Fuzzy Content

I was reading an article the other day which got me to thinking about how useful Facebook can be to you school.

Any here are a few idea

Student Groups

Problem
Most colleges have students groups like AMA, BSC, blah blah blah Lots of acronyms. Anyways they usually have a site for the group lets say http://myschool.edu/ama. It sits on some random server that IT hates to touch. They provide no support for it. So each semester you have to find one student in an organization that can hack up some kind of html. The level of experience varies each semester so sometimes the site is great, sometimes not so go. Some times the last person to do the site drops off the face of the earth and doesn’t pass on login or general info about the site.

Solution
Use Facebook for student group sites. All the things that are commonly on student groups sites are available on Facebook. Forum, pics, officer listings, member lists. All with no need for knowledge of html. It stays consistant, easy to maintain, multiple admins.

Hurdle
I told people at my school about this, they said why dont we make a facebook for our school. *Counter* No that is making another thing to join. Much less something run by the school. We should learn from Walmarts attempt at a Facebook and PASS! Everyone is already on facebook or can get on if need be. Facebook is open to everyone so there is no barrier to entry.

Groups for School

You can have a group for your school in general as opposed to student groups mentioned above. *NOTE* You cannot have a profile for your school. You can however create a group for your school. This can be a way to get in touch with prospective students. Some schools are slow to adapt these sites, personally I am all for it. Facebook and Myspace can make connections with students that you may otherwise not hit. I have lots of students connected to my profiles and have been asked questions regarding admissions, classes and various other topics. You can also syndicate things such as your student blogs on facebook using “Notes”.

-Matt Herzberger 

Disclaimer: If the account below were real, it would undoubtedly be so over-dramatized by yours truly that no specific factual details could be gleaned from it. In other words, the story told is not what actually happened, but a made-for-TV version of it.

So, it goes like this: a university goes on a bleeding edge, hosts unmoderated, full-open blogs for a handful of their students, feeding straight to the university home page. The blogs become instant success and by far the most popular part of the site.

Second year into the adventure, one of the bloggers starts pushing the envelope with edgier content. Her blog gets noticed, even linked from a major sports network site. Posts are sharp, fun, and closely personal. Popularity is rising.

The blogger keeps inching to the edge, eventually going over (can I call this a “rageboy syndrome”?): a person in Admissions office turns on their computer in the morning and reads in horror a fun-filled, but wildly inapropriate (not for a university official site, that is) story, featured prominently on the front of the university’s online face. Orders are yelled, buttons are pushed, post rolled back, everybody’s pissed. Ouch.

Sounds familiar? No? Let’s pretend it is a fictional tale of caution. But what should we be cautioned of? That we shouldn’t let bad girls blog? That people only want read really edgy stuff? That blogs are bad? That young people are not fit to shape the brand of the university?

The reason why I ask these questions is because I don’t have ready answers. Or maybe I do, but I don’t know if they are the right ones. Talk to me.

Here’s a thought on Millennial marketing: Who you know is more important than what you know (or where you found it).

As previously reported blogging about blogs being passé is passé, but even the passé can take on new importance as new audiences are introduced to the idea. And now we’re seeing retail sectors catch up with higher education in their efforts to market to Millennials.

Colleges and university’s have been using student blogs, or journals, since at least 2001 to help prospective students figure out where they fit in. But questions of credibility and the rise of social networking sites are likely weakening the power of blogs as a marketing tool with this generation. Will the retail sector figure this out and lead higher education to the next big thing or is that our job because we’ve been working with the generation longer?

So what is next? Sponsored pages on MySpace, apparently. But isn’t that a bit like Ford’s pseudo flash mob?

People value most the things they discover themselves. They also pass these things along with pride. Marketers have been trying to help people “discover” their products using search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing (SEM), but the effectiveness of these techniques (and certainly tricks) are waning due to changes in the browsing behavior of Millennials.

When I care more about what my friends think than what Google thinks, then connections become more important than Pagerank. So how do we get people to our content?

I think we can engineer serendipitous moments by expanding our idea of keywords and care words beyond SEO and SEM, whose importance will continue but only in as much as they effect contextual ad placement.

As social networking tools proliferate their collective power will outweigh that of the Google results page. Our SEO/SEM tactics will have less impact. We need a holistic, Web-wide approach to content management (and creation) if we hope to have an impact beyond a niche or two.

Tagging (and eventually microformats) can help us manage our brands across sites, devices and audiences. Beth Kanter moderates an N-TEN affinity group called Tagvocates where discussions focus on the strategic use of tagging as a tactic for non-profits. But the meme has yet to gain momentum.

My suggestion? Make a list of keywords/carewords and tags and a list of sites on which placement would be valuable. Do this as one of the deliverables from the discovery phase of every project. Work those into every aspect of the marketing plan and site design. Do this just as you might for a highly optimized campaign. Don’t neglect geotagging either! Local search is bound to take off eventually (and then wane in favor of neighborhood connections).

Name me three tags that you’d like to see your customers use on del.icio.us, assuming your customers are using del.icio.us which, BTW, few to none are.

I ran across this article from 2004 that discusses the need for personal aggregation, or as they describe it a “A Personal information and Knowledge Infrastructure Integrator.”

I’m posting it here in the hopes that the passage below will prompt Dimitri to riff on the consequence of overlapping communities. He has described this to me in conversation. But it hasn’t been captured to the Web. As I understand it, extended conversations among community members, which readers tend to view as tangential if not unnecessary and which we tend to call noise, are not noise but are conversations waiting for us when we are in the right context. The article’s conclusion brought this to mind, but the rest of the article is interesting if only for the prescience.

[The authors] propose that not only everything, but everyone can belong to several, possibly overlapping and discordant, intertwingled communities of interest. These communities will form dense networks of information linkage, allowing many types of structured and unstructured content to continually expand and weave even more interconnected webs of relationships.

Dimitri contends that noise does not exist in online discussions and communities. I can’t do his explanation justice. Dimitri? You there?

URIs are just one of many clues that readers use to divine information from a Web page. Jakob and others wrote about this years ago. I’ve taken it for granted until I opened the print version of the November issue of Campus Technology.

The first page of the Data Pioneers article includes an ugly URI that directs readers to the online edition of the August issue of the magazine by underlining: “www.campus-technology.com/article.asp?id=18953″. The last page of the article includes a call-out-box that promotes “Web Extra” and provides an other ugly URI. I’ll quote that one:

WEB EXTRA
Your DW solution is in place. Now, how to secure it? See www.campus-technology.com/article.asp?id=17886.

These URIs are even underlined! It’s bad enough exposing online readers to ugly URIs. Why in the world would a print publication do that with pages on their own site? Here’s some quick suggestions for the editors:

• www.campus-technology.com/web-extra/DW (and “extras” to catch the typos)
• www.campus-technology.com/november2006/DW
• www.campus-technology.com/august2006/
• www.campus-technology.com/archives/august2006

But to be really Web friendly they should simply use:

• www.campus-technology.com/data-pioneers

Ugly URIs slow the reader down online and on the printed page. They are a challenge to remember and type. But more importantly their use shows a lack of respect for your readers.

Use your URIs purposefully. Don’t miss this opportunity to show the reader some love.

(And you’ll probably get some Google love in return!)

I was talking to an admissions person at the school I work at. We were discussing student chat sessions using things like Chat University. It got me thinking why dont we do this with audio, like a confernce call? I have been using Skype for alot of my personal communication recently at home. I have a mic, the Skype client and a buddy (on my buddy list).

A little background for those of you who might not know about Skype:
It is like instant messanger but with audio. You have a buddy list and you click a person and start a chat. It literally has the same interface as an IM program. All you need to do it get a mic. Nothing special just a cheap one.

Anyways, so from here Skype has a thing called a Skypecast. You can have a free online confernce call or chat. You simply set it up on the site and then people can join in to the chat. Exactly like the old school chat sessions but with audio. I think it would be a bit more personal than simply a chat box. I am trying to run with this from here. There is new version of Skype coming out soon this will have stronger integration with Skypecast. It is currently in Beta.

Here are two articles with further info about the Beta and Skypecast integration
Skype 3.0 Beta - A Bloggers Paradise
First Look At Skype 3.0 Beta
You can also record the chats and make podcasts. And hey that is a buzzword so I’m sure you can sell someone on it

-Matt Herzberger

You’ve heard the phrase, “…tail wagging the dog.” The end result is driven by the least important factor. For instance, you want a CMS at your institution because “C.M.S.” are your initials.

This applies to Web process more than anything, in my experience. There are three elements to any Web site: design, navigation, and content. These elements are not focused on equally, which does not shock me. What shocks me is that the most important element gets the least attention - content. More specifically, content optimization.

With the competitive nature of colleges and universities only getting stronger, along with the globalization of education, it is important for institutions to own terms that relate to programs and careers, along with their name and location. When you are setting goals for a site redesign, search engine optimization is becoming commonplace, but rarely measurable. Here are some must do’s to make your site the most optimized.

• Identify user search terms. When people talk about you and your programs, what phrases do they use? What are the industry terms? What are your log files saying are the most searched terms on your site? The more you speak their language in your content (link names, headlines, body copy), the higher your chances are of moving up in search relevance. “Department of Arts and Sciences” may get less of a response than “Natural Sciences.”
• Measure Placement and Relevance. For those popular search terms, benchmark current relevance, then track progress post-launch. You may think you are using the terms frequently enough, but reviewing search rankings can tell you if you really are effective. Statistics show that Google visitors rarely go beyond Page 3. And a high majority don’t get past the first page. Review your rankings monthly and experiment with keyword placement on pages.
• Train your Authors. Your site is only as good as the content on each page. With that in mind, give your authors the knowledge they need to build good content. Hold workshops, pass around books, and continually get your authors together to discuss the big picture and share the SEO tracking data. Let them know how important each page is on the site.

With these in mind, content should improve from the ground up. An optimized site is a happy site, which is your best friend.