I saw @kprentiss give a great presentation at HighEdWeb 2009 on his ‘dance floor’ theory when discussing incoming students, the way they interact, and how they share interests (update: video from @tsand). Take that theory and apply it to your Class of 2014 community. A dance needs a chaperone to help things run smoothly, but keeps enough distance to let the students do their own thing and have fun.

After just being a passive observer of my school’s 2012 Facebook communities, I decided to take a chaperone role for the Class of 2013 Facebook group. What did that mean? After the original Class of 2013 group was removed (see: Facebookgate) and their ‘dance’ was abruptly ended, I stepped in and invited them to another space so they could continue to have fun. Once things were running again, I had some simple rules that any chaperone would follow. Someone is whining? Only step in if it’s annoying others. Someone joins that doesn’t belong in the group? If they’re causing trouble, ask them to leave. If that doesn’t help, kick them out. Kids are fighting? Split them up, and talk to them individually. Rumors are flying? Be the person of authority and correct the issue. Outside of that, sit back and let them have fun.

There are times to react, even if the students don’t ask specifically for your help. Maybe you’ll see comments from students wishing they could see the dorms even though they can’t visit the school before May 1. At a dance or school trip, that translates to hearing “we’re out of food” or “the music isn’t loud enough”. Go out and get the things they need. Create quick videos of the dorms for them. You don’t have time? Get your current students or tour guides to make the videos. Keep the dance running smoothly, or your accepted students will get bored and leave early. Don’t run a lame dance.

We had great results from our Class of 2013 Facebook group last year. I surveyed the members and asked some optional questions about the group. Here are some responses:

How would you rate Emerson’s involvement in the Facebook group?
Just enough – 121
Not enough – 10
Too much – 1

Were you ever helped with a question about Emerson via the Facebook group?
Yes – 113
No – 19

Do you feel the answers you received in the Facebook group provided the information you needed? 1= Not Helpful at All, 5 = Very Helpful
1 – 1
2 – 3
3 – 14
4 – 47
5 – 73
Average = 4.37

Do you plan to continue connecting to Emerson’s faculty, staff and students through Facebook groups?
Yes – 128
No – 4

If your accepted students know they can rely on you, they’ll give you the respect you deserve – and respect is the best thing a chaperone can earn. Whether you’re running a Facebook group, Facebook fan page, or private community (like Rachel Reuben wrote about last year), I think this idea translates across all platforms. I’m applying the same ideas to our Class of 2014 group again this year. How do you run your Class of 2014 community?

Photo credit: ibm4381

Related posts:

1. Protecting your College’s Intellectual Property on Facebook: Learning from the Class of 2014 Groups
2. Highlights from E-expectations: Class of 2009
3. Café New Paltz: A Yielding Success

For more reading, I’ve tagged a few articles mentioned in, or related to the presentation:

• http://www.delicious.com/tag/helix10-wave

Important takeaways:

• Wave is a new communications medium, inspired by today’s information sharing.
• Wave is not social networking, not the next Twitter – it’s a tool for getting work done.
• It’s part of a long term game plan that continues for at least the next ten years.
• Buzz was the opposite of wave: it was launched in haste, for the short term, to capitalize on a market trend.
• It’s hard to innovate, even for Google
• The Past
  • Communication used to be very slow, very analog: phones, intercoms, mail.
  • Classrooms have also changed from the old school: lectures, lots of face to face and small groups, libraries.
  • You had to work at communication and education
• Today
  • Today, communication is fast and easy: email, IM, forums, wikis, blogs
  • Education answered this problem with the LMS
    • An imperfect solution to a complex problem
    • Pleases some of the people some of the time, never all of the people all of the time.
    • Frequently under or over utilized
• The Future
  • Communication will be:
    • Multi-vector: Facebook, Twitter (Google Reader)
    • Multi-channel: audio, video, images, text (Skype)
    • Multi-party: Chatroulette (scary)
  • The future of the LMS is not in management, it’s in enhancement and augmentation.
• Right now, wave is an empty tool, it’s not ready for our use yet.
• Relax, be patient, keep your eyes on the news/articles for now.
• The launch of wave threw people off. The timing was strange, and released in a very public manner for a tool that is still very alpha in nature.
• Accessibility is also the elephant in the room, they have a long way to go yet in that area, and we have to wait on that.
• Looking ahead
  • Watch for GMail and wave integration (which will be far better than the GMail/Buzz integration).
  • Ubiquitous wave servers, like email servers (it’s been open sourced!).
  • Applications built on top of the wave protocol: LES, project management, help desk…
  • All with the goal of creating simple, flexible, coherent group communication.
• Use wave to enable people
  • Note taking/playback
  • Distance learning
  • Group work
  • Intercampus collaboration
  • Course planning
• This isn’t coming tomorrow…but you can begin to prepare and learn now.

Related posts:

1. Security in October: Google Wave, Facebook, XSS
2. The Use of Social Media in Higher Education for Marketing and Communications: A Guide for Professionals in Higher Education
3. eduWEB Presentation: Email Marketing for Higher Education

There were 144 responses over the first two weeks of March. There are 4146(ish) colleges and universities in the US, however there currently is no metric for how many of those are already using a CMS. Consider the results specific to the US, as even though there were a couple international entries, it was not statistically significant. See the chart below for a break down on campus size.

“This is one of the more political and important decisions a university makes. Every system has its benefits and drawbacks, but it is almost impossible to compare systems. This is especially true since you really don’t know the system until you’ve been using it for years, and at that point it is too late to switch or be able to evaluate other products.”
~ Survey comment

The golden question: Which CMS should I use? Well, as you can expect, that’s not a simple thing to answer. As you can see in the chart below, the top four (excluding in house solutions), is spread pretty evenly. OmniUpdate comes out at the top of the list, which isn’t surprising given the length of time they’ve been around, and the fact that they have produced a higher ed targeted, feature rich CMS. The other three – dotCMS, Cascade, and Drupal – run neck and neck, which is interesting, since these three systems are all quite different. But, that does emphasize the point that different schools will have different needs, and will choose a CMS to fit those needs. Always take the time to properly identify what needs and requirements you have before selecting a CMS.

PHP and Java rule the roost as programming language, with PHP just barely leading. Together, they make up more than half of what is being used in higher ed. This is good news for those looking to staff up on programmers, since these two languages are also generally in the top four most popular programming languages in general (along with C and C++), meaning applicant pools should be bigger for them. I realized I made a mistake and left Ruby on Rails off the survey, but it turns out that it has definitely not hit the radar, and was written in by only one school. Note: some survey entries were modified for uniformity and to correct incorrect platform language identification.

Schools were fairly evenly split in whether or not they had more than one CMS available on campus. Larger schools, with good reason, were more likely to offer multiple CMSs as opposed to small schools. Wordpress was one of the most popular secondary CMSs, probably as it sees significant use as a blogging platform, rather than primary site CMS. In fact, the secondary CMS reports showed additional penetration by other open source CMSs as well, like Joomla and Drupal. These systems will generally prove easier to deploy in a supplementary capacity since they usually have shallower learning curves and quicker turnaround times.

By and large, schools host their own CMS. I believe this is perfectly reasonable, since we normally have access to heavy iron more than capable of hosting a web server, and we’re connected to pipes with equally available bandwidth. The largest exception was OmniUpdate, which was mainly hosted by the vendor. They made up 75% of the responses that said they were hosted by their vendor. Of OmniUpdate users specifically, only one-third host it themselves. It should be noted, however, that this is intentional on their part.

Over half the schools (53%, 58% when unknowns are excluded) host only 5,000 or fewer pages. There was significant dropoff after 100,000 pages. This data roughly mirrors the demographics of survey respondents – 65% were from schools of 10,000 students or less. Small schools are more likely to have fewer pages, 75% have 10,000 pages or fewer versus 51% of large schools.

High traffic sites might be concerned about the number of pages they can serve without taxing their hosting resources. Surprisingly, if you serve over one million pageviews in a month, you are in the minority of universities. Note that some systems, such as Cascade, do push publishing to a second server, or others might have something like a Squid proxy running, so the CMS itself isn’t necessarily responsible for serving pages to a visitor. These statistics do not take that difference into account. Also of note, nobody serving over one million pages a month reported using Wordpress or Drupal (correction: three different respondents reported using Drupal in cases over 1,000,000 pageviews).

One quarter of respondents don’t make usage of their CMS mandatory. About half (47%) do, with another 28% having flexible rules. It would seem the trend definitely is towards trying to get people to use a central system. A slightly higher percentage, 35%, of larger schools don’t make CMS usage mandatory. Otherwise, statistics between large and small schools are relatively similar.

An interesting result, there appears to be relative consistency in the number of contributors schools have at each level, with a peak between 101 and 250 users. Only seven systems were being reportedly used with more than 500 users (each with only one vote): Contribute, Luminis, Plone, OpenText, Cascade, Ironpoint, and Drupal. The average satisfaction with a CMS appears to drop over 500 users as well, dropping by half a point among those users.

“Choosing and implementing a CMS can be done within a small organization like ours. However, getting the culture to change to accept distributed ownership of web content is much tougher!”
~ Survey comment

Regardless of the reason why, almost three quarters of users surveyed said they’d use the same system again, whether because they just liked it, or because it would be better than risking a switch to a worse system. The rest would either switch because they want a better system, or because options now are better then when they first deployed their current CMS. This metric didn’t take into account those who might be on the fence as to what they would do. Large schools were more likely than both small schools and the average to reuse the same system. Users of Contribute and custom/homegrown CMSs were most likely to want to change (71% and 62% respectively). That doesn’t include Serena Collage users, all of whom would change for obvious reasons (the product is no longer being supported).

“The real answer to the question about whether we would choose the same platform again from us would be: We’d do another analysis before concluding anything. Since we haven’t done that in ~4 years, for now we’d stick with what we have, but if we were really considering things again, we’d spend several months on a market analysis before concluding anything.”
~ Survey comment

Overall satisfaction was rated on a scale of 1 to 10. No conditions were set on how to rate the satisfaction, so this is very qualitative. The average score was 7.04. Contribute failed miserably out of all the CMSs (based on a minimum of five schools reporting usage). OmniUpdate took the crown, doing better than a 9 overall. Reason, a PHP based open source CMS developed out of Carleton College, came in second at 8.6, and dotCMS took third at 8.08. Schools using custom or homegrown solutions were more than a point under average, falling below a 6. Smaller schools were more likely to give higher marks to their CMS, though the total average score swing between large and small schools was only about a quarter point.

Top three paid CMSs*:

1. OmniUpdate
2. Hannon Hill Cascade
3. Ektron

* Based on reported satisfaction, minimum 5 ratings

Top three open source CMSs*:

1. Reason
2. dotCMS^
3. Drupal

* Based on reported satisfaction, minimum 5 ratings
^ dotCMS does offer a paid enterprise branch

Top three used CMSs*:

1. OmniUpdate
2. dotCMS
3. Cascade

* Based on number of surveyed schools using them, excluding custom and homegrown CMSs

If you download the raw data, you can read all the comments, pros, and cons people listed with each system. For the sake of brevity, I only included a couple here. This article will be followed up in the coming weeks by several guest posts discussing all the top used CMSs to give you a look inside other people’s experiences. In those posts, we’ll include some of the specific pros and cons that survey respondents submitted. Direct your thoughts and questions in the comments below, and we can continue discussing any of the metrics you’d like to.

[Results] Higher Ed CMS Usage by Michael Fienen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at doteduguru.com.

Related posts:

1. [Guru Survey] Higher Ed CMS Usage
2. Evolving in a Recession: Opportunity in Open Source
3. Student Workers in Higher Ed Web Offices Research Results

Or as John Palfrey, author of Born Digital, warns, “…some people do certainly share too much information about themselves online. They’re going to have tattoos in the digital space that they want to get rid of a few decades from now.”

But when I think of the tattoo example, I think of my first job as a teenager, in a family restaurant.  People with tattoos had to cover them completely with bandages or clothing.  If they could not, they would be assigned a job in the back, as a dishwasher or cook.  I was warned that a misplaced tattoo would land me a career in dishwashing forever.

I did what any respectable aspiring teacher would do.  I waited until my 20s… and eventually inked a spot on my back that would be covered by school dress codes.

By the time I got my higher ed job, tattoos have become more commonplace.  Higher ed blogger @micala blogs about getting her tattoo and how her supervisor accepted the idea.

The point is that if enough people are doing something (like getting inked) it becomes part of a cultural norm.  Sooner or later the naysayers end up accepting it, whether or not they ever like it.  As long as what you do or say isn’t on the far, far outside the norm (like tattooing obscenities on your forehead), you gain acceptance with the group.

Having a public presence on the Web should be no different.  At some point, the things we say and do on in social networking sites and on blogs become norms.  And while there’s professional risk in having a public persona on the Web, there’s also a greater chance than online reputation will result in professional opportunities.

What do you think?  What online behaviors are acceptable now?  What online behaviors are outside the norm?  What ones might be overlooked 5, 10, or even 20 years from now?  Do you think some online behaviors will always cross the line?

(Note: I’m not saying we shouldn’t expect students to be digitally literate.  As a matter of fact, I’ll be talking about the need for digital literacy next week.)

Related posts:

1. Division III Releases Social Networking Rule Change for Communicating with Prospective Student-Athletes
2. A Friendly Reminder: Social Media Is Social
3. Highlights from E-expectations: Class of 2009

Jessica Krywosa – Director of Web Communications – Suffolk University

Jess has been the Director of Web Communication at Suffolk University for closing in on two years now.  Although newer to higher ed, Jess has been a leader in electronic outreach strategies for grassroots educational non-profits for over ten years. She currently is focused on strengthening virtual relationships with a heavy emphasis on enrollment and retention based efforts. You have probably seen Jess on Twitter and feel free to connect with Jess on LinkedIn.  Her personal website and blog Krywosa.com has been a source for great content around web marketing and social media for a while now.  You might even remember Jess from her guest blog post, Integrated Grassroots and Social Media Efforts.

Mike Petroff – Web Manager for Enrollment – Emerson College

Mike is the Web Manager for Enrollment at Emerson College.  He leads web marketing and online recruitment efforts for undergraduate and graduate admission.  Mike also chairs the social media group at Emerson as they work on coming up with cutting edge ways to use the social web to recruit the next generation of students.  You can also follow Mike on Twitter or connect with Mike on LinkedIn.  You might remember his post at the end of last year advising us all on how to Protect your College’s Intellectual Property on Facebook.

Welcome!

So help me welcome these two gurus to the team! We look forward to them sharing more of their expertise in the coming months.  I’ve known them both for a while and have had great conversations with them about internet marketing and social media use in higher education. It will be great to have them share these stories in an open manner!

Photo credit: Petronas Twin Towers by Ehsan Khakbaz

Related posts:

1. Protecting your College’s Intellectual Property on Facebook: Learning from the Class of 2014 Groups
2. Introducing Blog High Ed: Aggregating the Best of Higher Ed Blogs
3. Surprise! New Guru Writer – Paul Gilzow

Some Interest Facts From The Video

• By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers
• 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year have met via social media
• If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s 4th largest
• YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world

Specifically there are some interesting educational stats that are included.

• 2009 U.S. Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students outperformed those receiving face-to-face instruction
• 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
• 80% of companies are using LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees
• In 2009, Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen

With all of these online students, what kind of problems does that pose for a traditional school and dorms? It was a while back that Michael Fienen wrote about how online education is changing.  If the data above is fully accurate then colleges and universities have a lot to worry about unless they are willing to adapt.  With LinkedIn beginning to hold such an important function in the hiring process this puts a lot of pressure on Career Services to fully take advantage of this platform or risk becoming irrelevant.

The video states it best:

Social Media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.

Besides all these interesting facts, the video is a perfect example of how to promote an online book through an interesting and engaging video.  Great content and now it has me interested in checking out the Socialnomics book.

So what are your thoughts on the data?  Any other great videos on this topic?

Related posts:

1. Live Blogging AMA Higher Ed: The New Power: Social Media Marketing Strategy for Higher Education
2. Help Me Help You: Social Media Education
3. Social Media Comes Last

Back in the 80s in a railroad town with a declining population, all we had was a top-40 station, (eventually) classic rock station, oldies stations, and talk radio. And of the entire catalog of classic rock songs and oldies, it seemed like the stations only played the top 40 hits of the respective eras they covered.

It wasn’t until the 90s and early 00s rolled around that things got better. Kids started bands, and we went to shows. We shared mixed tapes. There was an alternative station that broadcast in Central PA via radio and Web. It was around through my college years and first real job. I bought a ton of CDs. I went to Rolling Rock Town Fair, and I went to Warped Tour. When the station changed formats to country, it all went down the tubes. I lost touch with music. I stopped buying music. I stopped going to shows all together. I lost the better part of a decade.

Then @ronbronson, @andrewcareaga, @radiofreegeorgy, @TimNekritz, and a few other Higher Ed Critics did their The Top 100 Albums of the 2000s, and I realized it was time to crawl out from my frickin’ rock. I tried my local stations. That top-station? Crap. That classic rock one? Now 80s hair bands. The oldies one? Now a mix of 90s and 80s with a side of country. No good station to speak of.

So here I am in 2010 commuting an hour to work, realizing that the “oldies station” that plays hits that I wouldn’t have listened to in the 80s and 90s is probably all my town has left to offer. (And they just played that Bryan Adams song again for the tenth time this week.) Then it occurs to me that I don’t really need radio to keep me up-to-date; I need you. I need @dtatusko’s blips. I need Higher Ed Critics like @andrewcareaga.

What does this have to do with why I tweet? My department, my university, my town is a like local station. The Web has top-40 rock stars. Higher ed even has it’s own top-40. With twitter we can take our ideas and remix them. Share what’s new or unique. It’s great to hear what rock stars like Chris Brogan, Seth Godin, and Jared Spool have to say. But what’s even better is responding to @jeffswain, or sharing the blogs of @chasgrundy, @shelbythayer, @aprilsheninger, or joking with @brendensparks. Twitter is my playlist for insight and entertainment.

Who we follow, what tweet, and and what we retweet is like a mix tape that we share.  Twitter is not top 40 radio. It doesn’t have to play the same hits from the same rock stars 24/7, unless you want it to.  Every tweet peep is a garage band, and (@micala, @marleysmom, @DebraSanborn, @tsand, @3dogmcneill, @cmykdorothy, @joelgoodman, @cyndef, all of you) I am your groupie!

Why do you tweet? Who’s on your twitter “playlist”?

Image mix tape for matt’s bday by ramsey everydaypants

Related posts:

1. The Future is Here: Internet TV and Wireless Radio have Arrived
2. Happy Halloween from the Gurus
3. Pictures from the first HighEd Tweetup

The first step we wanted to take is to get a snapshot of just what was being used. We’re asking you, our readers, to take five minutes today to click the link below and fill out a quick survey so that we can show people just what is popular today, and provide a handful of examples for those researching CMSs to check out (and be sure to tweet, email, or share the survey with colleagues at other schools). We’ll follow up with a report on the results, and then begin a series of user contributed articles talking about their experience deploying and using particular CMSs.

(Aside: And be sure to check out CMS Matrix if you need a tool to begin doing comparisons with. Also, I’ll be presenting part of a series featuring open source CMSs in higher ed with Higher Ed Experts in April if you’re interested in dotCMS, Drupal, or Wordpress.)

Our hope is that this will help provide some stepping stones for those designing, redesigning, or realigning a site who need a new CMS to serve as the foundation for their university’s site. We appreciate any information you can share with us!

Start taking the survey »

photo credit: bionicteaching

Related posts:

1. [Results] Higher Ed CMS Usage
2. [Guru Survey] Are Classes In Your Toolbox?
3. Social Survey: Twitter for Higher Ed Marketing

I set up a Google text document for each individual and included the three questions in the document and shared it with them.  These three questions were intended to be both educational to me and to get them to think about what their job means to them.  These questions are also intended to be confidential unless the individual decides to share them with others. So here are the three questions:

1. What would you do to improve your existing job and make it better?

This first question basically recognizes that you are doing the job and hopefully are thinking about improvement.  I’m a firm believer that there is always a better way to do anything.  The day that you simply become content with the status quo is a very bad sign.  This is also the first step to saying I value your input.  If improvements have been identified and we aren’t making progress three months from now then something is wrong.

2. What do you want to get better at doing?  What can *Manager Name* do to help you to be better at this?

Understanding and admitting our weaknesses is one of the most important steps in progressing our careers.  Once again not only am I looking for personal feedback, but I want to know how I can help you improve this weakness.  Being not just interested but vested in someone’s development is a very important step to building credibility with someone.  If the manager chooses, this can also be an opportunity to identify weaknesses in individuals that maybe they don’t see but can start improving.

3. Where do you see yourself professionally in a year?

Very similar to the previous two questions this is a personal probe that identifies that you are thinking about a bigger picture and your future.  Now maybe you are thinking a year is not a point far enough away, but let’s be honest, a lot can happen in a year!  Also, we all have to be thinking about the future and how we can continue to develop professionally because there is less certainty than ever before in this tough economic time.  If people have certain interests, then helping them develop in these directions not only helps you build trust as a manager but also helps give you added value out of your team members.

How to use the questions

There are so many reasons even beyond the reasons I listed that these three questions provide such valuable and important feedback.  Employees are people after all.  I believe that all individuals are inherently good and mean the best.  The trick is to find out what makes them tick and how to motivate them.  Different people are interested in different things so there is no “one size fits all” approach that can be used for dealing with employees.

Besides going through the three questions in a 1-on-1 setting, I want my team to be able to make changes and update the document over time.  I also want to make it a point to revisit the document quarterly with them to make sure that we are progressing towards improvements across the board. This keeps everyone honest that we are make steps forward.  It also requires us to check in and talk about things that can get lost in the daily grind.

These three simple questions simply help to scratch the surface of understanding your direct reports, but they can also help you understand motivations and desires that you might NEVER learn otherwise.  Of course for this to work both parties have to be completely honest and understand the intent.  If the employee is gunning for the manager job and the manager doesn’t like this, then we have a problem.  Same if the manager is using these questions to find ways to stunt the growth of their team.

So what questions would you ask of your team?  What questions would you like for your manager to ask if given the opportunity?

Photo: Tres Hermanas [Three Sisters] Mountains by Ðeni

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2. Introducing New Guru’s @jesskry & @mikepetroff!
3. How NOT To Pitch A Blogger

“Multiple Templates on a Higher Education Website.  Is this a good or a bad thing.”

Great question Michael so we passed it around to everyone and here is the input from different perspectives.

The Technical Web Marketer Perspective – Kyle James

Personally I feel that your website should be consistent.  This doesn’t mean that it always has to include the exact same template for every single page, but that the pages should be branded similarly.  This means that they should be consistent in color, font, graphics, etc.  Yes you can give your content creators a few different templates (a good idea), but they should be required to work within these.  Nothing is worse than clicking on an internal link in a college website and getting taken to a website that looks COMPLETELY different.

I’ll give you some picture examples.  The following three came from the Wofford Website when I used to run the site.  It looks like since that time the athletics site has gone in a completely different direction and lost some of that consistency.  I’m sure that everyone in higher ed web knows this… athletics has a tendency to do their own thing so this isn’t totally a shock to anyone.  I would even go so far as saying this consistency should be in place in all other online and offline marketing.

Wofford's Home Page

Wofford's Sights and Sounds Page

Wofford's Old Athletics Homepage

The Web Manager/Developer Perspective – Nick DeNardis

My personal opinion is individual areas of your institutions web site serve different audiences, these audiences have different needs and different things resinate with them. Although it is important to uphold the identity of the institution it doesn’t mean you have to be absolute about it. A base set of colors, grid or wireframe is all you need to make many sites feel the same.

At my institution we have a standard header and footer that we require on all our sites. Beyond that we just have approved colors. We cannot enforce a certain template since all the sites don’t live in the same system. We do have a wireframe that all sites are built from but we don’t let it tie our hands if the needs of the site call some something different.

As you can see from the examples below, the first three use the same structure with navigation on the left while the admission’s site uses a different structure but still looks like it’s part of the same institution.

Honors College

Division of Research

Study Abroad

Undergraduate Admissions

The Web Manager/Developer Perspective – Michael Fienen

I think that it is important to distinguish between the concept of a “theme” and a “template.” The reason for this is very important. In the question, asking if multiple templates should be used, you’ll find that there’s pretty much no way to not use multiple templates. A web site using only one template will be bland, boring, inflexible, and won’t serve your users the way they deserve. So, building on what Kyle mentioned, I think the core of any institution should have a single theme covering all the basic design concepts, and this theme is then applied to a handful of templates. For instance, at our school we have six base templates people can choose from. They share common header, footer, and navigational elements, but each gives the content creator different options for the layout of content on the page itself. The amount of control your theme exerts on your overall web site will be partly dictated by your institutional breakdown.

All that said, I would also warn you to keep tools handy for one-off landing pages that might need to fit your theme, but be entirely independent of any templates you have. Such pages will be frequently used for advertising campaigns, microsites, and landing pages.

Do You Have A Burning Question?

Do you have a web related question that you would like the Guru team to answer?  Ask the .eduGuru’s Your Question today!

Related posts:

1. Taking the idea of a cohesive Web template in a slightly different direction
2. Website Grader: A Quick Site Audit Tool for Free
3. Marketing: The difference between building a website and using it

Keynote speaker Ben Jones from Oberlin College made the comment that I’m sure you preach at your school: “Strategy first, tools second”.  This comment lead so well into my presentation because strategy before making the jump into social media was the focus on my presentation.

Below you can see the 77 slides.  As always I have a tenancy to overdo it, but everyone should be able to find some key takeaway with actionable steps they can use today.  Also for anyone who has seen one of my presentations you might recognize some of the ideas from other presentations.

Enjoy!

Social Media Comes Last #edSocialMedia

Related posts:

1. Hello, Is Anyone Out There – HighEdWeb 2008 Presentation
2. Help Me Help You: Social Media Education
3. Live Blogging AMA Higher Ed: The New Power: Social Media Marketing Strategy for Higher Education

Brett Favre Hyundai Sonata Commercial

If you are interested in seeing more super bowl commercials here are some resources:

1. SPIKE.com Top 10 Super Bowl Commericals of 2010 List
2. Superbowl-commercials.org
3. @TSand Super Bowl Ad for his local Fleet Farm
   

Higher Education Commercial

Getting back on track here, let’s assume that the commercial has to be a national commercial unlike the Akron one.  Meaning you are going to fork it up for the full audience.  This year’s Super Bowl was the most watched television show EVER hitting an estimated 106.5 million viewers.

Super Bowl commercials have to be cutting edge and usually funny.  If they aren’t funny then they must be really witty and smart, like the Google commercial.  The typical college commercial that you see during a Saturday college football game simply would not cut it.   How would you make a college come across as witty and humorous?  It would also have to be for a major school that had national brand.

If I were making a Super Bowl commercial for a college I would want to find famous alumni to do the commercial.  Preferably it would be someone who is funny like an actor or comedian.  Maybe a versatile athlete like Peyton Manning would work.  Speaking of Peyton, how great would it have been this year for the University of Tennessee, Peyton’s alma mater,  to use him in a commercial in his typical role as a humorous, innocent funny man!?  That could be an interesting angle.  Every player in the NFL went to college as there is a rule that you have to play three years of college ball before you are eligible for the draft (or something like that).  If your school has a player on one of the teams in the Super Bowl showing your pride could be a strong bond to establish.  Even after the game if you have a former student-athlete here is an opportunity to showcase your brand.

According to Wikipedia an average Super Bowl commercial this year cost just over $3 million.  We are just talking about the advertising fees, not the production costs!  With education in such tight budget situations across the board right now let’s hope that schools don’t see this as a “justified” expense.  I mean, how many quality web people could you afford to hire for that kind of money?  Talk about really being able to make a tangible web impact and ultimately marketing impact!

So what do you think?  What would your Super Bowl commercial for your school look like?

Before I finish this fun little post, I have to send a congratulations to my New Orleans Saints!  I have been a life long Saints and Sunday’s victory was a very special win.  If you are curious about my history as a Saints fan I wrote about that on my personal blog earlier this week.

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1. Protecting your College’s Intellectual Property on Facebook: Learning from the Class of 2014 Groups
2. The Final Four: College Web Style
3. The Credibility of College Info from Social Network Sites (or Lack Thereof)

Everything is coming together. Slowly, steadily, it’s all about to come crashing together in an energy producing, gamma ray blasting, supernova explosion. Twenty years ago when the first colleges and universities started getting in to the web (and ten to fifteen years ago when it became more commonplace) the web was a very decentralized and amorphous thing. Rarely was there central control because there was no central to do the controlling to begin with yet. Part of our issue with centralized control now is that frequently colleges and departments started sites entirely on their own to begin with, and now don’t want to give up that freedom (whether or not they are doing good things with that freedom). That’s a problem many of us are dealing with, generally with varied success. Usually the move to an increasingly centralized control can be made or broken on the backs of high level buy in. That is crucial, especially with what I’m talking about, something that can span departments, colleges, and the university on the whole.

The issue I’m seeing is way bigger than that. It goes beyond who should be allowed to put content on the Art department’s web site. Look at your web presence – the whole thing. You likely have a web site that is all front facing and public, right? What about an intranet? Student portal? E-commerce platform? Student information system? Alumni portal? Athletics, fundraising, help desk, housing, event ticketing, blog system… The web isn’t just about a stack of HTML files anymore. This is the problem. Of all of these systems present on campus, how many different people are involved in running them, and how many of those are working together (better question: how many are working against each other)? How many are even under the same authority? I’ll happily throw down a stack of money that says you can’t even name everyone responsible for the whole of your web site. Peter Nissen of JBoye.com talks about some of the reasons decentralized control doesn’t work.

Despite all of this, we still have a core client to address. They might be in different audiences, but they are all web users, and they have common expectations. Is there someone responsible for looking at a housing management system that can say “Hey guys, this system has some serious usability and integration problems, and I don’t think it’s going to be a good fit in the overall web presence.”? I can answer that for you: you don’t. You should. I’m sure there are a couple exceptions out there that have gotten over this hump (and PLEASE share your experience in the comments, I’d love to see what you have to say). We see similar issues with content. Kristina Halvorson, in her book Content Strategy for the Web, looks at the web like a news show, newspaper, or magazine. All have to have multiple content types and sources, all reach an end user, and all need to have a central point of oversight to make sure it’s right. Where’s our editor-in-chief?

The Singularity in this case is user expectation with respect to our systems. Your web visitors don’t care that you have a dozen different systems and applications running to make their web experience happen. All they know is that if it sucks, then you must be failing. They get angry, they get frustrated. They want a simple, seamless experience. If you’re familiar with the MVC style of programming, users want a single, standard view, not dozens. And to put it simply, the systems are starting to get good enough that our excuses for not working towards that goal are getting very thin. It might be hard, it might take time, but that’s our job. We aren’t here to just set something up, slap the school colors on it, and walk away. If you aren’t striving to do better than that, then you are probably falling prey to the very issues I’m talking about.

Imagine if you will a cruise ship. Cruise ships have tons of components that make your vacation happen. Some you have direct contact with, some not. Engineers, cooks, stewards, bridge crew, medical, security, performers, and so on. Imagine if all of these people tried to make your cruise happen without any central management. It’d be a mess, a complete disaster. Every cruise ship has a captain. The captain might not know the fine nuance of the water reclamation system, but he can at least make sure their team coordinates with the right people when there’s trouble or when a common goal must be achieved. He can’t do the job of all 2,000 employees on the ship, but he is a successful planner. He dictates, directs, and designates well. He’s a 3D sort of guy (get it? 3D? Because he dictates, des… oh nevermind).

That’s what we need. Our web sites need a captain. That captain doesn’t have to be a Python guru, or a master of Flash, or a jQuery ninja. But, he should know the heading and be able to make sure efforts are properly and efficiently coordinated. Their knowledge should be broad, but not always deep. That’s why you hire the experts in the respective fields for your specific tasks. Our problems aren’t going to get simpler moving ahead. It used to be a web site was a handful of GIF animations and a dozen HTML pages. Now we have CMSs, tens of thousands of pages, multiple servers, and all that just to maintain our front facing presence. In the coming years, these systems will have more crosstalk, not less. Expectations will increase, not decline. And the complexity of our sites will balloon.

Centralized control might not be a popular idea to a lot of people, but it will become a necessity for success, regardless of how big your university is. That’s my prediction. The alternative risks a mess of code, duplicated efforts, and upset development teams. Without someone at the helm, to use a phrase from Twitter this morning, running your site will be like pushing a wheelbarrow of squirrels. That’s my rant for today. Our needs are going to come together, as users and providers, and we’re all going to be looking for something central to tell us what to do. We’re already near the event horizon of this problem. It will be up to us how we’ll handle crossing the threshold.

Illustration by NASA/Dana Berry, SkyWorks Digital Inc.

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The Ask the Gurus page is set up so you can send a question to us. This message will go to the entire .eduGuru staff, and will allow one or more of us to answer your question and give you some feedback that you’ll hopefully find helpful. This might be a question about which CMS to use, a good content strategy, or an opinion on a landing page design. Then, once a month or so we’ll feature some of the best questions we get in a post for everyone. You can opt out of that if you’d rather not share your question, or if you want to share the question but remain anonymous, you can do that to.

We just ask a couple things:

• We’re happy to help out and lend advice, but we aren’t a consulting firm. As such, we ask that you help us by observing the “use, don’t abuse” rule. The simpler your questions are, the more quickly we’ll be able to get back with you.
• We don’t know what kind of volume to expect yet since this is brand new, so be patient if it takes us a little while to answer you.
• If you want this to become a permanent component of the .eduGuru site, please, USE IT! That’s how we’ll know how successful it is.
• Understand that just because you say we can share your question doesn’t mean that we will.
• If you appreciate the tool, please let us know! We want to find ways to better serve our audience in 2010, and if you think this is a good way of doing it (or not), your feedback will help us direct our efforts.

Down the road, besides monthly posts, we’re also considering building a “knowledge base” of sorts out of the questions and answers that are produced as a result of this little experiment. We’ll be watching how this whole thing works out. We hope you like it and find it helpful!

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3. Presenting .eduGuru 2.0!

1. Do your homework. Pick your names with care.

After all the talk and high expectations about which one would take Twitter down, Apple or the State of the Union, it wasn’t just “Apple” or “Steve Jobs” or “Tablet” or even just “iPad” alone that trended. It was iTampon, and all the jokes that went along with it. (I guess in geekdom, even Apple gets tweckled.)

What’s the lesson higher ed can take away from this? While one could argue that the publicity from all the articles over the name iPad may not hurt, an academic institution—or someone acting on its behalf—may not be so lucky.  When we name a committee, come up with a clever acronym, create a URL for a website, decide on a hashtag, or what have you, we need to do our homework:

• Make the name descriptive but short. This way it is easy to remember and easy to type, but won’t impact character limitations.
• Do your homework. Doing a search may uncover meanings in other languages or subcultures—including from Urban Dictionary searches— that may affect your choice.   When selecting hashtags for events, try checking Addictomatic to make sure you’re not using the same tag as other existing events.
• Proofread before publishing, especially URLs.  (True story: someone once misspelled a page that should have had “public” as part of its URL.  It wasn’t discovered until months later, but breaking a few bookmarks was much better than leaving the offensive misspelling of the word.)

2. Give us our WiFi.

We move farther away from physical media, and local software.  To me the iPad isn’t the end-all-be-all, but it is a signpost that points out how little we need on a machine anymore.  While the iPad is not going to replace all forms of computing, it’s still a harbinger of future devices and future use cases depending heavily on 3rd party apps, cloud computing, and streaming content.

What’s the lesson higher ed can take away from this? With online enrollments increasing, higher education should take an active interest in the barriers to accessing online content.  People will be viewing content online, and that means that our copyright laws and our broadband need to keep pace with these changes.

3. Stop fitting square pegs into round holes.

We techies like to assume that every new release is for us. We want desperately to be the new adopters. We’ll justify anything shiny, fitting a square peg into a round hole, or as Kathy Sierra tweeted, “iPad lust 100% explained by science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein ‘Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal.’” In all our criticisms, did it occur to us that this was not a device meant for us? Maybe not right away.

What’s the lesson higher ed can take away from this? It’s not the tool; it’s the goal. It’s not about what you like. It’s about who you are trying to serve. Instead of thinking about why we would or wouldn’t want a piece of technology, we need to ask our customers what their needs are, and then figure out what technology serves this goal.

Image Credit: Apple Wallpaper by davidgsteadman

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