Keep Reading]]> In the quiet days before Christmas, revered marketing guru Seth Godin excreted this pile of words, in which he purported to offer marketers tactical advice on how to make a website.

Needless to say, among the web professionals I know, the article caused a bit of a stir. Godin introduces the piece as a guide to “how marketers can work with their teams, their bosses and their developers to get the site they want built with less time and less hassle.” This, in theory, would be great. Increasingly, we are finding that we need to look at the web holistically in order to build successful user experiences that drive business objectives. That includes developers, designers, content professionals, clients, stakeholders and, sure, marketers.

But he proceeds to offer no such guide. Instead, Godin gives the marketer a guide to how to go in a cave, surf the internet, and vomit the things one finds and likes into a developer’s lap before scurrying away.

The tips Godin recommends — browsing websites to find site features you like, mocking up site concepts using a medium with which you are familiar, refraining from diving into code — are not terrible as parts of a process, or as complements to or inspirations for parts of a process. But as a process in and of themselves? Absolutely terrible advice.

In creating this stellar guide, Godin neglects a couple of important things:

1) GOALS. This omission is kinda funny, given that he is supposedly writing this for the “goal-oriented non-professional.” See, a website is not an artistic exercise. It is not purely a visual creation. It is a means to an end. It is a strategic business asset. With that in mind, why do you need a website? What are you hoping to achieve for your business or organization? With whom do you wish to communicate? What actions do you wish for these people to take? These are the questions that the “goal-oriented non-professional” should be answering, not “which shopping cart module do I like the most?”

2) CONTENT. Content is the vessel in which we encapsulate our best answers to the above-listed questions. You can’t find the best content for your website by browsing other websites. And the developer to whom you hand off your Keynote arts-and-crafts project is not going to have it, either.

Just a couple of minor things, you know?

The Elders of the Internet Would Never Stand For It

Breaking news: making internet is hard.

Related news: I am fairly confident that Seth Godin has never actually been within a hundred yards of a modern website development process.

The day after Godin published his screed, Robin Sloan wrote about his realization that writers like himself cannot be tasked with making websites that will succeed in today’s mobile, multi-screen web world.

Today I don’t think the amateur’s best effort is good enough. We as internet users have less patience and less charity for janky, half-broken experiences. (Which is quite an evolution, because the whole internet used to be a janky, half-broken experience.) That’s unfortunate for me, and other amateurs of my approximate skill level, because that’s really the only kind we can muster.

But you know who can totally craft an experience that works flawlessly on a phone, a tablet, a laptop, and a rice cooker? The team that made Medium. Other teams like it. In a word: professionals.

Sloan is right on. In crafting a successful web experience, everyone holds a piece of the puzzle. The answer does not solely live in one person’s brain, be it the marketer or the designer or the developer. Now more than ever, the web is the result of a partnership of skills. That partnership thrives on collaboration, mutual respect, and ongoing learning.

A week and a half before Godin’s post, digital marketing luminary Mitch Joel blogged about the importance of minimalism in an online marketing experience.

As complex as marketing has become, it is the simplicity of the brand message and product that wins. … The brands that are triumphant in the online world, are scaling back and making the experience as minimalistic as possible.

Thus, the marketer shouldn’t be clicking around websites, browsing functionality options. The marketer should be identifying (and ruthlessly refining) the core messages and the top goals, then working with the web professionals to create a website supporting them.

“Marketers are going to have to adjust their attitudes and perceptions as to what marketing can be in this world of the new digital minimalism,” says Joel. “Think minimalism. Think bare. Think simple. We often toss these words out into the marketing zeitgeist without really appreciating the amazing opportunity that we have – as a marketing industry – to truly add value to the consumer’s life.”

Now, that’s twice I’ve mentioned a “partnership of skills” or “working with the web professionals.” But what shape does that collaboration take? I recently published an article for HighEdWeb LINK about responsive web design (RWD), and one of the themes that came up with each person I interviewed was the fact that the traditional waterfall approach (design, development, content) was quickly falling by the wayside.

RWD – which is arguably becoming the standard for developing a modern web experience – changes how developers, designers, content professionals, and even clients work together. The process is much more collaborative and concurrent, and the heart of it lies with the content. What are we trying to say? What are we trying to get people to do?

These are questions essential to the development of a modern website that someone like, say, our infamous marketer is well equipped to help answer. No coding required (though sometimes it’s fun and even useful to learn), but they will have to sit down with the designer and developer and, together, figure out how to make the website reflect those messages and goals.

In her response to Godin’s post, Amanda Costello phrased it well:

Building sites is usually a team project, and making an effort to understand what your teammates do and what they know will make the project go a lot smoother. You’ll build respect for each other’s specialties and knowledge. Respect doesn’t prevent conflict, or remove all misunderstandings, problems, and barriers. But it makes working with them, and building awesome websites, a whole lot better.

Working with developers and the like is apparently a scary prospect for Seth Godin. But I promise, Seth, it’s not that bad. It’s actually kind of awesome.

And Another Thing…

It wasn’t enough for Godin to share these blessed insights. Despite the lack of comments on his blog or a meaningful Twitter presence, word of the criticism must have reached his ears, because the next day he filed a retort entitled “True professionals don’t fear amateurs.”

“The best professionals love it when a passionate amateur shows up. The clarity and intelligence of a smart customer pushes both client and craftsman to do better work,” says Godin. “If you’re upset that the hoi polloi are busy doing what you used to do, get better instead of getting angry.”

(Also, says Godin, “Talented web designers don’t fear cloud services.” It’s true. I don’t know a single front-end web developer who lives in fear of Netflix’s shift to on-demand streaming movies. Related: what?)

So, what Godin says is very true, but I would be careful in how we characterize “passionate.” If you mean someone who has thought through their goals and knows what they want their website to achieve; is curious about how things work, willing to learn, and asks smart questions; is committed to measuring the effectiveness of those solutions; is willing to work with and learn from fellow professionals in the digital space; and who knows what they don’t know, then yes, bring on the passionate amateur.

But if you mean someone who thinks they know all the answers better than anyone else because they filled up their browser cache with click-around “research,” then I think you’re working with the wrong definition of “passionate.”

You know what else true professionals don’t fear, Mr. Godin? The things they don’t know. The things they don’t understand. True professionals never stop learning and are never afraid to admit when there’s something new to learn. In fact, it energizes them. True professionals are both eternal students and eternal teachers.

To this end, Mr. Godin, you would be best served asking a few questions about how exactly websites get built nowadays. I am sure that this knowledge would serve your business well. But until you start asking those questions, I kindly ask that you step away from the internet. I’m sure there’s a keynote to give or a book to write somewhere in the meantime.

Keep Reading]]> On Nov. 29, 2011, I walked out of the stable, comfortable job I had held for more than seven years and toward an uncertain future that would become whatever I made of it.

While I loved Tufts and the work I did there, I reached a point where I needed a “what’s next.” For a variety of reasons, the best option available was to create it. So I started my own consulting business, Crosstown Digital Communications.

I wish the song “It’s Time” by Imagine Dragons had been out when I made this change, because it sums up my perspective at the time perfectly:

So this is what you meant when you said that you were spent
And now it’s time to build from the bottom of the pit
Right to the top, don’t hold back
Packing my bags and giving the academy a rain check

I don’t ever want to let you down, I don’t ever want to leave this town
‘Cause after all, This city never sleeps at night

It’s time to begin, isn’t it?
I get a little bit bigger, but then I’ll admit I’m just the same as I was
Now don’t you understand that I’m never changing who I am

Truth be told, I had no idea what the hell I was doing. I had a bunch of solid leads and a couple of initial projects — plus, I was still part-time at Tufts through mid-January — but despite this cushion, I still felt overwhelmed. Did little ol’ risk-averse, change-fearing me really just throw away all of my security and take this huge leap? What on Earth was I thinking?

December was not easy, I admit. I was learning a whole new way of working, and I came down with a cold that I would fight on and off until the spring. I was dispirited, at times. But I kept plugging ahead, closing out the year with a restorative week in England visiting family for Christmas.

When I came back, 2012 was a blank slate, and I finally began getting my bearings in the strange new world in which I had planted myself. So, what follows is the breakdown of the year in which I would turn my life upside-down — and perhaps right-side-up again

• I visited 16 states – New Hampshire, Nevada, New Mexico (twice), Texas (twice), New York (four times), California, Maine, New Jersey, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Illinois, Arkansas, Ohio, Wisconsin and Rhode Island — plus the District of Columbia.
• I spent 68 days away from home – that’s 18.6% of the year on the road. Only 13.2% of that time (nine out of 68 days) was personal/vacation travel – the rest was for professional reasons.
• A few of the vacation days were spent with Rick in Las Vegas, as part of a contest he won via Twitter from Old Spice. A unique experience, to be sure, and probably the nicest hotel accommodations we will ever have.
• I attended SXSW Interactive for the first time since 2006. The conference changed a lot in six years, and while its was both over- and underwhelming at times, I had a blast and am glad I got to give SXSW one last hurrah.
• To date, Crosstown has worked with 11 colleges and universities on projects including social media strategy, online news assessment and strategy, editorial consulting, copywriting, and group presentations/workshops. I’m so proud of the work I got to do and in awe of how much I had the chance to learn.
• Meet Content continued to grow. We launched a newsletter, began hosting webinars (both free and paid), hung out at Confab, spoke at a few conferences, announced Confab Higher Ed (coming in November 2013!), and churned out some content I’m really proud of.
• I spoke at 12 conferences: PRSACHE, NCSRMR, EduWeb, HighEdWeb, PSUWEB, NERCOMP, SUNYCUAD, UTexas System Seminar, edSocialMedia Summit, Content Strategy Summit, Gilbane Boston and TEDxSomerville. That doesn’t include talks developed and delivered for clients. So, yeah. Lots of public speaking. I still love it.
• That’s right – I gave a TED talk. While I emerged from the experience somewhat disillusioned with the TED mystique, I am still very proud of the talk I delivered — while in the throes of a relapse of my never-ending cold, no less.
• I developed and delivered workshops for the first time. I created four workshops for one client, delivered over the course of two days, and I gave another workshop at HighEdWeb. It was a uniquely challenging experience, and one I would love to repeat in the future.
• I wrote a book chapter! mStoner’s “Social Works” comes out later this year, but being asked to write a chapter for it was definitely a highlight of 2012.
• Um, I GOT PREGNANT. Woohoo! Baby’s due April 2 — we’ve got a blog and everything. Interestingly, I found out I was pregnant at a HighEdWeb regional conference, and I’ll be attending another regional two weeks before my due date. Such is my life.
• And, in the end, I came back to higher ed. In mid-October, I began a job as director of online content at Suffolk University. Lots of challenges and lots of opportunity. It’s great to be back at an institution, especially one going through such a transformation. Good stuff lies ahead.

Sure, the year was filled with leads that didn’t work out, proposals (for both projects and speaking) that didn’t get accepted, and jobs I applied for but did not get. But it was also filled with more than I ever hoped or expected to learn — about my field, my industry, and myself.

I have a deeper understanding of my experience at Tufts, and working with a range of different types of schools has given me a broader perspective of higher education. These realizations, I believe, are serving me well at Suffolk and will continue to serve me well as my career progresses. And it was an education I could have only received by jerking myself away from my stable, reliable job and into something untested and new.

Coming Home Again

I realize that I am fortunate. My first year of consulting was successful, not just in terms of experiences and takeaways but also financially. I did not go back to work at a university because my business was failing — in fact, it was just the opposite. I went back because what I learned the most in my year of consulting was not so much about communications, but about organizations, leadership and strategy. And in order to go where I wanted to go in my career, I needed to be back at an institution, to apply those lessons and keep learning new ones. I wanted to belong to an institution again so I could feel tethered to a mission and do it justice by effecting change from within.

And, truth be told, as much as I suffer from chronic wanderlust and love traveling, I realized that spending 18.6% of the year away from home was not sustainable — not right now, anyway. I remember deplaning at Logan after returning from HighEdWeb and realize that, for the first time in a long while, I did not know when I would be back. It was an odd feeling.

Pretty Good Year

I look back through my Google Calendar for the past year, and I feel tired — it’s hard to believe I crammed that much into 366 (thanks, leap year!) days. But I did it. And it’s not just the volume of destinations or workload, but the context in which they transpired.

I started Crosstown having no idea what the hell I was doing, and to be fair, I don’t set Crosstown aside thinking that I’ve become some sort of expert consultant and business owner. Far from it. But I figured it out as I went along. I tried new things, I did old things better, and I did things that scared the shit out of me. I made a few mistakes, and I notched a few wins. I learned. I grew. I changed. But I kept moving forward — and ultimately, I succeeded.

In short, what 2012 taught me is that I can do anything. So bring it, 2013. I’m ready for you.

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Me wearing a Suffolk University t-shirt in high school. The pic is worn from being in my husband's wallet for years during high school/college.

When I left Tufts University last fall and started Crosstown, it was because I wanted to help other universities improve the way they told their stories on the web. I felt there were tremendous opportunities to learn and do good work just waiting out there. So I set off in search of them.

Boy, did I find them. My brain has been stretched six ways to Sunday, both by reflecting on my experience at Tufts and tackling new, challenging projects for clients. I’ve also had the opportunity to see how a range of universities, large to small, manage their communications, which has been incredibly enlightening and informative.

It’s been a successful, fulfilling and rewarding year, to say the least.

But while I have been blessed with the opportunity to learn and do good work, there’s been something missing. Indeed, a lot of the learning I’ve been doing has been not only about the subject matter of my field, but self-discovery around what makes me happy, challenged and fulfilled as a professional.

I soon realized what I missed. I missed being part of a team, sure. But more importantly, I missed being part of a community. I missed feeling invested in a mission. I missed feeling invested in a project — or a strategy — beyond the end of a contract.

In short, I missed caring about something bigger than myself.

A Homecoming, of Sorts

While I grew up in South Florida, I was born in Boston, spending the first two years of my life living on Beacon Hill. Before we moved to Florida, my mom finished up her bachelor’s degree (yep, she was an adult learner) in English at the school just down the hill, Suffolk University, located in the heart of downtown. Class of 1981. In high school, I often wore a Suffolk t-shirt and sweatshirt — people didn’t know how to pronounce the name!

My mom tells me she used to wheel me down in my stroller to the classroom buildings, where I met her classmates and professors. In fact, one professor — Prof. Stuart Millner — met me and declared with certainty to my mom, “I can tell she has English major blood!” (Journalism, but close enough.)

They say we all go home again, and I guess this much is true, because next month I will begin working at Suffolk as the Director of Online Content.

I am beyond excited to be returning to the higher ed fold, and I couldn’t be happier to be doing it at Suffolk. It’s a dynamic school with a smart perspective on the web, a savvy staff of communicators, and a ton of opportunities to do good work and learn new things — and that’s a magic combination. Suffolk is home to a community I am thrilled to join and a mission I am honored to serve.

As for Crosstown, that obviously takes a backseat, though I’ll still have limited availability for work or speaking engagements. And don’t worry, Meet Content will continue to grow and publish unabated — after all, we’ve still got a lot to talk about when it comes to web content in higher ed.

But right now, my main focus is on helping Suffolk tell its story. I look forward to walking around and beginning to learn what that story is. One of my stops will certainly be Prof. Millner’s office — no stroller necessary, this time around.

Keep Reading]]> One of the themes of my presentation “Storytelling as a Framework for Higher Ed Web Marketing” is that we in higher ed are in the business of celebrating ordinary people doing extraordinary things. The feats of the NASA scientists who orchestrated last night’s landing of the Mars Curiosity rover certainly fall under that category.

What’s remarkable – beyond, you know, lowering a rover to the Martian surface with a skycrane – is how NASA told that story. They did it with amazing content that informed, entertained and engaged a rapt online audience (even at 1:30AM EDT on a Sunday night) with not just personality but also humor and drama. (Tim Nekritz wrote a great blog post this morning talking about how they expertly leveraged shared experiences and the real-time web.)

No photo or it didn’t happen? Well lookee here, I’m casting a shadow on the ground in Mars’ Gale crater #MSL twitter.com/MarsCuriosity/…

— Curiosity Rover (@MarsCuriosity) August 6, 2012

But most importantly, their content had a heaping dose of awe. Through videos, tweets, live-streams and blog posts, NASA conveyed unabashed acknowledgment of the fact that the events transpiring were absolutely amazing, reflecting a very human longing for knowledge and thrill of discovery. And that, to me, was one of its strengths.

Why So Serious?

I couldn’t help but think about higher education (as I often do) and how we talk about research. We want to own our research accomplishments. We want to be noticed because of them, in order to attract funding, faculty, students and partnerships. In doing so, we often think organizationally, clinging to journal citations, jargon and internal priorities in shaping how we communicate about research. Research, after all, is a very serious thing.

But as I read about Curiosity – a highly important scientific undertaking with not just societal impact but also very real, hard science behind it – I wondered why we in higher ed can’t talk about research with the same level of personality, (appropriate) humor and downright inspirational quality that NASA employs. Research is serious business, sure, but it’s also important and awe-inspiring and creative and, sometimes, beautiful. We could be covering a technology that will help save lives on the battlefield, or a treatment for a rare disease that gives thousands of sufferers hope, or environmental analysis that will renew a community. These are amazing things that matter, and our faculty and students are diligently pursuing these solutions every day in the lab across the quad.

Sure, we need to write for the grant funding agencies, and sure, we need to write for the tech transfer partnerships. But if we’re trying to convey to the world how we are relevant, essential and innovative, can’t we find a way to retain that sense of awe in our communications? To capture some of the secret sauce that kept people up way past their bedtimes last night?

Telling the Story of our Research

Employing some of the basic elements of storytelling can help enliven our research coverage while embracing that sense of awe. Just look at the drama pervading the above “Seven Minutes of Terror” video (while still conveying the science and showing off some of the engineers behind the mission) and the quirky character of the (absolutely awesome) @MarsCuriosity Twitter account. Even NASA’s tagline for the mission, “Dare Mighty Things” (borrowed from a quote by Theodore Roosevelt) brands the initiative with historical significance, making it feel like just the latest chapter in an ongoing narrative of American ambition and accomplishment.

As if we needed more drama, NASA is facing major budget cuts. Their need to demonstrate relevance and value is urgent. And what is one of their key strategies for doing so? Telling (and owning) their story, of course, through smart and savvy use of various content tools at their disposal, while making it something in which we could all participate and be invested. For a cost of $7 per American, they gave us a hell of a show – and the curtain has really just gone up.

True, we may not be landing rovers on Mars at our university. (Or maybe we are – hat tip to Kyle Judah.) But we’re doing things that matter. Can we find a way to inspire and engage in our research coverage the way that NASA has done?

Do you have an example of higher ed research coverage that not only informs and educates but also inspires and engages? Please share in the comments!

Keep Reading]]> On July 25, I was pleased to present “Where Strategy Meets Serendipity: A Framework for the Thoughtful Creation and Maintenance of Social Media Content” at the Noel-Levitz National Conference on Student Retention, Marketing and Recruitment (NCSRMR). The slides are below.

Keep Reading]]> Recently, I’ve been playing around with various options for scheduling social media postings. After poking at Buffer and Timely, I caught up with many of my peers in falling in love with IFTTT (If This Then That).

IFTTT a smart-smart-smart service that allows you to cook up deceptively simple looking cross-posting “recipes.” For example, if I tweet a link via XYZ account, that trigger the same link being posted to my LinkedIn profile. My top accomplishments are a couple of recipes that allow me to use Google Calendar for scheduling content and, depending on which field of the event listing contains certain elements of the content (specifically, the text tease and the link), post to a Twitter account and a Facebook page accordingly. Magic! Content scheduled for each platform, with text appropriate to the medium.

While scheduling posts may make the real-time, always-on nature of social media seem like a piece of cake, it’s nothing more than an aid. Social media still needs you in order to succeed. If we use scheduling options smartly, though, we can both ease the burden on ourselves and make our hands-on presence more meaningful.

Here are what I’ve come to embrace as best practices around scheduling posts.

Be mindful of changing contexts

When you schedule posts, don’t adopt a set-it-and-forget-it point of view. Rather, set it and mind it. A fun, flip tweet scheduled for six hours from now will seem hopelessly ill-placed and ill-timed if, in the intervening time period, something dramatic happens on campus or out in the world.

This is one concern I have about services such as Buffer and Time.ly, which pick times for when to publish content. That outsourcing can mentally remove you, as the account manager, from the awareness of what’s going up where and when. Also, you know your audience, and you are the best person to gauge which audiences will be likely to pick up on certain types of content and when.

Don’t abdicate your real-time responsibilities

As I said above, post scheduling is an aid. It does not replace the essential role of your presence and engagement; it should complement those functions.

With that in mind, you should be prepared for real-time reaction and response to anything that you post. The danger of scheduling, say, a tweet that asks, “What is your favorite thing about summers on campus?” is that, if you’re not around to monitor and field replies, you might miss out on the opportunity to retweet, Storify or reply to responses while the conversation is still active. Or what if someone replies sarcastically, “My *favorite* thing is how the library closes at $#%@ing 5PM when some of us have summer classes!!1! What gives??”

Scheduling social media postings does not relieve us of our real-time responsibilities, so we should plan accordingly.

To each (platform) its own

Twitter has a 140-character limit. Tumblr is a short-form blog. Facebook is, well, Facebook. Each of these platforms is unique — not only in terms of format, but in terms of both audience and considerations for appropriate voice and tone. This means that we can’t write one block of text and blast it out to five different platforms. Keep the specifics of the service and your audience at top of mind at all times.

In addition to text, each platform has its own fields to consider beyond text – links, pictures, embeds, hashtags, mentions, etc. Will your auto-post to Facebook show up with the thumbnail that may help it stand out in the news feed crowd? Will posting with a bit.ly link obscure the link’s metadata in the resulting post? It’s worth testing such things before fully committing to a post scheduling regimen.

Your turn

These are just a few ideas that rise to top of mind for me. What are some other things to keep in mind when scheduling your social media postings?

Photo by alancleaver / Flickr Creative Commons

Keep Reading]]> On July 11, Stamats and HigherEdLive partnered to stream the annual TeensTALK panel discussion live from the Stamats Integrated Marketing Conference in Chicago, Ill. The discussion always yields frank and enlightening insights about higher ed web marketing and recruitment, straight from the mouths of college-bound high schoolers, and this year’s event was no different.

But one exchange in particular stuck with me. The moderator asked the students about their experience using college websites during their search. One student remarked that, upon visiting the website of a school he really liked, he found the website difficult to use, likening it to an “labyrinth.” His love of the school, however, was strong to enough to not let the dissatisfactory web experience sway him.

The school in question is lucky that this student loved them so much that its crappy website didn’t put a kibosh on the whole thing. Because what about the student who’s on the fence? Or loves them some, but not wholly? In those cases, the crappy web experience could mean the difference between an application and a bounce. The research bears this out. According to the 2011 Noel-Levitz E-Expectations report:

• 47 percent of prospective students (and 57 percent of parents) said “A bad experience on a school’s site may have some negative effect on my perception of the school”
• 17 percent of students (and 16 percent of parents) said “If I don’t find what I need on the school’s Web site, I’ll probably drop it from my list.”
• 20 percent of students (and 13 percent of parents) recalled an occasion when they disliked a school’s site so much that they removed it from consideration.

In my talk “Storytelling as a Framework for Higher Ed Web Marketing,” I emphasize that a holistic approach to web development is required to support a school’s narrative on the web. That means content, technology, design, user experience, the whole enchilada. All of these need to work together, in concert, in support of the brand and in the service of user needs. If one falls down on the job, the narrative is compromised, and no one’s needs are served.

But telling that story well extends far beyond the web.

Shut One Window, Open Another

Have you ever been in a car or a room where the air conditioning is on, but a window is open? “Close that window!” someone might holler. “You’re making the A/C work harder.” And it’s true. That open window is letting in heat, making the air conditioner work harder to cool the space to the designated temperature. It has more heat to overcome.

With a crappy website, you’re making whatever interest a site visitor has in your organization work harder. It’s like putting up a wall between you and your visitors and asking them to scale it. Sure, if you’re lucky, they like you enough to muddle through whatever labyrinthine web obstacle course you’ve laid before them. But even if they accomplish the task at hand and move on, that love is a bit taxed. The A/C may have achieved the target temperature, but it spent more energy to do so.

Every part of the university experience — from the landscaping to the website to the tour guide to the president — should support the school’s brand and story. They should all reinforce and support that idea of what the school is, means and stands for. A weak link compromises the story — it’s like finding out that pages 67 through 103 are missing from the book. Sure, I can get to the end, but I’ve missed something along the way, and I run the risk of abandoning the story entirely.

The connection that prospective students — or any target audience, really — have to our institution is a powerful, but also fragile tie. We can’t take it for granted, and we have to nurture it. We have to realize how all aspects of the university experience have the opportunity to either reinforce or sever that connection. For our purposes, that means always advocating for the value of a good web experience. Your web presence should reinforce and grow the interest a visitor has in your organization, not make it work harder to overcome the obstacles in its path.

By addressing the weaknesses on our end that are asking too much of our site visitors — prospective students among them — we are opening a window of opportunity whereby we can kindle that spark of interest into a heat that you won’t want to cool.

Photo by bixentro / Flickr Creative Commons

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New York Times newsroom, ca. 1942

Lately, everyone is talking about Aaron Sorkin’s new HBO drama, “The Newsroom,” where an anchor goes rogue and dares to, you know, report the news. I don’t get HBO, but I did have a chance to watch the pilot in my hotel room recently, and I know that if I did have HBO, I’d be hopelessly hooked. I wouldn’t even be writing this—I’d be off reading episode recaps and character analyses. (Good thing I don’t have HBO, huh? Sigh.)

See, when people ask me about my professional history, I have to be honest and admit that, as much as I love higher ed, my biggest career thrill was working in the newsroom of The Boston Globe. It’s a thrill I don’t think higher ed could ever top, if only because breaking news is an adrenaline rush like no other. (I wrote about it a little bit in this LINK article about being an ex-journalist in higher ed.)

My career has taken a few twists and turns since my days at the Globe, but I still find myself in the business of dealing with newsrooms—of a slightly different sort, of course. Organizations, in higher ed and beyond, are realizing that they can be their own publishers. They can own their stories and communicate them to the proper audiences in the most appropriate manner. Hooray! This is great!

But it’s also work. It takes a whole heck of a lot of process and protocol to make those stories shine, and a lot of that is work that the audience never sees or even knows about. The best newsrooms, in fact, are silent, invisible machines that churn our all sorts of relevant, targeted content without revealing their inner workings.

I learned a lot about this at the Globe, but also during my time at Tufts, where
I had a hand in multiple news efforts—including the university’s new integrated news site, Tufts Now, which was more of an exercise in editorial problem solving than it was a mere website.

A lot of people ask me about Tufts Now and say many nice things about it. “Great online newsroom!” And while I love hearing people say this, because I’m very proud of what our team accomplished, it compels me to clarify something:

A newsroom is not a website.

A newsroom does not end in .edu or begin with www.

Newsrooms are silent, invisible machines. Your news website is what that machine, all gears spinning and pistons churning, churns out.

A news website like Tufts Now may look great, but it’s like an iceberg—the true heft of it, warts and all, is hidden below the surface. Buried deep in that icy mass are the real successes—and the real challenges—that no one ever sees.

If you look beneath the surface and chip at the ice a little bit, what you’ll find is that a newsroom consists of calendars, editorial workflows, messaging priorities, incredible stories (of course), epic whiteboard sessions, CMS customization, usability testing and surveys, social media, community management—and much, much more.

But above all, a newsroom is people. You can have the best stories at your fingertips, and the most advanced equipment and technology at your beck and call, but if your people aren’t invested in either the value of telling those stories or the best process by which to tell them, all you’ve got is a machine that makes a lot of noise but creates nothing of lasting value.

I am extremely fortunate to have two opportunities this fall to talk about how to create these silent, effective story machines. One will be on Sept. 27 as a speaker at the inaugural Content Strategy Summit, an online event organized by Environments for Humans. Alongside incredible speakers such as Relly Annett-Baker, Margot Bloomstein, Karen McGrane, Melissa Rach, Ginny Redish, I am going to talk about content strategy for online news organizations. There are many unique content strategy considerations for organizations that find themselves publishing news content, and I hope to share some insight on a few of them. (Psst! You can get 20 percent off of this incredible lineup by using the code 20GEORGY when you register.)

In addition, I am presenting a post-conference workshop at HighEdWeb on creating an effective online newsroom. That’s going to be a fun, hands-on opportunity to learn what makes a higher ed newsroom work, diving into many of the same ideas I’ll share in my CS Summit presentation and that I’ve shared with many audiences and clients over the past year-plus. I’m really looking forward to that. (Psst! You can still sign up! And early bird registration for HighEdWeb is available until July 31.)

When I first spoke about this topic at HighEdWeb last year, my talk had a “Newsies” theme, and I feel that it’s appropriate to invoke the film (not the musical) again here. Because, like Davey says, “Headlines don’t sell papes. Newsies sell papes.” The stories don’t tell themselves. It’s up to us to tell them. So let’s figure out how best to get that done.

Photo by vitike/Flickr Creative Commons

Keep Reading]]> Back in March, I was honored to speak at the inaugural TEDxSomerville event on a topic that deviated from my normal fare about higher ed and digital marketing. I spoke about how I found my twin brother at age 23. Strange, but true! Curious? Watch the video and hear the whole story:

Keep Reading]]> On May 15-16, I had the pleasure of attending the finest content strategy conference in these here United States, Confab. Over on Meet Content, Rick and I posted a ton of coverage from the conference, including:

• Conference recap, including key takeaways for higher ed
• Coverage of the two higher ed-focused Confab presentations, including one on creating emotionally engaging content from Indiana University and one on implementing web governance at Normandale Community College, including exclusive video interviews and Storify recaps wi
• An in-depth, exclusive interview about content strategy in higher ed with Margot Bloomstein and Colleen Jones

That’s a lot! But I had a few additional ruminations that didn’t quite fit in that coverage. I shared a version of these thoughts at last week’s Content Strategy New England meetup, which featured other great recaps from Confab. (P.S. If you’re interested in content strategy, July is your month! Brain Traffic, the fab organizers of Confab, are declaring July to be Content Strategy Meetup Month. Find your meetup and go meet other folks who love to think about content. You don’t have to be a content strategist, per se — you just need to want to talk about content with fun, smart people.)

Anyhow, some of my spare thoughts on Confab:

Face the Future

One of my favorite quotes from last year’s Confab came from Erin Kissane, who observed, “It’s a weird time for publishing.” iPads, Kindles, time-shifted reading, you name it — there was a lot more to think about. But if was weird then, it’s downright bizarro now. Responsive web design has become a (nerdy) household word, we’re still figuring out mobile, our CMSes still often fail us and folks are buzzing about the value of a little thing called structured content.

Well, if last year’s Confab was an acknowledgment that the times they are a-changin’, this year we began to figure out what to do about it. From Cleve Gibbon’s discussion of CMSes and content architecture and valued tool to Karen McGrane’s clarion call of a closing keynote to embrace adaptive content, the whole conference was peppered with valuable, practical strategies and tactics for facing the future of publishing head on. It was just what we needed.

Journalism is Vindicated

I am a huge advocate of bringing lessons from online journalism to higher ed web publishing, so I was hearted to hear Kissane and McGrane relate to the field in their talks. In Kissane, which explored a wide range of ideas and inspirations from fields beyond content strategy, she talked about the promise of big data and how journalists are leading the way in using it to craft narratives.

Then McGrane shared a great nugget with the crowd as to why journalism is also ahead of the game when it comes to structured content — they’ve been publishing structured content for years. Hed, dek, lede, captions, cutlines, nut grafs—that’s structure, and that’s an inherent part of newsroom workflow.

Culture Club

When you think about it, the way you approach content reflects an institutional value. Multiple sessions at Confab addressed this. Fidelity’s Juli Smith talked about content strategy from an anthropological perspective — the need to observe the landscape, embrace the organizational values and understand the context in which the organization operates. She likened content strategy to terroir, the characteristics that geography, geology or climate lend to produce such as wine, coffee or tea.

From change agents to content sympathizers to the various relationships that ensure good work gets done, Smith reminded us that people are always at the heart of it. The other core component is process—even in content strategy, there are symbols and ceremony that are important.

Gerhard Arnhofer from Merck shared a case study of his company’s project to create Univadis, a portal for health professionals, out of a tangle of 20 CMSes, 250 content streams and no shared taxonomy. Such an effort, said Arnhofer, requires COURAGE—choosing partners carefully, outsourcing sensibly, understanding your environment, reusing what’s worth keeping, automating what you can, galvanizing your team, and evaluating your efforts.

For Arnhofer, building a culture around content meant ensuring only people who believed in content strategy were part of the team. In addition, he emphasized the value of alliances, information sharing and leveraging institutional knowledge for future efficiency.

There’s no single methodology for creating a content-centric culture, but it’s a huge priority. Content is a cultural value, and from authors to strategists to top level stakeholders, you need a shared vision in order to excel.

Preach It

While Confab is a somewhat elevated discussion of the ins and outs of content strategy, digital publishing and related concerns, the conference made me realize how fundamental those concerns are, and that I need to keep talking and learning about it. Why? Because it affects everybody. Content is a ubiquitous thing that people rely on heavily and invest in substantially.

The future of publishing a big deal. It matters a lot. Luckily, there’s a healthy community of people both in and out of higher ed who are constantly talking and presenting about this stuff. But we need to bust out beyond the echo chamber of fellow content nerds and preach the good word to the uninitiated. We need to advocate and evangelize. As I’ve charged audiences in the past, go tell it on the mountain! The future is depending on you.