If you’ve been doing this long enough, these conversations will all be familiar to you. If you’re new to this business or haven’t been in a client-facing role, you’ll do well to familiarize yourself with them.

1. Strategy Before Tactics

Are you sure you even need a new website? What do you mean you heard you needed a Facebook page? Let’s start from the beginning. Let’s start with your audience. Who are you trying to reach? What do you want them to do? If you can’t answer these basic questions, you might as well just start burning money. We’re not just pixel-pushers and code monkeys – we can help you make smarter decisions about what to do.

2. Measurement and Analytics

What gets measured gets improved. This isn’t 1995 – a hit counter isn’t going to cut it. There’s no excuse not to have at least Google Analytics (or something) tracking and providing information. What to look at? Let’s see – top content, pages with high bounce rates, referring sites, search keywords… the list goes on. Oh, and remember: reporting is not the same as analysis. So let’s figure out what we really need to measure (let’s call them KPIs) and set some goals.

3. Search Engines 101

Search engines are a major source of traffic. You can’t cheat the system. Search engines rank you based on the text on your site, the number of links pointing at your site, and the quality (or trustworthiness) of sites linking to you. It’s a little bit like dieting – there are tons of people selling shortcuts, and none of them are sustainable. You have to earn your ranking honestly, over time. Start by creating quality content that people want to read and the rest will come naturally.

4. Design Isn’t About You

I know you don’t like the [color | typography | photos | white space], but that’s ok – the site isn’t intended for you. You’re not your target audience. The design isn’t just about looking pretty (that’s a given). It’s actually about helping you achieve your goals. You remember your goals, right? We talked about them way back when we agreed on your strategy and decided what you were measuring. This design does that.

5. How to Write for the Web

Hey, great brochure. Really, it’s beautiful. But let’s cut to the chase: it’s not a website. You can’t just copy and paste that text into your website and expect it to work for you. Web visitors expect instant gratification. Don’t bury the lede. Make your copy scannable. And for goodness sakes, don’t ever put “Under Construction” on a page.

6. Web Isn’t the Same as Print

When you print something, you’re creating something permanent. You spend a lot of time editing, tweaking, proofreading, and painstakingly checking before you give the final go to the printer. Once it’s printed, it’s done – there’s no changing it. But the web isn’t a print piece. Every time a visitor hits our website is a new publication – a new chance to make a change, edit our content, and fix a typo. On the web, unlike print, you can’t let perfection get in the way of publication. The difference between 99% and 100% is a lot of investment and not a lot of return.

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On one hand, we have clients and want to help them get their projects done, make them happy, and accomplish their goals.

On the other, we have the institution. Even if we’re entirely client-driven and can run like a business, we’ve got priority assignments, rush jobs, and pet projects handed down from the top. These can disrupt any other projects we might have in the shop, and sometimes it’s hard to explain to clients with their own deadlines.

What are we to do?

Be a Leader

At AgencyND, we’ve started creating professional development opportunities for others on campus. We get out there and teach, we host speakers, and we organize webinars (like Karine’s Higher Ed Experts). We also work on providing tools and resources for communicators across campus, the people who really drive communications for the different departments and offices.

The goal is to raise the general level of expertise on campus and to position ourselves as experts so that people are comfortable coming to us, trust our advice, and generate new interest in the various topics we hit on – social media, analytics, strategic communications planning, email marketing, and so on.

Provide Service

Working to establish ourselves as leaders has had two effects: clients are smarter and they like us better.

Amazingly, our efforts in leadership seem to be changing the nature of some of our projects. People ask better questions, they pursue new ideas, and best of all, they share what they’re learning. They require less “client education” and fewer arguments over best practices. Generally, they seem more satisfied and certainly more understanding of our department.

The challenge that remains is being able to actually delivering on the service, with all this new interest and increased demand. But it’s a great problem to have.

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I’ve been doing a lot of hiring lately. This time around, I took careful note of the factors I considered as I reviewed resumes, interviewed candidates, and made decisions. If you’ve read the book Blink or had to pore over dozens or hundreds of job applications, you’ll know what I mean when I say that decisions are often made very quickly and sometimes arbitrarily. But it can help to be aware of your process and biases, which is what I’ve documented here.

1. Scan resumes

Look at the overall look and feel of the r̩sum̩. You can often tell where the applicant falls on the designer to programmer spectrum. See what info they put in the headers Рusually name, address, phone, email. If they have a Hotmail email address, go no further. Generally not good: comcast.net, sbcglobal.net. Better: gmail.com, yahoo.com. Best: Your own custom domain name. Why are some email addresses better than others? They tell me whether the candidate fits into the culture. A web candidate with his or her own website and domain name is more credible than one who slapped together a MySpace page and listed a Hotmail address.

2. Resume content

Check out their most recent two or three jobs and see what they’ve done. Look for specific URLs to check out. Scan their education, but I don’t really pay much attention to this. The best have a wider array of experiences with different web technologies and kinds of projects. The current job market is tough, so I don’t put a ton of weight on this. Some great people are jobless or have been working outside the industry and I won’t count it against them. Keeping busy and being involved are good signs of a self-motivated candidate.

3. Portfolio or sample links

This is a major part of how I decide. Quick glance at the sites or pages, and the next step is to View Source and check out the code. It takes five to ten seconds to see whether it’s decent code (semantic, web standards, no tables for layout) or not (tables, software-generated, etc). Show me your best work and I will mentally rank you on a scale from 1 to 100. This is important – I’ve already decided where on that scale I need to hire. If I’m looking for someone with relatively little experience (maybe a 30) and your work suggests that you’re a rising 60, my next thought is whether I can afford you. But that’s a good problem to have.

4. Look for a trail on the web

Do they have a website? LinkedIn? Twitter? If they’re out there, they’ve left a trail. This can be tough if it’s a common name, but this industry involves a good deal of self-promotion and if you can’t be found you’re not doing a very good job. Blogging is hard work, and someone who has invested that time in their professional development is bound to continue it after being hired.

5. What have they done?

If I’m hiring a designer, I look for little signs - good padding, decent typography, etc. Not that I’m skilled at these myself, but I do recognize some good design work when I see it.

For developers, I look for contributions to open source projects and the source of any pages they’ve posted. I tend to be pretty lenient on these.

6. Ask loaded questions.

I’m not psychologist, but it’s worth paying attention to how people answer the questions you ask. For instance, I like to ask about how they would solve a problem they didn’t know the solution to. A good response involves knowing how to find the answer. Self-determination is a good thing.

7. My favorite question: Tell me a joke.

I don’t ask this in every interview, but for some jobs and some candidates it can be a very helpful test. I simply ask the candidate to tell me a joke. The response is very informative. How quickly can the candidates think on their feet? Is the joke appropriate? What’s their personality? What’s their delivery style? Do they have a sense of humor? I don’t count this against people usually, but I certainly give major props to those who can handle it. When I’ve asked this and other people are in the room, they are usually horrified that I would do this to a candidate.

Process

Hiring takes a lot of time. Reviewing resumes, scheduling interviews, conducting phone and in-person interviews, etc. are all time-consuming. I like to try and make a choice as soon as possible, paring down candidates quickly and decisively. 50 resumes might turn into five phone interviews, and that may lead to 2-3 in-person interviews. Or I may have a clear choice after conducting phone interviews, and may only proceed with one candidate.

So how do you get a job on my team? Let your work speak for itself and make sure your resume isn’t the only way I can evaluate your reputation.

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As @donschindler pointed out, Jeremiah Owyang has a great comparison of some top social networks including Buzz. He urges marketers to

Google has had several forays into social networking, including a very popular network called Orkut (basically Facebook, but most popular in Brazil and India). They’ve also built Google Profiles, which are required to use the new Google Buzz. There are other social tools as well, but Google hasn’t caught the wave as an industry leader yet.

What’s most promising is the social integration with tools we already use and value. Facebook is a standalone application, but Google can add a layer of social networking on top of your email, documents, and other productivity tools. That social layer is great for collaboration, discovery, and productive networking (as opposed to seeing what your long-lost high school classmates are up to).

A great example is the recent social search that Google launched late last year. Once you’re hooked into it, you’ll see results from your social network. For instance, when I search for higher ed marketing at the bottom of the page I see “Results from people in your social circle for higher ed marketing” including blogs, links, and other content that people in my social circle found valuable.

We’ll see if Google supplants any of the networks (I doubt it) but I believe they’ll do a wonderful job of integrating them and augmenting our online experience to add value – something many other networks fail to do.

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What’s On the Horizon

The near-term technologies include mobile computing and open content.

The mid-term technologies (oddly noted as the “second adoption horizon”) are electronic books and simple augmented reality.

The far-term horizon includes gesture-based computing and visual data analysis.

Go get the full report >

Why Should You Care?

From a marketing communications perspective, these technologies will affect the future of our industry in a number of ways:

1. They will open and close avenues of communication.

Both mobile and augmented reality have been hot topics in the marketing world for several years. Mobile is already a big deal for many of us, working to provide mobile-friendly tools. What we haven’t necessarily done is find ways to communicate through mobile devices. We are hesitant (and rightfully so) to abuse SMS for marketing purposes. But there are opt-in SMS channels that higher ed has been slow to adopt except for use in crisis communications and in certain classroom applications.

Augmented Reality (AR) is another opportunity for blending communications messaging with real-world experiences. Like most tools in this Cluetrain world, AR will need to provide value and not just be an advertisement. Already, there are excellent ideas being pursued – including a an augmented reality campus tour application for the iPhone.

2. They will change the way we are perceived by our audiences.

The latest and greatest technology is a differentiator for a relatively short period of time, as early adopters get credit for being on the leading edge. These schools get more press and are often perceived as thought-leaders.

Next, there are the second-adopters who improve and perfect the technology. This is harder to do, but it’s potentially safer than trying to dive into every new thing. The iPod wasn’t the first MP3 player, and the iPhone wasn’t the first smart phone – but they certainly did them well enough to win some major market share. After all, there’s no medal for being first to market.

Finally, there are those who fail to keep up at all. This is a far more critical differentiator: not staying current. If students start to expect something, it’s folly to ignore those demands and expect to stay competitive. No school wants its students and parents to think it’s behind the times.

3. The model is changing.

As the report notes, “Open content has now come to the point that it is rapidly driving change in both the materials we use and the process of education.” (p. 13) Where students once paid a hefty price for access to information, free, open content is forcing schools to shift their value proposition toward education and experience. The higher ed business model is changing.

Communications will have a tremendous role in keeping schools in business by recruiting top students, faculty, and staff. They will have to take advantage of every tool in the toolbox.

What’s on your horizon?

Your own school and situation will be unique. Your size, budget, and priorities may direct you in one direction or another. That’s ok. But you should also be drawing up your own horizon report, asking yourself what you’ll be working on in one, three, or five years. Are you prepared?

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