Heavywinter – Page 4

State of Social Media at DU

As I make my exit from the University of Denver, I’ve decided to write one last series of posts outlining what I consider the state of social media at the university. To do so, I’d like to use The Community Roundtable’s Community Maturity Model as a starting point. The model is part of the Roundtable’s 2012 State of Community Management report. Below is the model with my determination of where DU sits. One caveat: I’ve ranked DU as a whole in this illustration rather than my department- MarComm- specifically. There’s a lot of variance in terms of social media sophistication across campus, so you may disagree with my overall ranking of DU and that’s OK. It’s probably worth ranking your own unit as a contrasting exercise to what I’ve provided.

My rankings for DU in terms of the community maturity model.

The eight competencies on the Y-axis are the building blocks of a successful social media program. The X-axis contain the maturity stages that organizations go through as their competency increases. Again, some units will rank higher or lower than what I’ve indicated, but as a whole, I’ve placed DU squarely in the “stage 2: emergent community” space.

While DU ought to advance into stage 3 and beyond, it can’t. Our culture of decentralization (endearingly referred to as “the silo effect”) is the root problem (depending on how many onion layers you care to peel). It creates a gulf between stage 2 and 3 which proves difficult for us to cross (and, indeed, most any other siloed organization). While tools and resources like Yammer and the WebEd series of in-person and online workshops were intended to create a mechanism to cross that gulf, they have only achieved limited success, if any. Other initiatives, like the Center for Teaching and Leraning’s video manager tool currently under development and the recently created marketing confab group that pools marketings from across campus together, continually get us closer, but they haven’t yet gotten DU to cross the gulf. So the question is: what will?

To answer that question we ought to ask why we should at all. Clearly, students live and breathe social media, an idea that has (and is) fueling novel ways for people, organizations and information to connect with one another. It provides an opportunity to better connect our community and it’s wealth of knowledge. Yet, DU was late to the game, officially speaking. Without systems, processes and resources for departments to leverage, siloed approaches once again took root with all of it’s associated issues.

As I look back on my 2 year tenure as a social media strategist at DU, I do see a desire across campus, at least on a grass roots level, to create a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. Of course, differing agendas, incentive structures and many other factors keep grass root efforts at the grass roots level. I believe DU needs to undergo fundamental change in terms of centralization versus decentralization before social media (and the web in general) become a springboard to a better student experience, lower costs, greater efficiencies and a model of DU’s desire to be a great university dedicated to the public good.

I’m very interested in reading and seeing the rankings you create for your own unit or for your own institution. Feel free to add rankings, issues, opportunities and anything else that’s relevant in the comments.

Book Notes: The Inmates Are Running the Asylum

Cognitive friction: the resistance encountered by a human intellect when it engages with a complex system of rules that change as the problem changes.
“#1 goal of all computer users is to not feel stupid.”
Larry Keeley’s three qualities for high tech products:
1. Capability: what can be done? Supplied by technologists.
2. Viability: what can we sell? Supplied by business people.
3. Desirability: what do people want? Supplied by designers.
Need and desire are not the same. Desire leads to loyalty.
Designing for a minority of users leads to success rather than attempting to accommodate all users. Specificity is key. Find a common denominator and work off of it.
Personas are a key to successfully designing a product/service. They must be specific more so than accurate in order for development not to get carried away with edge cases. Don’t average them because that saps the power of specificity. Specificity directs what should and shouldn’t be done in the system. Personas need to reflect users, not buyers or other characters that are close to the product, but not actual users of it.
Goals and tasks are not he same. Goals are stable while tasks can change with circumstances yet still achieve the goal.
After personas are created and goals outlined, create scenarios. Scenarios should outline user tasks (as uncovered by research and user testing) that achieve goals. You want to eliminate steps to complete tasks and make goal achievement as easy as possible.
Two kinds of scenarios: daily use and necessary use. Daily use are most useful and important. They’re the main actions a user performs and also the most frequent. One or two is typical- more than 3 is rare. Users will go from newbie to shortcuts to customization quickly. Necessary use must be performed, but not frequently. Typically more necessary scenarios than daily. Necessary uses don’t require shortcuts or customization since they’re too infrequent for the user. As such, they can safely be less thought through from an interaction perspective.
Edge cases can safely be ignored from an interaction standpoint. Include the necessary things needed to do the jobs, but don’t spend much time on them. Edge cases are the place where time and budget can be saved.
Less interface and design is better for the end user. An interaction designer’s fingerprints should be nonexistent in the best cases.
Inflecting the interface: controls for daily use scenarios should be easily found and used. All other controls for necessary and edge cases can be move to secondary locations.
Perpetual intermediaries: the idea that most people will be intermediate level users of a product/service. Beginners are important but people grow out of it quickly. Experts are rare.
Ensure vocabulary doesn’t get in the way. Semantics matter. Define things up front so everyone is talking about the same things.
Conceptual integrity: from Frederick Brooks, meaning that a single minded vision of a program is the most important ingredient to success.
Don’t become a customer driven company doing whatever your customers say to do. Instead, become a vision driven company that allows itself to be informed by customers, but not dictated to by them. Take a longer view of the business, take responsibility, take time and take control.
“The central recommendation of this book is that the interaction designer should be the ultimate owner of product quality.“

Mastering Difficult Situations

Aside from the ever present issue that decks aren’t nearly as good without the accompanying audio, this is still great advice. And since the audio is missing, I like to add audio in my head as I read the slides. For this one, I chose Marlon Brando’s slow and deliberate pacing that feels nonchalant yet wise and worth your attention. Your mileage may vary on that choice.

Car bumpers are stupid

I was in a fender bender last weekend. An SUV backed up into my Accord denting the hood with its bumper. Question: what’s the point of car bumpers if they don’t meet at a standard height?

Gerry McGovern & Audience Based Navigation

Gerry McGovern nails it again. In his latest post, he laments audience based navigation. Not always, mind you, but often. One of McGovern’s main examples is from the educational world where audience based navigation is rampant and, in my humble opinion, replete with the problems he cites. The main thing to ensure is mutual exclusivity among audience segments. Otherwise, people don’t know where to go if they find that they fall into multiple categories. I’ve covered this topic in the past and I’m glad McGovern has given it airtime. It’s long overdue for higher ed to, at minimum, treat audience based navigation as a secondary means of exploring a site.

Book Review: The Innovative University

Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring apply Christensen’s disruptive innovation theories to traditional, 4 year, public and private higher ed institutions. It’s a great primer for anyone who wishes to understand the issues currently facing the higher ed world. I’ve written quite a bit at this blog about the issues this book puts into historical context. I’m now much more well grounded as to the origins of the problems I see and how they can be dealt with in the future. Here are a few highlights:

Three of Harvard’s successive presidents- Charles Eliot, Lawrence Lowell and James Conant- each contributed to what we now stereotype as a typical university. That model is pursued by many (most?) “traditional” universities and it comes at a high cost.
The highly decentralized organizational structure is caused by a desire to provide the best education possible. Its outcome is the creation of specialized graduate schools that sit atop undergraduate programs. Those schools tend to isolate subject matter in order for faculty and students to interact and collaborate to a greater degree. The downside- isolation- squeezes a general purpose, liberal arts type of education as undergrads are more likely to be trained to enter graduate school than to be productive in the working world.
The grueling “publish or perish” approach that all would be professors must traverse in order to gain tenure takes away a portion of their time to teach. With research focused faculty incentivized to pursue discovery of the next big idea, they shun teaching low level courses in preference of working with graduate students who can help them advance their scholarly inquiry. Undergraduates suffer from a relative dearth of highly accomplished instructors.
Universities do not utilize their infrastructure well which causes overhead expenditures to unnecessarily be large compared with their revenue generation potential. Adding summer terms and using classrooms throughout the day and night would maximize the value of buildings.
A “bigger and better” mentality produces many high cost services including athletic programs and new buildings, a desire to hire the best faculty at higher financial and student learning cost, and ever stringent admission selectivity in an attempt to raise the institution’s rankings. All of these practices come at great cost, usually outstripping revenue even as tuition rises considerably faster than inflation. The entire system is unsustainable and requires state and federal largesse along with aggressive fundraising.

The authors spell out many innovative ways to get out of the snowball effect that these issues cause. They use BYU-Idaho as a model institution that has bucked many of the pitfalls that engulfs higher ed today.

If you work at a higher ed institution, this book won’t alleviate the frustrations you most likely feel, but it will give you some context to understand the nature of those frustrations. They’re systemic and not easily solved without major effort from senior management and buy in from employees.

Thoughts on Higher Ed in the Mobile Space

Mobile is on everyone’s mind these days. Many schools have already launched some kind of iteration to meet and compete in the mobile space. But I’m finding the early versions lacking. That’s not meant as a criticism though. All early attempts will be rough around the edges as novelty wears off and best practices begin to form. With that in mind, here are a few thoughts on where things stand.

Don’t conflate audience segments with use cases

I see this all the time in higher ed. A mobile site offers links to content aimed at prospects and also throws in “mobile” functionality like maps and directions. Who are the mobile tools intended for? Prospects are not in need of maps or directions- they’re not on campus. Yes, they are on campus during a visit, but with decision making processes lasting months if not years, it amounts to a rare occurrence (and you shouldn’t design interfaces for the exception to the rule- offer access to the functionality, but don’t make it a focus). Like any other project, you need to settle on who you’re building your project for OR for what purpose (i.e. use case), but not both. It doesn’t make sense to offer tools that are really meant to fulfill particular use cases alongside content meant to fulfill audience segment needs (unless they’re the same thing in which case we’re only talking semantics). Divide an conquer. Create a single .edu experience with focus and intent. Don’t get mesmerized by “mobile” functionality unless it supports the bigger plan.

Use cases might point you towards an app

If research suggests that maps or other kinds of functionality are needed, don’t be so quick to throw them in alongside the content intended for an audience segment. Instead, be ruthless in your curation and editing of the interface and user flow. Let the focus of your strategy be your guide and allow it to simplify your decisions. If your intent is to primarily reach prospects via mobile, then do so. Take the research finding that don’t fit well (like maps) and set them aside. Once you have the segment’s experience honed, then take all the leftover stuff and ask why it was left out. I think in the case of maps, it will be left out because it’s not directed toward prospects. It’s really intended for an on-campus use case which might mean it’s relevant to a prospect when visiting, but more apt for the people who are always on campus- students, employees. The use case cuts across traditional audiences and presents an opportunity to create a second experience, this time centered around the I’m-on-campus use case.

That use case might best be addressed through a dedicated app. Why? Because mobile doesn’t necessarily mean walking on campus. You can just as easily be sitting at home surfing on your phone. This fact suggests that the mobile site should actually be the same as the desktop site, or, in other words, there should only be one universal .edu experience whether it is seen on a phone, an iPad, a desktop or anything else. This is the responsive web design idea that’s gaining so much attention (and deservedly so). So, if all devices point to the same experience and that experience is determined to primarily be centered around prospects, then where should this use case approach apply? I say an app. It can include links to the intranet, Blackboard (or whichever LMS your institution uses), shuttle service, dining hall push notifications, etc.- anything that matches the use case.

Quick examples

Harvard has done an excellent job of providing focus to their mobile experience. You can tell by the content offered that it’s squarely directed to on-campus use. There is nothing extraneous to that purpose which brings it focus, clarity and cohesiveness. Their website, on the other hand, is squarely directed at prospects. There are ways to get to content that isn’t specifically geared to prospects, but those access points are secondary to the main show which is for prospects. Roanoke’s mobile site, in contrast, has less focus. You might think they follow an on-campus use case strategy too, but then you see that they include links for admissions and majors- content meant for prospects. They also have a link labelled alumni which is yet another audience segment, this time literally called out. In contrast to Harvard, Roanoke’s palette of content is much less coherent burdening the user to figure out whether or not the site is of use to them or not. Placement of the links is also a problem. Josh Clark teaches us that the audience specific links are located at the most accessible link target areas of the screen. That further adds usability confusion to the site.

Thoughts on Audience Segmentation Via Clayton Christensen’s Theories

In the past, I’ve written about the line that exists between audience segmentation versus fragmentation. In it, I pondered whether our institution’s landscape of nearly 300 social media accounts constituted good segmentation or out-of-control fragmentation. Since that June 2011 post, I’ve been doing a deep dive into Clayton Christensen’s work. He discusses how well intentioned, smart people can wind up with erroneous conclusions and poor results through the use of traditional audience segmentation practices (i.e. demographics) when it comes to innovation. Why? Because it typically only leads to incremental advances, squeezing out a bit more success where small pockets of opportunity might still be found. To make leapfrog advances, however, requires a different approach. Christensen’s work deals with disruptive innovation, but I believe aspects of his work can readily be applied to marketing in the higher ed world. One of his main ideas goes something like this: it’s a customer’s circumstances that should drive your efforts, not the actual customers themselves. You should ask yourself the question “What job is the customer hiring this product/service to do for them?” rather than “How can we use the data we know about the customer to entice them to use this product/service.”

In higher ed, we ask the latter question based on the segments we all know well: prospects, students, alumni, donors, parents, faculty, etc. The problem with this approach is that it’s too far removed from what our audiences need to get done. We segment this way based on what we want them to do, not necessarily by what they need to do. The gap that exists between the two is where you’ll find ineffective marketing.

In alumni relations, for example, we work hard to get people to engage with the institution through events, social media, etc. What that approach misses, however, is the fact that many of our alums don’t want to engage with us. It’s nothing personal, they just don’t. Yet, we shower them with as much marketing and programming as we can only to find that the efforts end poorly. Additionally, some who do participate will only do so because there is a temporary alignment of goals: we offer free food at a sporting event and an alum, who planned to attend anyway, decides to “participate” in order to get the free food. We mark that down as engagement, but it isn’t- at least not in the way we intended.

Let’s now take a Christensen approach and ask “What job is a member of the university community trying to get done?” Search for a job is sure to be top of mind, but what else? How about work/life balance, support for entrepreneurial start-ups and better time management skill? Seen this way, we find that these jobs aren’t limited to what we label “alumni.” Alumni may indeed list finding a job a top priority, but so would many other traditional audience segments. We see this with any set of jobs needing to be done. Parents grapple with work/life balance, students start businesses and everyone could probably benefit from better time management. We find that our traditional methods of segmentation are too one dimensional and place people in buckets that may not reflect who those people really are. In turn, they won’t provide a good foundation for programming and marketing success. If we simplify a group like alumni that are, in reality, exceptionally diverse, we end up creating and promoting programming and marketing that are one size fits none. Everybody loses.

So why does higher ed lump people in marginally meaningful ways? It’s likely because that’s how our internal systems, organization and data are aligned. As students graduate, they are deleted from the student bucket and placed into the alumni bucket and, hopefully, handed off to the alumni relations group for further engagement. Unless your institution has a sophisticated CRM tool that actively tracks the right sorts of data, then you can’t segment based on anything more meaningful. Unless fundamental change occurs, higher ed will be unable to think about it’s audiences based on their needs rather than their superficial characteristics.

This is very similar to the user experience field which wants to be “customer focused” by addressing people’s needs and wants. Needs and wants are uncovered through research and then tested against as the experience being built is created. This same approach is analogous to what Christensen advocates. To be truly successful requires us to uncover our audiences’ needs and create programming and marketing that specifically addresses them. That will require us to avoid grouping people in our traditional ways.

If you’re interested in learning more about Christensen, here’s a great starter video that gives an overview of his theories. Highly recommended, of course.