t stick, but, happily, our early experiments introducing content management systems hit the mark. Even though today most education websites use a content management system of some kind, a decade ago—when we built the first .edu websites using CMSs—that was unheard of.

In 2001, Rob joined Voltaire and me in founding mStoner, signing on as a partner but running Global Image as a separate business. He even financed our launch until we could bring in enough work to support ourselves (for a little while, Voltaire and I were actually Global Image employees).

As mStoner grew, our ties with Global Image became broader and deeper. More and more of Global’s work became focused on education as the needs of our clients expanded. Our companies worked together so well that some clients didn’t know we were actually two companies. Yet, over time, we realized that we could improve client service through even better coordination of processes across the two companies and even stronger collaboration between our teams. Finally, at some point, it became apparent to all of us that it just made sense to integrate mStoner and Global Image in fact, as well as operationally.

To be clear, this change isn’t really about corporate structure. Incorporating technology and software development as a core function within mStoner allows us to be more strategic and responsive in serving client needs. As a company, we’ve always emphasized that sound strategy precedes technology (or, for that matter, design or implementation of any kind). But today, great websites need sophisticated technology. We believe that our new configuration can provide that kind of integration for our clients—whether we’re building a website, an iPhone app, a marketing campaign, or something we haven’t yet dreamed up.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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When You’re Hiring a Consultant, Does Education Experience Matter?

“We want a fresh perspective, so we selected a consultant who has never worked in education before.”

That’s something we occasionally hear from someone who is calling to tell us that they hired another firm. They believe a consultant who works with other kinds of clients will deliver a different solution, one that they wouldn’t get from us or other firms who work primarily with schools, colleges, and universities.

Pardon me, but I’m skeptical.

It’s true that some consultants who work in .edu do seem to crank out work that looks very similar (though most don’t). But much more importantly, I haven’t seen a whole lot of evidence of fresh thinking or new perspectives in the websites, viewbooks, brand work, and other products emerging from the partnerships with consultants with that vaunted experience outside education.

Why is that the case? Here are some hypotheses:

• Schools, colleges and universities are complex institutions. So consultants who haven’t worked in .edu need to learn the business. But more importantly, they need to understand the culture. And it’s not easy to understand how to operate within the unique culture of an institution where power is diffuse, decision-making is often unclear, and relationships can be complicated. Even with a firm grasp on these dynamics, it can be hard to move the needle. So consultants that don’t understand colleges and universities have a pretty steep learning curve.


• By their nature, colleges and universities are conservative institutions. Most are unwilling to step too far out ahead of their peers—to take too many chances. So even when some people at an institution say they want something different, when it comes down to final decisions, they’ll likely opt for the safer option rather than the riskier one.


• Even if institutions are willing to sign off on a risk, key constituents aren’t. I can think of many examples in our own work where edgy designs-considered front-runners by the staff members we were working withhave been rejected after testing with target visitors and constituents. Or the college staff who told us “No purple on our web design!” and changed their minds when alumni missed their school color. And despite all the talk about the changing needs and interests of web audiences, there are certain standards and practices that work-and our testing shows that people want those standards maintained.

So, does experience in education really matter when you’re hiring a consultant? I believe it does. Here are some ways in which consultants with .edu experience bring value to a project:

• A consultant’s experience in working in education will help you avoid mistakes of regression specific to independent school, college and university projects. Having a history of what’s been done before and how best practices have evolved-especially on the web and in print-can save you a lot of time and money.


• A consultant’s experience provides you with cover. You may know what you need (or think you do), but there’s a big difference between having the right solution and selling it to the people whose support you need to make it happen. Fair or unfair, hearing feedback or recommendations from a consultant with years of experience in education may hold more weight with your colleagues, helping you lay the groundwork for positive change at your institution.


• The consultant’s past work helps them to understand the culture of education and the challenge of building consensus in an environment where decisions are influenced by, if not determined by, many voices. A consultant with experience in education will be familiar with the way things do (and don’t) get done in an environment like yours and can be a strong ally helping you to navigate your institution’s peculiar obstacle course.

What do you think?

Posted by Michael Stoner
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Innovators: Dan Forbush, Founder of ProfNet

Dan Forbush has served as executive director, communications, at Skidmore College for more than two years. But for nearly 12 years previously, he was president of ProfNet, a division of PR Newswire. PR Newswire is the global leader in news and information distribution services for professional communicators, businesses, and organizations of all kinds.

PR Newswire didn’t create ProfNet; Dan Forbush did. As he explains in the following interview, he had a vision of how campus PR directors could offer their services directly to members of the media using email. At the time, Forbush was associate vice president, university relations, at SUNY at Stony Brook. His idea doesn’t seen like a big deal now, but in the early 1990s, it was a radical one. Many campus PR officers were just starting to use email—and many journalists at newspapers didn’t even have email access at their desks.

Dan’s plan was pretty simple: journalists would call or fax their requests for experts to ProfNet, which would distribute them via email to campus PR staff, who would then follow up on their own to pitch their own experts to journalists. At first, the daily emails were pretty lean; then, as journalists discovered that ProfNet yielded a wide range of qualified experts, they grew in size.

Eventually Dan left Stony Brook and began to run ProfNet full-time and, a year later, sold it to PRNewswire. The sale provided the resources and scale that ProfNet needed to build out a substantial web presence, and, using PRNewswire’s powerful and wide-reaching distribution, provided better placement for ProfNet members.

In 2007, Dan left ProfNet and joined the senior staff at Skidmore.

What experience did you have in higher education before ProfNet?

The most important experience I had was working with people like Fred Gehrung, Frank Dobisky, and Bill Tyson at Gehrung Associates in Keene, NH. GA was (and remains) a small PR firm that specialized at that time in national media relations for colleges and universities. I worked there for three years in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

We had a lot of success simply by virtue of the fact that we represented 40 colleges and universities and could come up with an expert on any subject for a reporter simply by getting on the phone to our clients. We weren’t just a PR agency; we were an expert resource. After GA, I went on to become head of PR at Syracuse University and SUNY Stony Brook, but this is the experience stayed with me. I wanted to again be involved in the day-to-day development of major stories.

What gave you the idea for ProfNet? How did you get started?

Back in the early 1990s, email was a new medium-a powerful medium that for the first time enabled anyone to send a message around the world at no charge. It occurred to me thatby setting up a listserv of college and university news and information officers-our PR operation at SUNY Stony Brook could become a broker of queries for reporters in need of expert sources.

In short, we could create the same kind of interaction we had with reporters at Gehrung Associates, except we could do it for hundreds of institutions and we could provide the service virtually for free—which actually is how we ran it for the first two years.

What were some of the big challenges you faced in getting ProfNet off the ground?

It was fairly easy. Using a list that bought from CASE for $50, I sent out an invitation to about 900 news and information officers and quickly created a list of about 200 email addresses. Our IT department created a listserv in an afternoon. I announced the creation of the service in the “Journalists Forum” of CompuServe and on December 7, 1992, transmitted our first query for a UPI reporter who needed an expert on the hazards of winter flying. That proved the concept. Within two years, our team of student interns was sending 40 queries a day to a network of PR people at 600 colleges and universities. What really put us on the map was a story about ProfNet that appeared in The New York Times in May, 1994.

The biggest challenge was taking ProfNet global. Unfortunately, we never figured out how to overcome the barriers of language and cultural differences. ProfNet-like networks promptly sprang up in Germany, England, and Australia, and we played a direct role in helping to launch a ProfNet-like network in Sweden and South Africa, but we were never able to effectively link them in a world-wide service. Which was too bad, because I really enjoyed working with and visiting PR professionals and reporters in those far-off places.

What are some of the major changes ProfNet has made to respond to changes in technology?

When the Web came along, we created an expert database and launched a Webzine called “Media Insider.” Over a span of 12 years, we rebuilt the query delivery system four times. Over that same period, PR Newswire steadily integrated ProfNet’s main functions-such as editorial, sales, customer serviceinto the core of the company, and we closed our independent Long Island office in 2006. Other than sales, there wasn’t a lot more for me to do, and soas I always figured I would-returned to academic PR. I feel fortunate to have connected with Skidmore. It’s a very creative and forward-looking place.

The media industry is changing; how will ProfNet change in response?

One recent step they’ve taken is to transmit queries via Twitter. That looks like a smart move. Any step that sharpens the targeting of queries will make ProfNet more scalable and give it a strategic advantage. The same is true of HARO, their new competitor in the expert space.

What technologies are you tracking as you think about the future of ProfNet?
I confess I no longer think about the future of ProfNet. Now, like everyone else in academic PR, I’m trying to figure out how we’re going to use technologies and networks like Facebook, Twitter, and our own soon-to-be-launched Skidmore-hosted social network.

What key lessons have you learned from your experience in creating and running ProfNet?

There are two. The first is that, since all of these new technologies are new, you have to be willing to experiment. The second is that evolution is truly blind. What works, works. What doesn’t, doesn’t. Sheer trial and error creates the path of development.

What’s the next big thing that advancement/marketing/PR folks in higher ed need to pay attention to?

One is Twitter, I’m afraid. I say afraid because I personally have not warmed up to the medium but a lot of people evidently have. Another may be Facebook Connect—the ability to synchronize one’s Web site with Facebook.

Some big challenges we’re confronting at Skidmore: How do we easily transform publications into compelling Web pages? And how do we efficiently manage the content that’s going into the seven or eight targeted email newsletters we’re currently producing. If anyone has answers, please drop me a note at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

What’s it like coming back to a campus after ProfNet/PR Newswire? What surprised you?
I wasn’t really doing PR at ProfNet; I was running an information service on behalf of journalists and PR people. So I had to quickly get up to speed on things like content management systems, HTML email delivery systems, and online video. Beyond those, not a lot else had changed.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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Powered By Orange: A Comprehensive Social Media Campaign

Powered By Orange, launched in March 2009 by Oregon State University, is the most comprehensive university social marketing campaign that we’ve seen to date.

With an integrated marketing communications plan already in place, OSU’s next step was to create a campaign to raise awareness of the university in Portland, Oregon’s biggest media market.

Unfortunately, the budget for TV time or outdoor advertising wasn’t available. But, drawing on insights from the original communications plan, a group of team members from the University Advancement division developed a plan and creative concepts to take advantage of an integrated social media campaign. They tested these ideas with a mixed group of campus staff and leaders, including representatives of the OSU Foundation, the OSU Alumni Association, college communications representatives, admissions staff, and others.

These ideas evolved into Powered By Orange, which is now well-entrenched at OSU and appears to be on the verge of going viral.

According to Luanne Lawrence, vice president for advancement at OSU, “The feedback was consistently supportive of the Powered By Orange concept. So, we developed the campaign a bit more and tested it at a few alumni events and in focus groups and discussions with faculty, staff and students. Each conversation improved the concept and grew it to where it is going (and is still growing).”

What’s Powered By Orange?

What’s Powered By Orange? Here’s the answer from the PBO website:

“It’s you-the network of alumni, students, faculty, staff, friends and fans connected to Oregon State University. It’s the positive impact you make every day in Portland and beyond-on the economy, the environment and the community. Use this Web site to tell your story and connect with the other practical idealists who are Powered by Orange.”

One of the key insights from the research that led to the integrated marketing plan was the necessity of connecting with younger alumni, who are critical to future giving. Testing showed that this audience in particular wanted reassurance that OSU was making an impact on the world. “Not only did the research gave us insights into the needs of some of our key audiences—but it was a no-brainer to reach out to young alumni through channels that they were familiar with,” said David Baker, OSU’s director of web communications.

In short order, Baker’s Web Communications unit, in collaboration with University Marketing, designed a website powered by Wordpress to serve as the hub for Powered By Orange. Planning and execution of the site and social networking components, Baker said, “took a couple of months from first concept to site launch. We were able to move quickly because we had that research.”

[Note: for those interested in the details, Web Communications at OSU has six staff members: a director, assistant director/developer, web designer, writer, multimedia producer and a social media specialist. Baker said, “This last role is brand new as of last month, and we currently have it filled temporarily by a recent grad with a marketing background. If it works out (and it’s going nicely), we’ll make it permanent.”]

The PBO online ecosystem

The PBO website aggregates a significant number of social media tools and social networks.

• A focal point of the site is a Google Map that allows people who are Powered By Orange to place a dot to mark their location. Baker said, “Lots of people are adding themselves to the map because they are connected to OSU and OSU has played a part in making them who they are. They’re showing that they are part of their community—and not just through their profession. In fact, this reinforces how community-oriented OSU students are.”


• Content from the PBO Blog is featured prominently on the site; it is also syndicated to the PBO LinkedIn group and to OSU’s Portland Metro website. It will also be featured on OSU’s top-level pages, which are currently being redesigned.


• OSU has also focused heavily on developing video content for PBO. A YouTube video is featured prominently on the PBO home page, and this is just the start. Videos are housed on a YouTube page that currently features 36 videos. The videos are created primarily by a graduate assistant with video experience, though Baker emphasized the importance of having a cache of Flip videos that can be loaned out to faculty and students; at OSU, Flip video is often edited into video shot with the university’s high-quality video camera.


• The videos are syndicated into the Powered by Orange – 10,000 Beavers page on Facebook. And there’s an extensive Flickr gallery where people can post photos of Benny, the OSU mascot, in various places. An image of Benny can be downloaded from a gallery that includes computer desktop wallpaper; a doorhanger; and PBO website tags.


• OSU’s Twitter feed (@poweredbyorange) and a LinkedIn group are part of the package, too.

PBO now far beyond Portland

Though originally targeted to Portland, the campaign took off quickly. “Believe it or not, we’re still in the quiet phase of the launch,” Baker said. “We haven’t done much promotion to speak of, no print buys, no advertising, no PR. But we already have more than 10,000 page views on the PBO site and more than 1,600 members in our Facebook group. PBO has resonated well with the alumni who’ve discovered it, both young & old.”

With such a bold campaign, Luanne Lawrence knew that she had to be proactive in unveiling it for many OSU constituencies. She observed, “Like all other states, Oregon’s immediate financial future is dim. With a higher-than 12 percent unemployment rate and university reductions in the 12-22 percent range, morale was low. So, I decided to try to take PBO out on a road show to gauge its ability to create excitement, shared vision, anecdotes, and dreams of how to implement it. We also wanted feedback on how to make it better.”

She continued, “The response has exceeded my expectations. PBO has become something for people here to ‘hold on to.’ Faculty, staff and students are defining what the campaign means in their own way. My goal is to not control this campaign, but let others run with it. I want Beavers of all walks of life to define what it means to be ‘powered by orange’—to define their contributions as Beavers to their professions and communities; to use our main color, orange, to express themselves artistically, to make it their own.”

One big surprise of PBO, Baker said, is that this has actually happened. “Other departments and units at OSU became so interested in adapting it for their purposes. That made us change our thinking and change our direction to enable people to use the campaign to be their own advocates. We’re trying to be flexible in giving up control. The flexible theme resonates with people who are used to having control over their communications, rather than having it dictated to them.”

For example, the Athletics department simultaneously rolled out the “I am Orange” campaign. Luanne Lawrence noted, “We are seamless in using the color to self identify and create spirit … at least in this first phase.”

The campaign handed out PBO stickers to this year’s graduating seniors, who showed up at graduation with the stickers on their caps.

Luanne Lawrence reported, “We intended to keep this in the quiet phase until September when we planned a major public launch, but now I prefer to say that we are in the ‘viral’ phase before the public launch. It has been embraced by many people already.”

“It has really taken off on campus—students really like it,” Baker said. This could be just one more sign that the PBO campaign may be set to go viral.

Tracking results

Baker emphasizes that OSU is not only in a “launch and learn” phase with the PBO campaign-but also is assessing its impact. Most of the feedback to date has been anecdotal-and positive. He noted, for example, “Feedback from Luanne Lawrence’s presentations to different groups has been very positive so far, as it has from the focus groups we’ve conducted.”

Baker is also tracking the PBO Twitter feed. “We only have about 260 followers, but they are mostly business owners who are interested in sustainability. This could be very useful in the future.”

When asked whether audience members were contributing content-in particular blog comments or homemade videosBaker noted that audience participation was heaviest on PBO’s Flickr gallery, where people were posting and tagging photos. “We found it very difficult for people to produce videos-which is an experience that is fairly common on other websites, too.” As for blog comments, he observed that the blog is an institutional blog and has less of a personality and, as a result, less engagement, than a personal blog might have.

In any case, OSU is quite satisfied with the results of the campaign so far.

Advice to others

When asked what advice he’d give to people at other institutions who wanted to launch a campaign like Powered By Orange, Baker noted three key points:

• Do some groundwork. “One of the reasons we were able to do this so quickly is because we had spent a year doing research and planning an integrated marketing campaign for OSU,” he pointed out. Still, expectation setting is really important, he emphasized.


• Launch and learn. Be prepared to make adjustments to your strategy and your campaign after you launch it.


• Think of it as a grassroots effort that builds over time.

There hasn’t been much pushback on the PBO campaign, Baker reported. And, what little has occurred, Luanne Lawrence noted, comes from communications professionals who are uncomfortable with the notion that OSU is launching the campaign and doesn’t intend to control it. “I run up against some who subscribe to older models—pushing out press releases, paying for ads, controlling events, etc. While we still have these tactics in our mix, we are risking as much as we can to empower larger communities.”

Lawrence added, “This is not a high-comfort area for some in higher ed, so I have learned that it takes a tireless and enthusiastic leader to ensure that this approach is successful. If I weren’t a vice president with such a passion for making this campaign viral and in using a mix of traditional with very nontraditional media, I’m not sure this PBO campaign would have seen the light of day.”

In short, to ensure success of a campaign like this, one has to take risks.

And no campaign with perceived risks will be successful without a visionary and indefatigable leader. Clearly, PBO has two such leaders who are willing to venture out, but not recklessly. OSU’s approach demonstrates that research, planning, and thoughtful experimentation increase the odds that such ingenuity will be rewarded.

Update: See the post Kaukab Jhumra Smith, a contributing editor at SmartBrief, wrote about Powered by Orange for Smartblog on Social Media for some updates on the campaign.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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Rethinking “Visitors”: Just Call Them ... Friends

Three years ago-Tuesday, 30 May 2006-to be exact, I posted “Just Call Them Visitors”, which remains one of my favorite posts on this blog. I believe it’s one of the most important, too.

I stand by most of the sentiments expressed in that post, starting with this one:

People don’t “use” websites, they “visit” them. So just call them visitors, please, and design websites to make visitors feel welcome, to help them find what they want, and to delight them.

People visit websites to learn something, or to do something that’s important to them. It’s not about the way the site looks, but about making sure that it’s built from the ground up to facilitate your visitors achieving their objectives. Note the emphasis: it’s all about them and what they want.

Of course, 2006 was a long time ago—decades, maybe even centuries, in Internet time. The term “Web 2.0” was just two years old and the meme hadn’t yet slipped into wider consciousness. Now it seems almost passe, since early adopters desperately seek a new buzzword to make them sound cool. Four months after my post, Facebook, which launched in 2004, opened itself up to everyone age 13 and older with a valid email address. No one had even heard of Twitter, which launched in 2007.

So it was different back then. Now, we not only have “visitors” to our websites, but also we have “connections,” “fans” and “followers.” And today a web presence should be larger than a single website. We need to go where the people are and many of them are hanging out on other websites and spending time on social networks. The conversation is going on around us (and in some situations, without us). And in 2009 it’s essential to be part of those conversations.

Still important: Take a deep breath, pay attention to fundamentals

Social media seem easy, deceptively easy. As social media and social networks assume more importance and complement (and maybe someday-though not yet-replace) our websites as places to connect and learn, let’s keep in mind that there are still fundamentals that must be considered before launching a cool Facebook widget or get too far into planning a social media initiative.

I know that sounds so-how can I say it?-old-fashioned. Uncool.

But we still need to ask: for whom are we doing all this stuff, anyway? Whether we are producing an institution’s website or developing its social networking or social media presence, we’re designing for … people. Or at least we at mStoner are. And that should be your paramount consideration, too.

Start with your own website. To help people find information about your institution, you have to design your website for the needs of your visitors. Discovering that what they come to your site to do, to find, to learn is the fundamental challenge of a redesign. What do visitors care about? When you determine their needs, then you can provide information that is relevant to them and make sure they can find it through intuitive organization of that information and great search.

You want to develop compelling content that communicates essential truths about your institution. And you want to ensure that you’re using your content strategically across your site, syndicating it to places where it is relevant and where visitors will discover it when they arrive on a page through an external link or a Google search. Your content should be so compelling that it motivates visitors to take actions that are important to you: explore further, ask for more information, apply, give, sign up, engage.

But today you don’t want to keep content locked up in your site: you want to syndicate it to sites across the web where it can help you to connect to people who already care about your institution—or may come to care about it. I’m thinking of places like Flickr, Youtube, LinkedIn, iTunesU, Facebook. In other words, go beyond your own site to where your audiences are and make sure they can find your content there.

Wait: there’s more

Note, please, that it’s not just about great content in 2009. Today’s visitors don’t just want to visit your website for great content, they also want to engage—that’s why there’s “social” in social media and social networking

It’s time to ponder the deeper implications of “social” media and what that might mean for your institution.

You need to pay attention to the depth of commitment engagement can take and the effect that it can have on how offices run. If you launch a Facebook presence and don’t have plans for tending it and participating in and engaging with the community that will develop around it, why bother being on Facebook in the first place? It was one thing to develop and launch an alumni community in the 1990s: then, you had to convince your audiences that there was value in being part of the community and selling this notion was hard work. Fast forward to 2009: many of the people you’d like to reach are already using Facebook. Many of them are eager to connect with their institutions: in fact, so eager that they probably launched their own affinity groups before you joined the party.

So the real question for today is not about the “how” or “why” of being part of this community, but “when.” It’s not enough to designate people who will develop your content and keep it flowing. You need to think through who is going to manage your community presence and, crucially, what else he or she won’t do, because site management will take a fair amount of time and you’re not likely to get another staff member any time soon.

And for those people that you’re engaging with through Facebook, LinkedIn, or your own social network, maybe it’s time to come up with a name besides “visitors.” Shall we call them “friends?”

So, let me ask this: are you prepared for what will happen when your friends visit your web presence in 2009, not only at YourInstitution.edu but on Facebook, LinkedIn and everywhere else on the Net?

Note: I’d like to thank my wife, Denise Lyons, for her input on this post.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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When the Right Consultant Can Help

First, Karlyn Morrissette (she tweets as @KarlynM-and if you aren’t following her, you should be) provoked a minor Twitterstorm by asking: “Why are higher education consultants given more credibility than full-time staff who say the exact same thing?” Forty peoplepractitioners at all levels, faculty members, and consultants-weighed in. Karlyn created a mind map of the results and posted it on her blog.

Update, 30 April: Karlyn posted her own thoughts about “When to Hire a Consultant” this morning.

Then, Higher Ed Experts hosted a web redesign conversation and there was some talk about the role of consultants in the large web redesign project being discussed. I followed the discussion via the Twitter hastag (#heecamp): HEE is a closed community, and as a consultant, I can’t participate in HEE discussions.

I believe I can appreciate the multiple perspectives on these discussions. I worked as a staff member at three very different institutions (Lehigh University, Princeton, the College Board) in different roles; I’ve worked as a consultant since 1994 and consulted with about 250 organizations in that time; and mStoner has completed more institutional web redevelopment projects in education than any other consulting firm. In the early years of our practice, I led many of these projects personally; now, although I participate in some of them, I have other responsibilities at the firm. One of these involves interacting with key stakeholder groups at our client institutions around strategy, practice, and change management.

In short, my viewpoints are based on personal experience in the trenches as an insider and outsider. And they are seasoned with a dash of intergroup relations theory about how groups can scapegoat people.

I can understand why internal staff members would feel insulted, even threatened, when institutional leaders choose to hire a consultant to do a project that staff believes they can do. It’s especially problematic at institutions where leaders routinely ignore staff advice believing they somehow know better.

When the right consultant makes sense

But I also know that there are very good reasons to hire the right consultant. Here are some of them. [I’ll add others as I think of them—and you can add your own in the comments.]

1. A good consultant has done it before. Often many, many, many times. While the Internet certainly has made information widely available, information isn’t the same thing as knowledge or experience. It’s possible to exhaustively research process or products by doing a Google search and spending enough time online. But there are limitations to doing this kind of research. You often don’t know what important questions you’re not asking when you do your own research.

Case in point: I know of a campus IT team that spent hundreds of hours investigating content management systems, wrote an RFP, scheduled vendor demos, selected a CMS, paid a down-payment to the chosen vendor, and arranged a workshop for various on-campus users to unveil the product that they would all be using. The president of the company flew in; when he started his demo, his system crashed and it was downhill from there. He should have guessed that there were problems when the murmering began; finally, the director of one of the largest units on campus stood up and said, “I’ve seen enough. This isn’t going to work for us. We’ll find our own CMS.” He and his staff led an exodus from the meeting.

Can you guess what the problem was? Technically, the system seemed very sound, which is what really excited the IT team in the first place. But the UI was terrible and as soon as people who were evaluating the system for its effectiveness got a look at it, they were appalled. The director who left knew right away that none of the admin staff in his unit who were charged with updating websites would have the patience to figure out such a kludgy UI, especially when there were simple alternatives.

Our project managers have collectively managed dozens of projects. And we have developers who have implemented multiple content management systems multiple times. No campus I know of has staff with this kind of experience. Our clients benefit from our experience and it ups the odds that the project will run more smoothly.

Moral of the story: A good consultant will help you ask the questions you haven’t thought to ask and bring lots of experience to bear on your project—much more than you have internally.

2. A good consultant can help break up political logjams. As a campus communicator, I hated politics: politics gets in the way of getting things done. Just think of all those discussions that go round-and-round, with no resolution.

But politics is a fact of life on every campus. There are many times when an experienced outside voice can break through the chatter and help to move things in a different direction. Maybe it’s a different voice, with experience and perspective (those words again), who can give permission to take a different direction.

It also helps if your consultant understands education and what to say and what not to say to different audiences. I don’t believe I’m being less than authentic when I avoid the term “branding” when talking with faculty. There are other ways to get the concept across without using a term that they will immediately find objectionable.

In fairness, I’ve also seen cases where someone-whether a VP, a faculty member, or a president-just doesn’t want to be convinced, by anybody, that a change is necessary. So hiring a consultant to help change institutional leaders or cultures that are intrinsically resistant to change won’t always work.

Moral of the story: I’m not saying that it’s right that this phenonmenon occurs. But it’s the reality. So be smart and use a consultant as a catlyst to help make changes that will make a difference for your institution and for your life.

3. Staff can’t do the work. One of the reasons that people hire us-or another consultant-to do a huge project like an institutional website redesign is that they don’t have enough staff, with enough time, to accomplish what we can accomplish.

I know that people (like many university staff members) think that some big web redevelopment budgets are huge. But that’s at least partially because internal cost estimates don’t take into account the most important internal variable, staff time, and factor in how much time it takes, or how long it takes, to get a project done. If you track time accurately, you often learn that consultants can be cost-effective because they can save time.

It’s as if people think that because staff get paid a salary, there’s no cost for having them work on a project. To me, that’s patently false. I have to ask: what else could those staff people be doing? What other tasks might they have accomplished?

Typically, the biggest “expense” for a college or university-staff time-is also its scarcest resource. I’ve never met an IT team that has too little do do.

So, I put the question to you, “If you are doing a site redevelopment project, what else won’t you be doing while you’re doing that?” Can you afford for that other work not to get done?

What do you think it cost the University I mentioned above to have its IT staff choose a CMS and have its recommendation tossed out? For one thing, there were hundreds of hours involved in evaluating CMSs to begin with. You want to take a guess at about 1,500 hours conservatively? That’s 28 weeks’ worth of time or about $30,000 at $30/hour. I’ll bet there were a lot of other projects that went undone, some of which were probably important.

Moral of the story: Consultants can help you accomplish in lot, usually in less time than it would take you to do it internally. While the instititution may pay a premium, sometimes that’s the best way to get the work done quickly.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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Categories: Change management / Real life / Strategy

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Changing names in the YouTube age

You might design and print new business cards and other materials, but this is the age of YouTube. Naturally, you’d launch your new website and invite anyone on campus to participate in the fun by taking their own video about Missouri S&T spirit and uploading it to the site. Stay tuned to see how successful the campaign will be….

Posted by Michael Stoner
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My Webdom for an FTE

ME: So how’s that web editor position approval coming?
CLIENT: Oh, I still don’t have anyone. No dollars yet.
ME: Common, really. In fact, some of our clients have asked to outsource all of their editorial work to us long-term.
CLIENT: Sigh. I was hoping to use that new position to teach some of our people to write complete sentences.

Nothing produces head nodding more quickly than a conversation about staffing. Or, more appropriately, understaffing for the web within colleges and universities. Indeed, every year around budget time, our clients wrestle with the mentality among powers-that-be that their web presence is a capital expense, that content is free and easy, and that websites maintain themselves.

Was an era (small era) that large institutions got by on one web editor and one technical person managing the entire public site. Now, the core team we recommend is four to five times that size to account for editorial, design, training, statistics analysis, etc.—all the functions that don’t go away, but instead, increase, after a big, CMS-driven, site relaunch. The latest must-have: a rich media producer/editor.

I’ve used Shane Diffily’s terrific article about web staffing as a touchpoint in building the case for more staff for our clients. And from our own experience, we’ve found that each page of content on your site takes three hours to produce, roughly 15 minutes to build out, and an hour each year to update and maintain. And then there’s the project management …

Posted by Voltaire Santos Miran
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It’s Not Just Your Imagination: Spelling is Getting Worse

So I’m not surprised to read that a new study on the digital family sponsored by Nickelodeon reveals this:

Being a good speller is no longer felt necessary by 27 percent of parents and 21 percent of kids. Twenty-six percent of parents and 25 percent of kids believe it’s no longer necessary to be able to use a printed dictionary. The use of sites like MapQuest and Google Maps makes 20 percent of parents and 21 percent of kids think map skills on paper are no longer necessary.

Not too surprising. Let’s put this in perspective: a couple of generations ago, if I’d lived where I do, I would have needed to know a lot of skills that I don’t need now. Like how to cut down a tree, for example. On the other hand, to work effectively within an organization like mStoner and for most other businesses, one needs exceptional communications skills. The ability to spell is fundamental. So parents (and kids) need to be reminded-apparently pretty often!-that spelling is not just a trivial skill and that learning the difference between witch and which is still essential.

Nickelodeon also learned that 82 percent of teens 12-14 use the web. When kids stopped using the Net for ten days, “many noticed schoolwork became a bigger challenge. Parents had to help children by taking them to the library and sometimes conducting the research on the Internet for their children. In most cases, more time was required to complete homework assignments.” More, here.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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Old Media vs. New Media: Guess Who Wins?

One of my favorite blogs is Jason Kottke’s blog. One of the interesting posts for January looks at new media (blogs and citizen media) and uses Google keyword searches to see which ranks higher in coverage of major issues from 2006. Would you be surprised to know that blogs & citizen media fare better than the New York Times? Part of this may be due to coding and such [not-so-minor!] issues as the fact that after a week the Times allows only registered visitors to view its content. But it’s clearly also an indication that the lines between the old media and the new media-Wikipedia and the blogosphere-are blurring. More here.

This in a week when we also read in TargetX’s inestimable “Email Minute” that paper is where words go to die. And where there’s interesting data in reports from Ball State University and Pitney-Bowes reports that indicate enduring value in print. I’m working on some thoughts about this for a blog post and article for our Intelligence newsletter, but in a nutshell, my thought is that it’s not an either-or world. Even for millennials.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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