Web Communications

The Rule of 15 in Social Media

Rommel — Fri, 11 May 2012 12:34:00 +0000

Social media is ever growing in popularity and many industries are jumping on board to spread their word in the digital realm. Companies rush to sign up to Google+, or Facebook, or Twitter, etc., but what’s the next step? Most are not really sure on how to best utilize this new technology and there is really no definite method available on how to keep people engaged.

Rule of 15 Distribution

Personally, I have been using a technique that I’ve picked up along the way called the Rule of 15. The Rule of 15 is a very formulaic approach to social media interaction. It is based on the concept that for every 15 social media mentions put out by the company, %66 percent (10) are references from outside the company, 24.44% (4) are references from the company, and 4.44% (1) is a calls-to-action reference.

A call to action is a reference that is specifically targeted to get social media followers to participate in a company event or cause. This could range from voting, to attending an event, to donations, or basically anything the company is promoting.

This method is still new, as are most social media practices, and I am personally testing it out and tracking the analytics to determine its effectiveness (i.e. tracking the amount of unique click-throughs, the amount of reposts/retweets, the amount of followers gained, and the level of participation for the call-to-action).

Outside

The concept of sending out social media mentions from outside the company is based on generating a connection with your audience. A tweet, retweet, posting, repost or mention about an event, news, ideas, etc., gets people interested on what you have to say. It could be some random reference that other people are interested in and it draws that person to you based on your common interest. The reason why a majority of the method is based on building this bond is much like getting to know a new friend. You share interests and you build a bond based on those interests.

Yourself

The concept of referencing yourself lets others know more about you and your company. This is another way to build rapport. I consider this the largest leap in the method, because you are building trust with your follower. Trust is difficult to maintain and if your followers do not mesh with your thinking, you may lose them.

Calls-to-Action

The final reference is the calls-to-action. Once other people feel comfortable about you, they are more likely to take part in what you are promoting. For a definitive look into Calls-to-Actions, read Corey Eridon’s article on 13 Sloppy Mistakes You’re Making With Calls-to-Action.

You have shared your interest (10), let them know who you are and what you stand for (4), and you have asked them to support your cause (1).

The trick, however, is to find the correct pacing for your audience. Bombard them with stuff and they may be turned off. Sparsely sent and you will lose their interest. The pacing will be determined by how connected your core audience is to social media. Personally, I pace myself to 15 per 5-day period. Sometimes several times a day, but no more than 15 for that time span.

I’d love to get reactions on this method and if it works for you.

Good luck and happy tweeting!

Hiring: Web graphic designer with a passion for user experience

Nick DeNardis — Thu, 10 May 2012 01:02:47 +0000

Are you a graphic designer with a passion for user experience? We’re looking to fill a full time position left vacant by Joy Reed (which basically means you would have some big shoes to fill). We’re looking for someone who has primarily worked in the digital space, a traditional graphic design background is preferred.

This person will be a member of our dedicated Web Communications team and be responsible for the graphic design in complete Website redesigns, have an influence in the user experience across the Wayne State Web, both public facing site and the internal tools we create.

Our department’s responsibilities extend beyond the Web in to digital signage, html emails, mobile apps and illustrated icons. Lastly, this person must maintain, advance, and consult with the campus community on brand consistency.

Preferred qualifications:

Solid understanding of working with-and designing for-web applications.
Able to rapidly prototype static wireframes or use other dynamic prototyping tools.
Experience working on large-scale higher eduction websites.
BA/BS or above in Graphic Design, Information Design, or other visual arts; strong technical understanding a plus.
Minimum of 3+ years experience designing web-based products for a consumer-oriented website.
Ability to act as a leader in communicating conceptual ideas and design rationales, all within a user-centered design process.
Able to work and communicate effectively in a cross-functional product development team, and present ideas and designs effectively.
Self-motivated to prioritize and manage work load, and meet critical project milestones and deadlines.
Able to collaborate with colleagues to develop and enhance design standards.
An effective problem solver who comes up with creative solutions and considers many alternative solutions to each problem.
Fluent in HTML/CSS/XML, or full knowledge of associated capabilities/limitations.
Maintain an overall university brand across various mediums including digital signage.
An understanding of responsive Web design.

Think you have what it takes?

Check out the official job description at job.wayne.edu. posting #038624.

Or know someone who would be perfect? Be sure to pass this along.

Welcome Rommel, the new Web Project Manager!

Nick DeNardis — Fri, 04 May 2012 13:21:04 +0000

We are excited to announce a new addition to the Web Communications family. Rommel is no stranger to the Marketing Department or the university. He’s actually worked in Marketing since 2003 in various positions and even has his own t-shirt.

Project management

He is coming in to wrangle all the work we do and bring some order to this place. The Web department has never had an official project manager, we all shared the responsibility with the assistance of tools like Basecamp. That has worked well for some time, six years to be exact, and has forced us to be in constant communication with each other. But in the last few years the overhead of managing projects plus doing everyone’s full time job has really impacted the speed of our work. Rommel will be responsible for prioritizing all work assigned to the Web staff. This will let the designers design, developers program and the writers write. He will also be in all intake meetings and be the switchboard operator for our Web Inbox.

Social Media

As if project management wasn’t enough we are also going to task Rommel with being the official social media voice for the university and oversee our various communities. Since joining Twitter in January 2008 we have begun a journey of interacting on behalf of the university. Since then we have kept our focus small and manageable. This is another situation where multiple people shared the responsibility. Like project management it forced us to collaborate a lot but over time that overhead has started to slow down our innovation. Having a single person all the messages flow through will not only add consistency of voice but also an effective use of each medium. Rommel has a personality that will naturally resonate with the communities he will be managing.

A more structured process

Lastly, Rommel will be responsible for documenting our procedures, tools, and workflow. This all has been kept in various places over time but his organization skills will ensure it’s centralized and everyone, (ourselves and our clients), are on the same page.

If you work with us now or plan to in the future you’ll be sure to talk to Rommel at some point. Give him a Wayne State welcome.

Changes: Farewell Joy Reed

Nick DeNardis — Thu, 03 May 2012 13:02:13 +0000

It’s not often that a member of the Web Communications staff moves on but it’s a sad day when it happens. Although it hurts us a lot to say goodbye to Joy Reed we are happy that she is moving to a great opportunity at Media Genesis. Joy has been a Web graphic designer with us for 3+ years and has made an amazing impact on the user experience and the quality of work we produce here.

As you can see from the extensive list above, her eye for design, user experience and the university brand have made it’s way into everything she touched here.

It’s never fun to say good bye to an amazing person. Joy will truly be missed. Her contributions to the department, the Web, and the university have been second to none.

What now?

You can follow Joy on Twitter at @jedijoy. We will be reposting her position shortly and will follow up with a blog post to announce it. Stay tuned.

[Friday Links] The changes edition

Nick DeNardis — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 15:35:49 +0000

Fridays are always busy for us, we try to focus exclusively on internal projects, which means I often don’t have time to post my Friday Links list. So why not just rename it you ask? I don’t have a good answer for that.

Anyways, these links were too good to keep myself, enjoy!

So you want an HTML newsletter?

Nick DeNardis — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 13:52:59 +0000

The types of projects our department takes on seem to go in waves. A bit of a history lesson takes us back to an abundance of websites which pushed us to build the CMS. The many events that followed gave us the idea to write and centralize them all in to a university events calendar. Then came the RSVP’s for those events. We got fed up creating hundreds of forms so we wrote an RSVP system for the events calendar. After that the campus community could maintain their own websites, and create events and RSVP’s by themselves. They then asked us to create pretty HTML emails to announce all of these components and we did that for a while before crafting the self- serve HTML email creator.

Everything goes digital

Now we are on the age of transitioning traditional print newsletters to digital pieces. These are a little more complex than the standard email and sometimes connect to a broader website with more information. In the last four months we have literally transitioned more than ten complete print publications to online editions. I would love to say that in those four months we created a self-service system for the entire campus to create and maintain publications, but I can’t. They all seem to have some unique factor that required individual attention.

Multiple flavors

Requesting a new HTML newsletter can result in a 2 hour or up to a 40 hour project. It’s important to know what you need before starting the process. Let’s walk through the process of the newsletter request and I hope I’ll be able to shed some light on the reason for the complexity.

Simple single column email

The most basic email is just a single column with a single message and any action items go off to existing websites. The types of emails have a custom header that identifies your department or group and is reusable at your leisure.

Here are a few examples of single column emails we have done:

Multiple column email

Typically a multiple column email is required when there is a single message that needs to be communicated and the content warrants “action items” on the side. These can be: upcoming deadlines, buttons for next steps or just “for your information.” They’re a little more complex but offer some flexibility to highlight multiple items “above the fold”. (BTW, there is no fold on the Web.)

Here are a few examples of multiple column emails we have done:

Multiple column newsletter

Using the same format as the multiple column email the newsletter takes it one step further and keeps a consistent format but with categories and articles feeding in to compile a complete email. Typically the format is set up and each month/semester/year a new “publication” is created which consists of article titles, teaser descriptions and links off to more information.

If the links for each article go to existing stories already published on the Web it gets the user to interact with multiple areas of your website and possibly explore things they otherwise wouldn’t have without being prompted by the email.

Here are a few examples of multiple column newsletters we have done:

Newsletter Web page

Lastly the most complex and time consuming is the HTML newsletter that has a stand alone website which features the full text of each article and is organized like a newsletter with editions and archives. This approach is really driven by the print mentality of compiling an entire edition of articles and publishing the entire thing at once. It wraps up the email and website into a single package for the user to experience. One of the downsides, just like a printed newsletter/magazine is once the user receives it and browses through, they typically recycle it or close the window and never come back. Their only reason to come back in the future is when their next email comes in. It isn’t “sticky” and doesn’t build continuous engagement, but in the end it’s what most traditional writers are comfortable with.

Here are a few example of newsletter websites that we have done:

Thinking about requesting an HTML email?

Make sure you have thought through how you want it to work and be prepared to answer some tough questions by our team. Just because “email is free”, aka you don’t have to pay postage, it doesn’t mean that your audience will engage the same way they have in the past.

Campus shuttle routes now added to the campus map

Robert Vrabel — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 14:40:58 +0000

Very soon we will be launching a new feature on the campus map which will allow our users to view campus shuttle routes. Clicking a marker on the route will tell you more information about the pickup and drop off location. Since we now allow for polylines to be added to the campus map, we hope to find other uses for this functionality to add even more features to the map.

I used Google’s Interactive Polyline Encoder Utility to draw the route. I felt it was a much better approach to use the encoded data rather than using each longtitude/latitude point as it is shown on their example page. The encoded data is much smaller so transferring the data to the user will be faster since the routes have a lot of data points.

How does software quality happen?

Nick DeNardis — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 11:35:40 +0000

Have you ever wondered why most software you interact with is hard to use or isn’t updated regularly to fix bugs? It’s a fundamental problem of computer science programs, they have failed to teach us how to manage software projects. Learning and using complex algorithms is just one small part of the software development process. The larger, more complicated (and ultimate determinator) of a project’s success is managing the requirements, time, team and process.

The most complex human task

Writing software is one of the most complex human tasks according to Douglas Crockford. Writing software isn’t a linear process, it is so complex we still haven’t learned how to create quality software. Although this is an older talk, it’s the best explanation I’ve heard about why writing software is so complex and what we can do about it.

The software crisis

He explains why the early programmers were so concerned with the software crisis and why it’s still happening today. If you are part of any software development process or even if you just use software on a daily basis this talk can give you some insight about why you may have frustrations around it.

Quality is more than good programming

Source: http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2007/05/16/video-crockford-quality/

[Friday Links] The Molly Holzschlag Edition

Nick DeNardis — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 12:42:06 +0000

Yesterday Detroit welcomed Molly Holzschlag as the inaugural of Rise + Design Detroit in the morning and to give a full talk at Refresh Detroit in the evening. Molly is considered one of the ~~godfathers~~ godmother of the Web. Her talks centered around “From Documents to Apps: Evolving an Open Web”. As an advocate for open standards, she outlined how the open web allows for the empowerment of all individuals via global access. The archive should be up soon on the Refresh Detroit website.

She started her talk with a quote from Hillman Curtis that I am very fond of and wanted to share:

“Be prepared to reinvent yourself. Be prepared to go out on a limb occasionally, and be prepared to do the things that you feel strongly about”
- Hillman Curtis

Our first 48 hours on Instagram

Nick DeNardis — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 12:00:13 +0000

I’m a huge fan of “doing less better” and it’s a practice we embody here in the Web department. Social media is one of those activities that is far too easy to become over stretched. It’s a battle that we have been tackling for a while. With the responsibility split between three people we only have so much time, we pick our networks and strategies carefully. Not to mention we create as many tools as possible to manage tons of information and allow us to still be human online.

“We should be on ______ network”

We hear the question all the time, why aren’t we here or there and why not, it won’t cost us anything to start interacting. Unfortunately the cost of interacting is far more than most anyone realizes. Staff time, especially coordination, even if you spend as little as 30 minutes per day per network can add up to a five figure impact each year before you know it.

Instagram is an example of one of those networks we decided to leave off our list. It was a combination of audience (iPhone only) and the ability to automate. They did release their API some time last year which was one requirement but we still weren’t seeing the interactions we thought we should compared to our other networks.

And then came Android

That all changed two weeks ago when they released their Android client and added 10 million users in 10 days. They also topped the Apple App Store for the first time ever. Oh yea, and not to mention their $1 billion acquisition by Facebook. This started to get our attention and since the people who oversee our social media presence (myself and Jenn) are Android users we started to explore the content on a more frequent basis.

Although we don’t interact with every network out there, we always try to grab our username as quickly as possible. In this case I never registered our name, typically “waynestate”, when Instagram first came out and I have no idea why it slipped my mind. It was kind of a blessing the name was still available when I registered it last week Friday. For us it is important to ensure any network we are on doesn’t look dormant, because that reflects negatively on the university. Since the main way to find friends is to search existing networks we knew people would be finding us without us pushing them to.

The 48 hour case study

To my surprise just 8 hours after signing up we already had 15 followers and we didn’t even have a photo, bio, link or a single photo posted yet. As soon as I saw this I decided I needed to get on that. So late Friday I added all the basic information in to the account and started to look for photos to post.

That night I posted four photos which resulted in 18 likes and 20 more followers, which also got my attention. Throughout the weekend I posted a few more photos, and liked photos that I could find of campus.

The result was:

9 photos posted
86 followers in 48 hours (more now)
62 likes on our photos
0 comments on our photos
79 photos liked by us

What we learned

Perceived popularity doesn’t always mean a product/service is worth spending your time on. I can guarantee if we jumped on the Instagram bandwagon when it first came out we would not have been able to justify sustaining it for the “limited” audience. Especially since neither of the people who would be maintaining it had a device that supported the app.

Capitalizing on the “buzz” can make an impact. Since the standard method of finding friends is by an existing social relationship and all new users are walked through that process as part of their on-boarding it is mutually beneficial to us and Instagram.

The Instagram community re-enforced our existing notion that content is king. The photos we posted with a deeper meaning got more of a reaction. People often describe Instagram as a “photo version of Twitter” but it is much more. Not every photo is worth a thousand words, but the closer you can get to that thousand the more of a reaction you will get.

Update:
I had a few questions about promotion of our account, we have not done any beyond Instagram itself. No photos have gone out to Twitter, Facebook or Flickr yet.