Why is everyone so upset about Facebook?

There’s been a lot of thoughtful stuff written and said over the last few weeks as Facebook’s privacy policy has continued to erode (including a post by Michael Stoner written on this blog with some great insights about the big-picture implications about Facebook’s new announcements). You can also get a great set of insights here, here and here. But I’m more interested in why any of us are shocked and/or surprised by what Facebook is doing.

First a bit of background: I’m a privacy advocate, a member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and an optimist. So it’s not like I don’t care about the changes in FB’s policy, how personal information is handled online or have a gloomy outlook on everyday life. Just the opposite actually.

But as far as I understand them, these are the facts:

> Facebook is run by a guy with a history of unethical behavior
> We freely chose to join Facebook (a for-profit entity)
> We individually decided how much personal stuff to post on their servers
> Some of us decided to profile ourselves to a shocking degree of detail
> Some of what we posted we’d prefer not to share with the world
> Facebook realized/knew that co-opting this info is worth a TON of money
> Facebook slowly changed their policies to make it ok to exploit this info

What did we think was going to happen? We shared really personal information with a corporation who’d never really promised to take our privacy seriously. We watched as they incrementally shifted their stance on privacy (and on who actually owns the content we post). Basically, they made a really nifty platform that encouraged sharing and they decided to cash-in on that platform. Can we be collectively outraged at the fact that it’s happening? Yep. Should we honestly be surprised that it’s happening? Nope.

The admittedly flawed analogy that’s been bouncing around my head is to the cigarette industry:

Big tobacco behaved dishonorably and dishonestly in attempting to lead the public to believe that there were no health risks associated with smoking. But regardless of the health disinformation being circulated, smokers had to know on some level that there’s something inherently unhealthy about lighting an object on fire, sticking it in your mouth and sucking on it.

Facebook has behaved dishonorably and dishonestly in their communications about privacy and in the way they’ve repeatedly changed their policies. But on some level we all knew (or should have known) there were real risks associated with sharing our private information with a company that doesn’t seem to give a damn about privacy.

What it comes down to for me is this:
There are known risks associated with smoking. Smoke or don’t.
There are known risks associated with Facebook: Stay or leave.

Ultimately, just like there isn’t a safe cigarette, there isn’t a safe Facebook. If you’re worried about risk you can smoke less and you can share less. Or you can quit.

Posted by Patrick DiMichele
Additional Posts (10)
Categories: Social media

Discuss this article (1)

Almost (Tangentially) Famous

A couple of years ago we helped the College of William & Mary redesign their website. For their creative we aimed for an approach that blended the sensibilities of their two most famous alumni—Thomas Jefferson and Jon Stewart. Last week on the Daily Show, Jon Stewart spent some time teasing W&M about their new mascot (the Griffin) and he used the website as a prop to help him do it.

The clip (embedded below) is vintage Stewart—irreverent, self-effacing, borderline offensive, and completely hysterical. If you’re OK with a bit of good-natured genitalia humor, push the play button.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Virginia’s Confederate History Month & Griffin Mascot
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

Personally speaking this is the first time a web project I’ve been a part of has landed on TV—which is pretty cool in and of itself. But ending up (however tangentially) on one of my all-time favorite shows with one of my all-time favorite clients is really, really special. I’m a happy camper.

Posted by Patrick DiMichele
Additional Posts (10)
Categories:

Discuss this article (0)

From the Video Vault

It’s been a great week for discovering randomly awesome video content made by colleges and universities. My favorites so far:

President’s Day at Macalester College.
A few years ago we did a consulting project for Macalester. As part of that project, I met with President Rosenberg – a really smart, really interesting, Dickens scholar. While it was clear at the time that he was a pretty funny guy, I had no idea he had something this hysterical up his sleeve:

Via Jill Grossman of Connecticut College (@jillgee).
—-

William & Mary provides an unexpected look at campus statuary.
There’s a top-secret area of the William & Mary website for those in the know. Once you’ve clicked on the hidden link (hint: it’s on the homepage) you’re brought to a page showcasing quirky videos by and about WM. The latest addition? Lord Botetourt Makes a Movie. Statuary on the WM campus comes to life to discuss making a movie about the Stamp Act.

The top-secret video vault is maintained by WM Creative Services (@wm_creative)
—-

OK Go’s newest music video features the Irish.
This one wasn’t produced by a college, but the Notre Dame Marching band is prominently featured. Good stuff.

OK Go – This Too Shall Pass from OK Go on Vimeo.

Via Laurel Hechenova who sits around the corner from me at the office (@hechanova)

Posted by Patrick DiMichele
Additional Posts (10)
Categories:

Discuss this article (2)

Don’t worry about Swine Flu… Worry about ZOMBIES!!!

Swine Flu is capturing a ton of media attention these days… Hopefully, there’s a very slim chance that this super-epi-pandemic arrives at your campus any time soon. But zombies? They’re likely already there.

More and more college campuses are being invaded by Humans vs. Zombies. HvZ is essentially a complicated version of ‘tag’ that involves scores of college kids careening through campus in a desperate attempt to avoid being turned into zombies (or in a desperate attempt to turn the other ‘human’ competitors into zombies). HvZ is spreading across the nation at a rate rivaled only by the aforementioned pork virus.

Why should you care? Because the crux of the HvZ debate is, where (if at all) does an institution draw a line between student activities and something that (to a casual passerby) might be misconstrued as some sort of chaotic, relatively inexplicable, armed uprising.

To quote a recent article posted on Boston.com:

“The game provides students with a distraction from studies as they chase one another from classroom buildings to dorms. Students say HvZ is a healthy way to keep them on campus on the weekends and away from drinking. But the game has come under scrutiny. Reports of large groups of students wearing bandannas and shouldering 2-foot toy guns have alarmed passersby on some campuses. The game has been banned at some schools, including Butler University and Washington State University.”

So what do you think? Harmless diversion or armed rebellion in need of some quashing? I think it’s the former but am up for a healthy debate.

Posted by Patrick DiMichele
Additional Posts (10)
Categories: Real life

Discuss this article (3)

Groundwork: Outline Your Redesign Goals

Highly visible stuff everyone will notice:

• Intuitive, scalable IA that makes navigating the site easy
• Fresh, compelling design that feels like the college
• Inviting, engaging content that reflects the personality of the college
• Powerful, user-friendly publishing that enables content contribution

Does anyone not want these things? Every college web project (heck, every web project) should have these four goals someplace near the top of the priority list. But to what end? If we’re overhauling the IA to make the site easy to navigate, what are we hoping visitors will find? If we’re redesigning and rewriting the site to provoke an emotion what do we want the outcome of that emotion to be? Basically, building the super-duper new site on a slick new CMS is half the battle. The othe half?

 Less interesting stuff we’ll ultimately need to address in order to prove that the website redesign was actually successful:

• Usability (Is the site simpler to use? Are critical paths easier to navigate? Have page visits to key areas of the site increased? How do we know?)
• Stickiness (Do visitors return to the site more often? Do they stay longer? Do they sent content to friends / parents?)
• Branding (What do our core audiences say about the new site? What are they doing online? What are they thinking about us?)
• Recruiting (Did online application numbers jump? What about site traffic and stickiness for admissions & yield-related pages?)
• Giving (Did we see growth in online dollars? Number of online gifts or online donors? Growth in average gift size?)
• Engagement (Did participation rates in online communities increase? Was there an increase in event attendance or alumni giving?)

When putting together your goals for a website redesign, I’d argue that you need to prioritize the latter list (usability, recruiting, etc) according to your institutional needs. And then use the highly visible fun stuff (design, content, etc) to facilitate all of the outcomes you deem most important.

It’s not enough that your new site look cool and be fun to read, it also needs to drive the audience(s) you deem most important toward taking the action(s) you deem most critical.

Get all your goals on paper early and figure out how you’ll measure progress. That way when your site has been running for a few months and someone tells you how great it looks you can tell them about the 22% spike in admission applications it’s generated too.

Posted by Patrick DiMichele
Additional Posts (10)
Categories: Strategy

Discuss this article (0)

Proust Questionnaire: Nancy Prater, Ball State University

Posted by Patrick DiMichele
Additional Posts (10)
Categories: Design and usability / Marketing and branding

Discuss this article (0)

Groundwork: Form a Web Advisory Committee

Starting an institutional website redesign? Form a WAC.

I know, I know… just what you need, more meetings. Hear me out, for your redesign effort to be successful you’re going to need buy-in and support from across the organization, not just from your department or from your boss. So take the time at the beginning of the project to ensure that all the right (read: politically necessary) people are at the table when things get started. It’ll make it that much easier to keep the proverbial train rolling once it leaves the station.

So who’s the right group? I’d say you’ll need representatives from:

• Marketing / Communications
• Admissions
• Advancement
• Alumni Relations
• Student Affairs
• Information Technology
• Academic departments
• Students
• Faculty members

Depending on the specific quirks of your school you might need to include a few more people. Yes, that’s a lot of people. And yes, getting them in the same place at the same time is going to be a pain. But in order for this committee to have the stature necessary to get anything done it’ll need to include a representative cross-section of the needs / wants and hopes / fears of the college.

Specifically, you’ll eventually want the WAC to:

• Ratify the goals for the redesign (the next post in this series)
• Prioritize website audiences
• Review the information architecture
• Approve technology selection process / acquisition
• Select a design direction (with input from the target audiences)
• Formalize the tone of the website content
• Set policies and procedures governing website usage / publication

Essentially the WAC should become your supreme court of all matters related to the interwebs. It’ll make key decisions related to stuff like the look, feel and technical underpinning of the website as well as decisions about things like the policies related to blogging, template usage and ownership. Plus, since you’ll be meeting with the committee every couple weeks to provide a progress report it’ll keep you moving along the project plan (see: the forthcoming ‘Plan of Attack’ blog posts).

Want to see a real-work example of a fantastic WAC in action? William & Mary kept a website redesign blog and have lots of posts related to their committee. Check it.

Posted by Patrick DiMichele
Additional Posts (10)
Categories: Strategy

Discuss this article (1)

DIY College Website Redesign

(The kick-off of an ongoing series…)

With shrinking endowments, budget cuts and hiring freezes (or worse) fewer institutions are in a position to hire a hot-shot consulting or design firm to tackle all aspects of a far-reaching strategy / ia / design / content / html / cms implementation type of project.

Instead, colleges and universities (at least many of the folks we’re talking to lately) are looking for ways to do more with limited resources, which often means dividing work between internal teams and consultants like us. Partially to shave costs, partially to build internal capacity and partially just because a website redeployment is a lot of fun (really!). Sometimes we’ll do strategy and design and the college project team will handle writing and programming. Or the opposite. Or a completely different division of labor. The idea is to meet the client where they are: relying on their strengths, filling in gaps where additional expertise is needed.

But… in order for this divide / conquer approach to actually work (and to result in an actually great website) everybody needs an understanding of the nature of the work involved. So over the next few months we’re going to explain — in excruciating detail — the steps we run through in a “typical” website redesign (from initial planning to post-launch debrief meetings).

If you’re running your own project and this helps you keep it all straight, excellent. If you’re considering working with mStoner, it’s important to understand exactly how we work so you can determine what makes sense for you to do and what for us to do. No matter what, if you know up front all that’s involved in your big ol’ redesign then you can make some informed decisions about what to tackle on your own and when (if at all) to look for outside expertise.

The outline of our DIY Website Redesign guide looks like this:

• Groundwork
• Plan of Attack
• Design
• Content
• Technology
• Policies & Procedures
• Training Programs
• Sustainability

And, starting tomorrow we’re running through ‘Groundwork’ (probably an 8-part series).

Details to follow…

Posted by Patrick DiMichele
Additional Posts (10)
Categories: Content and writing / Design and usability / Marketing and branding / Strategy / Technology and software

Discuss this article (1)

Finding Inspiration

The main thing mStoner does is make websites, usually for schools. To keep up with design, IA and messaging trends I look at lots and lots (and lots) of college websites. Plus it gives me a great opportunity to steal be inspired by the things that have been done well.

But lately I’ve been looking at piles of websites (can you pile websites?) that have nothing at all to do with education. Sites that are doing interesting things in interesting ways. And trying to figure out how to steal gain inspiration from those sites too.

You’ve likely seen lots of these already but they’re new(ish) to me and I’m excited about them:

FFFFound!
It’s ffffantastic. (Get it? I’m funny.) The website is kinda like Flickr — but instead of posting photos you’ve taken yourself, you’re posting photos and graphics you’ve (fff)found. As a result, the range of “topics” covered expands wildly, the conversations between users are much more interesting and the ‘related images’ are downright bizarre. Good stuff.

I Want You To Want Me
Jonathan Harris is one of my favorite contemporary artists / designers. And he’s Princeton grad (fun fact: the Department of Psychology website Jonathan designed as an undergrad is still up and running). Anyway, he paired up with Sep Kamvar to create a super-fantastic interactive installation at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. The exhibition is over but you can play with a web-based version online. It explores the ways people with profiles at online dating websites go about presenting themselves. I spent a long time failing to come up with a pithy Cheap Trick reference to close out this paragraph.

30 Reasons
You may have heard that the junior senator from Illinois is running for President. To highlight that candidacy, 30Reasons.org has been unveiling a new poster supporting Barack Obama for the thirty days leading up to the election. Not all of the posters are great, but I check in on the website every day to see the latest post.

Happy clicking!

Posted by Patrick DiMichele
Additional Posts (10)
Categories: Content and writing

Discuss this article (0)

How unique should your institution’s website really be?

Potential Client: “Do you have an existing information architecture template that you use for a college that you’ll simply apply to our school?”

Me: “Nope. But what we do have is lots of experience doing this and a lot of ideas about how to initially create the framework for an IA that flexible, scalable and most importantly understandable. Some percentage of it is the same as other school websites (and should be) and some percentage is entirely unique to your school (and also should be).”

Potential Client: “I see. What percentage of our information architecture should be the same as other schools and what percentage should be totally unique?”

Me: “Ummm…”

I have to admit that I’d never thought about IA in terms of absolute percentages before. Since that question though, I’ve thought about it a lot. Here’s what I’ve come up with:

The top-level information architecture of your website should be 2/3 the same as other schools and 1/3 unique to your school. That’s obviously not set in stone but I think it’s a helpful guide for thinking about the global navigation of your site.

Let’s assume your site is composed of three types of navigation: topic-based, audience-based and task-based. If those three things are in place you can begin to figure out what should follow the model of other schools and what should be distinctly your own.

Topic-based
Schools interested in reaching prospective students should ALL have the following links in their topic nav:

About Us
Academics
Admission
Campus Life (or something of the sort)
News & Events
Giving (or something of the sort)

Once the basics are covered it’s more a matter of choosing what’s right for a given institution. If sports are a reasonably large part of the on campus experience then ‘Athletics’ should have a place in the navigation. We also place ‘Research’ in the topic-based navigation for many clients. And in the past we’ve included ‘Arts’, ‘Institutes’, ‘Service’ and/or ‘Libraries’. The idea being, we’re sure that the first six links listed are necessities – from there it’s much more a matter of which links belong on your top-level navigation. And that’s a decision that driven by the messages you’re trying to send prospective students, the personality of your school, the goals of your website and the tasks you’re trying to facilitate.

Audience-based
Should definitely have:

Current Students
Faculty & Staff
Parents
Alumni

After that, it’s wide open. in previous projects we’ve included, “Neighbors”, “Business Community”, “Managing Committee” and countless others. Once you’ve done the work of identifying your audiences it makes sense to highlight them prominently on navigation of this sort. And yes, the omission of a ‘Prospective Students’ link was intentional.

Task-based
This navigation is a whole lot less prescriptive than the other types. It should include a link to ‘Contact’ and a link to ‘Search’. Other than that it should include as many other links to get stuff done as you have. “Apply Online”, “Directory”, “Site Map”, etc.

Obviously this is just the tip of the proverbial ice-burg but I think it’s a nice, neutral place to start a discussion about information architecture for a school’s global navigation.

Later in the same conversation with the potential client we talked about how these percentages might apply to design. What percentage of the design should look like other schools? What percentage should be totally different? That response merits a blog posting of its own – which is forthcoming.

Posted by Patrick DiMichele
Additional Posts (10)
Categories: Admissions and recruiting / Design and usability / Marketing and branding

Discuss this article (4)