SCVNGR Treks Augment Admission Events & Tours

Soon, prospective students staring at their mobile phones on your campus may not be texting their BFFs, but participating in a game that’s designed to introduce them to the college—and increase their interest in applying to and attending your institution.

Early adopters in admission offices across the country are experimenting with using SCVNGR, a mobile gaming platform, for a variety of admissions-related purposes. Their experience suggest that teens—and their parents—can enjoy a good challenge while they’re visiting campus and participating in other activities.

SCVNGR is used by more than 400 colleges and universities around the country—and museums like the Smithsonian, art galleries, and businesses like Dunkin’ Donuts. Participants in a SCVNGR trek participate in challenges (“Take a picture of the library clock and upload the image”), earning points. And SCVNGR can be played on any mobile device via text message or by using a free iPhone or Android app.

A “trek” consists of a number of linked challenges. Participants can play casually by doing a couple of challenges. Or they can play more seriously, competing with each other to accumulate points, often in order to win prizes.

Colleges and universities develop SCVNGR treks for many purposes, including alumni engagement. But, given the teen penchant for video games, it’s unsurprising that admissions offices are looking closely at it. Here are some ways in which admission offices are using SCVNGR.

Complementing In-Person Events
Both Clarkson University and Penn State University created SCVNGR treks to give attendees at admission events something to do that’s less structured than the typical agenda.

“At Clarkson our goal was to teach participants things that they wouldn’t hear on a campus tour or learn throughout the rest of the day.” said Jessica McPherson, a staff member in Marketing & External Relations, “We had approximately 600 students and their families on campus for a jam-packed day of events. Knowing the schedule, we decided that if we were going to have a SCVNGR trek on such a busy day, it would have to coincide with event locations and stay quite simple.” The trek had five challenges in three different buildings.”

At Clarkson, at least 60 people participated, McPherson said. “We thought that was great! We even had parents playing. We were surprised that so many participants played via text message instead of with the app.” She added, “People loved the prizes and the idea that they learned something that others might not know.”

[Learn more about SCVNGR Treks at Clarkson and see SCVNGR’s case study about the Clarkson trek.]

Penn State developed a series of treks to supplement its summer visit event. Jenna Spinelle, an admission counselor, explained, “Penn State Undergraduate Admissions used SCVNGR for Spend a Summer Day. We bring almost 10,000 students and families to our University Park campus over six days in July and August to learn more about what Penn State has to offer. Our trek included challenges at some of our landmark locations around campus (the Nittany Lion Shrine, University Creamery) and other areas that we wanted to highlight (campus computer store, information fair with student organizations, etc.). Several hundred people participated over the course of six days, representing about 10 percent of total attendees.”

[Spinelle wrote about the university’s experience in “Spending a Summer Day with SCVNGR.”]

Augmenting (or Replacing) In-Person Tours
At Dartmouth College, SCVNGR treks are being used to augment in-person campus tours. The admissions office at Dartmouth created seven SCVNGR treks highlighting different aspects of campus life and learning so that visitors have something to do when campus tours aren’t operating.

In a post on the Wired Campus blog, Josh Keller observed that Dartmouth tours simply can’t accommodate the more than 20,000 visitors to campus every year. Using SCVNGR, Dartmouth can develop treks around special-interests like sustainability in addition to highlighting campus landmarks like the library.

John Beck Jr., senior assistant director of admissions, at Dartmouth noted, “Many low-income teens are more likely to access the internet over their phone than high-income teens, so we’re not shutting out a part of our population by socioeconomic means.”

Other institutions, like the University of California Santa Barbara, offer links to SCVNGR right from their Campus Tours website.

Keys to Success: Swag, Marketing & Mobile Access
Both McPherson and Spinelle commented on the importance of awarding prizes for playing SCVNGR. Clarkson erected a booth in the Student Center to distribute prizes to players, handing out a variety of Clarkson items, such as Frisbees, coffee mugs, bumper stickers, and pen sets. Penn State gave a small prize to anyone who stopped by their social media table and showed that they had completed at least one challenge. Each day, they picked one person from those who had competed to receive a gift bag of Penn State and SCVNGR t-shirts, water bottles, sunglasses, and other swag.

Advance publicity and on-site help with using SCVNGR will boost participation rates. Penn State started promoting its trek a few weeks before the actual visit day, using Facebook, Twitter and in an e-mail reminder that went to students who’d registered. Both Penn State and Clarkson produced small flyers explaining the trek and how to participate.

But on-site, in-person promotion, can help, too. McPherson notes, “We missed an opportunity to educate potential participants on SCVNGR. The accepted students had between one and two hours of downtime depending on when they arrived and registered on campus. Having a table set up next to the registration table would have been ideal to fill that void in activities and to teach students/families about SCVNGR.”

Both Penn State and Clarkson plan on expanding their use of SCVNGR next year. For those who are thinking about initiating a SCVNGR trek, McPherson advises, “Have some goals in mind, both for the outcome of the trek (were people glad they played?) and for the trek itself (what should a participant get out of playing?). Starting out, qualitative goals are equally as important as quantitative. We tried to get a lot of feedback so that we can continue to improve our treks and challenges.”

She also noted that one particular issue her rural campus faces: not all mobile phones work in Potsdam, NY. “We did not anticipate that we would have a lot of students with T-Mobile as their wireless provider and that they would not be able to use their phones at all.” Some resourceful Clarkson students saved the day for T-Mobile users who wanted to play SCVNGR, writing the challenges down and posting the answers for them. “The people they helped were especially grateful and we learned a valuable lesson. Next time we will print out a few challenge sheets in case this happens again.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Labels and the .edu website

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Welcome (and Farewell)

If you’re sitting there at your desk thinking that it would be really cool to be a consultant—like, say, me or one of my mStoner colleagues—I suggest respectfully that you take a moment to think about what it takes for us to do our job well. It’s a lot harder than most people think.

Most of the people on our team have worked at a college or university at some point in their careers, but being a great consultant is about more than being smart and having insights into institutional life and culture. That’s essential, of course (and the more the better).

One needs experience and a broad perspective on the web, marketing, analytics, social media, technology, and the other challenges and issues we deal with every work day (and, let’s be honest, nights and weekends, too). Consultants need to be able to pay attention to detail—and to the big picture. And have a certain level of maturity: we take pride in the fact that none of our team members is a prima donna. We understand that our work isn’t about us, it’s about solving problems for our clients and delivering solutions that help institutions deal with seemingly intractable situations. So many times we have to check our egos, really listen to people, and revise recommendations we’ve made that aren’t exactly right. And I haven’t even mentioned the marketing/sales and everything else we have to do to keep mStoner working.

In short: it’s very hard to find someone who has the right skill set and fit for our small, tightly knit team.

This was all running through my mind when I got one of those calls that everyone hates to get. A valued and important team member telling me he’s moved on. That was Patrick DiMichele informing me he was leaving after six and a half years. My first reaction was, ” Oh [many words redacted], not Patrick! He’s going to be really hard to replace.” My second thought was, “I wonder if Susan Evans would be interested in joining mStoner?”

I’ll make a long story short: she said YES!

So on 12 September, Susan will join us as senior strategist. That means that she’ll lead one of our consulting teams, developing the overall strategy and working with her colleagues to implement it. [Here’s her own announcement].

I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to announce this news. We’ve known Susan (and she’s known us) for years through our work at William & Mary, where she’s led teams that have done some awesome work (and garnered a slew of awards in the process). In her 22 years at William & Mary, she’s worked in IT and communications and led major campus-wide initiatives with many moving parts and multiple political agendas, demonstrating her ability to plan and to build consensus time and again.

We all know Susan well enough to know that she’ll fit right in. Personally, I’m eager for her to join us because I believe she’ll be able to offer insights that will help us do our work even better than we do it now.

I don’t want to close without mad props to Patrick DiMichele. Patrick joined mStoner as a designer and left six and a half years later as senior strategist. The dedication and insights he brought to his projects have made a big difference to many of our clients. I’m glad to see Patrick find new challenges (though I’ll really miss working with him!).

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Mallory Wood Joins mStoner’s Team

I’m very fortunate to be working with a great team at mStoner: I have smart, creative, engaging and talented colleagues.

These adjectives also describe our newest team member, Mallory Wood, who will join us in August as marketing manager. She’ll be based in our Woodstock, VT, office, and will be responsible for our marketing and business development activities.

Mallory comes to mStoner from Saint Michael’s College in Colchester, VT, where she spent two years as an admission counselor before moving to the Office of Marketing and Communications as an assistant director of marketing and the college’s social media strategist. In this role, Mallory developed and executed a social media strategy for St. Mike’s; provided training for social media users on campus; created and managed content for various social networks; and produced web video. She also managed the social media efforts for the Office of Admission, working student online ambassadors to engage future students on Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and other social channels.

But that’s not where I met Mallory. I got to know her first as @MalloryWood and began following her blog, where she shares insights into marketing, social media, and life.

She’s also known on the conference circuit, having presented at the HighEd Web National Conference, Penn State Web Conference, NEACAC Annual Conference, .eduGuru Online Summit, SUNYCUAD, and more. Mallory has also been a guest and a guest-host on Higher Ed Live, the weekly web show created by Seth Odell focused on the emerging role of social media and digital media marketing.

Because I was impressed by what I read—and learned subsequently—about Mallory, I was thrilled when she expressed interest in working with us and when she accepted our offer. My colleagues who have met Mallory are as excited as I am about working with her.

Before I close, I want to give a shout-out to Katie Jennings, who served as mStoner’s director of business development until a week ago. For the past several years, Katie has ridden herd over her creative and unruly colleagues to develop powerful and compelling proposals and manage our marketing. Katie assumed project management responsibilities for Beth Lee, who at this moment is awaiting the birth of her second son. Beth will return to mStoner part-time after her maternity leave.

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Email & Social Channels Help to Muster Support for Community College Rebuilding Project

We all know about how reluctant voters are to support infrastructure projects at a time of burgeoning deficits, etc. Right?

In November, 2010, Voters in Madison, WI, proved that they will indeed support building projects. Not only did they vote for a necessary improvements to Madison College, a significant community resource. But they responded to a broad-based campaign designed to educate voters about the need for these improvements conducted via multiple channels, but spurred primarily by email and social channels. The college created an extensive, multi-channel campaign designed to generate public support for the rebuilding project, an effort that passed with 60 percent of the vote.

Ellen Foley, executive assistant to the president and executive director of the communications and community development teams at the college, wrote a smart piece in the Chronicle about how the college did it.

You might guess from the title (“E-Mail Marketing Campaign Gets By With a Little Help From Some ‘Friends’”) that the effort was all about email and Facebook.

You’d be wrong, though. My take-away from her article is that despite the fact that the college used Facebook extensively, it was an add-on to the other things that they did to help build awareness. I don’t mean to diminish the role of Facebook, which was clearly important, especially in the last weeks of their awareness-building effort. But it seems to be the synergy, not just the social media, that ultimately paid off for the college.

Interesting, too, to read about how faculty and staff at this state-supported institution could use social media to “educate” during work hours and only “advocate” during free time, breaks, and before or after work.

One idea worth noting is the Future of Madison forum (there’s a screen capture at the top of this post). Foley explains how it worked,

Finally, late in the campaign, we launched a digital “idea forum” called FutureofMadison.org that awarded scholarships for big community ideas. This crowdsourcing tactic promised entrants that all suggestions for our community’s future would be placed in a time capsule inside the foundation of the first building the referendum dollars would finance. Seven winners were chosen, and while we received more than 350 ideas, we intend to expand this good idea and repeat it by partnering with our local K-12 school students, our future customers.

Very smart approach. This is worth reading. Twice!

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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.

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mStoner Seeks Awesome Marketing Manager

Are you a skilled writer? Do you blog or tweet? Do you have an existing network in .edu? Or, have you done marketing for a professional services firm? Are you just generally plugged in and awesome?

Maybe you’re the person we are looking for to serve as our new marketing manager and power our marketing efforts to even greater levels. Offcially, here are some of your duties:

[you will be] ... responsible for developing and maintaining strategies to market mStoner and develop qualified leads; managing mStoner’s marketing and visibility activities; producing marketing materials; and coordinating responses to RFPs. S/he is responsible for creating and managing appropriate and effective outreach to professional organizations, developing ways in which mStoner staff can share their expertise with others, and originating and organizing the development of marketing vehicles such as email newsletters, white papers, reports, conferences, etc.

Here’s a copy of the job description. If you’re interested, please contact me: Michael.Stoner (at) mStoner.com; let us know how awesome you are. And based on what you can learn about us on our blog, Twitter, and elsewhere, tell us three ways that you’d change up our marketing to make it more effective….

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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.

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mStoner’s Blog Turns 8

While June 13th is otherwise not very remarkable for me, it is the day we launched this blog. Today marks its eighth birthday.

Way back in 2003, it was post dot.com but pre Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter. Listservs were the social media of choice. There weren’t many other blogs focusing on education, education marketing, online marketing, the web in education.

Much has changed since then. But even in the age of Facebook, I don’t believe for a second that blogs are irrelevant. In fact, if you look at the winners of the CASE Circle of Excellence Awards for Social Media this year, you’ll see that 2011 is the year of the blog.

Perhaps that means that we are learning how important and strategic blogs can be for our institutional communications. This, five years after Debbie Weil (in The Corporate Blogging Book) encouraged bloggers in bsinesses and organizations, observing that: “We’re entering age of more open, honest, and authentic corporate communications.”

Indeed. How much more important these qualities are in 2011.

Since we launched, I’ve written 303 blog entries; my mStoner colleagues have written several hundred more. As I look over our blog, I believe that you can a pretty good sense of who we are and what we think about by scanning it.

And we’ve learned a few things about blogging in our eight years of doing it:

1. Blogging takes focus and dedication. Even when multiple people contribute to a blog, it’s very hard to post regularly. Especially when our first priority is great client service.


2. I’d rather we write smart posts, so I’ll trade nuance for frequency any day. And better fewer, smarter posts, than a lot of formulaic posts with titles like “11 thats about this” and “4 thises about that.”


3. I write long blog posts: what can I say? People who read my blog entries would be shocked to know that I can communicate in 140 characters or fewer. If you don’t believe I can do it, follow me on Twitter.


4. Anything we post about social media gets a lot of traffic.

One of our most popular posts is the one that Doug Gapinski wrote about pwireframing, which was featured on Smashing Mag. Doug’s post about pwireframing for mobile looks like it will also have enduring value.

My personal favorites are mStoner’s first law of branding, which was inspired by Barry Commoner’s first law of ecology and the post I wrote about Powered By Orange, which continues to draw a lot of traffic. [If you Google “Powered by Orange,” our post shows up as one of the top results.] I’m also partial to ‘Rethinking ‘Visitors’: Just Call Them ‘Friends’.” In it, I revisited an earlier post in which I suggested thinking of website “users” as “visitors” because it’s more welcoming and less mechanistic. But in an era defined by social media, “friends” is more appropriate.

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Organizing Social Media in .Edu

(Image from Jeremiah Owyang, “Social Business Forecast:
2011 The Year of Integration”]

Updated 23 May 2011

Organizing social media in .edu sounds like an oxymoron if there ever was one.

Consider that many institutions have some degree of difficulty managing marketing and brand activities—and the concept of integrated marketing (and acknowledgement of its importance) has been with us since the 1990s! Social media is much newer. And some leaders doubt its value—and perhaps don’t see a reason to manage it.

And then, even a small college is a complex, distributed organization that values openness. Participation in social media is baked into the culture on many campuses, with faculty, staff, and students participating in social media via blogs, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and many other tools. This cacophony of voices shares many disparate views, using social media for personal and professional purposes, mixing it up, incorporating it in learning and teaching activities, and conducting research via social media.

Still, social media isn’t going to go away. And it can be a powerful tool for communicating with and engaging audiences that matter to the institution as a whole: prospective students, alumni, parents, various members of external publics, and others. It’s more important than ever that institutions find ways to manage some of this activity.

Successful Institutions Manage Social Media

In the 2010 Survey of Social Media in Advancement, we learned that institutions that considered themselves to be successful in social media generally spent more time managing their social media presence: they were more likely to plan, measure, to have institutional buy-in and support, and to have policies. Our findings this year appear to be similar.

So one major area of focus for our 2011 white paper on social media in advancement will be exploring how institutions organize their social media activities.

To be perfectly clear: we’ll focus on social media for marketing, advancement, recruiting and other external relations purposes. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t good reasons to manage social media more broadly. Indeed social media can play an important role in connecting with internal audiences and serve many important purposes in student engagement, teaching, learning, and research. In an email to me, Mark Greenfield noted:

“I like to think of social media in three ways. First is the external audience…. Second is the internal audience. Based on conversations I had at the recent jboye conference, I am very interested in how a “social intranet” might work on a college campus. And last but not least is how social media impacts the classroom. In terms of management, it is important to leverage social media expertise on campus across all three areas.”

To guide my thinking about this, I’ve relied on work done by the inestimable analyst, Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang). A partner in the Altimeter Group (with Charlene Li, the author of Open Leadership), Jeremiah conducts regular research with social media strategists and business leaders to learn about how industries manage social media, what they spend on it, and how they organize it internally—among many other topics.

Through interviews with 140 top corporate social strategists, Jeremiah identified five different models for managing social media. Three in particular apply in education: the distributed (organic) model, the centralized model, and the coordinated model.

It turns out that I’m not the first person in education to make the connection between Jeremiah Owyang’s models and education.

Mike Petroff, who’s the web manager for enrollment at Emerson College, Boston, posted “Social Media Strategy and Business Organizational Structure” on .Eduguru on 31 January 2011(!). In it, Mike explored the pros and cons of the distributed, centralized and coordinated models, which I’ll cover in more depth below.

1. Distributed (Organic)

This model of social media management is typical of organizations where social media activity develops in many areas at once. Owyang uses Sun as an example of a company where blogging is supported and encouraged by culture. And empowered staff members throughout the organization would find other types of social media appealing, too, and be free to explore them. In this kind of organization, there isn’t much “management” of social media—it simply happens, bubbling up from everywhere. People often don’t know what others are doing, or sharing, in their preferred SM channel.

In .edu, of course, innovations begin at the edges and may flourish there long before they are taken up by the institution as a whole. This is the way college websites developed: departments, schools or other entities launched their own site and after a while, someone began to connect them into an institutional website.

The same thing happened with social media on most campuses: individuals or offices began to blog, then launched Facebook pages or groups, or began tweeting. There was no thought to coordinating or asking from input from anyone with overall institutional responsibilities for marketing or communications.

And many institutions continue to function this way today. Some are culturally attuned to grass roots empowerment, a model that has worked well for them. For example at Harvard, people speak of “every tub on its own bottom,” indicating that units like the College, the Law School, and the Business School are solely responsible for their activities; there’s little or no coordination of any activities across units.

Other institutions haven’t been able to come to terms with the importance of social media and therefore don’t see a need to manage it, or have difficulty managing anything across units.

2. Centralized

In contrast to the organic model, the centralized model reflects organizations where social media is controlled by a central office, often a marketing department. This is how Ford organizes social media—and Ford is often cited as an example of a corporation that “gets” social media and has used it effectively in crisis communications and marketing.

The major advantage of this model is that by adopting it, an institution can achieve an incredible amount of consistency in tone and voice across social media. So a college or university that’s focused on controlling its image will be eager to implement this model.

But you can see the problems inherent in adopting this model in education.

First, there aren’t many institutions where it would work. Too many people would question the control that the central team would have over social media and many of them would simply continue to do exactly what they’re already doing. It would be very difficult to police or shut down rogue social media accounts—the result would be too much ill will.

A major drawback with this model is that it won’t scale: large institutions like Ohio State or the University of Michigan will never be able to staff a centralized office to manage social media and even colleges would find it difficult.

Finally, while the centralized model may seem appealing to some, it could easily result in social media that appears way too controlled and inauthentic: too much like advertising or broadcasting rather than engagement.

3. Coordinated

In an organization that has adopted this model, one office or unit develops policies or guidelines and other procedures and is responsible for communicating them to other schools, colleges, departments, and other units. The central unit may continue to play a role as a coach, helping to establish and communicate best practices, etc.

You can see the appeal of this model immediately. Because various units control their own social media, there’s likely to be less push-back against guidelines. But there can be quality control over messages, usage, frequency, and tone. And the coordinated model is the only one that is likely to provide any ability to scale—it can work equally well at a small college or a large university with professional schools, research units, and other quasi-independent entities.

With this model, an institution has a real opportunity to excel in its social media activities. Owyang points out that this model allows an organization to develop a “Social Media Center of Excellence” that can have a major impact on how effectively units use social media. This is ”...a centralized program that provides resources, training, and strategy to a variety of business units that are deploying social media in order to reduce costs, increase efficiency, and provide standardization.”

The coordinated model is similar to the way branding/marketing initiatives function on many campuses.

Other Models

Owyang identified two other models that are less applicable to .edu than those identified above.

He calls one of them the “Multiple Hub and Spoke, or “Dandelion.” It’s similar to the coordinated model, but exists in large, primarily multi-national organizations with many units and brands. He notes that it requires a high level of coordination and communication—one that I don’t believe that .edu could never achieve.

However, Mark Greenfield noted, “The Dandelion Model might be appropriate in extremely large universities, especially when individual schools within the university are in different geographical locations.”

Finally, there’s the “Holistic or Honeycomb” model. In organizations like Zappos, where each employee is empowered and can act independently, social media becomes a key channel for customer service. For this model to work, it requires a focused company with trained staff that share a common purpose. Executives not only have to buy in, but they need to let go of control and messaging, trusting that staff members will do the right thing.

Finally, as Mike Petroff, observed in “Social Media Strategy and Business Organizational Structure” on .Eduguru:

When developing a social media strategy, it is important to recognize the best fit with your current business organizational structure. In the distributed approach, a social media strategy mirrors the immediacy and ungoverned nature of social media itself. A social media strategy in a centralized structure mirrors the hierarchical and controlled business structure of the institution. The coordinated social media strategy favors culture and community within the institution.

What’s Your Model?

What model does your institution use? How’s it working? What are its advantages and drawbacks? We want to know: we’ll expand this blog post into a section in our 2011 white paper on social media and advancement and are seeing insights from institutions that have a story to share. Please leave a comment below or email me: Michael.Stoner (at) mStoner.com.

Note: I’m extremely grateful to Jeremiah Owyang for the research he’s done on this topic – and for sharing it so generously with everyone. I’m also grateful to Mark Greenfield for his comments on this post and for Mike Petroff to alerting me to his post on .Eduguru, which I hadn’t seen when I published my original post on this topic.

Update, 23 May 2011

It turns out that I’m not the first person in education to make the connection between Jeremiah Owyang’s models and education.

Mike Petroff, who’s the web manager for enrollment at Emerson College, Boston, posted “Social Media Strategy and Business Organizational Structure” on .Eduguru on 31 January 2011(!). Mike explored the pros and cons of the distributed, centralized and coordinated models. And in summing up, he made an important point:

When developing a social media strategy, it is important to recognize the best fit with your current business organizational structure. In the distributed approach, a social media strategy mirrors the immediacy and ungoverned nature of social media itself. A social media strategy in a centralized structure mirrors the hierarchical and controlled business structure of the institution. The coordinated social media strategy favors culture and community within the institution.

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