Common Sense and Plain Language Take Your Visitors Where They Want to Go

Have you ever shopped the websites of an online clothing store like The Gap, Lands End, Boden, or Bluefly? These sites have certain things in common: they sell clothing for men, women, maybe kids; they may have a specialty or two like shoes or fragrances; and they have sales, new items, and other specials they want to highlight.

Each strives to differentiate itself from competitors. But if you glance at their websites, you’ll notice that terms like “Women,” “Men,” “Shoes,” “New Arrivals,” “Sale” appear on these (in fact, most) retail shopping websites as key labels in the primary navigation.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why. These sites are designed to move product and are organized so shoppers can find what they already want and spot other items they may find appealing.

When shoppers arrive at a site like Bluefly, they’re often interested in a certain item—a woman in search of the perfect black dress. Bluefly’s home is intuitive: click “Men” and you find men’s clothing. The choices are intuitive so that visitors can move on to exploring—and maybe purchasing.

It’s also pretty easy to see that websites that sell clothing would be at a huge disadvantage if they organized themselves differently. Why would someone who had just shopped Bluefly or The Gap spend any time on a site where shirts, slacks, and jackets are grouped together, with women’s and men’s clothing thrown into one long list? Shopping a site like this would be incredibly frustrating and visitors would leave, clicking to another site that made shopping for a man’s shirt easy.

In fact, you could argue that because shopping sites all have a similar organization, marketers can focus on differentiating these brands by other attributes. Bluefly—designer clothes at discount. Nordstrom—great service & well-curated selection, plus real stores.

Labels and the .edu website

Given the fact that this makes so much intuitive sense, you’d think that colleges and universities would understand that they don’t need to reinvent the information architecture (IA) and labels on their websites. As Chas Grundy pointed out, people who focus on solving similar problems often develop similar solutions. Embracing standards should allow institutions to focus on other challenges, like communicating the attributes that make them stand out.

And in fact, most colleges and universities do use a fairly standard set of labels for the primary navigation on their websites:

About / Academics / Admission / Athletics / News & Events / Research / Student Life

Some institutions may add an additional label or two depending on the need to highlight some significant area of specialty. But notice that all these words are fairly understandable, both to insiders (faculty, students, staff) and to even the most naive visitors.

It’s not a huge stretch to realize that “Academics” relates to classroom activity, courses, and majors. And most people understand that information about enrolling and applying can be found under “Admission.”

This isn’t just common sense: usability testing supports the approach I’ve described. Even teens understand these terms. Why is this important? Because when Noel-Levitz asked teens Noel-Levitz E-Expectations 2011, “academic programs” and “enrollment and admissions information” topped the list, by far.

So imagine this: a prospective student visits ten university websites. On nine of them, she can research majors by clicking on the “Academics” label. At the tenth, some “creative” site designer decided to relabel “Academics” as “Learn.” Now, our teen visitor has to figure out whether she can “Learn” about majors by clicking on that tab, or if she’ll “Learn” about student life, residence halls, or how to apply instead.

A bit confusing, right? May I remind you of the wisdom of the Don’t Make Me Think mantra, which underscores the fact that the more people have to consider their choices on a website, the less happy they are with it.

Noel-Levitz found that “One in five students said they removed a school from consideration because of a bad experience on an institution’s Web site.” You don’t want your institution to be the one rejected because of decisions to institute a nonstandard IA, do you? Yet just this week, I saw a newly launched, redesigned website that not only used nonstandard labels for its primary IA, but saw the need to double-label everything. That approach is neither smart nor innovative.

Of course it’s important to think about every aspect of your website. It shouldn’t be a static entity: it must evolve to accommodate changing visitor needs and institutional realities.

And you should even evaluate your information architecture. But be wary of changing it just to be different or because a design partner thinks it would be “creative” to do so. Changes should be informed by data and guided by usability testing, including tests against peer institution websites. Before making changes, be sure that your choices are enhancing the experience of visitors to your site, not confusing them or, worse, turning them off and sending them directly to another institution.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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CASE Circle of Excellence Awards 2011: Best in Social Media

And … it’s a wrap. The judges’ report for the 2011 CASE Circle of Excellence Awards for Best in Social Media is finished. This year’s entries were generally uninspired, but we had two excellent entries that earned Golds: one of them was from William & Mary, which entered its blogs (hence the image above); the second from the University of Nottingham, which achieved amazing results from a smart campaign focused on achieving exposure for faculty experts blogging about last year’s election in the UK.

Judging for the 2011 CASE Circle of Excellence Awards, Category 12: Best in Social Media, was held at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, for two days in April, in conjunction with the judging for Category 11: Websites.

This year, the panel of judges included representatives of American and Canadian colleges, schools, and universities, both public and private. Half of the judges had never participated in one of these panels before. Three work for institutions that won national CASE Circle of Excellence Awards for their websites—and headed the teams that built the award-winning sites. Several are well known in the .edu blogosphere. One judge has earned a gold for social media. The panel included people with experience in design, web strategy, web content development, admissions, student recruitment, social media, web technology, and marketing.

According to CASE’s website:

Gold, Silver, and Bronze awards may be given in each subcategory to recognize best practices using social media within new and established programming. One overall category Grand Gold award may also be awarded for superior work. Eligible programs may come from any area of institutional advancement. Programs may be on-going or new in 2010 but must have been in place long enough to have produced well documented results. You may also enter best uses of social media in the following categories: Alumni Relations Programs: Creative Use of Technology and New Media and Fundraising Programs: Technology Applications and Creative Use of New Media.

There are four subcategories in “Best in Social Media.” Here they are, with the number of entries in each subcategory and the number of awards given:

• 12a. Best Uses of Social Media in Alumni Programming: 13 entries, no awards


• 12b. Best Uses of Social Media in Fundraising: 1 entry, no awards


• 12c. Best Uses of Social Media in Student Recruitment and Marketing: 7 entries, 1 award


• 12d. Other Uses of Social Media: 32 entries, 3 awards

Award Winning Social Media in 2011
In the second year for CASE’s “Best in Social Media” Category, it seemed that the entries were either very good or pretty bad, with not much in between. This is one indication of how institutions are struggling to make sense of social media and to use it effectively. In general, we observed that when institutions clearly defined the problems they wanted social media to solve, they were able to develop innovative solutions.

As judges, we were looking for the following attributes from award winners:

• Strategy: What’s the overall goal? How will social media be used to achieve it? What channels are appropriate? How are they used?


• Integration of tools/channels
  
• Clear objectives across channels and a clear strategy in place to measure results

One positive development this year was that there were more entries from institutions that had clearly thought about integrating their social media across channels into a type of “campaign,” taking advantage of different social media platforms. Consider, for example, the University of Nottingham’s award-winning effort to cover the 2010 election in the UK, which combined traditional media relations with a 24/7 blogging/Twitter effort.

This integration of communications channels is a positive movement away from what we observed last year, when many institutions indicated that having a Facebook page or a Twitter feed in and of itself was a social media strategy worthy of an award. And it’s also a clear indication of growing sophistication about social media as a key channel that must be managed appropriately. Institutions are learning that Twitter is different from Facebook and the rules of engagement are different. Pumping tweets onto a Facebook wall is a fan-losing proposition. So is a one-way communications model that emulates broadcast.

And, as one judge pointed out, “While we can appreciate that at your institution the fact that you have a pretty well-run Facebook community is impressive and it took a lot to get there internally, it’s not innovative.” We want to know what institutions are doing with Facebook and other social media channels, and how they are leveraging their social media community to accomplish their communications goals.

We were hoping to see more collaboration across communications, web, alumni, and admissions teams than we did, with more integration. And we’re still not seeing clear goals behind institutions’ adoption of various social media channels, much less metrics that would let them know if their social media efforts had been successful. And we’re not seeing great examples of engagement, especially on Twitter (which happens to be the preferred social network of many of the judges).

Awards
category 12c: best uses of social media in student recruitment & marketing
gold: The College of William and Mary: William and Mary Blogs: Bloggers; Admissions Blogs; Law School Admissions Blog

category 12d: other uses of social media
gold: University of Nottingham: Election 2010: Social Media Impact for Politics at the University of Nottingham: Election Blog; Politics in 60 Seconds YouTube Channel; Ballots & Bullets Politics Blog

bronze: Columbia College Chicago: Manifest Urban Arts Festival Schedule Builder; St. Edwards’ University: Give it a Whrrl: St. Edward’s Graduation gets Socially Connected; Whrrl Blog: St’ Andrews University Makes History

There’s more detail in the complete Judges’ Report, which contains further comments about process and comments about each of the award winners.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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CASE Award Winners 2011: Websites

In case you’re wondering, that’s a screenshot of a CASE Gold award winner this year: the Online Viewbook from Arizona State University.

We’ve just completed the Judges’ Report for the 2011 CASE Circle of Excellence Awards for Category 11, Websites. Read on for some thoughts about what we saw this year and follow the link below to download a copy of the entire judges’ report.

The judging this year was held in early April at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec. We’re grateful to the university for hosting this year’s judging—and especially to Shelagh Pedeen and Laurie Zack for their excellent hospitality. Laurie has served as a judge for these awards for nearly a decade. This was his last judging: he retired in May. I will miss his insights and his contributions to future discussions about the websites we’ve viewed.

Category 11 includes complete institutional websites (35 entries; we awarded a silver and two bronzes) and individual sub-websites (89 entries; we awarded 2 golds, 3 silvers, 4 bronzes, and an honorable mention). We did see some good, even ingenious, sites this year. But our overall impression was that quality of sites was down and that there were many, many missed opportunities.

Perhaps it’s time to acknowledge that there is a certain sameness that’s the state of the art for school, college, and university websites. It’s not that sites can’t be striking in their own right: it’s possible to create a beautiful, functional website that reflects well on an institution, attracts prospective students, and engages alumni. But now that many of the standards have been set, innovation occurs within a much narrower range than it did a decade ago. Maybe we can expect to see fewer sites that elicit a “wow” at first sight—but we see many more that we will appreciate the more we use them because their designers have attended to the many important usability details and populated the site with compelling stories, powerful images, and amazing video.

The most innovative sites we saw this year—those for Biola and ASU—were designed for prospective students. One could argue that sites focused on particular audience segments (prospective students, alumni, and others) can take more risks. If the sites are compelling enough—and their audience dedicated enough—they can use nonstandard navigation, offer up interactive Easter eggs, and break other rules. An institutional website has too many demands on it in terms of making its information findable to serve the needs of many different audiences to break too many rules or push too many boundaries.

Trends
Some trends we noticed this year:

• If you ever needed evidence of the international nature of CASE, take a look at this year’s entries. Among the award winners are three institutions in the UK.


• Whatever happened to editing? We saw many instances of sites trying to do way too much and not succeeding at much of anything. And we gave awards to sites that were powerful precisely because they represented a compelling concept, simply implemented. Take a look at the University of Toronto’s alumni reunion sign-up: the designers of this site edited it down into a clean, simple interface that made it extremely easy to sign up for a very complex series of events.


• Perhaps it’s a sign of the economic times, but most of the sites we saw were homegrown and few were produced by external agencies. Some of this homegrown work was excellent and innovative—the sites by Biola and ASU, for example, arose out of a desire to be “different,” but the sites are easy to use and navigate nonetheless.


• Many sites had identity issues and did not provide us with a strong sense of what the institution was, what it stood for, or how it was truly different from its competitors. Take a look at the ASU site or Biola’s site to see examples of a strong brand, one that couldn’t easily transfer to another institution.


• It’s still hard to find calls to action on many websites. One judge recounted difficulty finding information about how to apply—much less an “apply now” button— a website he viewed. We consider calls to action to be a basic feature of a .edu website.


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


• While .edu websites are much better organized and easier to navigate than they used to be, we still saw sites with “layers and layers of navigation all over the place,” which made them confusing to navigate. This is particularly challenging on sites that don’t have a clear design hierarchy for pages or where choices appear to have been dictated by internal politics rather than respect for what a visitor to the site might want to do. In contrast, the best sites represent a lot of thinking and hard work about their target audiences before design begins. King’s College is a great example of this. Their innovative nav bar was only possible because they had streamlined and cleaned up their site first.


• Sad to say, we still see plenty of evidence that institutions still don’t appear to start projects by thinking about how they’re going to measure outcomes and determine how they will know if their site is successful. They may have some general goals in mind, but they aren’t doing the hard work necessary to close the loop. We observed few examples of institutions using web dashboards or metrics to iterate and change based on traffic patterns or user behavior. It’s difficult to tweak a site after launch without clear metrics. One of the judges observed, “One of the reasons we see this disconnect is that communications/marketing leaders aren’t at the table when strategic decisions are made and, hence, communication and marketing teams are not feeling accountable to those conversations.”


• On many sites, screen space is not well used. For example, we saw pages about curriculum choices that carried a big header and large images. What value does that have to a visitor looking for the content below? And while a big, splashy homepage may impress a first-time visitor, what happens when repeat visitors tire of it and just want to reach the information they’re seeking? Does the great moving image on your homepage load so slowly that visitors leave before they see it?


• While we did see good content on some sites, some of it was buried on the site and hard to find. And some good content was overused—a in a site that featured profiles of the same six people everywhere. Images, too, need to be refreshed and updated, especially when they depict events that happened some time ago.


• Some of the special-purpose sites, especially annual reports and some of the magazines, were totally devoid of interactivity, including basic links.

A word about the importance of written submissions. Comments in the submissions that outlined how much testing had been done or how successful the sites were convinced us to give awards to several sites that we might otherwise have passed over.
Likewise, some sites might have fared better if they had demonstrated that the unorthodox choices made by their designers were supported by usability testing rather than whim. One of the judges remarked: “It’s not just about the numbers, even if you have them. It’s about providing context for your content and trying to serve your customers. Posting content is no longer enough—you have to think about providing a service and include a task-based perspective; that’s where analytics shine.”
To understand that context, we paid attention to the organizational work and cross-campus cooperation that went into building the backbone of some of these sites.

And the winners are…

Category 11a (complete institutional websites)
According to the description on CASE.org, in this category, “Grand Gold, Gold, Silver, and Bronze awards may be given for innovative Web sites or pages developed for any institutional use . . . Judges will only be looking at multi-page/layered sites or pages.”

• SIlver: University of California, Riverside: Riverside Extension


• Bronze: Guildhall School of Music and Drama; King’s College London

Category 11b (individual sub-websites)
In this category, institutions can enter ”...innovative Web sites or pages developed for any institutional use . . . Judges will only be looking at multi-page/layered sites or pages.” This includes sites created for a special purpose (such as annual reports, fundraising, or news) or directed toward a well-defined audience (alumni, prospective students, current students, parents).

• Gold: Arizona State University: Online Viewbook; Boston University: International Programs Site


• Silver: Biola University: Undergrad Site; Roosevelt University: Online Housewarming: Furniture & Fixtures Registry for New Building (use the “gift registry” text); University of Toronto: Spring Reunion


• Bronze: Cornell University: CALS Green (reporting tool: CALSGreenGuest/Corn3ll0); Cornell University: Cornell Lab of Ornithology; Denison University: TheDEN; University of Rochester: Memorial Art Gallery website


• Honorable Mention: Stanford University School of Medicine: Employee Recognition

Here is a copy of the complete Judges’ Report, which contains further comments about process and extensive notes and comments about each of the award winners.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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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
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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
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mStoner’s First Law of Branding

Let’s get right to the point: “Everything is connected to everything else.”

I often begin conference presentations about social media by talking about this concept. To me, “Everything is connected to everything else” means that what you tweet about should be connected to what you post in Facebook. Not the same, mind you, but connected.

And while I’ve had insights before about how this is as true of brand strategy as it is of social media [and the real world: it happens to be Barry Commoner’s first law of ecology], the connection really hit me this week after a conversation with Ed Sirianno from Creative Communication Associates. Ed and I were talking about a presentation he’s developing for the Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education next week and I had one of those DUH! moments.

“Everything is connected to everything else” is the foundation of brand strategy, which social media should support. In an ideal world, anyway.

The conundrum of a .edu brand

Let’s not delude ourselves: in the world of education—which is the world that mStoner serves—institutions are much more alike than they are different. So to market itself effectively, an institution must be clear about what it stands for and what differentiates it from other institutions. Institutions or consultants work hard to determine the essence of those differences and come up with the right language and images to communicate them. Many people think that “branding” is all about the shorthand you use or the stuff you create to package the image: the tagline, the colors, the cool design, the institutional typeface, the advertisements, and other cool stuff.

WRONG. TOTALLY WRONG.

Real branding is about selecting, cultivating, and communicating what many agencies call “key messages.” [At mStoner, we focus on understanding and telling authentic brand stories; I’ll write a blog post about this topic at another time.]

Back to our first law. Once you identify those important messages/stories, you’ll want to incorporate them into the important channels of communication and interaction for your institution. The more disciplined you are, the more effective you’ll be. Call it “integrated marketing” if you will, but it really is about connecting everything in a systematic way, across multiple channels.

Your website is your most important communication tool, but today your website is part of a much larger ecosystem. The social web is particularly important because that’s where of your institution’s target audiences connect and engage—prospective students, parents, alumni, friends, donors, members of your local community, faculty, staff, current students, and so many others spend their time in these spaces. Print and other channels help to reinforce the value of these social web interactions.

Every communication—whether a 2500-word profile in your alumni magazine or a 140-character tweet—should reinforce your brand and work together as an ecosystem bound by a sure knowledge of the stories that are most important for your institution and yours, alone, to tell.

As I said, it’s simple. Once you understand that “everything is connected to everything else.” It’s just putting it into practice that’s difficult.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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MashED Up: Mashups and Higher Education

Hey, remember the spork? The bizarre utensil combining the properties of a spoon and fork? The spork is an analog mashup: a combination of two existing things into a third thing that has some of the positive attributes of its parents, but also has its own structure, pattern, and level of fragility.

The spork is a great example of a mashup because it’s simple—easy to understand, easy to parse, with a catchy name. Most mashups are more complex, and the internet has given rise to a multitude of digital mashups, combinations of APIs and content designed to leverage assets and code already written.

It’s estimated that in 2007 YouTube’s bandwidth exceeded the bandwidth of the enitre internet in 2000. The ever-growing well of content that the internet represents, in conjunction with huge media repositories like YouTube and open source APIs, isn’t just changing how we think; it’s changing how we build. And how we build is important because the structures we build end up dictating the spaces we occupy physically, mentally and socially … in the analog world, and on the internet.

In the first quarter of this year, my coworker Laurel Hechanova and I noticed that a growing number of the interesting projects we were working on, like the new branding page for Trinity College (part of larger relaunch that is not yet live) or design of a social media aggregator NMHbook were mashups.

So we spent the last few months taking a deeper dive into mashups, and the result was this presentation (download as PDF) for Eduweb 2010. We’ve taken care to curate by the mashups we felt were most compelling in higher education and beyond. While NMHbook is an mStoner project, the other examples are simply really nice projects we’ve selected so you can get an idea of what’s out there.

For easy reference, here are the examples shown in the presentation by category.

Education examples:
Savannah College of Art and Design: Connect
Northfield Mount Hermon: NMHbook
University of Maryland, Baltimore County: Be.UMBC
Towson University: Campus map

Non-education examples:
Newsmap
SeeClickFix
WeFeelFine
HandmadeSpark

We also felt it was only appropriate to create our own mashup based on the live presentation. The second half of this blog post is a combination of Expression Engine and the Twitter API. Stuff you tweet with the #mashed_up tag goes into the second half of this post automatically. You’ve got an opportunity to say something insightful–or incendiary–that becomes a part of this post and the back channel simultaneously. The blog post also gives you a chance to drive traffic to your twitter channel. We look forward to seeing how your comments become a part of the mashup.

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

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

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

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

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

Results: Category 11

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

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

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

Observations and Trends

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

• a sound strategy;


• sound information architecture, navigability, usability and search;


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


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


• a clear identity that is appropriate to the organization;


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


• standardization of interface across the site;


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


• metrics; evaluation plans; results;


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

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

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

Some trends we noticed this year:

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Michael Stoner
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Fashion Institute of Technology, Northfield Mount Hermon Websites Earn Honors from CASE

Congratulations to Fashion Institute of Technology and Northfield Mount Hermon School for earning CASE Awards of Excellence this year for their websites and social media!

Fashion Institute of Technology won a Gold medal in Category 11a, Complete Institutional Websites, and Northfield Mount Hermon won a Silver. There were four awards in this category—a Gold, a Silver, and two Bronzes. Winners were chosen from 54 sites entered.

Northfield Mount Hermon earned a second Silver for its NMHBook social media aggregator site in Category 12, Best Use of Social Media in Communications and Marketing. This was a new category this year; judges gave two awards, a Silver and a Bronze, chosen from 19 entries.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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With a Little Help From Your Fans

Last year, at least one institution scuttled its rebranding effort when students, faculty, and staff took to Facebook and soundly panned the identity before the planned launch. Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ, is hoping to avert this outcome by asking its constituents-at least, those who are Facebook fans-to vote on a new logo. Stevens will roll out this logo in celebration of its 140th anniversary.

The poll is the latest step in a process that began last summer. The resulting logo and institutional rebranding is linked to plans for Stevens’ anniversary celebration. Michael Schinelli, the Institute’s associate vice president for graduate marketing and communications, notes that their design partner, Spiral Design, had developed identity materials. “We were going through the normal approval process until earlier this year when we talked about getting the community to give input on the designs. I suggested that we create a Facebook campaign that would allow stakeholders to vote—and also grow our social media fan base.”

Spiral developed four concepts. Schinelli reports, “The designs went through a series of revisions and we settled on four that we thought were both divergent enough to offer a choice and strong enough to be a winner. The poll also has info on the design elements, such as the authentic characteristics, history and aspirations that would identify Stevens better than our current logo. These include our gatehouse, the river (we’re perched above the river, overlooking New York City), Alexander Calder’s artwork (he was an alum), the University motto “Per Aspera, Ad Astra” (Through adversity to the stars), and the S for Stevens.”

Stakeholders can cast their vote via a Facebook poll to be launched today. The poll will be open through 9 a.m. Friday.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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