Social Media

Content / Higher Ed / Information Architecture / Social Media — 5 comments
17
Mar 11

Where Higher Ed Sites Need To Go

The single most important thing higher ed websites can do is change the fundamental organizing principle away from the org chart (content organized via department) and toward people. This means organizing content via degree programs which represents the fundamental connection point between student and school.

User tests show that students have consistent informational needs when deciding which university to attend:

  1. Do you have a program of study that interests me?
  2. Can I afford that program?
  3. Does the school’s culture/vibe feel right (will I fit in)?
  4. Grad level students’s needs will lean more towards faculty, their interests and research opportunities away from cultural fit on a social level (grads don’t usually live on campus so the social component isn’t as important)

This basic set of questions all revolve around degree programs, not the broader departments within which they exist. Because of this level of specificity, departments should take a secondary role in how a higher ed site is structured. Degree programs should instead be the central organizing framework.

I see too many university sites where I can find a program of study through the top level pages only to be taken to a departmental site’s homepage where I have to find the same degree information I thought I was originally linking to all over again.

With a shift in how higher ed sites are organized, other pieces begin to fall into place: building communities around logical points of interest, presenting appropriate content (research, faculty, pricing, culture, etc.) within context and, importantly, filtering out a lot of stuff that’s not relevant because it has nothing to do with a student’s preferred degree program.

Social Media — No comments
24
Feb 11

Calculating Social Media ROI? Is it Possible?

There’s a lot of talk about how to measure the ROI of social media. For marketing campaigns, it can be captured easily enough: track people from exposure to sign-up or purchase or whatever the final goal is and then compare that against what the campaign cost.

However, for social media interactions without any predefined parameters of success, the ROI debate needn’t happen. For example, does anyone track the dollar value of a sales clerk who answers a customer question while they’re going about their primary job duties of stocking shelves, cleaning up, etc.? No, because answering customer questions is the price of doing business and its cost is baked into the clerk’s salary and job duties (as well as everyone else’s in the store).

Does higher ed look for a dollar value in a professor who spends 15 minutes to help a student with an assignment? Again, no because interacting with students is part of a professor’s job, not a separate “engagement” function that needs to be monetarily tracked. Working with students it’s part of the job and so the cost is included in the salary expense and the positive goodwill from the interaction is captured in the price of tuition. Given this, why do we feel the need to place a value on the professor’s “engagement” if the interaction takes place online instead of offline?

What’s missing from the conversation is that social media is part of everyone’s job who interacts with customers. “Social media” is one of many aspects to the clerk’s or professor’s assigned duties. It’s perfectly rational to think that they’d get paid the same regardless of whether engaging with customers (online or offline) was a defined part of their job or not.

Communication / Higher Ed / Social Media / Strategy / Technology — No comments
19
Jan 11

Higher Ed: Marry Social & Technology For A Win

Universities are social organizations, but there’s little proof of it in how their technology is thought of, planned or deployed. Sure, everyone now has a set of icons that will whisk people to Facebook, Twitter and beyond, but precious few are really embracing what social really is and how to bake it into their core experience.

College campuses are inherently social environments. Classmates are friends, roommates, drinking buddies, dates, teammates, maybe all of the above. At a minimum, a typical undergraduate’s social world is inextricably interwoven with the college experience- they’re one and the same. And yet, so many edu websites are socially barren landscapes. Publishing a Twitter RSS feed or showing a Facebook widget is not what I’m talking about here. Those are a step in the right direction, but we can do better.

Higher ed could take a cue from a fantastic service put forth by Vail Resorts, a ski industry company. Their EpicMix service marries skiing/snowboarding’s social nature with technology (check out the video for an overview). It embraces, supports and extends what people already do in the social context of a ski resort without trying to take it over or mandate use. Instead, it uses a set of tools and services to evolve and augment what’s already being done and does so in an easy, unobtrusive way. Either use it or don’t, it doesn’t force anything behavior on people who don’t want to participate, but for those who do, they get additional benefits. And if you’re not a participant, you still get some benefits too (scanning your pass makes the lift line experience quicker and easier).

The same concepts from EpicMix can effectively be applied to higher ed to gain the same basic benefits- augmenting what students are already doing on campus like communicating, sharing advice and information, planning meetings on the fly, etc. Students are a captive audience for a university so deploying the service is an easy matter and students have an inherent incentive to join and participate- everyone else would be using it.

This sort of service runs parallel to the creation of a university centric social network, another great idea university’s should pursue (but one that’s best left to its own post to discuss). EpicMix is itself a niche social network that works with the Facebooks and Twitters of the world to extend and leverage those services for a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts.

There’s a lot of hard work underlying EpicMix and what it represents to higher ed, but social networks aren’t going away so the time is now to get on board and take the first steps.

Books / Communication / Social Media — No comments
02
Jan 11

Review of Digital Strategies for Powerful Corporate Communications

Digital Strategies for Powerful Corporate CommunicationsMy Goodreads.com rating: 3 of 5 stars

If you’re at all connected to the social media world within a work setting, much of this book will be basic to you. That said, it’s easy for lots of small opportunities and ideas to fall through the cracks on a day-to-day basis and this book will bring back some of those missed opportunities. I kept a list of ideas to investigate and think about again and for that, I give it three stars.

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