The following is a guest post by Gabe Sanchez at Inigral. If you would like to go deeper into this Facebook data be sure to check out the upcoming webinar the State of Facebook in Admissions Tuesday May 22nd. –Kyle James

Over the last 8 years, Facebook has played a pivotal role in higher ed. While it’s beginning was just with current college students, Facebook now plays an influential role in a student’s transition from their high-school network and into their new college community.

In a recent sample of 163 colleges we found 50% of them are using a Class of 2016 community to allow students to meet one another, ask questions, and discuss life before they step foot on campus.

While this is a best practice for universities looking to build community and improve yield, rarely do we hear exactly what students are talking about, which conversations are most engaging, and how the medium affects the message.

In order to shed light on these qualitative aspects, we analyzed a dozen Facebook Pages and Groups for the incoming Class of 2016 at private universities in the U.S. Below is a summary of our key takeaways.

What Do Students Talk About?

Since there’s no easy way for students to find future classmates by specific commonalities (i.e., major, hobbies, etc.), many rely on “introduction posts.” We found that the majority of posts by students dealt with their hometown and intended major(s). Whether it was a school-affiliated or third-party Page/Group, these topics were the most common way for students to reach out and make an initial connection.

What’s Engaging?

An “engaged post” had five or more comments. Some of the most engaged posts were written by confused students trying to find more information about orientation, registration, and housing, but these posts were not always getting responses.

It’s important to monitor student communities to ensure important questions are answered, whether it be by a current student, other admit or administrator. These mediums are about letting students open up and meet future classmates, but also responding when appropriate. Remember, there’s a fine line between not enough and too much administrator involvement. We observed one school’s Page with very little student-to-student interaction. After looking at the activity, the administrator responded to almost every single post, leading us to believe that the omnipresent school administrator turned students off from using the Page.

Does the Medium Affect the Message?

Although our sample size was small, we discovered significant differences between the types of posts that appeared on Pages vs. Groups, as well as what students shared on official school-sponsored communities vs. a student-started or 3rd-party-created page.

Key for graphs:

• Affirmative decision – stating their decision to enroll in the university
• Dorms – discussing the freshman dorms on campus
• Excitement – expressing their excitement about attending the university
• Introduction – introducing themselves to future classmates
• Hometown – finding others in the same hometown or region
• Major – sharing their intended major
• Roommate – students trying to find roommates

The Group format is more conducive to conversation and thus more likely to engage students.

Not only did conversations differ in each community, but engagement as well. We noticed that 87% of comments and 64% of likes on posts occurred in Groups. However, many schools had Pages for students as opposed to either open or private Groups. When creating a Class of 2016 Page or Group, schools must determine what they plan to accomplish and then monitor the community to determine whether they are moving in the right direction.

Continuing the Facebook Fun

Something to keep in mind, just because a college created a Page or Group does not mean that all the conversations were happening there. Students did not care who started the Page or Group; they just wanted a way to connect with their classmates by finding something in common – majors, hometowns, or interests.

Did your university use a Class of 2016 community this past year? We’d love to hear what trends you are seeing and be sure to check out our upcoming webinar the State of Facebook in Admissions Tuesday May 22nd with our latest research findings and best practices to create meaningful and measurable connections on Facebook.

Photo Credit: Flickrverse by cobalt123

Related posts:

1. Facebook Page, Group and Inigral Schools App Use by Accepted Students
2. Everything you know about your Facebook page is wrong
3. Facebook Page Redesign: How It Impacts You

If you’ve ever searched on Google (if you haven’t you must live under a rock), you would have noticed above and to the right of the search results, Google Ads.  For years these have been a staple for businesses to promote their products and services.

Over the past couple years I’ve noticed that more and more higher education institutions using Google Ads to promote their academic programs. Why? Because they can work, if used correctly.

While this isn’t an exhaustive list of the factors contributing to the success or failure of a Google Adwords campaign, they are the key factors.

1) Keywords

The primary targeting tool for Google Adwords are keywords.  This is one reason why, in my opinion, Google Adwords are more effective than Facebook Ads.  The audiences have already pre-qualified themselves for your message by searching for terms like “business degree”, “engineering education” “online MBA”, etc.  But I digress.  Ensuring you select keywords that target the right people looking for your products is critical.

Blanketing all related keywords or “spraying & praying” is a poor practice that may generate many clicks and easily spend your ad budget, but will not yield conversions or leads. At one point we used an external consultant to develop our Google Ads campaigns.  They took the “spray & pray” approach with our keywords.  For example, one of our academic programs is heavy equipment technician. Some of the keywords they targeted were “heavy equipment rentals” and “heavy equipment sales.”  Shortly after, I removed all unrelated keywords and focused on keywords that included terms like “diploma”, “degree”, “certification”, “education”, etc. After revising all the keywords, we saw a 46% decrease in our  ad spend and a 5% increase in lead generations.

There are three great ways to identify which keywords to target:

1. Review your site search to see keywords visitors are using to find content on your web site.
2. Use your web analytics software to identify keywords visitors use to find your web site organically through search engines.
3. Use the Google Keywords Tool to identify potential keywords to target. This tool will make recommendations and indicate the global competition and monthly searches using that keyword phrase.

2) Targeting

Casting your Google Adwords net wide through various targeting options may yield further reach, but may not generate leads.  There are a number of targeting options:

• Geographic: you can specify your ads to only be displayed to visitors in specific geographic regions. Your ads can also appear to people who have expressed an interest in your geographic region by including geographic terms in their search. For example someone in Boston wouldn’t see your hotels ad if you were only targeting Anaheim.  But if they searched “hotels in Anaheim” they could see the ad then.
• Device: you can limit your ad to appear on specific devices like desktop, tablet or mobile.  If your landing page experience is not optimized for mobile users, consider excluding mobile devices from your campaign.  This will increase your conversion rate and help you strategically spend your ad dollars.

3) Ad Copy

Your ad copy is very important.  While targeting the right keywords will get your ad in front of prospective students, crafting the write ad copy will motivate them to investigate further and click the ad.  Your ad copy, along with your keywords, have a direct influence on your clickthrough rate (CTR).  That is the percentage of people who see the ad that actually click the link.

There are number of ad copy strategies that will improve the effectiveness of your ad:

• Call-to-action: invite your prospective student to take action through words like “Apply Now”, “Register Today.”
• Include keywords: every keyword you target has a quality score.  The higher the score, the more often your ad appears and at a lower rate. Include your most important keyword(s) in your ad copy.
• Value proposition: differentiate your product or service from your competitors.  Indicate your unique value to your prospective customer.
• Test, test, test: create 2-4 variations of your ad and then review performance.  Some ads will perform better. You can then make the better performing ad the default ad.

4) Landing Page

All your effort so far can be easily wasted by directing your prospective students to a web page that is not optimized for lead generation.  In some cases, the goal of the Google Adwords campaign may only be brand/product awareness.  But without including a conversion (form completion, PDF download, etc.), the full benefit of Google Adwords can’t be realized and there is not an easy way to accurately measure success.

Most public institutions fail to understand the importance of an optimized landing page, resulting in minimal leads.  Take for example the screenshot below.  This is the web page that I was directed to from a Google Ad for Simon Fraser University’s Graduate Business Diploma.  This web page is part of their main website and has all the main features include site search, primary/secondary menu links, etc.  There are many opportunities for the prospective student to adjust their click-path and end up somewhere not intended and ultimately loose them.  As well there is no clear call-to-action, no invitation.

An optimized landing page looks much different.  In fact there is one clear purpose – to enter the prospective student into the sales funnel.  That could be through a form completion, white paper download, etc.  There are hundreds of articles that speak to strategies for effective landing pages.  Here are some things to consider:

• Keep it simple. Avoid the clutter and distractions of your main web site.
• Include at least on call-to action. Make it easy and obvious what next step your prospective student should take.
• Use active language. Your page copy should be in the active voice, encourage participation and instill emotion.
• Provide a phone number. Not only does this instill trust by allowing the prospective student to talk to a “real” person if they want, but it also provides a way for them to reach out should they be having difficulties completing the form.

In the screenshot below, you can see a stark contrast between the SFU landing page and the landing page from Queen’s Executive MBA program. The landing page from Queens’s is simple, to the point and without distractions.  It also has a very simple and obvious call-to-action and offers prospective students an opportunity to call directly.  I’m not suggesting that this landing page is without fault, but the point is clear that it will perform better than the SFU landing page, if only for the fact that Queen’s can at least measure results.  Which brings me to my bonus point.

Bonus) Measure

Spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on Google Adwords a month cannot be maintained without demonstrating a return.  There are three main of areas to measure with Google Adswords:

1. impressions
2. clicks
3. conversions

Impressions and clicks are easily tracked through the Google Adwords program, but to track conversions, you need to set up a goal in Google Analytics.  If you are not tracking conversions with your Google Adwords campaigns, then you are wasting your money and have no way to connect your ad spend to any form of a return.

There are many other areas to measure in Google Adwords including keyword performance, ad performance, etc.  But at a minimum, you need to be measuring conversions.

Related posts:

1. Offline Campaign Tracking: Presentation Clickthrough Comparison
2. Colleges Join In For Google+ Pages Launch
3. Talkback: Successful Higher Ed Branding for the Web

This article was written by Andrianes Pinantoan is part of Open Colleges, an online courses provider with great business management courses. When not working, he can be found with a camera on hand. You can follow him @andreispsyched.

There are three things that must occur at the same time for people to take action, according to BJFogg, founder of Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab. The same is true when we try to convince teenagers to leave their comfy homes to move halfway across the world to study.

The three things are:

1. People must have the desire or motivation to do what you want them to do.
2. People must also have the ability to do what you want them to do.
3. The third and most often missed factor of persuasion is the trigger – they must be reminded, essentially, of their desire.

So let’s talk about these factors a little more in-depth and how to use the model to influence international students.

1. Motivation

This is where research really comes into play. Understanding the true motivations behind an international student’s decision to choose one country over another and one school over another, and the intricacies behind it, is crucial – and many education marketers get this wrong (I should know, I was an international student).

For example, many university advertisements emphasize on “world class education”. But what does “world class” really mean? Most international students have never heard of your university’s brand and there are so many university rankings, they are often contradicting.

Instead, you might want to focus other motivations, such as:

1. Internationally recognized qualifications (especially true for parents of students, whom I will discuss later).
2. Are they allowed to work part-time in the country? This is not up to the university to decide, but if the local government does allow it, then use it in your advertisement!
3. And here’s one that’s often missed… international students often want to migrate to the target country. Can your degree help with that?
4. You can also create motivation by educating them. What makes your university stand out? How will a degree affect their wellbeing (are there any statistics you can show off?) How much does your average international graduate earn?

The more informational it is, the more comfortable the student will be when it comes to making a decision.

2. Ability

The fact that they want to study in a foreign university, however, doesn’t mean all of them can afford it. The person who usually funds the student’s education are the parents. And because of that, parents have a huge say in which university their children study in.

This is why marketing materials attempting to attract international students must also convince their parents. What are the concerns of these parents? Here are a couple:

1. Parents accord greater concern for safety and security than do their kids.
2. Parents are concerned about undue peer pressure and bad influence.
3. They care about tradition and religion – is the university accepting of their practices and do they have the appropriate facilities (like a prayer room)?
4. And finally, will the qualification their child gets be recognized in their home country?

Then there’s also the issue of living expenses. Some universities provide local accommodation at a heavily discounted rate so as to attract new students, for example. And what they found is that profits ultimately lifted – because now MORE international students can afford to move.

Once we get the parents to approve and make sure they can afford it, the next thing to make sure is that they BOTH have the ability to enrol. This is where agents come in. They help lost international students navigate the VISA process and all the documents universities need.

In my opinion, the enrolment process in most universities is archaic. The fact that they need an agent to help them fill out the form speaks volumes about it. So some innovative universities simplify the process to one simple form that students can fill out online – and they ask for more information after the student enrols.

3. Triggers

Based on BJ Fogg’s model, there are 3 ways I think we can do to innovate:

1. Facilitate. This happens when a potential student has high motivation but low ability. Triggers for these students can be advertisements that emphasize on how easy it is to enrol, or the 24/7 support to help them out if they have issues.
2. Spark. This happens when a potential student has high ability but low motivation. This is what most ads are designed to do: inspire, scare and/or offer hope.
3. Signal. This happens when a potential student has high ability and high motivation. And all they needed is a little reminder. A great way to do this is get them to sign up to an email list in which you can then follow up with – if you want to deal directly.

So there. Create the motivation, make it easy and trigger them to enrol. All it takes is a bit of cultural understanding to pull it all off.

Photo Credit: On a jet plane by kennymatic

Related posts:

1. Higher Ed Web Analytics: What’s Really Important to Report?
2. Facebook Groups and Pages Compared: Communities for Accepted Students
3. Reach More Students Without Leaving Your Office

Over the past few years the big sexy conversation at conferences has slowly morphed from social media to mobile. It is partially because social media is better understood now but it’s also because mobile is the shiny new toy that everyone is trying to figure out. We have seen incredible inroads that mobile traffic is making up a larger and larger portion of web traffic. Mobile traffic to websites has doubled across the year alone in 2011.With all these discussions it has me thinking more and more of the future of mobile apps.

With recent data suggesting that the average user has well over 50 apps installed on their smartphone it is a great time to be an app developer. I on the other hand can’t help but feel like we are in a case of history repeating itself.  We are also seeing that time spent on mobile apps is greater than time spent on the desktop or the mobile web. I am probably no different as I have right at 50 apps installed. I actually went through and counted and deleted a few that I never use in the process.

About a month ago I was at the OmniUpdate user conference on a panel talking about mobile and its adoption. Of course lots of questions about mobile came up and I went back to my original guns. It was almost four years ago when I wrote an article on why building smartphone app’s wasn’t the best approach and schools should think about building for the mobile web first. I still stand behind that statement and let me tell you why. It is all about the history.

History Repeats Itself

Think back to the beginning of this decade around the time of the .com stock bubble. Do you remember how you used your computer at that point? Like most people I would download an application off the internet and install it on my computer. At the time I most likely had well over 50 different applications installed. Back in those days we didn’t call them “apps” we used that really long name “applications” or just simply programs.

The point is what happened next? Well the .com bubble might have been a bust for investors but we started to fundamentally change the way that we used our computers. The browser became the supper “app” and began to replace everything that we did. We no longer needed weather bug to tell us the temperature or AOL instant messenger to chat with friends. Databases moved online and we could do much of the work that used to be through installed applications through a web browser.

Think about what is happening right now… IT IS THE SAME THING! With the introduction of HTML5 it is only a matter of time before the smart mobile web is good enough to easily and quickly do everything you need without installing a dozen apps to do each individual thing. Do you ever find yourself deleting an app and just relying on the browser to get the data you want? Let’s go back to weather or how about sports scores? Is it really that much better to install ESPN Sportscenter than it is to just have a bookmark to the mobile web version? Where do we draw the line and say, nope that it is we aren’t going to install any more apps. Does the app that you build make the cut?

If you go back past into last century we didn’t download even software. Instead we install it from CDs and Floppy Discs. If you have an Xbox 360 or one of the other modern gaming platforms you probably don’t always buy a game on physical medium anymore as you can now download them directly to your consoles hard drive. There is a large debate right now about this being the standard on the next generation of gaming consoles and cutting out the whole reselling gaming market. We see this exact same transition happening in that market!

Taking Two Steps Forward

The argument that I made four years ago still stands true today in my mind. Just because you can build a mobile application it doesn’t mean that you should. Many mobile applications are just browser shortcuts put into a pretty frame anyway. We know that mobile browsing is only getting better and although it looks like Flash will ultimately be a casualty of the transition that might not be a bad thing.

In closing I want to share a recent Pew research report on the Future of Apps and the Web. The summary not surprisingly agrees with a lot of what I’m saying here:

Futurist John Smart, founder of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, looks beyond 2020 and sees apps as merely a passing phase in Internet evolution. “Apps are a great intermediate play, a way to scale up functionality of a primitive Web,” he said, “but over time they get outcompeted for all but the most complex platforms by simpler and more standardized alternatives. What will get complex will be the ‘artificial immune systems’ on local machines. What will get increasingly transparent and standardized will be the limited number of open Web platforms and protocols that all the leading desktop and mobile hardware and their immune systems will agree to use. The rest of the apps and their code will reside in the long tail of vertical and niche uses.”

The executive summary of the report provides a lot of great bullet points for the web and for apps and is absolutely worth a read.  They list out all the pros and cons of mobile apps that I’m not going to get into here.  I’m curious about what you think on this subject? Do you still think there is a case to be made for building mobile apps or focusing on your mobile web strategy.

Related posts:

1. Best of the Mobile Higher Ed Web
2. #heweb10 – CSS for Mobile Devices
3. Mobile Analytics Revisited (Have You Been Keeping Up?)

Who has been wondering what services and software solutions other schools outsource? The time has come to share those results with you. I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was a little disappointed with the number of responses. With only 32 completed surveys this is the smallest sample we have collected for any of the number of surveys that we have completed. Maybe I didn’t pick a topic that was interesting to people, the survey was too long or it was confusing. I have no way of knowing unless you tell me so leave a comment and let me know.

I’m not going to attempt to make any assumptions besides simply sharing the data below. The data (minus individual schools which I pulled out) is shared and licensed under Creative Commons and you can download the complete results here. I’ve separated it into a PDF and Excel dump depending on your flavor of viewing/remixing.

Download Results – The State of Outsourcing in Higher Ed, 2012

The Data

On the surface there probably isn’t enough data to make any statistically significant claims.  Even in this small sample we do have a wide range of schools represented.

This being a blog focusing on higher education marketing it isn’t surprising to see the majority of responses are from individuals in marketing/communication.

Outsourcing Services

For the most part schools outsource about a third of each of these services. That isn’t always the case but most schools aren’t regularly outsourcing everything.

(Click image to view full size)

 Outsourcing Software/Platforms/Storage

I would especially recommend reading through the section of software that is outsourced. Besides picking a pretty complete list of software solutions that colleges typically outsource, we also left room for individuals to tell us more about this decision and what they are using. Although the data might not be significant the individual responses to different outsourced solutions and homebuilt services is worth its weight in gold in my opinion. It is the first time I’ve seen a wide angle view of how differently so many schools are doing these various things. You can also see how silos and fragmented approaches creep into many of these responses.

(Click image to view full size)

Takeaway

This data was a big part of my .eduGuru Summit presentation so if you are curious about my thoughts on this then you can check out the slides from the presentation below. Either way I highly recommend downloading the results so that you can read through the details around each outsourced software solution these schools provided. This will hopefully give you some idea as you approach one of these projects yourself.

Download Results – The State of Outsourcing in Higher Ed, 2012

So what other surveys and data would you like to see? It’s about time for the annual Social Media survey this summer, but we want to make sure we are providing data that you want.

Photo Credit: Lego Village People by guin

Related posts:

1. [Survey] The State of Outsourcing in Higher Ed, 2012
2. [ Results ] The State of Higher Ed Video
3. [Results] The State of Higher Ed Social Media 2011

Take a moment and think about your listing of majors and minors. Really think about it. Is it good? Does it reflect how great your offerings are? Is it even accurate? Is it just a stupid, boring, damned list (if you’re interested in something a bit off the beaten path, check out RIT’s Pathfinder system or look at what the University of Arizona is doing)? If the answer is yes, I want to kick you an idea. Filtrify.

On its face, Filtrify is just another jQuery plugin that you can use for atomic control of a collection of DOM elements. Which is cool enough I suppose. But check out this example on their demo site. Now, instead of movies, imagine it’s student action photos from different programs, or some other visual representation of the program. Instead of genres and actors and directors as filters, you have schools and interests and jobs. It would leave you with an interactive program listing that invites a user in to play and explore. In this particular case, Filtrify is serving as an extension of the live filter design pattern - enabling a user to see all the available options, and then selectively removing that which isn’t relevant to them. People like toys, and they are inherently curious. Create an environment that promises an opportunity for exploration, and you’ll net some explorers.

But wait, it doesn’t have to be Filtrify per se, either – that’s just one idea. Something like filtering blocks would work just as well. As would something you come up with entirely on your own. The trick is, you need to start rethinking the UX of the program listing (and probably a lot of other stuff on your sites, too), and really consider how your tools may be impacting prospective students’ ability to see you as the right institution for them. Jakob Nielsen pointed out how bad lists could be nearly a decade ago (see #7), yet schools seem to be married to them for lack of the desire to construct a better way. People don’t find long, unfilterable lists to be user-friendly at all. We already know that 17% of students will drop a school from their list if they can’t find what they want on your site. Even more will mark a school down if they have a bad experience. What is that risk worth?

The underlying issue here is that schools need to start putting more effort into the next step of their web design processes, and start looking at the user experience of what they are making. It’s easy and fast to slap stuff together and move on, but there is enormous value in usability testing. It’s part of the overall process that is too frequently skipped, since a webpage published is frequently seen as “good enough.” While the old fashioned linked list may be functionally adequate for the data being displayed, it’s a terrible way to encourage interaction and leave a good impression on your visitor.

Even if you didn’t want to use a library like Filtrify, you can still come at the problem of filtering content in a user friendly way by falling back on some basic principles like LATCH. LATCH is a content filtering methodology that most users are, consciously or not, readily able to adapt to. That makes it a great place to start when trying to solve the problem of helping people find what they need in any large archive of structured information.

So how could we apply LATCH to a set of link filters for our program listings? Here’s one example (and there are plenty others):

• Location: This could be a physical campus location, online programs, or a more meta concept like a college or school.
• Alphabetical: This pretty much goes without saying. But keep in mind your taxonomy might not be the same as the visitors. Don’t be afraid to overload topics and point them to the same overall detail page.
• Time: This one can be harder, but could be length of the overall program, number of credit hours, or number of total semesters.
• Category: Think generalized subject or job areas here. For instance, “teaching” will likely return a number of different specializations.
• Hierarchy: You could use this to break down by schools and departments, or requirements, or to set up graduate tracks

The insane part about all this is that in many cases it would only take a little work to make fairly significant usability improvements over the current lists of programs. Something as basic as a live search filter would provide users with at least a little empowerment over the current model for many schools. Empowered users will be engaged users. And it’s much easier to get an engaged user to fill out an application. And on the other hand, if the technology you’re employing on your website doesn’t instill them with faith in you to be modern and student-centric, then they’ll move on.

Majors, minors, and programs are just one of many examples that could benefit from a little of this kind of TLC. I mention it as the focus of this post mainly because it tends to be really high in the funnel though. But how about:

• Student organizations
• Offices and departments
• Faculty listings
• Events
• Courses

How many things could you improve with just a few hours work, and a little focus on the overall UX of the content you are trying to present? Which do you think your visitors would get better use out of? Are you particularly proud of your program listing page? Share it in the comments below for others to see. And if anyone actually does build a site based on Filtrify, let me know, I’d love to see how it turns out!

No related posts.

If you read this blog then chances are you don’t really need any reasons to sign up for our second annual online marketing and web development conference. Well just in case you do need some reasons I’m going to do my best to convince you.

View the Presentations and Presents

Buy Your Ticket Today

1. It’s Online So You Don’t Need To Travel

That’s right, you don’t need to pack a bag, book a plane ticket or spend money on a hotel room to attend this summit! One of the greatest things about HighEdWeb or any of those other annual conferences is actually physically meeting and hanging out with everyone. We admit we’re not worthy and don’t even want to compete with those guys. We want you to be able to focus on the backchannel and have the freedom to ask that question that you are dying to know from behind your computer screen. We have a saying that you might appreciate.

Time spent on the road could be better spent with your family and friends!

2. We Have Legit Rockstar Presenters

Ok, so maybe that Kyle James jackwagon is a little bit of a joke, but that still puts us at 11 out of 12 presenters being awesome! That is over a 90% hit rate! Our presenters have lots of experience presenting and even more as true subject matter experts. These presenters have lived in the trenches with you and don’t just say they understand the problem… they really do! Most of these presentations are brand new.

Karlyn’s presentation description simply states “A Rant.” That has to be pretty legendary, right?

3. We Have Something For You Mr. Web Developer or Ms. Marketing Guru

Similar to our summit last year we have broken up the presentations into two days where one is marketing focused and the other is more technical. The great thing about this is that we have something for everyone. You can attend a single day if you have more code to write and could care less about the marketing side of the equation. Of course we want everyone to attend both days, but we’d rather have you get specifically what you want and just make a single day over nothing.

4. Every Session Is Recorded

Every session will be recorded and available to you to watch as many times as you want. This was one of the biggest positive pieces of feedback we received from the event last year. Recordings are especially great for the more technical talks. Even if you can’t attend the conference live, the recording is still totally worth the investment. After all, we aren’t asking you to buy a plane ticket or stay at a hotel. Put your money where it matters!

5. Tell Me Where You Can Attend A Conference This Cheap

You know without travel we cut down on the costs of this summit greatly! That is kind of awesome too, right? We can’t just give away access to twelve presenters of this caliber for nothing, but we can come pretty close. We encourage lots of questions in the sessions and we want to answer all of your questions. Hit us with your best shot and you won’t be disappointed.

So your totally signing up, right? What else do I need to tell you to convince you? Don’t make me write another post with five more reasons to attend… I will do it!

View the Presentations and Presents

Buy Your Ticket Today

Related posts:

1. Announcing the .eduGuru Summit!
2. .eduGuru Summit Starts Tomorrow #eduGuruSummit
3. Q&A About The Upcoming edSocialMedia Summit

I was passed this infographic the other day.  It has more to do with the value of a college education to someone that is thinking about attending a school, but as a college digital marketer it is nice to see that we are still marketing a valuable proposition.  There has been a lot of talk and action about the flattening of higher education recently.  Nobody has been able to completely ignore the layoffs and cutbacks in our industry for the past few years.

I firmly believe there is no single better investment than investing in one’s education.  I won’t get political but just imagine if our government doubled down on education?  The truth is that a better educated society probably has an easier time providing and supporting better jobs.  It wouldn’t matter if we shipped low end jobs overseas because the demand for high end jobs like engineers, medicine and science are always in demand.  Also imagine common sense and intelligence prevailing to solve problems instead of pointing fingers and blaming the other party at every chance.  Ignorance is a great thing but it’s also easily abused unfortunately.  <off soapbox>

“ACADEMIC politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.”
— Henry Kissinger

Marketing higher education is still a noble cause and changes lives for the newly educated on a daily basis.  Sometimes we get bogged down in the politics of higher education and forget that.  This infographic is just an optimistic reminder that we are still doing the right thing for the right reasons.

Via: Online Universities Resource

Related posts:

1. Your Education: Was it worth it?
2. Kyle’s Google Analytics and SEO Presentations from HighEdWeb 2010 #heweb10
3. [Survey] The State of Outsourcing in Higher Ed, 2012

It’s time for another one of those great surveys that gives us all a better understanding of something in Higher Education.  This “State of Outsourcing” was inspired by my upcoming presentation at the .eduGuru Summit, You Don’t Need IT To Do That.  I’ll be presenting the results in that presentation and will release the results in a follow-up post after the Summit.  The survey will be open through the month of March, but please don’t wait until the last minute!

Over the past ten years we have seen a range of incredible online tools change the way we do business, but I’m curious exactly how much we have adopted all of these tools.  That is one of the questions that I hope to answer with this survey.  I also didn’t want to limit outsourcing to just software. I’m also curious about what services are being outsourced.  I tried to include everything that people commonly outsource and took quite a bit of feedback on what people would like to see included.  Hopefully you are as interested in the results of this survey as we are.

See The Results

I do want to give a shout out to SurveyGizmo through which I’m “outsourcing” the survey.  This is a pretty freaking powerful and customizable tool!

Finally, please don’t be shy to tweet and share this survey to get as many of your friends and colleagues to help us get an accurate picture of our industry.

Related posts:

1. [Results] The State of Outsourcing in Higher Ed, 2012
2. [ Survey ] The State of Higher Ed Video
3. [Survey] The State of Higher Ed Social Media 2011

Let’s face it, higher ed has problems. They have a lot of problems. Whether it’s bad coding, poor graphic design, or a lack of upkeep, someone is always talking about something that’s not working and getting plenty of sympathy from the rest of the web development community. Article after article, conference after conference we talk about all the different things we have trouble with and try to understand why it doesn’t work and what to do about it. One area that’s been getting more and more focus, in part thanks to folks like Meet Content, is content strategy (regardless of whether or not you think it’s a “Real Thing.” I’m looking at you, Karlyn). With the start of a new year, many of us are taking some time to revisit our policies and practices, and get ready for a better 2012. But there’s one big problem when it comes to content strategy for us:

We’re gonna fail.

The thing is, there are ultimately so many factors working against us, that it’s extremely difficult to find success in any kind of realistic content cycles. There are a handful of folks doing okay, and parts of sites that venture off on their own have also managed to find success, like the Financial Aid department at Ithaca College. The tough part is that despite all of the case studies and conference presentations, schools find they cannot replicate the success demonstrated by someone else. But as I’ll discuss, there’s a good reason the ones that are doing well are managing it, and it requires tough decisions.

We’re too damn big

I’ve talked to more than one DI level school that has, and I kid you not, millions of web pages. Millions. Millions. Think about that for a second.  If you checked 100 pages a day, every day for a year, you wouldn’t even manage to check the quality of 50,000 pages. If you had only one million pages, that wouldn’t even cover 5% of your site. One of the first steps in starting a content strategy is a content audit. How much of your site are you prepared to commit to that when you’re so huge? Yes, a lot of that is automatically generated or archival. Yes, not all of it is meant for normal human consumption. Yet the fact remains that when a problem is so big and you can’t even pinpoint where to start, many will choose to do nothing. Since many university sites lack any comprehensive business or marketing strategy when it comes to the creation and maintenance of content, literally every piece of information gets put out there, and it’s put out there by hoards of individuals that are ultimately not qualified to edit web sites. So we grow. And grow. And grow. Then there comes a point where you see folders that literally have ten versions of the same page, and you’re faced with the challenge of figuring out which one is “right.”

Remember my mantra. Repeat it to yourself in your sleep. Tattoo it on your forehead. Wax it into your chest hair. Do less better. Stop pretending that some day you’ll come around and find a way to control this problem. You won’t. Your users will keep producing content that will eat your site alive over time, at a rate that will outpace your ability to police it, until it’s impossible to find the pieces that are of value to your visitors. Think of it like the signal to noise ratio of your site. There is a DEFINITE line that you must mind. One of the best ways to know that you’re getting to close to it is when you get this phone call:

“Yeah, hey, we were wondering… when you do a search on the site for Billybob’s Big Adventure, our page is like the 1,337^th one that shows up. It really should be first, but instead right now you see Billy Bob’s Big Adventure from 2010. See, that’s old and we changed it to Billybob for The Twitterz. Students are complaining and we have an ad going out in 7 minutes, 26 seconds to promote it. Can you fix that and make it show up first?”

Maintaining good content is an expensive process, both in time, labor, and money. Not maintaining a bunch of crappy content is sort of like running up a balance on your credit card. When the bill comes due, the interest will eat you alive.

Employee turnover

If you aren’t, imagine you’re an army of one. You leave. What happens? How many keys do you hold? How well documented are your processes? You’re the motor, the driving force behind all the important web strategies. Do you think you’ll be replaced by someone just as motivated? Just as skilled? Just as willing to work until midnight without logging comp time? Will you be replaced at all? When we experience turnover in our offices, that’s bad enough (Though I do believe the applicant pool for our positions is getting better with age). If you are one of the keystone’s of your web office, how many months of productive web time are lost when you leave? That’s a tough blow to come back from, and on it’s own can have high costs for your overall site quality.

...knows a thing or two about being an army of one...

What if your boss or VP left and was replaced with someone that had a different vision of strategy for the web? What if that person decided to gut years worth of hard work and cycle building (because they don’t trust their tools – see below). How would that impact your ability to maintain the site?

An even bigger challenge is if you have a hundred or more people across campus contributing to the site, how quickly are they getting recycled? Are you even told when these folks leave? Do you keep track of the attrition rate? 10%? 15%? More? And these aren’t usually people that know the web, love it, and breathe it like you and I do. They’re the ones calling with questions about putting an image on the right side of a page. Nevermind their writing skills. With constant turnover, and typically mediocre training programs in place, you never get to train a solid foundation of thoughtful, understanding web contributors. In cases where you do, then you stay awake at night worrying about private sector competition for those people. This is also the nightmarish trick that will turn an apparent short term success into a long term failure.

The idea of a sort of “critical mass” in your editor pool where they become somewhat self sufficient and able to help each other and stay productive, for most universities, is a myth.

Wrong chain of command

I was at my last university for going on six years. In that time, I’d had three bosses (four if you count the time I had to answer to the VP directly for a few months until my current boss was hired), four offices, and have been part of three different organizations: OIS (our version of IT), Marketing, and finally Marketing and Communication (an evolved and restructured version of #2). This is an incredibly common story. When you can’t stay in one place for more than a couple years, it’s nearly impossible to get solid processes and cycles in place – they always end up disrupted and thrown into disarray by the changes.

Where do you keep yours at?

Ultimately, none of these kinds of offices – IT, marketing, development, PR, etc – are the right place for us. It’s a responsibility shell game. Web communications is a system and discipline unto itself now, and it needs to be recognized, authorized, and resourced as such. Anything else is hiding it in a silo, where it’s efforts and priorities are colored by the strategy of whomever is in charge. Moving it around doesn’t solve that issue, it only changes the flavor.

Hint: if it tastes purple, see a doctor.

We’re too established

Higher ed is changing. Slowly, but surely. Many times, it’s a tortoise and hare race, and more than once the slow pace of higher ed has been a good buffer to my benefit. But, the cycle of change isn’t coordinated enough. Our foundations are old, but solid. There are cracks, but it’s not compromised yet. Look at the pyramids. They show their age, they’re a little worse for wear after the weather, the wars, and the abuse. They also aren’t going anywhere. This is the source of much infighting in higher ed. I am not a fan of decentralized web management. I feel it breeds resentment and accomplishes little success in its results. People use decentralization as a “solution” to the “We’re too damn big” problem without consideration for how it actually functions. It’s a mismatch in the problem-solution process.

The thing is, we’re too “established” in the politics of how we got here. One of the main reasons we let everyone have a site and do their own editing isn’t because its good for the users, or good for the content, but because we don’t want the headache or the bad press for trying to take the capability away. What the hell kind of screwy strategy is that? It’s just yet another shell game – this one of responsibilities. Creating any kind of good content strategy is going to require changing the way people work on your web site, and that is diametrically opposed to the long standing tradition of “this is my site, I’ll edit it how I like.” Culture, by very use of the word, is a hard thing to change.

Sometimes you just gotta rip the band-aid off.

Looking too much at startup success

I try to read a lot. Sometimes I’m a bit more successful at that than other times. One of the huge constants I see though is that a lot of the success stories we look to outside higher ed come from tech and startup firms. MailChimp is a great example. Their Voice and Tone site is a thing to behold. And you can’t have that. Not yours. Tech firms get it. They understand the role web plays in their business strategy, and they address it properly as a result. Start ups (tech or otherwise) have the advantage of building their processes correctly from the ground up. Instead, we’ve bolted it all on, like that guy in town driving the 1989 Buick Reatta painted in gold fleck with a plywood spoiler (I REALLY wish I had a picture of that right now to share). We can’t use those examples because we aren’t them. And as I previously stated, we can’t even look within our own industry many times because schools are too unique – we can’t just replicate others’ success by rinsing and repeating.

Part of finding success is making sure your solutions fit your problems. We share many commonalities from school to school, but every problem we face requires some introspection and tailoring. It’s okay to get input from colleagues elsewhere to make sure you’re on the right track, but make sure you’re working towards your own solutions.

Focused on finish lines, not cycles

Pretty simple here. We have to get the people we work with or through to understand that the maintenance processes of a website are not something that is ever complete. It’s a cycle. You’re always doing it, and it’s not something you can ultimately step back from and wash your hands of.

That’s what she said?

We don’t trust our tools

One of the biggest and most common complaints I hear from web folks at other schools is the lack of internal validation they get on campus. They offer an opinion, are ignored, and end up having to cede to the HiPPO. For some reason that still defies much logic, we hire experts (or at least people that could be trusted with giving the advice), but administration has no interest in taking their feedback with more than a grain of salt. Slowly, I see this changing, but it’s still part of the “We’re too established” principle that will be around for a while. The web is built around challenging old world concepts, so answers to questions usually involve risk and speed (not the drug. Hopefully), and that’s uncomfortable for higher ed administration.

So what do we do? We pay consultants to tell us what we already know to slow things down a little. Something we already knew gets drawn into a six month ordeal. And when it’s all said and done, we still don’t empower our people and validate that they were right all along.

This is why our “recipes for success” often come out looking burnt and tasting like purple.

So, What Do We Do?

I hate griping for so long without offering some kind of solution, because that’s not very productive (though I know you just sat in your office for 30 minutes reading this, so don’t gripe to me about productivity. Also, I’m sorry I’m such a long winded jerk). You can boil this down to some pretty simple takeaways.

1. Wake up – stop running the rat race. Acknowledge the fact that more than likely, the way you’re doing things isn’t really a plan for long term success. You need to be clear headed and have a strong vision if you’re going to…
   
2. Get high level buy in – your boss, your boss’s boss, and your school president. Sit down with them mano-a-mano and sell your process to them. Change has to come from within, but it won’t come at all if you don’t have some big iron behind you. This will also help you as you build towards acquiring proper authority and chain-of-command.
3. Prepare for pain – if you’re going to make real headway and do some actual good, you’re going to need to piss some people off. In the words of Colin Powell: “Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off.”
4. Identify the right problems – one of the biggest mistakes we make is not really understanding the root of our troubles, which then leads to…
5. Identify the right solutions – decentralization is not a solution. Make sure you have properly matched a solution to the problem you need to solve. And make sure it fits your organization and needs. Understand that all the articles and workshops in the world won’t prepare you completely for what you’ll need to do at your school to get things on the right track.
6. Set the right goals – because this is how you’ll validate all the pain and build a new foundation using the right models.
7. Do epic shit – seriously. Break the establishment. Smash that egg and make a delicious, digital omelet.

I apologize if you expected a bit more than some simple platitudes regarding how to get your web content on the right track. I can’t offer more than that, because the real solution is just doing a lot of hard work. And I don’t care if you call it content strategy, or marketing strategy, or web marketing strategy, or whatever. There are a million right ways to do this, and only a few wrong. The key is to work your butt off towards the goals you set, and you can’t go wrong. We’re all in the same game and playing for the same team. The difference is how you come at steps 4, 5, and 6 above. Focus on what will work for you and make your plans successful.

Photo credit: Some rights reserved by QuinnDombrowski

Related posts:

1. Content Strategy is More than Marketing Strategy
2. #heweb10 – Content Strategy: Key to Effective Web Content
3. Live Blogging AMA Higher Ed: The New Power: Social Media Marketing Strategy for Higher Education

If you haven’t heard of edSocialMedia then it’s about time you were introduced.  I’ve known Peter Baron, a partner at edSocialMedia, for a few years now.  They have done some great things for the independent school market and have been expanding into the higher education market slowly.  They have an upcoming day long conference and the Community Manager, Madeline Senkosky, was gracious enough to answer a few questions about the upcoming event and their general purpose.  Enjoy.

Visit the edSocialMedia Summit to learn more about the event

Q: Tell us a little about edSocialMedia, how it was founded, the direction you want to go and how the summit fits into everything.

A: edSocialMedia was founded in 2008 as a project between four friends who had been in the education industry for several years. After seeing the power of social media in its early forms, Steve Ritchie, Peter Baron, Ernest Koe and Antonio Viva set out to provide a space for educators to learn how to use social media effectively while staying current with the social media trends and best practices. As our mission evolved, edSocialMedia became the institute for educators to learn and explore social media in education. We have now trained more than 1,100 people in our social media bootcamps, and more than 60 contributors consistently write for our blog at edsocialmedia.com.

The edSocialMedia Summit fits into the scope of edSocialMedia as it is our big event that has evolved from the practiced past of professional development workshops. The scale of the Summit is grander in the sense that it cultivates a conference-like approach to social media from big-named presenters. It brings together seven compelling speakers who have seen success in their own methods by use of their approach in their own businesses. Each presenter will provide tangible examples that attendees can implement into their own social media strategies.

Q: The majority of people in higher education have limited time and money for conferences. What’s the most compelling reason that they should attend the edSocialMedia Summit?

A: We firmly believe the edSocialMedia Summit will be one of the best social media conferences in the country for 2012 because of two primary reasons: The first is our focus on giving back to the industry that supports us. We are donating 25% of the profits to local, education-focused charitable organizations. We truly believe that supporting organizations with the root of our mission is the best way to underwrite a cause for bringing together social media masters from all over the country.

Additionally, we think HigherEd professionals should attend the edSocialMedia Summit because the presenter list is one of the finest, new gatherings of speakers for the education market. We have top-notch presenters that have made a compelling name for themselves in their respective industries and are very excited to be presenting to an education-focused audience.

Q: Is the whole focus of this summit on social media?

A: The primary focus of the edSocialMedia Summit is centered around social media, but what will evolve from the Summit are conversations around how your organization can communicate better across all sectors of your community. Other important topics are sure to come into play such as marketing trends (specifically inbound marketing), videos, community building, fundraising and relationship cultivation. The reality is, anyone who has conversations with members of their community are sure to walk away with something they can implement in their office the very next day.

The other focus of the Summit, as we mentioned before, is to raise awareness for giving back to the communities that support each of us, which is why we are giving 25% of profits away.

Lastly, the Summit is also focused on networking HigherEd folks with fellow education colleagues. The format of the event will allow for several questions and conversations, which will lead to very personalized presentations. The coffee breaks and the space we have reserved are prime for connecting with people just like you, who are searching for more ways to build a strong community.

Q: What can attendees plan on taking away?

A: You can plan on taking away a novel of innovative ways that you can generate interest and conversation around their community. Brian Carter (@briancarter), best-selling author on Facebook, promises to deliver 99 ways that your school or organization can encourage your fans to listen and interact. Georgy Cohen (@radiofreegeorgy), founder of Crosstown Digital Communications and co-founder of MeetContent, is going to focus on how you can tap the resources of your community to craft a more accurate and authentic story for your institution.

Rand Fishkin (@randfish), the CEO of SEOmoz, is often dubbed as one of the best names currently in the inbound marketing and SEO space. Rand will talk about how organizations can best manage the creation and promotion processes for their social media content, including how to effectively use analytics to gain better traction. John Hill (@linkedinjohn), the Higher Education evangelist for LinkedIn, will talk about how organizations can leverage the connections of their alumni to make stronger resources for current students and development offices.

Andy Shaindlin (@alumnifutures), the Associate Vice President for Alumni Relations & Annual Giving at Carnegie Mellon University, will share his thoughts on how education and non-profit leaders can balance the weight of creativity in leadership roles. Erin Swanson (@explodingsoul), the marketing programs manager for Water.org (@water), is going to talk specifically about how non-profits can leverage their social networks to raise money for a great cause. Last, but not, least, Ian Symmonds (@symmonds) will talk about how organizations can empower video to show their story in a more compelling light. His tried and true examples will give several organizations a high-bar to strive towards.

All in all, each individual attendee will walk away with an abundance of ways they can elevate their social media strategies to create an active, giving community.

Q: Is this a one-time event or will there be more in the future?

A: We hope to incorporate this model into an annual event at several locations throughout the country. Since we’ve kicked off the inaugural event in San Francisco, we hope to being it back to the East Coast sometime in the near future.

Visit the edSocialMedia Summit to learn more about the event

Related posts:

1. Why Social Media Comes Last – Presentation from #edSocialMedia
2. Upcoming Bronto E-mail Marketing Webcast with this guy!
3. .eduGuru Summit Starts Tomorrow #eduGuruSummit

We had so much fun with the 2011 .eduSummit that we decided to host another one in early April.  The summit is April 10-11.  We couldn’t be more excited about the lineup of presenters and topics!  Once again we’re breaking it up into two days with one day focusing more on the marketing aspect and the other day focusing more on the technical side.  There should be plenty of great content for everyone on both days.

So check out the list of presenters and topics below.  Chances are if you follow this blog or the higher ed web industry then you probably know most if not all of our presenters.  If you don’t, I took the liberty of linking to their own bio pages about themselves.  If you would like to read the full description or get bios on any of our awesome presenters then check out the registration page.  Also we have a 20% special discount code if you want to go ahead and sign up early.  Use the following for the discount code — 20DOTEDUGURU –

Check out the Presenter Lineup & Topics and Sign Up Today!

What is the .eduSummit?

The eduSummit is a two day online webinar style conference.  We do an online conference because it provides lots of advantages including:

• Attending a conference online means no travel hassle
• Bring the experts live to your desktop
• Time spent on the road is better spent instead with family, friends, or in the office
• Sessions are developed to dive deeper into the material
• Ask questions directly to the speakers
• Can’t make it the day of the conference? Watch the recordings whenever you want!

Marketing Track Speakers – Tuesday, April 10, 2012

• 9AM CT – Don’t Be Afraid of Community Engagement by Robin Smail
• 10AM CT – Re-Imagine Content in Higher Education by Rick Allen
• 11AM CT - (re)Mix010gy by Michael Fienen
• 1PM CT – Admissions Fitness by Ashley Hennigan
• 2PM CT – Why Content Strategy is a Myth by Karlyn Borysenko
• 3PM CT – Lifetime Engagement Management by Fran Zablocki

Technical Track Sessions - Wednesday, April 11, 2012

• 9AM CT – The Future Friendly Campus by Dave Molsen
• 10AM CT – The 10 Minute WordPress Shortcode by Curtiss Grymala
• 11AM CT – You Don’t Need IT To Do That by Kyle James
• 1PM CT – Inside Web Video Marketing for EDU by Seth Odell
• 2PM CT – Serve the Needs of Prospective Students by Dave Marshall
• 3PM CT – Creating API’s for Mobile by Nick DeNardis

Check out the Presenter Lineup & Topics and Sign Up Today!

Related posts:

1. Announcing the .eduGuru Summit!
2. [Survey] The State of Outsourcing in Higher Ed, 2012
3. 5 Reasons You Should Sign Up For the .eduGuru Summit

If hindsight is 20/20, then college reviews from your school’s alumni are worth big pots of magical gold to your prospective students. Put yourself in their shoes (or their parents’):  Back when you were looking at colleges wouldn’t you have given anything to learn more about the schools you were interested in from the students themselves?

Before parents and students are setting foot on your campus for a tour, you can bet that they’re searching for reviews of your college online. Sure, you may have tons of awesome case studies, interviews, or testimonials from recent grads and current students on your website. But here’s the kicker: parents and students don’t always trust them!

Between being bombarded by glossy viewbooks and flashy admissions websites, your potential applicants are Googling for reviews of your college to sort out fact from fiction in their own minds. Just like using Yelp! to see what people are saying about the new restaurant in town, they’re going on third-party college review sites to get that coveted unbiased perspective.

So what can you do?

Google Shows More Reviews of Notre Dame

Do your homework first.

Search for college reviews on popular college search sites to see what people are saying about your school. You might even want to check your school’s Google places page by seeing what external review sites are automatically being aggregated. If you’re not seeing any reviews for your college on these sites that’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it means that there’s ample opportunity to start encouraging your students and alumni to leave their feedback and opinions.

Work with your alumni office.

If your admissions and marketing departments don’t communicate with your alumni office you’re missing out on tons of excellent collaborative opportunities. Suggest that in your next alumni newsletter that you include a recommendation and a link to leave a school review one of the third-party sites you’ve discovered. If your alumni office is active on social media (like they should be) you can request that they spread the word that way as well.

Don’t be shy to leave reviews yourself!

In some cases you don’t necessarily have to be a student or alumni to write a school review. For instance, StudentAdvisor accepts reviews from school faculty and staff members in addition to students and grads. Don’t just limit to your reviews to college review-specific sites either:  Why not share what you love about working at your school on Glassdoor, Yahoo Local! or Google Places?

Make it a yearly effort.

A lot can change at a college in just a few years. Parents and students searching for information will often put in the current year when searching to make sure they’re getting the most recent reviews. For example on our site we get plenty of search engine hits for “X name college reviews 2011″ or “University of Y reviews 2012″. If you notice that there haven’t been any new reviews on third-party sites of your college in over a year or so, it’s time to encourage your community to write some fresh ones.

Related posts:

1. The Credibility of College Info from Social Network Sites (or Lack Thereof)
2. sex…Sex…SEX! Now I Have Your Attention.
3. #heweb10 – Progressive Personalization for Alumni-Driven Sites

Dear John,

It’s not you, it’s me. At the same time, it almost seems oddly fitting that I tell you all this just before my birthday. 2011 was a somewhat complicated year for me, professionally. I released my book, dotCMS From the Ground Up, spoke at more events than I can remember, did about 25,000 miles in travel, accomplished some great research, and did the most consulting work of my career with other schools. It’s been an enormous amount of fun, but I’m also just very, very tired. Unlike Seth Odell, I like to sleep once in a while.

I started off 2012 with a plan. It was a grand plan, and one that seemed staged to really focus my work and help declutterfy my brain. We’re just a month into the year and that plan lie in ruins at my feet. It was not my intention, but when opportunity knocks, you need to at least open the door and have a chat. Which brings me to the point. Near the end of February, one month shy of six years, I will be leaving my current position as Director of Web Marketing of Pittsburg State University. It wasn’t an easy decision. The very opposite, actually. It was damn hard. And it was made all the harder because the company I will be going to work for is not related to higher ed. I have accepted a position with the marketing and design staffing firm Aquent, where I will be their senior interactive developer (translation: I’m gonna be doing some crazy cool things with dotCMS). While this means my contributions to higher ed may begin to wane, this affords me the opportunity to substantially increase my role within the dotCMS user community. On the flip side, I’m extremely interested to see if there’s some way I can connect Aquent’s unique ability for channeling talent with higher ed’s need to be more flexible and nimble in web design and marketing. We shall see.

Though I may have a new boyfriend, believe me when I say I am far from gone. I plan to still occasionally contribute, albeit in a somewhat more editorial fashion, to .eduGuru (I have a couple posts in the queue as we speak that still need to come out). I’ll also retain my role at nuCloud, which you’ll undoubtedly see me peddling the wares of at some of the standard higher ed conferences. Finally, I also plan to remain active on UWebD. You can take me out of higher ed, but you can’t take higher ed out of me.  For now, it looks like my adventure is just going to lead me down another path for a while, and I’m looking forward to a lot of new and different challenges. In the mean time, PSU is going to have a need for a talented web person, and I’d love to see one of you take that on. It’s a great place to work, and a fantastic opportunity for someone that wants to really leave a mark on an organization. For the record, at least for now I will be staying in the area, and I anticipate keeping myself available in case the school needs any support with some of the more technical, harder to replace components of the job. So you wouldn’t be without a sounding board if you had questions about how things were set up. Think about it, and if you’re curious about the position, feel free to shoot me some questions and I’ll answer them best I can. I’ll share out the job listing once it’s posted.

I’m not the first, and I won’t be the last to say that this community of people is something I’m damn proud to be a part of. I’ve made a hell of a lot of good friends here, and I plan to make a lot more still. In the mean time, stay in touch. You know where to find me: Twitter, Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn.

Don’t ever stop being awesome. Ever.

Yours in respect, yours in friendship,

Michael Fienen

No related posts.

Jason was recently telling us about the launch of their “Connect with UNH” page.  Managing multiple social media channels across campus that many of you face daily.  Their approach is very ambitious and I asked him to share it with our readers.  Enjoy!  –@kylejames

The University of New Hampshire offers over 100 majors across multiple campuses and enrolls over 14,500 students who engage in daily discovery … including the use of social media. Research shows that social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter continue to grow.  By using these new communication tools, we can better reach out as a higher education institution and give our school a louder voice by creating engagement between the school and the student body, staff, alumni, and surrounding community. Because social media is so powerful and enormous, UNH recently hired me to coordinate and monitor all its social networks and to evaluate the tools that work best.

UNH has many social media outlets, both official and unofficial. Currently, there are more than 30 affiliated Twitter handles, 120 affiliated Facebook pages and groups, 12 affiliated YouTube channels, not to mention our official Foursquare, Google+, Flickr, and LinkedIn Alumni pages. There is also a growing collection of both departmental and student-run blogs. There was no central place to find all these social pages, which led to our new webpage, “Connect With UNH.” By creating this page, we’ve connected all our social networks tab by tab and ask that any program, department, club, or student organization that is not listed send us their information, which gets added to the appropriate spot on the index.  It’s categorized and well-ordered, making it easy to navigate and find just what social page you’re looking for at UNH.  “Connect With UNH” is evolving. We receive updates and requests everyday, so our social media list continues to grow.

Visit the Connect with UNH page to check it out

Just because social media is easily available, you cannot assume everyone at your institution uses it or is using it properly.  Since I began my new position as social media coordinator at UNH, I have met individually with various departments and organizations looking for tips and tricks when creating a Twitter account or promoting an event through Facebook or Foursquare. I spend a lot of my time monitoring our social networks, creating content, and trying to engage our audience, but I also make time to discuss social media around campus, offering advice through tutorials and on-site training.

If I can offer any advice for monitoring social media in higher education, I would invest in one of the many social media monitoring tools like Hootsuite, Radian6, Sprout Social, Meltwater Buzz, or Tweetdeck.  Most of these platforms offer a free trial, which can simply be downloaded from the respective websites. Trust me, these tools make it easier to stay organized and allow you to integrate many of your social media channels for easier monitoring, engagement, and messaging.

Related posts:

1. Reining in the outliers for a university-wide cohesive social media presence
2. Is Social Media A Fad? Social Media Revolution Video
3. The Power of “Social” in Social Media