So I’m doing this presentation titled “Students: Your Social Media Secret Weapon” at the HigherEdWeb Regional Conference (#hewebvc, for the hashtag-inclined). And I kinda promised I’d put related links somewhere.
Here they are:
Class of 2014 Lightning Fast Laker Contest
Admitted Student Day Video Essay
Clubs and Organizations Flickr Slideshow
What 15 Freshmen Taught Me About Social Media
Um, OK. Wasn’t that exciting?
It is an ancient Mariner and he stoppeth one of three. – Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
In a way, I envy that ancient Mariner. Stopping one of three, especially in today’s go-go world, is a herculean task. And engaging them? What an albatross!
Fig. 1: Links followed from the Visit SUNY Oswego page.
After my Pondering the Point (.0) of Web Writing post, Rick the Indispensable Tech Guy sent the above bit of analytics showing where those landing on the Visit SUNY Oswego page go. My beloved body copy fails to stoppeth even one of three.
The most effective link, the one that reads Visit Us and sends people to the admissions visit page, nets 13 percent of readers. Another 11 percent proceed to the campus tour page. Four percent pursue the open houses link. And a big fat zero percent go to schedule your visit online from this page. Wow! Or, perhaps, ow!
The analytics don’t tell all, as we aren’t sure if readers follow the inline links or the related links of the same name. A bit more than a quarter — 27.3 percent — do follow the sibling links under Visit SUNY Oswego on the leftnav. It’s nice to see 5.8 percent check out the Fast Facts feature I sweat over. And while 1.2 percent go straight to the search box instead of navigating by this page, the overall dropoff rate — those who leave the site entirely — looks daunting at first (math is hard).
Since this is a high-level oft-visited page, these are humbling figures indeed. But what’s a Web content creator to do?
Actually, this — analyzing what readers do — is a good start. In a perfect world, you have the time and resources to assemble a focus group of future students to say what they’d like to see on the page. (In this perfect world, chocolate also grows on trees and it never rains til after sundown.) Failing that, you could ask current students their opinions. You could also look at the links people most follow and see if the links most accessed from those pages would make sense on this one.
But also remember that people can only click one link at a time. More than 3 out of 4 (75.7 percent) of visitors at any time click the top 10 links — all contextual, structural or related — so we must be doing something right.
One should also avoid overreacting, just summarily dumping links with lower clickthrough. Sure, only 1 percent click the structural College Offices link, but given the high volume of traffic, that means a significant number of readers jump from this page to find a specific office. That represents an audience being served in seeking more information.
That said, if you’re a perfectionist (as I am), anything less than 100 percent service just isn’t enough. There are readers, readers everywhere; let’s make many stop to link.
I’m presenting yet another workshop on Writing for the Web next month, but starting to wonder if I’m using outdated information.
When I served as chief content editor for our campus-wide redesign in 2003-04, prevailing literature suggested using phrased hypertext linking in clear, concise sentences driving a listener to action. I think that’s all still important but, in a Web 2.0 world, it seems like the amount of content in actual sentence form on the ‘Net is shrinking.
Currently, our Web site incorporates three plans for linking within the body of any page:
Fig. 1: A sample oswego.edu page.
Left/red circle: Sibling or structural links = related within directory structure
Center/green circle: Contextual links = phrases sending reader to information that sparks their interest
Right/blue circle: Related links = other pages that may interest the reader
As a creator and reader, I mostly employ/look for contextual links, but then that’s the tendency of someone who’s wanted to be a writer since I was four years old. Some others prefer navigating by structural or related links. Yet others just go straight to the search box and type in their term. All are valid ways of finding information.
But when I look at something like Facebook, arguably the top social-media presence going, the main links are structural or related. And short. Its navigation is certainly intuitive — anyone knows what links that say view photos or send message or view friends mean — but it provides a challenge, if not a full-blown conundrum, for those trying to teach others to write Web copy.
I certainly don’t think colleges should ditch Web writing in complete and grammatically correct sentences. Our primary pages should contain what we would call marketing copy (much as those words make some academics bristle) to make the pitch … but are readers becoming more accustomed to just searching for links or Twitteristic 140-character communication?
But then I took a step back and remembered that Web 2.0 is about conversations. Those conversations tend to take place in sentences, not just through posting links or photos (though links and photos can start/continue conversations). And good Web copy, like good advertising copy, should be in a conversational tone. The rise of Web 2.0 doesn’t demolish Web 1.0 … in some ways, it actually helps us understand traditional Web sites better.
