Topline Results from CASE/mStoner/Slover Linett Social Media Survey

On Monday, 19 July, Cheryl Slover-Linett, managing partner of our research partner, Slover Linett Strategies, and I presented findings from research we conducted with CASE on how CASE member institutions use and manage social media. Our panel at the CASE Summit included Andrew Gossen from Cornell and Charlie Melichar, who just left Colgate University and will be joining the staff at Vanderbilt University in September.

Scott Jaschik from Inside Higher Ed attended the panel and reported on the discussion on 20 July. Cheryl and I will present a webinar about our findings for Inside Higher Ed in August and we’re working on a white paper that we’ll release in September. Stay tuned for details on both….

The research is the first survey to look at how institutions use and manage social media across the campus and within units. We emailed links to the survey to 18,000 CASE members and received 968 responses. Interestingly, the respondents reflected CASE membership demographically.

The survey represents a partnership between mStoner, Slover Linett Strategies, and CASE. We worked closely with CASE’s social media task force, which is composed of members of the organization’s three comissions (Alumni Relations, Communications and Marketing and Philanthropy).

There’s a lot of data here and some of it is surprising. But it’s a start and provides a benchmark that we’ll revisit next year. As I work with the data and review the open-ended responses, I expect to share a more nuanced perspective.

Slover Linett’s work on the study was led by senior associate Bill Hayward, a veteran institutional researcher who directs the firm’s higher education practice. “This really stemmed from many higher ed professionals asking, ‘What are my peers doing? What are the best practices out there, and how can we improve the way we run our social media?’” Hayward recalls.

“We knew that nearly all organizations use social media to some degree, but this study suggests that it’s still in a growth phase: most organizations expect to expand their social media activities. The tough news is that few plan to hire more staff to do it. So at least in the short run, administrations will be doing more with less.”

Here’s a PDF download of the topline findings from the survey.

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Timing is Everything

Some folks, like my colleague Patrick DiMichele, were mystified by the reaction to the news that Facebook had suddenly revised its privacy controls, making public information that many people thought they shared with only a few people. If you post something online, don’t be surprised if it is shared, Patrick believes.

I, on the other hand, was among those who were really angry. I’ve been online since the 1990s and learned a long time ago to be circumspect with what I shared since it is so easy for anything posted online to be distributed widely. I wasn’t too concerned about personal details in my profile or wall posts being shared with others. But I was angry about the way in which Facebook breached my trust, cavalierly altering an agreement it had made with me about what I could hold back from public view.

Whatever your attitude, I believe this widely publicized incident may make many people more motivated to exercise some control over how info about them is shared. Pew research indicates that already the Facebook generation—those who adopted Facebook in college and are now among its most avid users—are more likely than older adults to “take steps to limit the amount of personal information available about them online” (44% vs. 33% of internet users between ages 30-49) and that 71% of them have changed privacy settings or deleted unwanted comments that others have made on their profiles (47%).

In short, the canard that this generation doesn’t care about privacy isn’t true: they might be more comfortable than older people in sharing information about themselves online, but they’re also more active in managing their reputations.

Takeaways—and taking action

If you maintain a proprietary network of some kind—an alumni community or another kind of social network—this is the time for you to demonstrate that you’re helping your members to protect their privacy or manage their reputations.

First, review the tools in place for allowing members to restrict or share information. Are they clear and easy to use? If not, how can you make them clearer, simpler, more straightforward? Make sure that you have a clear FAQ in place and that people can find it.

It’s also time to review your privacy policy. Make sure it’s up-to-date and outlines what you do—and don’t do—with information that people share with you. And if you don’t have a privacy policy, write one. Now.

Once you’ve reviewed and updated your policy, it’s time to remind users in your community about it. You might want to clarify their rights and responsibilities and remind them to be respectful of what other community members share. And invite them to review what they’ve shared already and to adjust their sharing settings.

At minimum, this approach shows that you’re paying attention to what’s going on in the world of the Internet. And it can reinforce the fact that your own community, unlike Facebook, takes privacy seriously and wants to allow its members to control their own privacy—and reputations. While many people many not pay attention to online privacy issues, some people care about it. Showing everyone that you take it seriously helps to reinforce your cred as a community host and manager.

It’s too early to tell about how this news will affect how people interact with Facebook and what they share (or don’t share) with each other and with you. Only time will tell. But you need to keep up on these developments and pay attention to how they affect your community.

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mStoner changes—and stays the same

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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CASE Awards of Excellence 2010: Report for Category 12, Best in Social Media

This year, CASE created a new category, Best in Social Media, in its Awards of Excellence Program. I led the judging for social media, which was held in conjunction with the judging for websites at George School in Newtown, PA, in early April. [Here’s a blog post containing results, comments, and a downloadable version of the Judges’ Report for Category 11, Websites.]

Eight of us judged the social media category. Judges represented American colleges, schools, and universities, both public and private. The panel included people with experience in design, web strategy, web content development, admissions, student recruitment, social media, web technology, and marketing. Some members of the panel have considerable exposure on social media, including significant number of Twitter followers.

According to CASE,

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 2009 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.

So there may be awards for social media coming from entries in these other categories: stay tuned.

Results

Here are the number of entries in each subcategory and the awards given:

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

12b. Best Uses of Social Media in Fundraising: 5 entries, one award
Silver: Children’s Hospital Trust Boston Social Media Portfolio: Facebook (English); Facebook (Spanish)]; YouTube (English); YouTube (Spanish); Twitter: @helpkids

12c. Best Uses of Social Media in Student Recruitment and Marketing: 19 entries, 2 awards
Silver: Northfield Mount Hermon School NMHBook
Bronze: Brock University Both Sides of the Brain [url=http://apps.facebook.com/
bothsidesofthebrain]Facebook Application[/url]

12d. Other Uses of Social Media: 25 entries, 3 awards
Gold: College of William and Mary Mascot Search
Gold: Oregon State University, Powered by Orange: Facebook page; Twitter: @poweredbyorange; YouTube; LinkedIn; Flickr.
Bronze: Tufts University, The Beelzebubs on NBC’s The Sing Off: news package and chat.

Comments and Trends

Social media is new enough that there aren’t a whole lot of precedents for great uses of social media. But there are some. Last year, for example, several initiatives that used social media won in various categories, including Flight of the Flyers from Nazareth College and Emory University’s Blue Pig campaign, both of which won awards. [I wrote blog posts about Flight of the Flyers and the Blue Pig.]

So before we began viewing the entries, we agreed that just having a Facebook page or a Twitter account—or even both of them along with a LinkedIn presence—wasn’t enough for an entry to qualify for an award. We wanted to see strategic goals set—and accomplished through the use of social media along with, perhaps, other channels. We wanted to see some evidence of engagement on the part of a target audience—blog comments, retweets, wall posts. And we wanted to see something that was new or different, not something that every other college or university was doing.

Honestly, we didn’t know what to expect and in general, we were relatively disappointed in the submissions. We did see a number of institutions that thought having a Facebook page or a Twitter presence was significant. It isn’t, not today.

From the award-winners, we gain an emerging sense that “best practices” in social media do involve multiple channels. Sometimes these are multiple social media or online channels. Northfield Mount Hermon’s NMHBook mashup is an example of this approach: it aggregates social media feeds into the school’s website. Powered By Orange, OSU’s impressive awareness campaign, mashes up social media with many other channels, including banners, signage, and face-to-face events. [Powered By Orange is an awesome campaign; here’s a blog post I wrote about it last year.] The College of William & Mary used multiple online channels in its search for a new mascot and did it brilliantly.

These are great examples of the kinds of social media-focused programs that institutions should emulate.

In judging social media, as in judging websites, written submissions are essential. Comments in the submissions help us to put what we’re seeing on-screen in context. A well-articulated strategy, supported by results, helps us to understand that social media can achieve institutional objectives. We’re keenly aware that these award winners will serve as models for other institutions and can help to convince reluctant administrators that social media is a safe channel to advance institutional goals. In this context, results are essential.

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

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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.

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Zuck You, Facebook ....

Maybe you’ve read that Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, believes that privacy is so, like, over. And since he believes that none of us should care about privacy any more, he and his colleagues are doing everything that they can to foist their envisioned reality onto Facebook’s millions of users. Facebook has continued to push the envelope on privacy, changing its approach multiple times, each time creating a brouhaha.

This time it’s serious.

I’m talking about the uproar caused by Open Graph. By adding a snippet of code to your website, you can allow Facebook users to “Like” it, revealing their preference to their entire social network. It’s instant personalization that allows essentially any web page with the embedded code to become a Facebook page. Zuckerberg describes it as connecting people to things.

This is mighty powerful stuff. Alex Iskold has a terrific piece on the implications of Open Graph, which you should read.

Instant personalization could be great for marketers. To understand how cool it is, read Andrew Gossen’s thoughts about the implications of Open Graph for alumni relations on AlumniFutures. It’s a must-read, in that he clearly outlines the benefits for a university in Facebook’s new tools.

On the other hand, brave new worlds seldom emerge without a few problems here and there. Michael Fienen pointed out that this might not be so great for marketers after all.

And there are still more problems. One of them is security. Last week, MacWorld pointed out that even if you opted out of instant personalization on Facebook, sites could install unwanted apps in your profile. Yesterday, TechCrunch reported security issues with Facebook’s Open Graph and Yelp.

Though Facebook moved quickly to address these problems, there will be more to come.

And, more significantly, there’s a growing backlash against what many view as an assault against privacy by Facebook. At the very least, Facebook has changed the way its users can protect information and decide who they want to share it with; Facebook used to allow users to restrict views of their private info, but these controls have largely been eliminated—and what remains are vastly more complicated—in the push toward instant personalization.

With this move, Facebook appears to have lost a huge amount of credibility, not to mention trust, within the tech community and among early adopters. Wired.com called for “an open alternative to Facebook. And Jason Calacanis wrote a blistering blog post about how Facebook has overplayed its hand.

Read the comments to Facebook executive Elliot Schrage’s interview with the New York Times to get a sense of how angry people are, if you haven’t been following the controversy. And it’s not just early adopters or techies: even regular people are concerned: ReadWriteWeb noted that “How Do I Delete My Facebook Account” was a fast-growing query on Google.

Yesterday, Facebook held an all-hands meeting to discuss the issue. Many people, including me, were curious about what might happen. But strangely enough, though Facebook wants everyone else to be transparent, there’s no news from the meeting.

The end of privacy, or a new beginning?

I can understand how Facebook benefits from Open Graph, since it essentially turns the web—including my sites and yours—into one huge extension of Facebook. If you implement the Open Graph code. I can see how marketers benefit from having access to Facebook’s millions of members and their networks. I can even imagine how users could benefit.

But count me among those who resent how Facebook has forced users to accept its vision of a Facebooked web without allowing individuals to make the choice about whether this is something we want to opt into. The only apparent recourse is to leave Facebook or to maintain a minimal profile. Or to use an app like The Green Safe to lock up your information and make sure that you can control how and what is shared.

No lectures, please: Facebook has the right to whatever it wants to do with the information formerly considered to be “private.” And I don’t need any reminders from those who say “It’s the Internet & anything you put out there isn’t private any more.” I’ve been online for a long time; stuff I posted in the 1990s is still findable.

This isn’t just some old-fogey notion of privacy. Sam Jackson posted his thoughts about his expectations of privacy. Privacy isn’t a simple concept.

In fact, I find danah boyd’s (@zephoria) perspective on this particularly illuminating. Privacy isn’t dead—the value of being public has changed:

Privacy is about having control of a situation. It’s about controlling what information flows where and adjusting measures of trust when things flow in unexpected ways. It’s about creating certainty so that we can act appropriately. People still care about privacy because they care about control. Sure, many teens repeatedly tell me “public by default, private when necessary” but this doesn’t suggest that privacy is declining; it suggests that publicity has value and, more importantly, that folks are very conscious about when something is private and want it to remain so. When the default is private, you have to think about making something public. When the default is public, you become very aware of privacy. And thus, I would suspect, people are more conscious of privacy now than ever. Because not everyone wants to share everything to everyone else all the time.

This week, the New York Times reported on Diaspora, a new social network that, unlike Facebook, will provide privacy controls for users. The self-described nerds behind this project are in their early 20s.

And if you’re interested in deleting your Facebook account, here’s how. Facebook’s own instructions are tedious and cumbersome. Wonder why?

Update: In this post, Andrew Careaga offers links to posts that I didn’t mention or didn’t see when I wrote this. And I hadn’t seen his post before mine went live, or I would have linked to it!

Update: There’s so much going on that I could update this every 15 minutes and still not be up to date. But danah boy’ds post on Facebook and Radical Transparency is a must-read. And confirms that people just don’t understand how widely their information can be shared.

Update; Patrick DiMichele posted some thoughtful remarks about privacy on Facebook.

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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.

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CASE Honors Carol Cheney with Ashmore Award

I learned this week that CASE selected Carol Cheney, president of Cheney & Co., as the 2010 recipient of the Frank L. Ashmore Award for Service to CASE and the Advancement Profession. I’m delighted to hear that Carol will receive this award and want to extend my congratulations.

Carol and I have known each other for about 15 years—we first met when we were co-teaching at a CASE Summer Institute—and in that time, I’ve come to respect her as a colleague and value her as a friend. Moreover, I’ve learned a lot about how much time she’s invested in being a teacher, conference presenter, mentor, and volunteer (and not just for CASE). She’s given a lot to the advancement profession and it’s great to see her contributions honored.

I wrote a letter supporting Carol’s nomination for this award, as did many others, apparently. Here’s some of what I said that I think speaks to why this award is particularly well deserved:

Carol has done so much as a CASE volunteer, I hardly know where to begin.

Rather than enumerating Carol’s many activities, I’d prefer to note that in my mind she’s distinguished herself because so many of her volunteer activities for CASE have focused on a significant segment of CASE’s membership—advancement professionals at independent schools. She’s helped many, many individuals to develop their professional capabilities and knowledge of the advancement profession through dozens of conference presentations, communications and publications reviews, participation as a Summer Institute Faculty member, and many, many long-term personal relationships. I continue to be amazed at how many people credit Carol with helping them in significant ways at critical junctures in their professional development.

Carol will receive her award at this summer’s Summit for Advancement Leaders in New York.

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Perspectives on mStoner and Our Business

[Note: this is the first of three posts sharing some perspective on mStoner’s business. Read about our experience in 2009 and what we’re looking forward to in 2010.]

Since we launched this blog in 2003, we’ve focused on sharing our perspectives on trends as they affect our industry, our practice, and our clients. We’ve tried to be transparent about some of the insights we’ve gained from our work on many different kinds of projects for a wide range of institutions.

But we’ve shied away from talking about the business side of mStoner, mostly because I don’t think anybody cares that much aside from our team and our families. Except maybe prospective clients who want to know that mStoner is a well-managed business that will deliver on its promises.

That kind of thinking was understandable in 2003 or 2005 or even 2008. But today is different. We live in difficult economic times. I believe it’s important to make a clear statement about where we are as a company in these times when there’s no certainty that even well-known institutions and companies will survive.

I’m reflecting on this because we heard some shocking news about one of our competitors. As a result, I wanted to share some perspectives on 2009 and how mStoner responded to the downturn. Then, I want to focus on 2010. And, finally, bid farewell to BigBad, one of the companies that didn’t make it.

I’m posting this in three parts to avoid a really huge post: this introduction, a report on how mStoner fared in 2009, and a brief look ahead at 2010.

If you want the short version, though, here it is:

After some worrisome months in 2009, mStoner emerged stronger than ever at year-end. We look forward to launching some great websites in 2010—and to launching some new products and services of our own. We remain committed to realizing our vision of being the smartest and most strategic integrated marketing, branding, and technology firm serving education. Period.

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Buh bye to 2009

[Note: this is the second of three posts sharing some perspective on mStoner’s business. Read the introduction to this series and what learn what we’re looking forward to in 2010.]

From a business perspective, I’m not sorry to see 2009 end. Ultimately, mStoner was fortunate: we didn’t suffer as much as other companies in our peer set. But that’s largely because we had a wake-up call in 2008, when we realized that we needed to tighten up our business practices and the way we managed projects. Or else.

So we entered 2009 much leaner and more disciplined. We also had a backlog of projects from 2008. It was a good thing, too: by March 2009, we looked ahead and worried about what we’d face for the rest of the year.

It will come as no surprise to you that schools, colleges, and universities faced major challenges in 2009. More than ever before, our clients were expected to do more with less. We’ve always been willing to tailor our services to a client’s needs, but several projects in 2009 required a new level of flexibility, with clients encouraging us to explore how to balance our own resources with theirs. We’ve always considered our clients to be our partners, but some of these collaborations have taken partnership to new levels in order to help make the most of available budgets.

By year’s end, the RFP flow picked up and some of our clients signed off on additional projects. We had managed to eke out a tiny profit. Mind you, no one on our team got a bonus. But, when many companies had to reduce size considerably or fold, we were fortunate to have wonderful clients who completed their projects with us and, in many cases, engaged us for additional work. To all of you: thank you. We’re very grateful!

Thriving creative and new projects

But 2009 wasn’t all gloom and doom. mStoner had an incredible year from a creative standpoint. The George School website won a Grand Gold in the national CASE Awards of Excellence competition, and William & Mary’s website) won EduStyle Awards for Best Website Redesign and Best Use of Photography.

We launched a number of great sites last year, and several of them exemplify how our work is taking significant new directions:

Progressive branding: In the age of authenticity, branding is a two-way street shaped by the dialogue between an institution and its constituencies. Storytelling and social media are the new pillars of branding because they allow real people and their stories to create and reinforce a brand’s meaning. In particular, four of our clients’ sites exemplify this approach: Boston College School of Social Work, Fashion Institute of Technology, College of Charleston, and the Northfield Mount Hermon School.

Social media: Most of our projects now incorporate social media in significant ways. For example, Northfield Mount Hermon’s website integrates social media feeds so that visitors can move back and forth between NMHSchool.org and various social media sites. We spoke and wrote about social media: our blog last year includes a half-dozen case studies relating to campaigns that integrate social media with other channels. (I presented on this topic at the CASE Summit, CASE VII, and CASE V.) Also, a whole series of posts focused on how independent schools are using (and excelling at) social media for an article published in CASE Currents. Doug Gapinski, one of our creative directors, developed a two-day workshop on social media that he presented at Kenyon College.

Collaboration: We developed a new model for an immersive, collaborative web strategy with Bethel University. Two of our client partners there, Michael Vedders and Mark Erickson, spent a couple of days in our Chicago office to work out information architecture, wireframes, sitemaps, and other significant aspects of Bethel’s new site, which will launch this year. [Read more about that process.]

Public Square: In another example of collaboration, we helped researchers at the Pennsylvania State University conceive, name, design, and build an interactive collection of research projects currently underway across campus. We named it “Public Square” to make it as clear as possible to the public that the work showcased is ongoing and participatory. The site’s tagline is “Public Square provides a place for the public to learn about and get involved in University projects that aim to make the community-and the world-a better place.” The site will launch in 2010.

Community Colleges: Institutions offering customized, flexible two- and four-year programs are experiencing rapid growth. Last year, we worked with several community colleges. We launched sites and provided training for Oakton Community College and many of the colleges in the Kentucky Community and Technical College System. And we worked with Nevada State College, a nimble four-year institution located in a suburb of Las Vegas.

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