Fuzzy Content

Many of you have heard of Blackboard’s social bookmarking initiative, Scholar. This new service allows the Blackboard portal to become one-to-many, rather than one-to-one. It connects all Blackboard institutions (or at least those with the latest upgrade), and gives faculty and students the ability to share academic resources with each other.

I attend several conferences a year and have seen the art of networking amongst peers and competitors. Now, the academic community has a tool to practice this activity as well.

Read their press release for more information.

For those in marketing (me being one of them), I hear many stories of frustration in building a visitor-centric Web site. You can control the message and presentation, but you will never be able to control where site readers enter the site, what sequence they move through pages, and when they decide to leave.
Web 2.0 (I know, I know) means that now I have even less control. Not only did I lose control over visitors on how they used my site. But now, I will see many visitors get information without even entering my domain. Syndication has allowed site content to become a collection of information that I, as a reader, review in the comfort of my own RSS aggregator (newsgator, myYahoo, etc).

As microformats continue to take hold of consistent content, this will even become more of the case. Sites and software are beginning to format their information (profiles, blog entries, events, and eventually course catalog information) following standard structures. This practice gives visitors an even wider platform to find information related to you.

The secret is to understand where people find information about you, then participate. In the “real” world, prospective students find information and build impressions of your institution without stepping foot in your admission office. But the more active you are in advertising, printed material, and high school visits, the better chance the information and impressions are accurate.

So, if you haven’t already, actively participate in Facebook groups. Submit your events on upcoming.org, and look for tools that help you gain exposure outside your .edu. You won’t have complete control over what your visitors are reading, seeing, and acting on, but you will better understand who and where people interact with you as an institution.

Social content on the internet has reached a blistering pace. My head spins, but my eyes twinkle at the possibilities. For example:

For all of you who enjoy regular podcasts, you now have your favorites. I listen to about 4 or 5 podcasters on a regular basis. Some have daily podcasts, but others are for less frequent. For those everyday podcasts, I find it hard to catch up. But a service has been out there for a few months that caught my eye. Pluggd has Hear Here, which allows you to search podcasts for appropriate content. So, let’s say you are listening to Chris Pirillo, but find his hour-long daily program too much. You just want to know more about the new ChaCha search engine. Type in ChaCha, or “search engine” and it will show you where in the hour-long program that may be discussed. Brilliant! I’m not supporting their service, but if you use it and like it, let me know.

How does this relate to you? It is now more important than ever to expand your walls of the .edu site. If there are no services that push people to your site (besides standard Google searches), you are missing the boat. Your podcasts, blogs, and events need to be found in aggregators, microformat searches, and blog searches.

It’s a crowded marketplace…your content needs to rise to the top.

I don’t claim that this is an original thought, but I wanted to put it out there for discussion. I just read an e-newsletter that talked about demographics of the U.S. population and, in a separate section, how colleges and universities can use Facebook for marketing.

It made me think about what we’ll be doing to attract the class of 2011. Here’s the prediction:

• Social networking *sites* will be irrelevant as each reader (user) will carry with them the context that they are now creating on sites like Facebook.

To the contrary of some experts, devices like XFN will make sites less important while increasing the importance of specialized or vertical search engines and even personal portals as those tools continue to develop.

SEO and SEM are going to get real interesting real soon. I can’t wait!

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?

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.

Dimitri and I just got back from Rochester, NY for this week’s highedwebdev conference. With over 400 attendees and five session tracks, there was plenty to soak in.

The first thing that caught my eye was that many of the sessions (at least in title) were focused on the very thing that we love…fuzzy content. The sessions were not as much about what you do to your site, but more of how your site is a bigger piece of the Web puzzle.

I also found that sessions were focused on the front-end how-tos. With the potential for this to be a nuts and bolts conference, I was delighted to see usability as its own track. And content management as a separate track. I thought the “design and strategy” track could have been sprinkled a little more throughout the other tracks, but just the fact that there were sessions dedicated to “planning before investing” brought a smile to my face.

All in all, a good week spent with an army of those moving toward a similar goal. Now if we can only get VPs to drink our Kool-Aid, we’re in business.

To relive (or to live vicariously), goto del.icio.us or flickr for more. And follow Dimitri’s (and others’) guest posts on collegewebeditor.

What made Fonzy cool was his lack of effort to be cool. But he didn’t wake up in the morning and say, “Today, I am going to be as cool as I can be.”

• Flickr is cool. What makes Flickr cool is that millions of people contribute photos and share stories because they want to, not just because they can.
• iPods are cool. They have revolutionized the way that music is listened to, downloaded, categorized, and used.
• Tagging is cool. Information on the Web is no longer a series of islands. Now, content can be syndicated, bookmarked, and searched through del.icio.us, newsgator, and technorati.

What makes these cool is the fact that they have been embraced. It’s not a matter of how fantastically structured the technology is. Who cares how Flickr does what it does. It’s more cool to see what the people do with Flickr. It’s more cool that Web sites embrace microformats and RSS.

I ran across this quote from Gerry McGovern. It’s not earth-shattering by any means, but it defines what cool is.

“I embrace technology. I love it. I’m surrounded by it. What I have to keep reminding myself is that it’s not about the technology itself; it is about what we can do with the technology.”

Cool is a reflection of what people do, or say, or how they act. They determine success. They determine what’s relevant, and important. They determine what’s cool.

We seem to have confused “management” with “writing” and “publishing” which might explain the poor state of Web content over the last 14 years.

e-fuze.com (beta, of coarse) describes itself as:

[A] new social content management system [that] will allow registered users to submit online content. The entries with the top votes get published on the homepage. Voting will be open to all users, though submitting content requires a free account.

As usual, e-fuse views content management in terms of:

• Authoring
• Permissions
• Posting
• Editing
• Voting

This is the technologist’s view of writing. The technologist is concerned with who is allowed to write and where are they allowed to do it. The technologist is concerned with business rules and policies. The technologist is concerned with management, and while management is a necessary evil it should not be the purpose of our efforts.

Content is wasted unless it has meaning to the reader. Making content meaningful requires much more than a workflow process or attention to the brand position. It requires an intense awareness of the readers purpose and intent. It requires contextual awareness at any given moment in the readers experience.

That level of awareness is best illustrated by a conductor who creates an two-hour experience out of a tangle of instruments, expertise, sounds and intervals. The conductor is concerned with:

• Orchestration
• Concert
• Symphony
• Harmony

Look these words up and consider their meanings beyond their typical usage.

Dom DiLillo, Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut each create a single experience out of a complex environment of characters, personalities and events. The collaboration of author, editor and publisher results in a concert of emotion and meaning for the reader. That should be the goal of a content management tool. Orchestration.

Web conductors can attempt to produce a meaningful experience for their readers if the conductor knows their audience well enough. But few of us do. We have to get out of the office and into the field to meet them face-to-face. We need to record and make sense of their online behavior. Or we need to acknowledge that we cannot know everything and hand the baton to the audience. This is not to say that we surrender, rather we acquiesce and embrace collaboration.

What kind of cacophony will a thousand conductors create? Which audience member will the bassonist follow and at what tempo?

e-fuze, Digg and most other social content sites tend to address this problem through voting in one way or another. But that takes us back to the management issue and all its pitfalls and shortcomings.

Social content management isn’t about voting, it is about sharing experiences. Web sites can allow our readers to share experiences in many ways:

• Page-level commenting
• Blogs
• In-page chat
• Page sharing
• Repurposing content on other sites

But that requires a lot of effort from the reader and not all readers will be willing to take the time to do those things. So what else is there? I’m interested in tools that will help aggregate experiences and that can assume some of the reader’s context as derived from online behavior.

Social content management is about personal content aggregation. NetVibes anyone? Sure, but what about the automation and the sharing? Nextumi? Now there’s a big question.