There has been A LOT of discussion on Higher Education Blogs and at Higher Education conferences lately about this thing called Social Media. First of all Social Media isn’t all that complicated, in fact it’s the simplest and oldest form of marketing called relationship building. As I’ve said many times before “social media = building relationships”. After reading a recent post on SEOmoz about The SEO Fundamentals Pyramid and participating in a panel discussion at CASE V I think it’s important to make sure that people understand that social media comes last. I know I’ve preached “just do it” when it comes to social media, but unless you have the rest of your eggs in a basket then quite frankly you aren’t ready for social media.
In the post on SEOmoz they built a pyramid where great content then usability and accessibility is the foundation of your website. If your site isn’t in excellent shape then social media won’t do you a lick of good. If visitors can’t find what they want on your site then social media won’t do you a lick of good. If your email marketing isn’t connecting with readers then your social media efforts won’t do you a lick of good. Do you see where I’m going here?
Let me try and approach this situation from the other end. You have a Facebook presence and are engaging prospective students and the conversation gets to a point where you ask them to click over to your institutions website to learn more information. They click over and your site is a mess. They can’t find the information that they are looking for, the forums are difficult to use and your content is outdated. You FAIL.
You have to build your foundation before you build anything else. Think of social media as the icing on the cake. You have to learn to crawl before you learn to walk. Social media is the future and it is turning the technology of the internet into a relational experience but your foundation still needs to be solid to handle the rest of the conversions.
So Where Do I Start?
I would work on building a site in the following order only moving to the next level once you have mastered the previous. This is also a good blueprint if you are going through a site redesign:
- Defining Goals – business goals and what your site must accomplish. Who is your audience and what makes you special.
- Content – creating the great content that tell the stories because if you don’t have this the rest simply doesn’t matter
- Site Architecture – Initial layout
- Navigation – Usability, crosslinking content, sitemap, footer
- Accessibility – 508 Compliance, Search Engine Optimization, CSS friendly
- Site Intelligence – Site Search, Analytical tracking
- Multimedia/Web 2.0 – videos, audio, flash, blogs, RSS, social bookmarking, dynamic content
- Link building – directories and making sure the rest of the web is aware of your great content
- Site Optimization – finely tuning the site that you have created now that you have search ranking intelligence and analytical data
- Marketing Efforts – Landing Pages, Email Marketing, Advertising, Promotional
- Social Media – now you’re ready to jump out there and build the relationships and market your social media using the rest of your wonderfully built site.
So now that you you have a defined path to follow start at the beginning and get to work. So what did I miss any steps that you think need to be added? What about order or any other thoughts? Leave some comments and tell me what you think.
This post was written by:
Kyle James - who has written 178 posts on .eduGuru.
Kyle is an Inbound Marketing Consultant at HubSpot and formerly the webmaster at Wofford College. Kyle is an active contributor in the social media spectrum. Although his background is technical, he claims to know a thing or two about marketing, but mostly that revolves around SEO, analytics, blogging, and social media. He has spoken at multiple conferences on topics ranging from e-mail marketing to social media and Web analytics. He's definitely a fairly nice guy.
Ways to Connect with Kyle
December 20th, 2008 at 11:46 pm
I’ve had this same subject on my list of topics to write about at my own site, but now I don’t have to because I would have promoted the same stance — concentrate on website fundamentals before venturing off into projects like social networking. In fact, I would go so far as to say that none of the items on your list are must haves if enough of the others are present as a counter balance.
My only caveat is to carve out a special place for “defining goals.” Without that, what’s the point of doing or not doing any of the others? How do you balance or counter balance if you don’t know where the fulcrum is? Without a plan, even a basic one, your website will likely devolve into a mess, be difficult (in terms of time, effort and money) to manage, and place you into a reactive state instead of a proactive one.
December 21st, 2008 at 2:01 pm
Kyle,
What a fantastic article. I strongly agree with your analysis that most schools have to stick to basics and improve their websites and eMarketing strategy before they can move forward with social media! It’s the same with email marketing…when schools get people to click through, and the website doesn’t do the job…they FAIL as well. Good work with the article.
- Brad Kleinman
December 22nd, 2008 at 6:58 pm
Kyle, I’d agree with Mike in terms of thinking about the goals very carefully. These determine everything to do with your site.
I think the goals, your content strategy and your individual circumstances will probably dictate the order you approach things. In my opinion social media doesn’t necessarily come last. I think that through encouraging the use of off-site social media tools you can often make some quick wins – e.g. awareness, contributing to the link building process, utilising additional off-site content that makes the university more real but would get blocked if you tried to put it on your university site. (P.S. I’m guessing as it’s an SEO diagram you use to start your post that you’re thinking of on-site social media which I recognise is probably a bit different.)
Thanks for the thought provoking post, I definitely agree with the sentiment expressed.
December 22nd, 2008 at 10:27 pm
@Mike & Brendan – You have me thinking… there could probably be a whole post or series of posts just on defining and establishing goals around the web. It really is such an important piece of the puzzle. Also so much of goals is fully understanding what all is possible which is multiple other discussions.
@Brad – Thanx for your kind words. I’m glad that you enjoyed the post.
December 23rd, 2008 at 2:22 pm
@Kyle and Brendan- I agree that goal setting (or what I also tend to call strategy) is a big topic and something I try to cover from time to time. This post and a couple of others motivated me to put some thoughts down on paper (paper?):
http://www.heavywinter.com/2008/12/the-step-before-defining-a-websites-goals/
To be honest, the topic is so large, it’s difficult to only write one post. Perhaps we can all tag team on it.
December 30th, 2008 at 1:56 pm
I’ve written another post that touches on this point:
http://www.heavywinter.com/2008/12/how-to-turn-around-a-problematic-site/
Thanks for starting this discussion. There’s much to be said about it.
January 17th, 2009 at 2:24 am
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March 17th, 2009 at 7:20 am
I would say its presenting old wine in a new bottle. Building relationship is not old but building them online is certainly a new thing, i would call it an evolution of sorts
May 9th, 2009 at 3:16 pm
Hi Kyle,
This article is a very good guide to people who are developing new web site. This will give them a great idea of what they actually need to do and in which order. Many of the web master are actually in a hurry to generate quick traffic through social media and social marketing and most of time they completely ignores the importance of other things in web site promotions. This article is an eye opener for them and I hope it will work.