Twitter: Aging in Reverse?

There is an interesting read on mashable.com about increased Twitter usage by young people. We’ve been working with some institutions on social media solutions, and I’m wondering if this means we will see an increased use in this platform by colleges and universities that serve traditional-age students.

A highlight from the mashable article regarding trends in Twitter demographics: “In other words, unlike popular social sites before it – most notably Facebook and MySpace – Twitter is actually ‘aging in reverse,’ first gaining popularity with older users and only later teens and young adults.”

Social media and it’s growth, as we’ve seen, is difficult to predict. Some providers have focused on creating platforms (such as MySpace, Facebook, and Tumblr) where people can easily feed in a variety of links and media types, and Twitter lies on the other end of that spectrum. It’s almost the anti-Facebook; there are no ads, no goofy applications, no quizzes, and no rich media. You get 140 characters per post and that’s it, so each thought or link is usually fairly self-contained. If you want to link rich media you can still do it, but the Twitter service itself does not embed the media in your post. There are only two options for relating to other users: follow or don’t follow… Twitter has no groups, calendars, no fan pages, and no polls. Twitter makes its users communicate in a way that is arguably much simpler than the social media platforms that have have come before it.

In an age of information where “more is more” can a strategy that is focused on providing less actually work?

My theory is yes. I believe that Twitter and microblogging platforms like Twitter are going to continue to grow in popularity for a few reasons:

Sometimes, less is more. As we’ve seen, Facebook is increasingly filled with apps, ads, and robust media. In a best case scenario, robust media means a more immersive experience, and in a worst case scenario, it means you have to wade through a lot of irrelevant details to actually see what your friends are doing. The way Twitter distributes content is more like an RSS feed. So you can see what people are up to without having to do as much mental sifting.

Shorter, more informal communication seems to be the benchmark of social media. Twitter is kind of on the leading edge of this, because they give you hard cap on characters per post. The Twitter rule set forces you to be concise, even more so when providing a link. While it’s not quite as short as texting from a mobile phone, it’s the same kind of communication as texting. This is another reason I think we’ll see Twitter usage continue to increase with young people.

It’s flexible. The Twitter API is extremely easy to repurpose (i.e. RSS feeds), integrate with social networks that are trying to be a platform (like Facebook), or analyze (sites such as wefollow.com). Twitter isn’t trying to do everything, it’s just trying to do one thing really well. It’s less like a platform, and more like a good tool that can fit into just about any toolbox.

I’m fully aware that the future, and the fickle public may prove me wrong. For now, I’m going to keep an eye on the growth of Twitter and its changing demographics.

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The Recession: the Prospective’s Perspective

According to a survey conducted by the National Association for Business Economics, leading forecasters predict the end of the recession to be imminent: “About 74 percent of the forecasters expect the recession—which started in December 2007 and is the longest since World War II—to end in the third quarter. Another 19 percent predict the turning point will come in the final three months of this year, and the remaining 7 percent believe the recession will end in the first quarter of 2010.”

But while it lasts—and even after it’s over—what kind of impact will the economic downturn have on college enrollment? We marketing and admissions consultants and institutional professionals have had plenty of time to think about our points of view and ponder some of the big questions, such as: What will happen to admission trends in the next 10 years? Is there going to be a marked shift in the admissions landscape?

Meanwhile, consider the perspective of future students and families looking to send one or more children to college. They are worried about their own challenges. Loans have been much harder to come by and many households have one or more breadwinners out of work, so finding affordable ways to send students to college is a common source of frustration for American families.

Sometimes hearing personal stories is the best way to understand how the recession is affecting the people our institutions serve.

I found this collection of NPR stories and streaming audio from the last 11 months. If you’re interested in hearing a series that takes an empathetic approach to telling the story of the recession from the point of view of students and families who want to send their child to college at a bleak point in the American economy, check out the link. The streaming audio gives you the freedom to listen while you work .. after all, we’re not out of the recession yet!

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Share and Tell

Here’s a sampling of some of the links that got passed around the mStoner offices in the last month… links dealing with social networking, higher education, search engines, and yes, streaking.

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Pwireframing: Paper Wireframing

The Bethel Strategy Background
Every web redesign project we get comes with an essential strategy document. This strategy document is a tailored roadmap laying out specifics for a successful relaunch including wireframes to help visualize how new web templates will take shape, a review of competitor sites, key messages to be surfaced in the new creative stylings of a site, a streamlined information architecture, rollout schedules, and more.

Two clients of ours from Bethel University, Mark Erickson (Director of Web Communications) and Michael Vedders (Director of Web Technology), came to mStoner’s Chicago office for two days earlier in the month to work directly with us on the Bethel strategy document. The idea was that two days of intense collaboration and discussion would produce a more cohesive report, better suited to Bethel’s needs.

It Doesn’t Get Any More Old School than Paper and Scissors
Part of this two day process was an exercise that I like to call paper wireframing, or Pwireframing. It’s an idea that came to me based on a link that my colleague Laurel Hechanova sent me: The Design Police Visual Enforcement Kit. If you take a look at this page, it’s essentially a print-it-yourself sticker kit, laying out a bunch of funny “laws” you can stick to a piece of communication.

The idea behind Pwireframing (again, wireframing with paper) was to make the regular wireframing process more modular and collaborative. Instead of having a designer simply follow the instructions of a strategist, we started by discussing all possible contents of pages as a group, including syndicated feeds Bethel is currently maintaining. We also made some decisions about feeds or content Bethel would be likely to bring online in the near future. After this, I drew and printed modular drawings of all of the types of content we talked about, and cut them into sets.

We then taped some blank page templates to our upstairs whiteboard. These templates carried only consistent information: the Bethel logo, the topic-based navigation, the tactical navigation, and the footer. From here, we started by thinking about which pages would need their own specific templates (or which templates would be the most flexible for filling out the full Bethel site) and pasting these up with modular contents.

Let’s Talk it Out
The best thing about this process, in my opinion, was the dialogue it created between Bethel’s representatives and the mStoner strategy team.

The process made us ask each other critical questions. Which templates were the most essential, and which could be consolidated in favor of others? How should we address an admissions page for a University that has a fairly even split between traditional-age students and post-graduates, with completely different niche colleges such as Seminary? Which pages might rely on tabbed structures to present larger sets of data more efficiently? These are only a few of the questions we asked each other as we taped content to these rough drafts.

It was incredibly valuable to have this kind of discussion between Bethel team members who are closest to the needs of the institution, and mStoner team members who are more familiar with best practices.

Hey, It Worked!
Of course, as part of the full strategy, we redrew the paper wireframes digitally. It was tempting to show our hacked-up, taped-up paper to Bethel’s steering committee, but sometimes it’s important to put a bit more polish on official documents.

The end result was exactly what we had hoped for: a highly tailored set of wireframes, custom-cut to meet the needs of Bethel, and a template suite designed for maximum flexibility for filling out the specific needs of the Bethel relaunch.

We presented the full strategy document last week, and it was very well received by the steering committee. I know that part of the reason is that we had a chance to work closely on the document with Bethel team members, using exercises like this to guide us in our collaboration.

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Give Your Interview Content Some Soul!

A couple of weeks ago, our managing partner Voltaire Miran was kind enough to arrange a visit from Caleb Paull of Roosevelt University, formerly of the Center for Digital Storytelling. Caleb came out to the mStoner office and presented to a small group of us, sharing some of the basics of good storytelling and showing an example of an excellent student piece produced in one of his storytelling workshops. His presentation evolved into an extended conversation on how to apply good storytelling techniques to profile or interview content for higher education.

Before I finish this story, let me give you a bit of background. As of about 6 months ago, I was given editorial responsibilities over the clients I serve as Creative Director. For me, the desire to improve profile or interview content on web sites is driven by the fact that this kind of content is nearly ubiquitous on all sites in higher education, but it’s not always great material. I want the sites we produce to be the best, so I started by trying to think of ways to improve interview content we’re doing.

Around the same time this was happening, Voltaire was becoming more interested in digital storytelling, and it seemed like a good opportunity to turn some of the profile content we generate for clients into more story-based writing. I don’t think every person necessarily makes an incredibly interesting avatar-of-the-institution profile, but I do believe every single person has a few really interesting stories in them. I believe that by making typical profile content more centered on a single story from the person’s life, you can open the door to doing more profiles (since you don’t necessarily have to choose the most well-rounded students to be avatars of the school) and generate more interesting content.

Cut back to early May of ‘09 (or the first paragraph of this blog post… your preference), sitting upstairs in our comfortable office lounge on plush couches, talking to Caleb, the digital storyteller, about these ideas: what can we do, as a company, to generate the most compelling interview content? I’m paraphrasing at this point, but here are some of the words of wisdom we heard from Caleb.

Good stories deal with change. This is a writing basic that is easily forgotten. Caleb stated that the most compelling stories deal with real change, or with a changed perspective. By asking a person broad questions, and by identifying natural storytellers, you are more likely to discover dynamic stories. The broad questions, “What has changed you the most?” or “Who has had the biggest experience on your impact here?” open the door for a subject to tell a story that has real meaning to them.

Don’t force a personal story to have a specific point. This, in Caleb’s opinion, is a recipe for losing emotional strength. He said that most stories start with a “kernel,” a small, specific detail, a photograph, a sentimental object, or something of that nature. The story then meanders around before arriving at a destination. He pointed out that most storytellers, when relaying a story for the first time, don’t even know where that destination is when they begin. So, let’s apply that philosophy to higher ed profile content: when you start out by trying to prove that a student represents a branding attribute of the school, you’re forcing the story to arrive at a destination, or specific point. Caleb’s opinion is that a good translation of a story creates a glimpse of a storyteller that a reader would really want to meet… and that’s way more emotionally effective than trying to use a student to illustrate a specific branding attribute.

Make sure the storyteller “owns” the story. When Caleb hears stories that sound too cookie cutter, he says he often asks the person, “How is that your story?” By asking people to make the story specific to themselves, he says, they often fill in interesting and unique details. These details are often where the sense of voice comes through—one of the basics of good digital storytelling.

Untie the story a little if it wraps up too neatly. Having done several workshops with immigrants, Caleb said he often heard stories ending with, “…and then I got to America, and everything was alright.” His response, “Really? You haven’t struggled since then?” His point was that very seldom do real stories end with full resolution, and when they do, the person usually isn’t being 100% honest with themselves. By challenging a subject to examine his or her ending if it sounds a little cliché, a story can become more authentic, and thus more interesting.

Make sure it’s got soul. This last one’s my favorite because it puts a unique spin on authenticity, a buzz word we’ve all heard many times before. Caleb said, “The authenticity of a story is measured by how much the audience and the storyteller believe that what the storyteller is saying has soul.” While Caleb didn’t necessarily exactly enunciate what soul is, his statement struck the intuitive part of my brain as right on the money. Soul in this context seems to be a way of describing emotional truth. Only if both the speaker and the audience believe in the words being communicated does the message really resonate. Another thing he said about authenticity was “Stories must be told, not sold.”

These last two statements were the inspiration for the title graphic of this post! As I tackle more editorial responsibilities, I intend to take Caleb’s words to heart… looking for ways of adding more of the elusive soul to the stories we are telling.

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Northfield Mount Hermon: Social Media Done Right

Northfield Mount Hermon School (NMH) is a ninth through twelfth grade private, college preparatory school located near the Connecticut River in the town of Gill, Massachusetts. This is an interview with Heather Sullivan, Director of Communications and Marketing for Northfield Mount Hermon, regarding how the school is handling social media as of May, 2009.

Hello, Heather. What is your history in higher and secondary education?
After graduating from Kenyon, I worked as Senior Associate Director of Communications for Milton Academy for three years. From there, I went on to a position at Mercersburg Academy as Director of Strategic Marketing and Communications for two and a half years. I then accepted a position at Northfield Mount Hermon and have been here for just over a year as Director of Communications and Marketing.

What is NMH currently doing with social media?
Basically, we’re maintaining a fairly robust presence on Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook, in addition to news and events feeds on our main public-facing site. We try to have as little overlap as possible in the feeds because we’re setting up certain areas like our boxes section in Facebook where feeds are consolidated. It gives our audiences a chance to participate in everything, or to view NMH through the channels they want to.

How and when did your team decide to set this up?
There was a moment about a year ago where NMH brought in new leadership in Admission, and myself in Communications and Marketing. And one member of the admission team was also interested in social media and really facile with the tools and implementation. There was a feeling that admissions work had been handled very traditionally and so the goal was to shake things up and rethink the strategy.

We are in the middle of a web redesign, and we couldn’t tackle big things on our current site, but what we could do quickly and at low cost was social media. Being involved in social media sends a message that we understand how young people communicate. The idea is to demonstrate to the public that we’re savvy enough to be using new channels intelligently, and show prospective students that we’re willing to communicate with them on their terms.

What have been the biggest challenges in putting social networking into practice in secondary ed?
We’re still working through how social media integrates with larger marketing efforts. We want to be sure that information we surface is complementary and not redundant, which is already a challenge when you think about maintaining 4 or 5 feeds almost daily. A little bit of overlap is acceptable for really important events, but we want to give the public a reason to participate with NMH on every channel. To do this, the information has to be a little different on every platform.

Another challenge is that internal expectations for our communications are very strong… we have high expectations about quality. When you move to a channel that works best when maintained daily such as Twitter, or a platform inviting participation from fans such as Facebook, those platforms have their own standards. Social media is inherently less formal and less controlled. Institutions have to strike a balance between the idea about formal messaging and circulating ideas more quickly and casually. There’s a delicate line you walk between informal and inappropriate.

Resourcing is also a challenge. We’re lucky enough to have a team who jumped at the possibility of setting this up on these platforms and they do a lot of work in keeping the platforms maintained. But resourcing is more complicated when it comes to social media, because you have to be aware of which trends to follow. Yesterday we were looking at Ning, and we were having a hard time thinking about how to apply it. So there’s a challenge in staying informed about which platforms will really help you accomplish your goals. You can’t jump on every bandwagon. For us, right now, it’s Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, and soon Youtube.

How many people were required to set up your presence in social media? How many people are required to maintain these efforts successfully?
For Flickr: Chris Arnini, our current Web Manager, helped set up and integrate flickr into our current site. The galleries are supported by him, by Sharon Labella-Lindale, Assistant Director of Communications, and by a faculty member who is shoots most events as part of his responsibilities.

Jesse Bardo, Admissions Counselor and Communication Coordinator, maintains and monitors our daily Facebook presence. Chris Arnini helped with the setup of the feeds. Kate Snyder, Writer, is the primary writer of the web site highlights.

Kate Snyder manages the news feed on the main site, which is fed into Facebook. Our calendar of events on the main site is managed by Sharon and this feeds into Facebook as well.

Our Twitter presence is also maintained by Jesse Bardo.

What do others need to know if they want to try something similar?
I can’t imagine us being able to pull this off if we hadn’t started with a dynamic team of people who were (and still are) already interested in social media. Having one or two people in the organization who have a real love or affinity for social media is crucial. Invest in thinking and teamwork up front about what you’re going to do, think about adding texture or presence (e.g. boxes) up front. Be willing to put the hours into maintaining a presence on any platform you choose.

What kind of discipline issues or problems have you had on these platforms?
We haven’t had many problems with inappropriate messaging, which was the big concern most people had when social media first emerged. People were underestimating how social media has its own etiquette and online communities tend to self-monitor. Young people who have been participating in online communities are more aware of the boundaries and etiquette than adults are sometimes.

I don’t think the occasional bad apple in the bunch has a real negative impact at all. If nothing bad is ever mentioned, people begin to question the authenticity of the messaging. We often forget that negative messaging appears in print, as well. Most magazines are willing to run negative letters to the editor, even in the front of the magazine. If you have courage and you’re being yourself, you should be willing to share the voice of opposition… negative comments can foster a dialogue or create a level of engagement.

The most common negative comment tends to be alumni upset about decisions, and they don’t tend to use inappropriate language. We don’t want to hide these comments because it is important to discuss issues that upset people.

Do you have any metrics, or anecdotes, that indicate that social networking supports admission goals? How about alumni donations?
We do have some metrics about overall popularity and growth (shown below). I will say, because our institutional strategies right now are highly focused on enrollment management, we made the choice to focus on prospective students in this first phase of our social media presence.

Anecdotally, I think our efforts are working for admission, but it’s difficult to say how much impact these things have. It’s tricky to try to attach metrics about admission to something like a website redesign or social media because these things don’t tend to be the decision maker, they just help build or strengthen the case for why a student (or their parents) would want the student to attend. I could tell you that our yield is very strong right now, and our enrollment is stronger than it was last year (before we launched social media) but our social media presence is only a part of the work that we’re doing to support admission goals.

The focus this year for admission has been on quality of relationship. We weren’t necessarily going for quantity of applications, we were going for quality of relationship with prospectives and with parents. We saw social networking as another dimension of the relationship. Think about how Facebook helps a relationship. We like possible students seeing alumni posting that the time at NMH was the best four years of their life… or even stuff that’s less dramatic, like alumni talking about how they miss the place. Social media is a tool that allows the marketing types to step back and let people who are interested talk to one another.

What’s the next big thing you have planned for social media?
We’re currently working on getting a Youtube presence set up and mStoner is helping with this. Also, with the new web relaunch, we have a really cool integration piece that brings social media into the public-facing this site, but we’re not ready to show that to the public just yet, because we feel like it’s good enough that it’s going to be copied. Check back after the NMH site launches this fall.

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Carry On, My Wayward Sean

It’s never good to lose a member of the company, but when someone leaves to follow his passions, we like to wish him well. mStoner collectively offers best wishes to Sean Lee, who has been working with us part-time in the role of Assistant Producer. Sean is leaving us to work in Egypt, in a position well-suited to his undergraduate studies and to follow a career path he’s highly interested in.

In Sean’s own words:

“I’m going to be on the Amarna Project, as a member of the physical anthropology team. Amarna is a particularly interesting site, because of the 18th dynasty (King Tut, Ahmenhotep etc.). During that period of time, known as the Amarna Heresy, Pharaoh Akhenaten moved the Egyptian capital to Amarna and pulled the kingdom under monotheistic worship of the god Aten. His rule also created a shift in artistic styles in Egypt to be more realistic.”

“This new job is like a more international version of [my other part-time job] at the Field Museum: analysis of human remains. There are obvious things that can be gauged from a survey of a skeleton (inter/intrapersonal violence, deformity, grave theft) but then some not so obvious things. For example, my undergrad research focused on evidence of butchering/cannibalism in Native American remains. On the Amarna Project, I will be looking at signs of metabolic stress and disease on the human body. My goal is to draw on the information about dietary stress and prevalence of disease in ancient remains, and draw comparisons between modern populations that show statistically significant similarities in their demographics. From that I want to reciprocally create public health profiles of both populations drawing on information from each to better understand the other. This will focus largely on fecundity, life expectancy, and cultural factors that contribute to or inhibit disease.”

Wow, Sean. Good luck with all of that!

Patrick DiMichele (Sean’s former manager) is looking at part-time replacements for Sean, who helped us with a number of projects, including usability testing, survey reports, and data migration.

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Building a Photo Library for CNU

We’re working with Christopher Newport University on a web site redesign. One of the additional services we’re helping them with is building a photo library in Adobe Bridge that they’ll be able to use to tag and track images. To kick off the new library with solid images, we did a week long shoot with photographer Chris Crisman, myself, and our client contacts: Bruce Bronstein, Maggie Vaughan, and Stephen Murphy.

The strategy in the week-long shoot, besides getting as much footage as we possibly could, was to get several types of photograph to help tell the full story of the CNU experience in an emotional way.

Group photos: communities you can belong to
Because CNU transitioned from a commuter institution to a four-year liberal arts university in the early 90s, there’s still a lingering perception that there’s not much to do on campus. To help dispel this myth, we tried to get groups that people could identify with—classrooms, people gathering socially, students walking around campus, performing or practicing everything from ballroom dancing to basketball.

Portraits that speak to (and about) high performance
Part of the CNU long-term admission strategy is to go for higher ability students. The university’s statistics and rankings have improved across the board over the last decade, and they want to continue the trend. Our client picked out students who are true leaders in different areas… from service to undergraduate research to athletics. We captured great images of them and will be conducting interviews to deliver the stories of these students.

Mentorship photos
What’s the best way to speak to the idea of faculty attention in a competitive market where many institutions talk about small classroom sizes? One way is to create feature content with specific examples of individual students with mentors. We captured images of some students with the mentor of their choice - the faculty member or advisor who has had made the biggest difference for them at CNU.

Hi-fi facilities
CNU has been able to raise an astonishing amount of capital funds since the arrival of their president, Paul Trible, and many of their buildings—from the student union to the library to some of the residence halls—are less than 10 years old. With so many of the facilities new, and in great shape, we wanted to make sure prospectives get a sense of exactly how nice everything is on campus.

Nice work, but how will they sustain it?
An additional follow up to the shoot is some training for a student photographer who already owns some of the same equipment as the professional we used—so that they can continue to sustain a high level of quality in their images for the next few years.

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Because Sharing is Caring

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Branding and Belief Systems

Are brands belief systems, like any other, that can interpreted and examined in the way that other belief systems are? Thinktopia argues that brands can be understood in this way, and they make the process of interpretation informative, compelling, and fun.

We’re working with a local client, Roosevelt University, on a website redesign. Like many projects, there are other vendors working with the university and in this case, Thinktopia has been hired to do a brand excavation and overhaul. This process begins with interviews of all audiences the institution touches, from prospective students to faculty members to community leaders.

Last Friday, we were invited to participate in a brand workshop hosted by Roosevelt (with representatives from marketing and web teams, as well as faculty members and leadership) where Thinktopia presented their interview and research findings and allowed participants to outline the seven main ideas inherent in the Roosevelt brand, including the creation story, the creed, rituals associated with the brand, icons, and more.

Using this process, participants were able to build on and enunciate four core messages of the Roosevelt brand platform. Although we can’t expand on specific outcomes too much yet, the branding messages that emerged will be woven into the new Roosevelt website in an emotional and unique way.

If the workshop, or branding in general sounds interesting, I recommend checking out Patrick Hanlon’s book, Primal Branding. The book invites us to understand brands in the same way we examine belief systems such as religions or mythology, and to identify the core identity elements of the brands we love, or the institutions we belong to.

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