mStoner’s top picks for 2011

For my last blog post of the year I have enlisted the help of the mStoner team to bring you mStoner’s top picks for 2011. In this post you will find the sites, tools, and designs we fell in love with this year. Picks include everything from iPad apps to our favorite uses of social media in higher education.

Without further ado…

Design

Moment Skis
We think this site is cool because of the way it uses horizontal and vertical scrolling to fill the landcape of the screen. It layers several carousels of different types of content including profiles, video, products, and slideshow based photography. The design uses texture and a muted color scheme to give it a mountainy-vintage feel. This is future forward design that’s breaking the boundaries of link by link categorized navigation and molds well to any mobile device. Now, where are my Rossignols?
– Anne Glista and Kevin Rieg, Interactive Designers

Ampersandbox
My favorite project of 2011 was the “Ampersandbox” undergraduate enrollment project we did for the College of William & Mary. They wanted a new viewbook with a dedicated web component that together would capture the personality of William & Mary and set it apart from its peers and competitors. We gave them a box of postcards that superimposed funky, evocative word pairs over photos we pulled from their Flickr feed. I liked it because it was a former client coming back to us for more work, which is always validating. I liked it because the William & Mary client trusted us and was bold enough to consider ideas that were designed to appeal to the right prospective students rather than the most prospective students. I liked it because the creative process was fun and very collaborative. And I liked it because it was successful. William & Mary’s admission counselors tell us the cards have been a hit at college fairs, and the web component, a site that allows visitors to create their own word pairs, photos and stories, has had lots of traffic.
-Mark Sheehy, Creative Director

Blogs and other online tools

The Project Management Hut
As a project manager, this site is very useful to me. I like that articles are contributed by many people, so you aren’t stuck with only one person’s point of view. In addition, the articles are based off of experience and not just what the “tech books” say.
– Beth Lee, Project Manager

Disqus
The slickest snippet for enhancing the social media aspects of your website for 2011 is not up for discussion. It is, in fact, Disqus. Disqus is a unique tool allowing a developer to place a small snippet in any page or template. This quick inclusion immediately allows for inline commenting. It has support for nested responses, a sweet “ajaxy” style, as well as a back end administration site which includes: reporting, user management, moderation, ranking, and much more.
– Kevin Zink and Jim Johnson, Senior Technology Consultants

Seth Godin’s Blog
This year I discovered the writings of Seth Godin. I am currently working through his books and his blog is one of my favorites. Godin’s posts might vary in topic and length but these daily updates never lack inspiration. His stories are relevant, his ideas are thought-provoking, and his encouragement to become a linchpin is motivating. I’m better at what I do because this blog challenges me to think in new ways, work harder, and take risks.
– Mallory Wood, Marketing Manager

Social media in higher education

University of Nottingham’s Election 2010 blog
My hands-down favorite is the University of Nottingham’s Election 2010 blog and social media initiative, which won a CASE Gold in 2011. This is an incredibly smart blend of social (using a blog, Twitter and YouTube) and traditional PR outreach to bloggers and traditional reporters and newscasters with the goal of sharing insights from the University of Nottingham’s political scientists about the 2010 election in the UK. The results are impressive: those experts were quoted in every item of national election coverage on Election Day 2010 and the effort resulted in exceeding all the objectives created for the campaign.
– Michael Stoner, Co-Founder and President

UT Austin’s Know
The best content hub that I’ve seen in 2011 is UT Austin’s Know. This site offers a substantial stream of content, including a way to submit your own. The site navigation is exceptional, the structure is driven by both topics and mediums, and the design supports the comfortable consumption of a wealth of information. The Know social media directory is extensive and likely represents the future for higher ed social media.
– Susan T. Evans, Senior Strategist

Apps for the iPad and iPhone

Dropbox
Is this the most original choice on this list? Not by a long shot! Is Dropbox the one app that has changed the way I work most? Absolutely. This year I had an onsite client visit where I was able to use the iPad to read my usability testing script, revise the site IA, review the project timeline, and make minor edits to a change order. Because of Dropbox I could easily access, edit, and change those documents. My iPad has turned into the swiss army knife of productivity toolsets. And that is largely thanks to Dropbox.
– Jeremiah Worth, Project Manager

Flipboard
The app I used on my iPad more than any other in the last year is Flipboard, the pocket-sized social magazine. It’s a place to discover new, curated content and it connects to many of the social networks I use every day. Flipboard connects with my Facebook account to keep me up to date on my friends and family. I use Twitter as a way to keep up with industry thought leaders, and I can view their tweets from the app. I can share content, save it to Instapaper for later, and keep up with my Google Reader. Even better? A new iPhone version was released this week!
– Rob Cima, Co-Founder and CFO

Books

Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs defined innovation for our generation. This book is fascinating.

Mobile First
A terrific case for inverting the traditional approach to designing websites as more people use their smartphones and tablets as alternatives to laptops and desktops.
– Voltaire Miran Santos, Co-Founder and CEO

Do you have a top pick for 2011 that you would like to share? Leave a comment.

On behalf of the entire team at mStoner, there is no time more fitting to say “thank you” for everything you do for the education community and to wish you a happy holiday season. See you in 2012!

Posted by Mallory Wood
Additional Posts (9)
Categories: Content and writing / Marketing and branding / Social media

Discuss this article (2)

EDUniverse: Discover, Learn, Engage.

Are you a web developer, designer, social media strategist, PR person, marketer, or alumni relations or admission professional working in higher education? If you answered “yes” then you know that there’s a lot of valuable content that can provide insights, examples, and inspiration for your own initiatives. What has always impressed me most about the higher education industry is the passion of the people working in it and their willingness to share “insider secrets” to those working at other institutions.

While there is no shortage of interesting content, the problem is finding it. I’d bet that you use Google Reader to keep track of the many blogs authored by industry thought leaders, follow #highered on Twitter, check SlideShare for the slide decks of sessions you attend (or miss!) at conferences, and sign up for email newsletters. The list grows daily and the content only gets more scattered.

We have the solution. Enter, EDUniverse.

EDUniverse, a website designed and built by mStoner, will serve as the goto destination for those who want to find out about the latest innovations in higher education communications and marketing. The website is designed as a hub where professionals can find and share inspiration, learn how others have solved problems, and network with each other.

We put together a quick video to show an overview of what EDUniverse can do for you.

Anyone can visit EDUniverse to learn about current thinking and find out what solutions might have worked for others. By creating a profile on EDUniverse, a contributor will be able to share content from their blog, Twitter, YouTube and Slideshare accounts, and will be able to upload content like video and white papers directly to EDUniverse.

Contributors will also be able to comment and rank content shared by others and tag content for sharing with people who have similar interests like design, social media, fundraising, research, or public relations. By ranking and commenting on content that is shared on the site, EDUniverse participants can endorse thought-provoking ideas and noteworthy posts or presentations. The home page and other areas of the site will feature this user-curated content.

EDUniverse is anticipated to launch in February 2012. In the meantime, you can sign up at EDUniverse.org to ensure that you are among the first to gain access.

Posted by Mallory Wood
Additional Posts (9)
Categories: Content and writing

Discuss this article (5)

Personal Reactions to Confab: Relief, Challenges, and a Content Strategy Manifesto for .Edu

Passionate. Engaged. Daring. Friendly. Supportive. Funny. Motivated. Optimistic. Oh, and cake-loving.

That’s a very short (and highly curated) list of adjectives that describes the folks who attended Confab last week. Some could legitimately claim to be content strategists, and a few could boast that they were doing content strategy before the term was invented. Others were seeking to learn what content strategy is all about … and how it could be applied in their organizations.

As for me, I left the conference relieved. Relieved because I believe that mStoner stumbled into “content strategy” some time ago and has been practicing the discipline for awhile. But I also feel challenged because I recognize how much those of us in .edu have to do to get institutions and their leaders to care about content and content strategy.

Confab
Don’t know about Confab? Here’s the short version: it was the creation of Kristina Halvorson (@halvorson), the author of a key work, Content Strategy for the Web. There were a lot of speakers with amazing insights to share. If you want to learn about some of them, here are links to 50+ conference resources:blog posts about the conference, slides, and other goodies, courtesy of Firehead. I’d also recommend the post by Meet Content, “Higher Ed Takeaways from Confab 2011: The Content Strategy Conference.”

Attendees ranged from the head of Hilton Hotels’ content strategy team to Facebook’s content strategy lead,who did a fascinating presentation about content strategy at Facebook. About four dozen people from higher ed attended.

Relief
I remember reading about Confab and thinking, “Sounds interesting: I should learn more about this.”

As a concept, “Content strategy” made intuitive sense to me. Kristina’s book is one of the few I’ve read lately that I wish I had written. And as a business owner who is (really) passionate about doing the absolute best work that we can for our clients, I was curious to know what mStoner could learn at Confab about content strategy and how it could benefit our clients.

When we launched mStoner in 2001, we didn’t want to focus just on the way our sites looked. We wanted to focus on content and how it was organized and sustained. And that approach became one of our strong differentiators (and it still is). But, I wondered, would I learn at Confab that our approach to content strategy sucked?

Imagine my relief when I discovered that mStoner has done pretty well. Because we recognized how desperately our clients needed tools, processes, and tactics to make sense out of and manage their content, our team incorporated elements of content strategy into our client engagements from the very first:

• We baked into our process an exploration of what content our clients produced—and how they used it and sustained it on their websites.


• We advocated hiring and supporting staff who could develop effective content.


• We focused on process.


• We encouraged clients to curate content on their websites.


• We became experts in the tools needed to manage and deploy content.


• We train our clients on how to do all these things with the tools we installed.


• And, since 2009, we’ve incorporated content from the social web on our sites.

This process didn’t result from following a playbook (we didn’t have one!). And we didn’t call it “content strategy.” As a small team, we had to be pragmatic generalists rather than focused practitioners of a single element of content strategy.We’re in a good place as a company: we’re refining our practice of content strategy—primarily by focusing on methodology and process—not starting from scratch.

Challenges for .Edu

But we’re not only practitioners, we’re educators and thought leaders. In that capacity, there’s a lot more that we can do to help .edu understand the importance and value of content strategy.

During her keynote at Confab, Ann Handley (@MarketingProfs and coauthor of the must-read Content Rules), urged us all to “embrace the fact that you—the brand—are a publisher.” And, in fact, “today, all brands are publishers” was simply accepted as truth at Confab.

The right content helps to deliver value, create trust, and build relationships with people who can be motivated to take actions—apply, join, friend, comment, give—that benefit themselves and the organization.

Our clients—schools, colleges, and universities—don’t recognize this fundamental truth. Plenty of content is being created on any campus, but few institutions think strategically about managing and deploying it, much less measuring its value. They must begin to think and act as if content matters. Because it does.

Without the realization that content is a strategic asset, staff members end up in the position of Michael Fienen, who presented about implementing a stealth content strategy. At Pittsburg State University, Michael works largely by himself to guide development of the university’s website, using persuasion and kindness (and coffee!) to help his colleagues improve their areas of the site. He has a tiny budget and limited resources. And the sad fact is that Michael isn’t alone: many institutions have someone in exactly the same position, if a lot less talented.

One clear message from Confab was that many organizations don’t understand content strategy, so we who work in education are not alone. But few industries are under as much pressure these days as are colleges and universities. I can’t foresee many colleges adding chief content officers to their leadership teams anytime soon.

So here’s the challenge for us and for everyone who works in .edu and understands the value of content: how can we help to build a persuasive case for the strategic importance of content in education marketing?

As consultants, we can play an important role in educating our clients about these and related issues. But how can we do more? Since its founding, mStoner has worked hard not just to serve our clients well but also to identify, pioneer, and share best practices.

There was a palpable sense at Confab that we were all part of a somewhat historic moment. Content strategy is poised to take off as a discipline. And a discipline needs tools: methodology, models, case studies, approaches, best practices … all to be shared, debated, iterated, debated, refined. Rinse and repeat.

So we are mStoner are going to be much more active about advocating the value of content strategy. And we intend to do what we can to contribute to formalizing the emerging discipline called “content strategy” and communicating to education how essential is. We hope you’ll join us.

Posted by Michael Stoner
Additional Posts (316)
Categories: Change management / Content and writing / Design and usability / Marketing and branding / Strategy

Discuss this article (1)

Thoughts About MBTeamS and the (First) Great Tweet Race

I haven’t checked, but I might have lost quite a few Twitter followers last week. Why? Because I participated in the Mercedes Benz Tweetrace (MBTweetrace).

The Tweetrace was a pretty crazy idea and an even crazier experience. Mercedes Benz fans submitted videos about why they and a partner should be chosen to drive a Mercedes to Dallas for the SuperBowl. Each team was assigned a celebrity coach to help out. Four teams were chosen and each team started out in a different city, heading to Dallas and converging at the big game.

The idea was that during the days they were driving, they’d mobilize their Twitter followers to tweet about the race. Hashtagged tweets enabled the teams to fill up virtual gas tanks and accumulate points. During the race, each team had challenges to complete—take a photo of Mercedes dealerships in towns they were passing through, for example. And their followers were assigned challenges, such as tweeting photos of signs supporting their team. The winning team members were awarded for their efforts with a new Mercedes—not to mention fame and glory. And, more importantly, a substantial donation to a charity.

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m not at all interested in sports, don’t really care about cars, and am pretty much skeptical about brands conducting this kind of activity in the first place. Not to mention the fact that I value my Twitter followers and don’t want to tweet more frequently, about more largely irrelevant things, than I already do.

But all that changed when Todd Sanders (@tsand) created an amusing, authentic, and sly video and won entry into the MBTweetRace. So I became one of a large number of people who tweeted on behalf of MBTeamS—led by Todd, his partner John Pederson and fueled by 1453 other folks who included the #mbteams hashtag in their tweets on February 2, 3, and 4, when the race was conducted.

In the process of participating in the race, I learned a few things about how to conduct these kinds of events—and how to succeed.

1. You need a compelling cause.

Todd and John were raising money for St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital, a charity chosen by their team coach, Pete Wentz, Chicago-bred bassist and frontman of the band Black Cards. Their own followers coalesced to raise $5,000 for St. Jude’s; Mercedes will contribute $25,000—and more if MBTeamS wins. A compelling cause for all who participated.

2. You need a compelling leader with a unique voice who’s able to engage people.

Todd works in student affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. I’ve met Todd and count him as a friend. We met him about six years ago when he won a CASE award for his innovative use of YouTube in communicating with students. He’s still pushing the envelope in student affairs, as Eric Stoller noted in a terrific profile on his Inside Higher Ed blog.

But, more important, Todd is well known for his warm, amusing, unpredictable, sly, and totally authentic presence on Twitter (where I and about 4,000 others follow him). He’s amassed a large number of Twitter followers who work in higher ed and, as Tim Nekritz pointed out this week, Todd is beloved by this community. Like many others, I appreciate the fact that Todd is an original. I’ll do a lot for him.

3. Three days is a long time to participate.

Some people (I’m not mentioning names here, but you know who you are @juliafallon, @timhoff, @epsteadaS, @jesskry, @ganyardp, and @andrewcareaga) tweeted a lot during the race.

Fortunately, one of the days was a snow day for a lot of people, so they could participate from home and that probably boosted support. Though I did notice a lot of tweets on Friday. For myself, I was on the road and in meetings and did what I could. It’s very difficult for people to pay attention and tweet for this length of time. I give Todd a huge amount of credit for being such a powerful voice and keeping us all focused. He was a masterful leader. Without his humour and engaging presence, it would have been a lot less fun.

It was tremendously exciting for those of us who were involved in the race supporting Todd. On the other hand, it was asking a lot of our Twitter followers to be involved along with us. I don’t know if I lost many followers, but one person left, tweeting: “I’m tired of the #MBcrap.” I was as absorbed in the race as I could be, given other commitments and responsibilities. But not everyone was.

4. It helps to have a tech-savvy community supporting you.

I haven’t done much investigation into the other teams and as I write, this, I don’t know who won. The winner will be announced tomorrow: follow @MBtweetraceHQ or join [url=http://www.facebook.com/mercedesbenzusa]the Facebook group[/ur/].

I do know, though, that if you look at the analytics on tweets alone, it’s hard to imagine any other team pulling ahead of MBTeamS, Todd & John’s team. At the start of the last day of the race, I tweeted this: “Here’s where we start: @tsand #mbteams = 65,485 pts; other 3 teams together = 73,564.”

And I captured this screen showing the tweet volume this morning:

It was amazing to see how Todd’s support team used powerful tools to help meet challenges. One challenge was a Scavenger Hunt: supporters were tasked with coming up with images of Mercedes Benz-related locations and items. MBTeamS supporters built a Google doc to list the items and figure out how to track them down: at one point, there must have been 50 people editing the document simultaneously. It was thrilling to watch the Google doc being updated in real time and watch items being crossed off the list.

Being able to use technology in this way enabled Todd’s team to crowdsource the assets needed to meet this challenge.

5. In the end, community is everything.

Early on, bloggers with significant numbers of followers in higher ed rallied support to MBTeamS—chief among them Karine Joly, Andrew Careaga, and Eric Stoller.

Karine entitled her post “Let’s show the power of the higher ed community.” It was very exciting being part of the action, when I could be. There were a lot of ways to connect to this event—the support of St. Jude’s, doing something crazy with people you know, and a lot of people you don’t. I, and many others, definitely felt like we were connected to each other and do a larger community. Curtiss Grymala wrote, ” I think it’s amazing how well the higher education community (which made up the majority of supporters for Team S) bonds together for a cause.”

Or, as Alaina Wiens pointed out,

As I reflect on this experience, I’m sure I’ll have other thoughts to share. It’s been an amazing three days. And I want to thank Todd for giving me and so many others the opportunity to participate in a crazy, fun, and enlightening event. And to other MBTeamS supporter—thanks for a powerful demonstration of virtual community at work.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about the MBTweetRace—what you learned about the power of virtual community as you experienced it.

UPDATE 1, 5 February: MBTeamS won, and not just by a few points. The final total was 131,643 points, which means that Todd and John amassed more points than the second and third place teams combined. Mercedes is contributing $45,000 to St. Judes, which means that the total is more than $50,000 at this point. Truly amazing.

UPDATE 2, 7 February:
I’ll try to update this post to link to other posts about #MBTeamS:

Mark Greenfield
Mark aka @markgr wants to create a poster aggregating the avatars of all those who tweeted on behaf of MBTeamS to give to St. Jude’s. He tweeted about this on Saturday: it’s a brilliant idea and I urge everyone to support it.

Michael Klein
Mike @dezguy added his own observations in the contents, below, but offered more detailed observations in his post. One of them, about the quality of the user-generated content on this campaign, is spot on:

This campaign is hands-down one of the best uses/integrations of user-generated content that I have seen. The photos, videos, commercials and tweets not only made the journey entertaining it served as the glue to keep the community engaged; all without hiring fake bloggers or sponsored tweeters.

Lori Packer
Lori (url=http://twitter.com/]loripa[/url])stresses community, too. But I love this particular observation in her post, about how important people are:

I still occasionally run into a critique of social media that goes something like this: “Everyone just updates their screens all day. Why don’t you go out and talk to some actual people for a change?” To which I reply: Who do you think is posting all these updates and writing all these tweets?! PEOPLE! These are actual people, and because of social media tools like Twitter and Ustream … I can communicate with them even when we’re not in the same room or even the same city.

These people—connected through Twitter and phones or computers—formed the community that coalesced around #MBTeamS.

Patrick Powers
I loved this insight from Patrick Powers, aka @patrickjpowers:

We often use buzzwords to measure the success of social media efforts — content, engagement, influence, etc. They’re important measures to ensure we’re doing our job. But an effective social media campaign goes beyond these numbers. The most successful campaigns are fun.

He’s right. The whole thing was fun. At least for me and the others who supported #MBTeamS by tweeting, liking, videoing, etc. Maybe not so much for our followers. Which is why I hope instititutions and brands who want to use this model for an event are judicious about how they plan it.

Robin Smail
@Robin2Go offers a cogent observation about the “value” of the team celebrity coaches in this post:

But I think it’s fitting—and compelling—that tsand was able to leverage his own brand and higher ed community to do it on our own, without celebrity help or endorsement. This community was engaged and invested in the outcome of this race and that investment was, quite literally, how the higher ed community blew the competition out of the water. The only time there was a follower spike by another team was by Team CL, whose coach, @RevRunWisdom, actively called on his followers to assist their drivers. Without continuous encouragement from the celebrity coach, however, they simply couldn’t sustain a last ditch effort.

I’ll confess that I never saw Todd retweet something by Pete Wentz and I didn’t know who Pete Wentz was until I wrote this post about the race and looked him up!

UPDATE 3, 8 February:

Talk about a trial by fire! Twitter newbie Eric Page—@highedcm—describes his introduction to Twitter during the MBTeamS event. Welcome aboard, Eric! You saw how powerful Twitter can be.

UPDATE 4, 21 February:

As I write this, @tsand is back to work (well: no today, a national holiday when he’s reported on Twitter that he’s making pizza). There are a couple more significant updates to report.

Michael Powers [url=http://museyroom.com/post/3228984954/the-tweet-race-epic-fail-for-mercedes-or-failing-like]muses[/ur] about whether the tweetrace actually boosted the Mercedes brand. I’ve pondered this myself; my own engagement in the race had nothing to do with the fact that Mercedes was sponsoring it and everything to do with supporting a friend—and contributing to St. Jude’s. Once I got into it, being part of a community was significant. I don’t feel increased affiliation with Mercedes, don’t lust after a Mercedes (even the hybrid), and don’t anticipate buying one. Ever.

I didn’t know until I saw the interview with Todd on HigherEdLive that he and his co-pilot thought the race was fixed and that they’d never win it. So they started as the underdogs and through organizing their community, they won. [Note: the interview is NSFW!]

John Pederson weighed in before the race and afterwards, too. I don’t know John, but I appreciate his statements about the power of social tools to organize a community.

Posted by Michael Stoner
Additional Posts (316)
Categories: Content and writing / Social media

Discuss this article (13)

Using Mobile to Share Content en Route to Social Media Metrics & Privacy

In writing about key trends for 2011, I realized that I could jam many of the keywords for this post into its headline. So you won’t be surprised when you learn that I’m paying attention to mobile, content strategy, social media, metrics, and privacy.

I believe these issues have the potential to stir up a lot of discussion in education this year—at very least, among those of us who focus on marketing, branding, and online experience.

The economy isn’t on my list. It’s a huge issue for everyone—a constant reality of life these days that factors into every decision everyone is making. I don’t expect things to get better soon, given what’s happening in states like Texas. The economy is all the more reason to be clear and careful about how your institution approaches the important issues of the day.

1. The mobile web

OK, I know: some early adopters (@markgr and @dmolsen, I’m thinking of you here) will probably say that mobile was SO last year. I’ll agree, to the extent that there was a lot of buzz about mobile, especially apps, in 2010.

But an app is a niche strategy. You build an app to allow people who’ve already invested in you in some way (alumni, students, prospects) to do something that’s cool. But why would someone who doesn’t have a relationship with you download and install an app to use features on your website? And why would someone who has a relationship with you continue to use an app that doesn’t make their life easier in some way?

No, building an app isn’t the same as turning your attention to building a mobile website that really works. That’s not an easy thing to do, which is why it hasn’t happened to any large extent in education. It requires a website that’s already functioning well, not to mention vision, strategy, and budget to realize a highly functional mobile site.

I think that 2011 is the year when institutions will begin to take mobile sites seriously—and start to do something about them. [And, apparently, so does the Chronicle.]

2. Content is king, but won’t reign without strategy

I’ve always been proud of the fact that since our earliest days, mStoner has advocated (and practiced) strong web content embedded in an IA that makes it findable and with a backend that makes it easy to manage. Here’s one example of what I mean, from a blog post by my partner Voltaire Santos Miran from June 2003. Entitled “A different approach to content,” Voltaire wrote:

“During a project evaluation meeting, one of our clients commented that the most significant benefit of our engagement was not so much the new site—with its clean interface and fresh content—but the process and workflow that we enabled them to put in place.”

As early advocates of developing strong content, we’re gratified to see the “content strategy” meme developing in .edu. Is it too early to proclaim 2011 the year of content strategy in .edu? Maybe.

But I do believe we’ll see institutions focus on developing and sharing great content as never before. Which means that they’re going to have to take content strategy, information architecture, and content management seriously: that means planning for it, funding it, and developing processes that enable staff members to sustain it.

3. Social media, meet reality

Is it just me, or are you already sick of social spam—being asked to “like” this or that by your friends, not to mention being targeted by brands you care about only marginally to accept their crappy content in your Facebook stream? I wonder if this isn’t the year that consumers generally will start to get tired of all that friending, sharing, and (especially) liking, because they’re going to see a whole lot more of it as marketers jump on the social media bandwagon. [Read this post to see what teens think about being asked to “like” everything. And it’s only starting to happen!]

This is weirdly reminiscent of the days after everyone (finally) had email. And everyone tired of getting emails with earnest warnings about fake computer viruses. Now, maybe we’ll see consumers—regular users—start to exhibit engagement fatigue as social spam becomes as annoying and as easy to ignore as an email funds appeal is now.

A change in consumer perception and/or behavior will mean changes in the way that institutions engage constituents through social media. Many of a college’s constituents already have an emotional connection to their institution. Therefore, because they feel closer, connecting on Facebook may seem more comfortable than “liking” a brand like PriceChopper or Walmart.

Still, it’s time for institutions to take their friends and followers seriously and nurture them. That means focus, relevant content, and more staff attention. In this context, the approach that the Emory Alumni Association is taking to social media makes so much sense: they’re training staff to weave social channels into alumni outreach broadly and making sure that the content they offer alumni is something they really want.

And social media advocates: I’m a huge fan of SM (especially Twitter: you are following @mstonerblog, aren’t you????) but it’s time to be advocates for real, measurable outcomes for social media. It’s quality, not quantity, that should matter. And that’s a general theme anyway because in 2011:

4. Outcomes become really important. Really.

Why are we doing all the stuff we’re doing? Building websites, redeploying content, implementing content management systems, paying attention to Facebook pages, tweeting about the chancellor’s speech? Because we expect our efforts to contribute to some kind of outcome.

Well, it’s (past) time to be clear about the outcomes we’re working toward and then to focus our tactics and everything else we’re doing on making them reality. Maybe during a time of relative affluence, clear goals aren’t important. Maybe at one time it was acceptable not to develop success metrics and analytics programs to track them. That’s all changed. While I don’t buy into (all) the hype about edupocalypse, there isn’t an institution I know of that isn’t looking at cost cutting and saving money. So every initiative should have goals and measurable outcomes.

5. Real people start paying attention to privacy

Last year we witnessed a number of privacy gaffes widely covered by the tech press and blogged about by privacy nerds. And just last week, Facebook announced its decision to share phone numbers & home addresses of members with third-party app developers. And then rescinded it until it can be “better communicated.”

It’s not a question of whether Zuck & crew will ever learn. They’ve shown themselves to be extremely smart businesspeople who continually push members as far as they possibly can in pursuit of profits. The question is whether Facebook’s members are willing to accept this continuing abuse of their trust.

More and more people I know have stopped accepting “friend” requests from people they know only vaguely, have tinkered with their privacy settings to restrict access to their content and profiles, and, even then, still carefully consider what they share. Let’s see if this becomes a trend; I’m betting (make that: hoping) that it will.

And in case you’re wondering what Facebook’s reputed “power users”—teens and young adults—are doing, danah boyd speaks and writes about the ways in which teens manage their privacy on social sites like Facebook. Check out this blog post in which she describes innovative strategies that teens use to game Facebook’s (lack of) privacy controls. Let’s hope that more and more adults follow that lead.

Posted by Michael Stoner
Additional Posts (316)
Categories: Admissions and recruiting / Content and writing / Design and usability / Real life / Social media

Discuss this article (5)

The Kids Just Launch

Watch this (it’s less than two minutes). Then you can file it away under “What All the Kids Are Into These Days,” and then, you can make a copy of that file and file it in your secret “God, I Feel Old” file.

Mitchell Davis is a self-made YouTube celeb from Ohio who, segue, kind of reminds me of a young Jim Carrey if Jim Carrey’d had iMovie at 18. What I’d like you to note about this video is how genuinely “2010 teenager” it is. It’s a vlog, first off, so the format is new-ish, and there’s a sort of MySpace-y casual narcissism, but there’s also the obvious comfort with technology, the use of comedic editing techniques culled from the media he’s grown up with, and the way the whole thing looks and feels like a video chat.

Next, I’d like to direct your attention to my favorite fashion blogger. Tavi Gevinson is 13 and has honed a common childhood penchant for playing dress-up into a prodigious sense of (and interest in) fashion that, in turn, has become a widely read and highly regarded fashion column. Style Rookie reads like a teenage diary because that’s how it started out and, as Tavi maintains, what it still is. Most importantly, it’s that natural lack of pretension that makes her blog great.

What these kids give us is a triple lesson in real artists shipping, good enough being great, and authenticity. The nice thing about that last one is if you’re doing the other two right, “realness” comes along for free.

So ship that thing you’re sitting on. Make it good, but don’t wait for perfect—improve it as you go. Is the editing in that student-produced video not quite right? Are the styles in your faculty blog still a little off? Are you worried about selecting the right photos for an event recap? Do/make/publish the thing. Get it in front of people and let them beat it up. Then do it again and again. Your project will either die from the constant pummeling and you can move on, or it (and you) will be stronger than ever. Then you can learn from your mistakes and get better and faster at producing content.

Bonus takeaway: make sure you’re not afraid to try things. That’s how to get millennial-level familiarity with new tools: just have at it. You’re not going to break Photoshop or the Internet. Go ahead and mess with the weird settings on your camera. Try GarageBand. Vlog. Then keep at it until you decide you hate it or something good comes out. I mean, come on…all the cool kids are doin’ it.

#hadto #sorry

Posted by Laurel Hechanova
Additional Posts (11)
Categories: Content and writing / Marketing and branding

Discuss this article (1)

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
Additional Posts (316)
Categories: Change management / Content and writing

Discuss this article (3)

Trends and Judges’ Report, CASE Awards of Excellence for Websites

This year, I chaired the judging panel for the CASE Awards of Excellence Judging for websites. The judging was hosted by Roosevelt University, Chicago—a shoutout to Lisa Encarnacion, director of university outreach, who made all the arrangements for us, and to Lesley Slavitt, vice president, government relations and university outreach.

This year, 15 judges convened for two days in March for the judging. The judges represented American and Canadian colleges, schools, and universities, public and private. The panel included people with experience in design, web strategy, web content development, admissions, student recruitment, web technology, and marketing. We also had a number of consultants on the panel, one of whom spent years working as a high school counselor. More than half of the judges have won national CASE Awards of Excellence for their websites. (Typical panels that judge other categories in the Awards of Excellence competition number about six to eight.)

There were 56 complete institutional sites entered in Category 10A [Complete Institutional Websites] this year and 94 sites entered in Category 10B [Individual Sub-Websites]. This year we awarded a Grand Gold and two Golds. In Category 10A, George School won a Gold for its redesigned site. And in Category 10B, Xavier University won the Grand Gold for Road to Xavier and Nazareth College took a Gold for FlightoftheFlyers.com.

Short list of Award winners for 2009; more details about each in the Judges’ Report for 2009.

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


• good 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


• evaluation plan; appropriate results

We also ask whether the site does something particularly interesting or unusual. We’re not very interested in sites that merely look good. It’s easy to make a site look good, but is the site great at what it’s designed to do? If a site looks good but isn’t well-organized or lacks coherent messaging, it won’t get an award. Competition in this category is very rigorous, and winning is difficult.

Managing Conflicts of Interest
Judging panels for other CASE Awards of Excellence categories top out at about six people. There are a number of reasons why we invite such a large number of people to participate in judging this category. First, building websites is a complicated undertaking and we want people with different kinds of expertise in the room to comment on issues such as audience appropriateness, usability, design, and other issues as they came up. Second, we have a lot of sites to review and having a large group of people makes this process go faster. Third, having a large group of experienced people with strong opinions ensures that a broad range of opinions is heard. Finally, the large group ensures that conflicts of interest do not emerge in this judging.

We take conflicts of interest extremely seriously. Several of the judges represented institutions that had websites entered in Category 10, and several mStoner clients entered sites in this category. Judges with a relationship to a site being judged do not participate in viewing the site during the first “elimination” round; if the site survives this round, judges are expected to recuse themselves from judging the site, are not allowed to comment on it, and are asked to leave the room when the site is being discussed during the final round when awards are given.

Trends
I’m sorry to report that the judges were underwhelmed at what we saw this year. One remarked, “I felt as if I was looking at websites from 1997. I was disappointed and surprised at how bad they were.”

Some sites we explored are clearly reaching for “wow,” but wow in and of itself isn’t enough. Without functionality, wow quickly becomes annoying. We noticed a lot of gratuitous elements that had no purpose and/or were not useful; examples of bad design; and many generic websites. One judge remarked, “I don’t see many best practices emerging this year.”

It was particularly galling to see sites that completely lacked any sense of branding or even a sense of place: the institutions could have been anywhere. For example, we looked at one site from an institution on the California coast and couldn’t find a single image that showed us where it was located.

And as important as authenticity is today, many of the sites we looked at seemed to lack authenticity. Authenticity was one of the elements that people liked about George School’s site, as well as Northland’s and Nazareth College’s Flight of the Flyers.

Another shortcoming overall was a decided lack of great content-we saw very little excellent writing or video on any of the sites we viewed. Too much of the writing was characterized by the usual university-language clichs. Sites need to be edited-and not just for misspellings (we observed far too many). And, often, excellent content was buried deep inside the site: this is good content used poorly, where one had to stumble upon it in many cases. This is not only a waste of time (and/or money), but also attention: visitors want good content!

One judge observed, “When I’m looking at your site, all I have is what is on the page. Don’t assume I know who you are; or where you are.” [Note: one of the strengths of the award-winning site for the George School is that the site provides a sense of what George School is, in words, images, and video.]

There were a number of sites that did a nice job in tying real-world experiences into the web—particularly Nazareth University’s Flight of the Flyers site. This site, McGill’s Six Word Stories site, IUPUI’s Events Calendar, and The Road to Xavier were particularly good at engaging visitors with the sites and encouraging them to share information in a variety of different ways and on different platforms, including social networking sites.

Some final comments:

• One judge noted, “What’s with the small fonts?” It wasn’t just older judges who complained about the lack of readability of small type on websites.


• We noted that a lot of sites used Flash and provided no alternatives, so they were inaccessible.


• We noted that many of the people who entered sites this year hadn’t spent much time thinking about how to evaluate the results of the all the work that went into their site. There were some clear exceptions, two of them being George School and Xavier University. At Xavier, a robust analytics toolset allows people on campus to monitor how the site is being used and respond to groups or individuals appropriately. Bravo to these award winners—and to others who thought through this key step to making a site “effective.”


• Many of the entries were a bit cagey about the use of consultants in the redesign process. Some of the winning sites were designed by on-campus teams; others were designed by consultants. We’re not particularly focused on how much a site costs, but on how good it is and what kind of results it gets. Please credit consultants for their work and be transparent about the share of the costs allocated to consultant fees when you prepare your entries. We’ll recommend that, next year, entries that reference consultants but don’t break out their costs be eliminated.

Additional Resources

Short list of Award Winners for 2009

Judges’ Report for 2009

Judges’ Report for 2008

Posted by Michael Stoner
Additional Posts (316)
Categories: Admissions and recruiting / Alumni / Content and writing / Fundraising / Marketing and branding

Discuss this article (1)

Award Winners, CASE Awards of Excellence 2009: Category 10, Websites

There were 56 complete institutional sites entered in Category 10A [Complete Institutional Websites] this year and 94 sites entered in Category 10B [Individual Sub-Websites]. This category includes special-purpose websites ranging from campaign sites to alumni sites, virtual tours, admissions sites, annual reports, search sites, and others.

Full report on the judging, complete with comments about each of the award winners, is here [it’s a PDF].

The entry form for the category states:

Grand Gold, Gold, Silver, and Bronze medal awards may be given for innovative Web sites or pages developed for any institutional use. Do not enter only your homepage for evaluation. Judges will only be looking at multi-page/layered sites or pages.

Category 10A: Complete Institutional Websites
This category included sites designed to represent an entire institution, from the home page down. In the past, we’ve noted that it’s difficult to have all the parts of a great site come together at once at an institutional level, and this year was no exception. You’d think that a small institution—a school or a college—would have an advantage here because the scope of work is narrower than that of a large university.

Gold
George School

Silver
Northland College
SUNY-Potsdam

Bronze
University of Virginia
Georgia Tech Research Institute

Category 10B: Individual Sub-Websites
These sites—developed for special purposes for particular audiences such as prospective students, alumni, or others—allow institutions to develop a coherent, deep web experience for visitors. It’s often easier to build a special-purpose site: there are usually fewer political issues, a clearer purpose, and more of an opportunity to measure results—assuming, of course, that there is a plan in place to do so.

Grand Gold
The Road to Xavier, Username: hopsonk1, Password: Twitter1

Gold
Nazareth University Flight of the Flyers

Silver
Boston University Annual Report
[url=http://www.bu.edu/admissions]Boston University Undergraduate Admissions Website{/url]

Bronze
Boston University, College of Fine Arts Website
Cornell University Photography Image Library, login: case; password: case1
Hobart and William Smith Colleges Daily Update
Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis Events Calendar
McGill University
Virginia Military Institute Don’t Do Ordinary Website

Additional Resources

Judges’ Report for 2009

Judges’ Report for 2008

Posted by Michael Stoner
Additional Posts (316)
Categories: Admissions and recruiting / Alumni / Content and writing / Design and usability / Marketing and branding

Discuss this article (0)

How to Win a CASE Gold

People often ask me, “Mark, how do I win a CASE Gold medal?” And I say, “Hoss, (I address everyone as ‘Hoss,’ including my mother) here’s whatcha gotta do . . ” And then I wake up.

Back in my waking life, two mStoner-designed sites were honored last week. A site we did for the George School won a CASE Gold Medal, and a site we did for the College of William & Mary was one of three nominees for best overall web site on EduStyle.net. We are very pleased for both clients and defer much of the credit to them as these were very collaborative-and very rewarding-projects.

They were also very different projects. George School is a small Quaker boarding school. William & Mary is a public university with the nation’s second oldest college at its core. And the nature of those places required very different sites, and, to a certain extent, different processes. But both projects shared certain attributes that helped make them successful. Those attributes add up to something of a formula for giving any marketing or communications project a school undertake with consultant the best chance of being extra special.

Do lots of intake, most of it with students and faculty. Obviously we need to know the president or headmaster’s vision for the the school. And we’ll need to talk to the Admissions, Development and Alumni Relations staffs to get sense of the school’s competitive situation and how it is currently perceived by its various audiences. But if we’re going to make a website or a suite of enrollment pubs that represents the school in an accurate and compelling way, we have to talk to the students who choose to go there and the faculty who choose to teach them. We need to know what they like about the place and how it fits their own sense of themselves. We have to absorb as much of their enthusiasm for the place as possible. Put another way, our job is to drink the Kool-Ade. The client’s job is to serve it to us. (And just to belabor the point, Kool-Ade is made from students and faculty who love the school and are enthusiastic about its mission.)

Test thoroughly. Use the results thoughtfully. One of the things mStoner does with its intake is develop a message platform—basically a short list of things a website or viewbook should be saying to anyone who reads it. Then we give that message platform and a creative brief full of insights about a school’s students and competitive situation to teams of writers and designers and ask them to develop two or three (sometimes four) very different-yet-audience-appropriate ways of expressing that message platform. Then we test those ideas with current and prospective students to see which ideas convey our key messages most compellingly. We always do an online survey. George School, like many of our clients, chose to supplement the surveys with on-campus focus groups, which are great because in addition to letting us probe for more detailed feedback, it gives us a chance to see body language and other kinds of response that surveys don’t capture. Getting a chance to see kids ooh and ah over the winning concept made George School much more comfortable moving forward with a challenging concept. After much consultation, Ball State, which won the EduStyle “Best Overall Site” award a year ago, deliberately chose a design the came in a close second in testing because they felt it better reflected the school they wanted to become. William & Mary was faced with a similar choice and decided to go with the winner.

Trust your institution. This is probably the toughest one, particularly now when prospective students and their families are particularly price sensitive and feel obliged to go where they’re getting the best deal. But to get a student to apply in the first place, they have to want to go to your school. And that means you need to be as appealing as possible to the students who are the best fit. Both George School and WIlliam & Mary knew they weren’t for everybody. George School wanted to highlight their International Baccalaureate program. William & Mary wanted to remind people that their sometimes-overly-studious student body knew how to have a good time (guerilla a capella, anyone?) But both schools were otherwise comfortable in their own skins and willing to let go of those prospects who were not likely to be a good fit anyway. And it’s much easier to come up with an engaging, meaningful creative idea when you’re trying to say one clear thing to a particular audience than trying to be everything to everyone.

Trust your consultant. Okay, this one is as much on us as on you. We-or whoever your communications consultant might behave to earn your trust. With George School and William & Mary we did our bestas we always try to-to make the process as collaborative as possible and to listen to the client’s needs and the reasons behind changes when they requested changes. In return, they listened to us when we occasionally pushed back on changes. In addition to making us all feel good about the process, that respectful back and forth made the designs better.

So there you have it, Hoss—a four-stop process to getting a website or a viewbook that says something authentic and compelling about your school. We can’t guarantee that it will win you an award, but we feel reasonably confident that it will win you enthusiastic students who fit your institution.

Posted by Mark Sheehy
Additional Posts (6)
Categories: Content and writing / Design and usability / Marketing and branding / Strategy

Discuss this article (0)