.eduGuru Summit: Online conference for online communicators.

Communicating in higher education, especially via web and social media, is a fast-evolving field, so it’s marvelous that so many options for professional development exist. Next week comes one such opportunity you can tackle without even leaving your office or home: the 2013 .eduGuru Summit on Wednesday and Thursday, March 27 and 28.

I’m thrilled to be part of a lineup that tackles timely topics in strategy (day one) and technology (day two). Full lineup as follows:

Wednesday, March 27, Strategy Track (eastern time zone, presuming my math skills still work):

• 10 a.m.: “How to Create a Culture of Sharing,” Donna Talarico, Elizabethtown College
• 11 a.m.: “Building a Successful Web Team,” Matt Herzberger, FIU
• noon: “Establishing a Social Media Program,” Michael McCready, NorQuest College
• 2 p.m.: “What Robocop Can Teach Us About Alumni Engagement,” Jeff Stephens, University of Florida
• 3 p.m.: “How Student Blogs, Video and More Can Help You Meet Goals and Provide Solutions,” Tim Nekritz (me), SUNY Oswego
• 4 p.m.: “I Don’t Have Your Ph.D.: Working with Faculty and the Web,” Amanda Costello, University of Minnesota

Thursday, March 28, Technical Track:

• 1o a.m.: “SEO for the Modern College Newsroom,” Kyle James, nuCloud
• 11 a.m.: “WordPress FUNctions,” Lacy Tite, Vanderbuilt University
• noon: “WordPress Themes 101,” Curtis Grymala, University of Mary Washington
• 2 p.m.: “Designing Responsively from Mobile to HD,” Philip Zastrow, University of Notre Dame
• 3 p.m.: “Rebuilding a University Homepage to be ‘Responsive.’ Twice. In Less Than a Year,” Erik Runyon, University of Notre Dame
• 4 p.m.: “Making Analytics Reporting Actionable,” Becky Vardaman

Honestly, I find every one of those tracks fascinating and several extremely useful. So consider registering for the .eduGuru online conference and joining us next week. It’s an outstanding lineup, and you don’t have to worry about canceled flights and lost luggage to attend.

nate silver and the rise of analytics: what it means to you.

As the election drew near, many political and stats junkies (like me) became fans of Nate Silver, aka @fivethirtyeight, the shrewd political number-cruncher and blogger for the New York Times. His way of aggregating the most reliable presidential polls into megapolls, and factoring in those polls’ historical accuracies, was considered by some to be as revolutionary as the introduction of “Moneyball” — or use of undervalued stats — on baseball.

Like anyone who develops a following, Silver soon drew his shares of detractors. Newsmen, pundits and politicians alike scoffed at his methodology, and Silver tended to respond quite intelligently with an unrivaled grasp of statistics. Even as the news networks hyped the election as anyone’s game last week, Silver said his estimations “represent powerful evidence against the idea that the race is a ‘tossup.’ A tossup race isn’t likely to produce 19 leads for one candidate and one for the other –  any more than a fair coin is likely to come up heads 19 times and tails just once in 20 tosses.” And, yes, unless Florida reverses course, he will have called 50 of 50 states correctly. That he even triggered the briefly popular Is Nate Silver A Witch? website tells something about his crossover success.

But let’s forget politics for a moment (please!); what’s impressive here is the rise of analytics writ large. Silver succeeded by keen understanding of statistics, willingness to discard dubious assumptions and eagerness to innovate. In higher education, we always talk about working smarter not harder and trying innovative things … then everyone rushes to “best practices” and well-plowed ground and research (like that on “Millennials”) based on questionable assumptions.

It all starts with data. Working with the web and social media avails us to a wealth of analytics and metrics via Google and other methods. But as Silver cautions, it’s about looking for the right data, not necessarily the most obvious or easiest. Avinash Kaushik, perhaps one of the top experts in web analytics, jokes that “hits” is short for “how idiots track success” … i.e. the number of visits to your website tells you only surface information. Instead, he says, look at things like bounce rates (how many people visit one page and immediately leave), average number of pages per visit and what paths and tasks users complete while on your site.

Google’s In-Page Analytics (seen above) is one of my favorite tools for seeing where visitors go after hitting a page. Those orange tags are click-through percentages, which you can roll over for numbers. I look at our home page using this tool very frequently to see what is and isn’t working, and regularly check other key pages. It’s interesting to see that sometimes switching out a picture or changing wording can have an impact on click rates. Among the most basic tips:

• Pics of students work better than anything else. (Except maybe sunsets, but that’s a whole other story.)
• Pics of logos and/or clip art are virtually useless. The only logo anyone ever clicks is the Oswego logo at the top left to get back to the home page.
• Don’t overpromise or mislead with link names. I’ve seen pages where users think they are getting one thing because of a page name, only to realize the info they seek is not there. In cases like these, a user is more likely to leave our site entirely than go back. (We’ve seen this fixed by merely changing a link or page name.)
• If your page has an embedded video but a very low average time on page, it’s pretty clear that video isn’t getting watched much. You can correlate with YouTube views — there’s a chance they’re watching it on YouTube — but you can often spot a dog quickly. This also ties into our data that shows videos about students and/or made by students tend to do much better than any other videos.

Another great Google Analytics feature is event tracking, which lets you see microtrends. With our new megadropdown headers and Popular Links, developer Rick Buck inserted a Google event tracking code to get a finer picture of who clicks where. The Academics part of the header rules, as it does in breakout tracking. This underscores our longtime push that good academic content and information architecture remain key to a college website’s success.

In addition to looking small, we look big. We recently completed our third month of compiling, filing and sharing a monthly web and social media analytics report, which has provided clues into what works and what doesn’t. We will learn even more as we add and hone various measurements and see trends in longer spans of data.

On a related note, you should also look long-term and not be so hasty that you change things too quickly. Silver’s data worked because he had large sample sizes. You need to track a page for at least a month (maybe more) to ensure you have a good enough sample size to judge user activity. A day or two is too small a sample size to glean a full picture.

Some colleges are showing a need and desire to invest in data. Ithaca College, for example, recently hired Colleen Clark as a full-time marketing analyst, and Colleen describes what that entails in this interview with Karine Joly of Higher Ed Experts. Not all colleges are in a position to hire full-time web analysts, but institutions should ensure that at least one (probably more) people in their organization have enough training, knowledge and — importantly — time to look at stats and trends.

Because as Nate Silver showed with this election, relying on conventional wisdom and erratic statistics get you results that are only as good as their flawed data. The more data you have, the better you understand it, the more effectively you implement what it shows, the higher the chances you can start achieving some real wins … whatever you do.

goodbye, google places. hello google+ local. but does it matter?

In its never-ending quest to revise and renew to provide (apparently) desired services, Google has bid adieu to its Places feature and replaced it with Google+ Local. Given the large leverage any Google property has, it technically has potential. But it currently has stumbling blocks, with content being the main one.

If you’re a G+ member (I won’t go for the easy joke), Local will appear as an option in your left-hand sidebar. That’s about the only easy thing I’ve found so far. Clicking it gives me the following screen dominated by an Outback Steakhouse. In Liverpool. More than a half-hour away. When I happen to live in a city with lots of eateries already that are dwarfed by this promoted location.

Of course, I can just scroll and look through a number of options such as Pizza Restaurants, Steak Restaurants, Bookstores, Motels, Pubs, etc. Most of the locations have either no or few reviews, which doesn’t particularly help with decision-making. I checked the Pubs option (near and dear to my heart) and discovered several of the listed establishments had closed. A local power plant was also listed as a pub, so I wondered about data hygiene … i.e. who vets or confirms listed information. And with any system, up-to-date accurate content is a huge consideration!

To make it even stranger, I can’t find any way to use Google+ Local on my iPhone … but I can download the old Google Places. For a geosocial platform, you’d sure expect this to be easier.

So other than being neither easy to use nor updated with accurate content, what exactly does Google+ Local have to offer that makes it a must-have platform?

Let me know if you figure that out, because I have no idea.

admissions page makeover: less talk, more action.

A few weeks ago, our admission folks asked me to design a new landing page for a marketing push they were working on. Apparently the direction went so well, they asked if I could adapt it into the new admissions home page. Or they were trying to soften me up to get to the bigger project. In any event, the new page went live on Monday and shows the continuing evolution in how we handle web content.

As a writer, it’s hard for me to let go of graceful, compelling sentences full of descriptive adjectives, active verbs and strong nouns. Yet in high-level pages, it seems users have been more likely to click buttons, play videos, follow left-navigation links than click on inline links. And as Mary Beth Kurilko, one of the brighter minds in web writing, likes to say: If the opposite is ridiculous, why write it? Do any of our competitor schools NOT have outstanding professors, a range of academic programs and a desire to help students succeed? So perhaps this writing has always been cliche.

Here was our previous admissions page; I never thought of it as that bad, but always had room for improvement:

Even though it was less than a year old, you can see the incrementalism in it, as we kept adding one thing, then another, then another. The buttons were a nice addition at the time, but they ended up looking kind of strewn around the page. The virtual tour promotion came later. See all those contextual links? Our analytics found they weren’t terribly effective. Say, is that a July event still in our upcoming events list in September? Oh dear.

The new page is much simpler and more streamlined:

The incremental redesign’s new central emphasis is a two-minute admissions video. Below sit links for related videos, including an extended (~12 minute) version and introductions to our four colleges and schools. The buttons on the side emphasize actions that enrollment management would want to drive — take a virtual tour, schedule a campus visit, apply — and I also recommended a link to majors/minors since statistics show this is a popular link on any page it appears and since one of a student’s first questions is whether we have their program.

We generate the buttons via this site, which eases some crunch of not having a dedicated designer for our office. I’m on the fence as to whether six buttons is a lot; streamlining options is generally a good thing but if Admissions wants to start with six buttons and they all serve valid functions, I can’t argue. What we can do is look at the analytics after the initial push and see where people click and don’t click — and adjust accordingly.

I’m still trying to adjust to less writing, but short directive phrases (Update Status, Add Photo, Write Post) seem to work for Facebook, right? In any event, we’ll see how a new direction of less talk, more action works for us.

stop treating QR codes as shiny objects!

QR (quick response) codes, you may have heard, could have many beneficial uses by enabling smartphone users to scan them to unlock additional interactive web content. Sadly, too many people still seem to treat them as a shiny object — something to be used for the sake of appearing trendy, not for practical purposes. I point to this conversation from a colleague at another college (offered anonymity) as an example:

Department: “We’re going to post QR codes at the shuttles stops so that people can use them to access the shuttle schedule!”

Web person: “Couldn’t we also just post the shuttle schedules?”

Department: “Ummm ….”

Pop quiz: Which is more convenient for a user: A piece of paper they can read, or a symbol they may or may not know is a QR code, and that they can only read if they have a QR code reader and a smartphone? You could provide both, but at the very least provide the former … at least if you prize actually letting people find out about your shuttle schedule.

Sadly, that’s not the worst example I’ve heard involving QR codes. Someone at another college told of a proposed PDF with a QR code that, when you scan it made your mobile device try to download — wait for it — the exact same PDF.

No. No. No. No. No!

I can’t stress it enough: Goals first, then tools. Don’t treat QR codes as shiny objects. They are gateways to additional information, not replacements for necessary information! The first college that sends out acceptance letters to prospective students that forces them to scan a QR code to learn whether they are accepted or not should lose its accreditation on the spot!

When I interviewed him last fall, the always impressive Tim Jones of North Carolina State rightfully termed the potential use of QR codes as “enormous, and we’re working with several departments and organizations on campus to develop some interesting ways to use QR code check-ins.” Imagine, for example, accessing additional information on a play, actors or the director from a program, or gaining a building’s office directory, history and local social media posts via scanning a QR code.

A good example at our campus involves QR codes on event posters that bring up a page when users can purchase tickets online. At #hewebroc, we had QR codes that allowed attendees to go online and fill out evaluations (with a chance at winning a prize). At lunch this week with the organizer of our campuswide Quest academic symposium, which often includes fretting over last-minute changes after the printing of the program, I suggested a QR code connecting to a web page with late-breaking updates.

I’ve heard lots of creative and inventive ideas that can really benefit users. What they all had in common was they involved solving a problem or fulfilling an action, as opposed to a desire to use a QR code for the novelty of it.

in a blackout, can social media light the way?

Losing power to campus in the middle of the day on Thursday provided a serious challenge on several fronts. But it also taught me an illuminating lesson on proactive social media use.

I was sitting in a meeting around noon when the lights went out. The head of facilities was also in the meeting and relayed that power was out for most of campus. This happened earlier this semester in the evening and I didn’t even learn about it until later after quite a few complaints on social media. I didn’t want that to happen again.

So, even without much information, my first instinct was to acknowledge the issue via Facebook and Twitter:

Since I did so via iPhone, the update to our Facebook page posted as — surprise, surprise — me! I got over any concern about that quickly, realizing it was more important to have the information out there, even if it draws things back to show the man behind the curtain. Note also that the Twitter message got retweeted, which makes for nearly instantaneous dissemination via personal networks.

I returned to my office where with a laptop and working ethernet (that in itself a minor miracle), we put any and all updates onto Facebook and Twitter and fielded any questions we could. Some people wondered about questions out of our control, but our main promise to provide updates — which we did — may have sufficed for many folks.

In this instance, social media preceded information via official channels, because an official mass communication may involve many more players and factors. Fortunately, the outage itself was resolved fairly quickly, plus it was really nice outside, so the majority of hardships were minimized. In all, it brought home the vital role of social media communication and the importance of us receiving timely and updated information. Not a lesson I was in any hurry to learn, but it’s good to know.

do you keep a social media inventory?

In preparation for this semester’s first meeting of our student social media team, I decided to compile a social media inventory for all the platforms where our office keeps an active presence — which I posted online as a Google document.

My first two thoughts were: 1) Wow! Even I was surprised at how many channels we had; and 2) Why didn’t I do this earlier?

If you haven’t compiled a social media inventory this yet, the process yielded good reasons why you should:

1. Creating your own social media map. You can see where you are and who’s there. The inventory can note what audiences (prospectives, current students, alumni, etc.) use the channels, what kinds of content we share (video, news links, blog posts, etc.) and any related goals. We can realize what channels are best available for what audiences and what kinds of messages.

2. Facilitating assignments for your social media team. It helps my four-student social media team — three generalists and one web video producer — know what channels need monitoring and can provide opportunities for content they generate. It also can serve as an assignment sheet to break down who focuses on what channels and works on specific projects. And as a Google documents with links, it provides a one-stop shop of where we are.

3. Helping others in your organization understand social media options. If I was mildly amazed at the number of social-media channels we have, imagine the reaction of those who don’t pay that close attention. This document helps underscore the important work of our social media team and, in better budget times, could support any requests for more resources.

Making it a Google document means it is, like the social web itself, dynamic. For instance, I just plugged in a new Transferring to SUNY Oswego Facebook page, which recognized a gap in coverage, since about 1/3 of our incoming students are transfers and have specific questions and needs (it’s a cooperative effort with Transfer Services). Note these are just the resources available to our small team, and does not currently include social media presences elsewhere in the college, including the alumni office’s well-trafficked outlets.

If I haven’t mentioned the backstage answers wiki before, it’s proven exceedingly helpful. We set it up as a place to put all the questions we receive via social media, as a behind-the-scenes reference for our social media team as the same questions come up. New questions, and the answers, are added to the wiki, which is organized by topic for easy browsing.

So if you don’t have a social media inventory yet, consider putting one together. Given the time and brainpower you likely put into your social media efforts, having some go-to information seems a worthy investment.

coming together: colleges unite to fight facebook fraud — updated

Imagine you’re driving through unfamiliar territory and your car starts malfunctioning. You pull into a small-town garage and ask the mechanic to look at your vehicle. “I can’t do anything about your car, but I can get you in touch with other people who bought this car,” he says. As you stand there perplexed, he adds: “Hey, would you like to book a hotel room?”

“I’d like you to see what’s wrong with my car,” you respond, growing a bit irked.

“We’ll happily book your hotel room,” the mechanic replies. Then you realize there are no cars in the shop, no oil stains and the gent saying he’s a mechanic has a spotless uniform. Something is amiss.

Now imagine you’re a high-school senior looking into colleges. You see a “Class of 2015″ group for a college you’re interested in. You join it, but instead of finding anyone who can really answer your question or receiving timely info, you see posts promoting a roommate-matching service. Something is amiss.

Welcome to shady Facebook marketing, a near-annual ritual facing incoming students. New York Times education blogger Jacques Steinberg offers an interesting look at the latest fraud — where a roommate-matching group called RoomSurf (nee URoomSurf) created more than 150 fake pages for colleges from coast to coast.

How did he learn about this? Because a group of higher-education web professionals found out about the shady-looking pages, compared notes and conducted some research. A lot of research. We found the same names coming up over and over creating groups posing as official college groups.

Why do we care about this? Simple. Because we want to make sure students and parents looking at colleges — any colleges, not necessarily our own — can get honest and helpful information during this important search. It has been remarkable to see the higher-education community — outsiders may see different colleges as competitors, but we are also colleagues and collaborators — come together and perform research well into the night to make sure students (even if they won’t be our students) don’t get duped.

Whatever the shakeout of this story — whether this attention will prevent shady Facebook marketing from becoming an annual rite — I’m thrilled to see so many colleagues at so many colleges really go to great lengths to make sure we put our students first. Because when you’re kicking the tires of your ride for the next four years, you really deserve some honest answers and connections.

UPDATE, 7:50 p.m.: What a crazy day it was, with additional developments.

- By afternoon, most Class of 2015 sites created by RoomSurf now bear disclaimers saying they are not officially associated with colleges and say they were created by the RoomSurf roommate matching system. See more in New York Times blogger Jacques Steinberg’s recent update.

- Late this afternoon, the State University of New York legal office served RoomSurf founder Justin Blackwell, aka Justin Gauthier, and the company a cease-and-desist order on behalf of the 10 SUNY institutions found to be impacted by the suspect Class of 2015 groups.

- By around 6 p.m., Blackwell’s profile had disappeared, at least from view, on Facebook and he is no longer listed as creator of said groups, multiple sources confirmed. Whether this was his own choice or has anything to do with the investigation Facebook mentioned in last night’s story remains a mystery at this time.

when a website goes live, it doesn’t go dead.

Over the weekend, we began rolling out the new web design for oswego.edu to a pretty good reception. The design portion of the project — from first comps to launch — took less than three months, an exceedingly short window in higher education, so it has been quite a rush. But throughout the process I’ve emphasized that the new look is only a first step.

What we really wanted was a look that was cleaner and less cluttered than the previous design, which had a lot of colors and tables and suffered the misfortune of aging the way anything does in seven years web time. The new look is a skin we’re putting over pages migrated into our new content management system, Ingeniux, which topped some 200 other contenders (when the CMS team started) in large part through ease-of-use for our nearly 300 campus editors. But it’s also a powerful CMS we’ll tap more in the future.

As we were tasked with having the new design up before the Admissions cycle heated up this month, and since we have a huge site with a short window to get this far, some of our old pages remain in our old look and CMS. We continue the migration, but people can still find pages with this look:

In the new site, we try to play up the use of large photos (500 px by 205 px) first proposed by the freelance designer who did the makeover. Feedback from more than 200 incoming students pointed toward a preference for simplicity and a strong visual sense. Adding components (reusable blocks of content) in the right side can help make our pages more dynamic:

But there’s much left to do. We had to make some hard decisions about what we could complete before relaunch, and what we knew would still need work. We don’t want to throw everything into Tales From Redesigned Land’s mythical Phase 2 black hole; we’d like to keep working hard to make the website better on a daily basis. Stewart Foss of eduStyle calls it incremental redesign, and I’m a big believer.

The phrase I use, blunt as it is: When a website goes live, it doesn’t go dead. Everyone working in the web, imho, should think that way. We’re always tweaking, editing, looking to improve. Every day is a new opportunity to make things better than the day before.

the virality myth: why ‘going viral’ isn’t a strategy.

If you work in the communication field, someone may have approached you with a line resembling: Let’s make a video that goes viral! A nice thought, but making a video for the sole purpose of it going viral is as flawed a strategy as buying lottery tickets as a retirement plan.

Any video you make should serve a purpose first and foremost: To showcase a strength, entice prospective customers (or students), raise awareness on an issue, etc. To deploy a more simple breakdown I learned in a public speaking class, presentations (and I’d include video) should try to do one or more of the following: 1) inform, 2) persuade or 3) entertain. That’s where you start.

Making a video for the sole purpose of hoping it will go viral is mere folly. Viral videos are quite often accidental hits, double rainbows or kids after dentists or a dying professor’s extra-resonant lecture. Sure, the Old Spice campaign went viral, but that’s because it represented a breakthrough in terms of superior creativity, near-real-time interaction and remarkable talent on both sides of the camera.

I’ve heard the let’s make something viral pitch a couple times, and my first question is why they think the concept would go viral. One more flash mob or lipdub is just following the herd, and if you can’t provide an amazing new wrinkle, will you stand out from the pack? A clever idea is nice, but thousands of clever videos hit the ether every day. Remember that the latest YouTube statistic is that 24 hours of video are uploaded every minute! Have you truly made something that can cut through that clutter?

It’s totally cool to make and use videos in your communication efforts, but to borrow my favorite maxim from #stamats09: Think goals first, then tools. Does the video serve a purpose to some key audience (in highered: prospective students, current students, faculty/staff, alumni)? Does it inform? Could it persuade? Will it entertain? These are all good reasons to make a video, or a series of videos. When I work with my student videographers, these are our general parameters. It helps that they are members of the target audience and know what others their age may find interesting.

It’s funny that our video with the fastest rise in immediate hits was anything but non-stop excitement — the footage of a wind-turbine installation mentioned in this post. We saw the video as a sidebar to a story, a visualization of a neat green product. But it had news value and picked up hits, links and retweets from a lot of environmentally minded folks. A recipe for success? Not exactly. But here’s something to remember: There is no absolute recipe to success, any set of ingredients that guarantee anything on the web going viral. Period.

So if you’re heading out the door, camera in hand, to make that viral video, also swing by the convenience store and pick up a lottery ticket. Who knows, maybe your chances of the latter jackpot could be even better?