EDUniverse Launch Party!

And you’re invited.

EDUniverse is a site for you. For education professionals who are looking to make their life easier, spend less time searching the web, and who want to discover relevant industry-related content. This party isn’t just a celebration of a site launching. It’s a celebration of the people who work in education, from student affairs to alumni and development to marketing professionals and everyone in between, who are helping shape the future of this industry.

We hope you will join us. This party and EDUniverse will only be successful if you attend.

When: Friday, February 24, 5:30 – 7:30 PM
Where: SCVNGR Headquarters, 175 Second Street, Cambridge, MA 02142

Please RSVP by February 15 via our Evite invitation.

Since the announcement of EDUniverse our team has been working hard to get the site ready for beta users. Interested in getting early access? Sign up at EDUniverse.org.

Questions? Email Mallory Wood, Marketing Manager. Or leave a comment!

Posted by Mallory Wood
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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
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#heweb11 Why all the frenzy about it?

I’m at HighEdWeb in Austin this week. Posts containing #heweb11 filled my personal social stream in the weeks leading up to this annual event that brings together web professionals in colleges and universities throughout the country.

Why all the frenzy? Why such anticipation? I’ve been a member of professional associations for as long as I can remember and I can’t think of any other associations that have been as useful or as directly tied to what I do to earn a living. Why?

Because “the web” can be a lonely business. And, frankly, we get by with a little help from our friends.

Anybody remember the time when the college/university website was considered supplemental? You had to have one, but it certainly wasn’t the flagship communication piece. Battle won, that hurdle behind us. Even so, the infrastructure needed to support the institutional web strategy is still developing. We’re still working to establish the discipline of web on our campuses.

I often meet individuals who refer to themselves as a “web team of one.” They are courageous and enthusiastic about what they do but, still, they face an isolating and challenging work environment because there is no one else who does what they do.

I still meet people who are leading (and nurturing) campus web teams. They are having some success, but their team members don’t yet have the right skill sets and competencies to take their work to the next level. And, what these teams advocate and accomplish is sometimes misunderstood and under appreciated by campus leadership.

I’m regularly asked by our clients to share organizational structures, position descriptions, mission statements, and various and sundry reports from other colleges and universities. (Thanks to all of you who have provided them for the benefit of others!) Web professionals are hungry for data about how to make it happen well.

Enter HighEdWeb. It’s not just a conference, it’s a community.

For the web professional going solo, it provides colleagues. And not just people you exchange ideas with once a year. More often, the HighEdWeb conference is where you finally meet the person behind @putyournamehere for the first time. Because really, you already know each other because you’ve shared ideas, figured out solutions to problems, and provided mutual encouragement through social media.

For the web team with limited professional development funds, the HighEdWeb event provides a stream of content (live from #conferencelocation) that can be an exceptional resource even for those who had to miss it. Even if it wasn’t your turn to go this year, you still benefit because you can follow along.

For every higher education web professional, the conference offers a shot in the arm and, more importantly, a way to realize you’re not crazy. There’s nothing like an affinity group to make it clear that your highs, lows, struggles, and successes in the world we call .edu are shared by many. Some of the smartest people you’ll meet have been where you are. Cool thing is, they’re ready to share. They’ll save you some time, give you an idea, or teach you something you didn’t know. That’s what all the frenzy’s about.

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mStoner lands in Austin!

Are you attending the sold out HighEdWeb conference in Austin, Texas next week? We bet you are already packed, following the #heweb11 hashtag, and counting down the minutes until Sunday night’s welcome reception kicks off.

mStoner will be presenting on topics that include mobile, social media, and building a creative services team. Check out the sessions below and we hope to see you there.

“Creative Services, Anyone?”
to be presented by Senior Strategist Susan Evans on October 24, 8:30–9:15AM in the Marketing, Management, and Professional Development Track

This session will cover what it takes to set up a unit on your campus that operates like a successful in-house creative agency. Susan will share her experience establishing and building a creative services team at the College of William & Mary.

“Beyond Blogging: Create an Integrated Online Student Ambassador Program”
to be presented by Marketing Manager Mallory Wood on October 24, 9:30-10:15AM in the Social Media Track.

The presentation focuses on how to expand, integrate and manage your institution’s student bloggers’ presence across multiple social networking platforms.

“On Your Mark, Get Set, Mobile”
co-presented by Tiffany Broadbent of the College of William & Mary and mStoner Creative Director Doug Gapinski on October 25th, 8:30–9:15AM in the Content Track.

This session is a primer for thinking about an institutional mobile site and covers the types of information you should offer in mobile format, the decision to create a mobile app or a mobile website, trends and guidelines for styling and coding, and examples of mobile content from colleges and universities.

If you can’t make it to Austin this year, you don’t have to miss out! Check the mStoner blog next week for our slide decks.

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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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What Do You Want to Know About How Institutions are Using Social Media in Advancement?

If you have thoughts about what you’d like to know about how schools, colleges, and universities are using social media in their advancement activities, now’s the time to let us know.

That’s because we’re designing the questionnaire for the 2011 CASE/mStoner/Slover Linett survey of social media in advancement. We’ll review the first draft this week and launch the survey in early February. Share your thoughts as a comment below, or send an email to me (Michael.Stoner(at)mStoner.com).

Last year’s survey results provided a benchmark for how schools, colleges, and universities were using social media in marketing, fundraising, alumni relations and other advancement activities—essentially those that involve interactions with external constituents. We’ll survey the same group this year.

While we want to see what’s changed since 2010, we also wanted to fine-tune some of the questions we asked. We fine-tuned “current position” titles and categories (e.g. added titles like “coordinator”), revisited the list of “motivators” and “barriers” to implementing social media, and tried to provide more fine-grained explanation of how the survey categorizes divisions and departments (for example, a communications unit within an alumni office).

We also will explore how (or whether) respondents are using social media to conduct research on their audiences and how they are marketing social media activities.

We weren’t very happy with the data we collected about staffing last year; this year, we revised questions on staffing committed to social media to capture both “dedicated” staff and staff who have multiple responsibilities but who spend at least one-quarter of their time on social media.

Finally, this year we’re planning to contact enrollment management/admission staff and invite them to respond to the survey. They were underrepresented in last year’s survey. See this post for a sense of what we learned about how social media was used by admission/enrollment offices last year.

But what did we miss that you want to know? Again, Share your thoughts as a comment, or send me an email (Michael.Stoner(at)mStoner.com).

We’re planning to unveil the results of the survey at the CASE Social Media & Community conference, to be held in San Francisco on 13-15 April.

And in case you missed them, here are the topline results from last year’s survey and a white paper discussing the implications of the survey.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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Categories: Admissions and recruiting / Alumni / Articles, handouts, downloads / Marketing and branding / Real life / Social media

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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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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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