I like to compare writing end-user documentation to fluency in a second language: Most of us pick it up by immersing ourselves in the culture.  We read technical documentation, and from what we learn from the “native” documenters, we use in our own writing.  But for grammar nerds like myself (a former English and Communications teacher), we realize there are rules governing this language—a special syntax, it’s own punctuation, and more.

I was recently invited to speak about documentation to a documentation team for Penn State’s implementation of ANGEL.  Here is just some of the advice I shared:

1. Document the steps or actions in order.

This one seems like a no-brainer.  However when we construct sentences in everyday English, it’s easy to rearrange a prepositional phrase out of sequence because we listen to instructions completely before acting on them.  For example, “Select Print under the File menu.”  When people read documentation, they are trying to act on it as they read, so order is very important.  We need to rework our instructions to reflect that, eg. “Under File, select Print.”

2. Document every action.

As superusers, we take for granted the intermediate steps, like clicking Next on a wizard.  Even when we encounter something new, we are more prone to just taking a guess at what to do.  Not every user is comfortable with making that leap of faith.  Good documentation is like getting directions to someone’s house: you need to know what do expect at turn—maybe even every intersection—so that you know you are not lost.

3. Answer three questions with every step: Where am I? What should I do? What will happen?

Imagine if you had these questions answer for driving directions: “At the corner of 51st Street and 4th Avenue, turn right.  You should see a park.”  Shouldn’t all instructions be so explicit?  “Under the File menu, choose Save As… The Save As dialogue box will appear.”

4. Keep the steps short and simple.

People don’t read documentation word-for-word; they scan it.  Provide them with a single step at a time.  When describing a path through a menu, replace prepositions with right arrows (→) to facilitate scanning.  For example, which of the following is the easiest to scan:

• On the Format menu, select Alignment and click Left.
• Select Format, Alignment, Left.
• Select Format→Alignment→Left.

5. Use the language that the tool uses, but avoid jargon.

End-user will take what you document very literally, so pay attention to whether or not the application uses “OK”, “Save” or “Close”.  If you must use a new term with which your audience may not be familiar (eg. “Scaffolding”, “Cascade”, “SSL”, etc.), make sure you define it.  Be especially wary of how you use unfamiliar terms in your headers as their search terms might include different language entirely.  For example, “Activating a Page” versus “How Do I Publish a Page”.

6. Don’t assume your audience is reading your documentation from beginning to end.

When was the last time you curled up with an entire manual and read it cover to cover?  Your end-users won’t do this, especially with documentation on the Web.  Make sure you treat each page of documentation—even each anchored section—as if your audience is approaching you material for the very first time.  Define terms again and link to related content to provide your audience with some context.

Related posts:

1. Teaching Them to Fish: Strategy for Implementing a Knowledge Base
2. Let’s talk about Landing Pages and Bounce Rates
3. Spring Cleaning: Finding your lost sock. The guide to content audits.

Yes? Let’s brainstorm about how we can best react to and assist people on campus who come to us to ask for guidance with some ideas they have.

No? Let’s pretend. Play along with us here — the more collaborative minds we put together, the better.

The primary purpose of this post is to flesh out  the best response to this type of question:

“I want to create a Facebook Page for my [department/program/event/service] and thought I should probably coordinate that with you. Where should I start?”

I understand this may not be as likely to happen on larger campuses as it is in small to mid-size campuses. The point of posing this question is to talk through the best ways we can help educate and partner with people on campus who want to embrace social media.

I usually start with this first question:  Who is your audience?

Then I move to:  What are your department’s/program’s/event’s/service’s goals? Let’s start with the end result and work backwards.

Next, I tell them social media may or may not be the best tool for them to use. This usually stumps them. Yes, I present at a bunch of conferences on social media. Yes, I did a research paper on the use of social media in higher education. Yes, I’m an active user of many social networking sites. However, as I say in just about every presentation I give — social media is not the be all end all. It is just one spoke in our marketing wheel. It may or may not be the right tool to use for a particular department/program/event/service — it all depends on your audience and your goal(s). It can be a very powerful medium that can reach very targeted audiences, but may not be the right tool for every audience and strategy.

“But I want my event to go viral.”

Just because you want something to go viral doesn’t mean it will. It takes a dose of effort and a pinch of luck, along with a powerful strategy and commitment, to really make this work.

Let’s keep exploring. Next steps:

• Educate them about the art of listening. Chris Brogan has a great post I regularly point people to — “Grow Bigger Ears in 10 Minutes.” In addition, Kyle James wrote a post about monitoring your online identity that provides additional ideas and details. Listening first gives you a sense of what is being said about your department/program/event/service. It may also give you further ideas for content generation (see next step), and gives you an opportunity to join in existing conversations.
• Content issues: Where will the content come from? Who will be responsible for maintaining your content and your presence? How will you engage your audience? Having a presence is not nearly enough – you must commit to fresh content that would be of interest to your audience.
• Integration: How will you integrate this effort through the other mediums in your marketing wheel? Things to consider — mentioning in e-mail newsletters, e-mail signatures, print publications, ads, Web sites, blogs, admission tours, etc.
• Measurement: How will you measure if your effort is successful? Were goals achieved? Is having a dollar value ROI important? (If so, see Karlyn’s presentation on Eye On the Prize.) While there is great value in calculating ROI, I also like to focus on the “I” as “influence” — looking at the long tail effect. For example, in our Café New Paltz community for fall 2009 accepted students, I’m interested in tracking the different impacts on student service offices from their typical routine and schedule over the summer and early fall. Students in this community were figuring out as early as January who they wanted to room with, instead of waiting and scrambling during Orientation in July, taking a load off Residence Life and Student Development staff from what they’re normally used to that time of the year. Students are asking questions earlier about paying bills, setting up meal plans, and how to accept financial aid packages. There likely won’t be as big of a rush in these offices at the end of August, as we’ve been answering their questions months earlier. How else can you measure your success? I posted some other ideas in “Café New Paltz: A Yielding Success” that might give you some additional ideas. 

What steps did I miss? Do you have other strategies you employ when faced with a similar question? Do you make an concerted effort to coordinate all of the individual social media outposts on your campus, or just concern yourself with the big picture presence?

Related posts:

1. Reining in the outliers for a university-wide cohesive social media presence
2. The Use of Social Media in Higher Education for Marketing and Communications: A Guide for Professionals in Higher Education
3. Live Blogging AMA Higher Ed: The New Power: Social Media Marketing Strategy for Higher Education

I had coffee with a colleague one day a few months back and she made a great analogy in regards to email.  When you’re looking to buy a car, the dealership  will give you all sorts of pretty brochures with lots of pictures and bullet points to convince you its the right car for you.  They don’t give you the owners manual until AFTER you’ve made the purchase.  

In higher education, we love to fill emails with as much information about humanly possible to users who haven’t yet decided to make the purchase.  We’re giving them the owners manual before the brochure.  Over the medium, it just doesn’t work.  Instead, you need to grab your user’s attention as quickly as possible.  Make the message so bold that they can’t help but look.  Here are some steps you can take: 

Differentiate your links from the text 

When a user opens one of your messages, make sure they know what you want them to do.  Which do you think works better: 

blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah

-or-

blah blah  blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah

blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah

blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah

Copy is irrelevant.  Subject matter is irrelevant.  This is nothing more than how you design the message. Pull the call to action out of the paragraph and let it stand on its own.  Bold it.  Slightly increase the font size. Play with the typography. Do what you can to make it the first thing your users see (while still making it look professional…it is coming from a college after all).  

Subtlety is out 

I’ve seen people spend enormous amounts of time segmenting a message, only to change one or two words that appear mid-paragraph in each segment.  That’s crazy.  People rarely read these things word-for-word and just aren’t likely to notice a one or two word difference, yet it would take hours to coordinate it.  That’s a waste of time.  If you’re going to dedicate the time to segmentation, do it in a way that will pay off.  Make sure your users will notice that you’ve made the effort to target the message to them and things they care about.

Ditch the form letter format 

Higher ed has some pretty skilled print communicators in its ranks.  These are usually the people who get put in charge of electronic communications.  How different can it be, right?  But nine times out of ten, it just doesn’t translate.  Form letters that may work over print is one of the tactics I see most often directly translated to email.  It’s not written for the medium.  Big blocks of text only confuse the user and make their eyes glaze over, rather than inciting them to action.  Instead of making a direct translation try something like this: 

This email is still in a letter format, but affectively its also a bulleted list without the bullets.  It’s much easier for your users to scan to find the call to action.

~~~~~~~~

Email is no place to be subtle or coy.  Your best results will come when you’re as overt as possible with your users.  Remember, the goal of an email is not to educate – it’s to get your user to click on a link, go to your website and take an action.  Keep an eye on that goal and you’ll be more likely to design more effective messages.

Related posts:

1. Step away from the computer: When NOT to send a marketing email
2. There is no “best day” to email
3. Time to get serious about email

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:

1. Defining Goals – business goals and what your site must accomplish.  Who is your audience and what makes you special.
2. Content – creating the great content that tell the stories because if you don’t have this the rest simply doesn’t matter
3. Site Architecture – Initial layout
4. Navigation – Usability, crosslinking content, sitemap, footer
5. Accessibility – 508 Compliance, Search Engine Optimization, CSS friendly
6. Site Intelligence – Site Search, Analytical tracking
7. Multimedia/Web 2.0 – videos, audio, flash, blogs, RSS, social bookmarking, dynamic content
8. Link building – directories and making sure the rest of the web is aware of your great content
9. Site Optimization – finely tuning the site that you have created now that you have search ranking intelligence and analytical data
10. Marketing Efforts – Landing Pages, Email Marketing, Advertising, Promotional
11. 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.

Related posts:

1. Is Social Media A Fad? Social Media Revolution Video
2. Reining in the outliers for a university-wide cohesive social media presence
3. Do we really need a social media strategy?

K

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Benchmarks, benchmarks, benchmarks.  It seems to be all I hear about from people when they start seriously venturing into email marketing.  ”How do we compare to everyone else???”  It seems to be a reasonable question.  And it would be easy for me to give you benchmarks in the education industry to comparing your stats with…but I just don’t feel comfortable doing that.  In fact, I’m going to recommend that you IGNORE industry email marketing benchmarks.  Why? Because they are faulty on several levels: 

They assume that all email marketing plans are created equal

When you look at email benchmarks, you inherently accept that really crappy email programs are going to be included in the results.  And in education, there’s a lot of REALLY bad email going on.  According to a recent paper by DemandEngine, colleges seem to ignore email best practices more than they practice them.

Now, if you’re looking for benchmarks I hope that you’re not one of those colleges.  I hope that you’re more the variety that has put a lot of thought and effort into your program.  But the reality is that you don’t know what types of institutions these stats are pulled from.  Even if you do know the specific schools they are coming from, you don’t know whether their plans are good or bad as its doubtful that you’d be able to study them in-depth.  Really, its just a bunch of meaningless numbers.  

They assume all audiences are created equal

I always recommend that people manage their expectations regarding what their email will achieve based on the specific audience you’re mailing to.  Not all audiences are going to respond the same to your email campaigns and once you lump them all together, it will completely skew the results.  

For example, in my office once you make your annual gift, you stop being solicited by email.  Contrast that with an admissions office that actually ramps up email (at least they should) to students as they work their way through the funnel and become more interested.  Both are in the education industry. One is only targeting people who have been non-responsive to previous requests.  The other is (or, again, should be) primarily targeting people who have demonstrated responsiveness.  Comparing these stats is like comparing apples to oranges.  On face value you can predict that the admissions audience is going to be more responsive since they have been in the past, whereas the fundraising audience is going to be terribly unresponsive since nothing has worked with them yet.  Meshing them together to create an arbitrary benchmark just makes a huge mess.  Additionally, its rare that you’d be privy to the actual makeup of the benchmarks and what types of communications they’re sending, thus complicating the problem further.  

It assumes all reporting is created equal

If someone told you that their average open rate was 70%, you’d probably be impressed.  But what happens to me when someone gives a state that impressive is that the red, flashing warning light starts to go off in my head.  It’s not that the person reporting that number is lying – they firmly believe it.  The problem is that their tool is lying to them.

Something many beginning email marketers don’t realize is that there’s a way to track both the unique number of times an email you sent is opened and the total number of times that email is opened: 

• Unique opens: The number of your unique recipients that opens one of your emails.
• Total opens: The total number of times an email you sent has been opened. 

So say a user gets one of your emails and its so awesome that he goes back to it five times.  That counts as one unique open, but five total opens.  This also applies to click throughs.  The problem is that there are email tools out there that don’t differentiate between the two, so their users have no idea how their rates are calculated.  I’ve seen more than a few of these tools that use the total number of opens to calculate the open rate.  This is a problem, since open rates are traditionally calculated using unique opens (again, same with click rates).  

Additionally, I’ve stumbled across more than a few email marketers don’t accurately calculate their click through rates, instead doing the calculation for click-to-open rates:

• Click Through rate: Your unique click throughs against the number of messages that were delivered.
• Click-To-Open rate: Your unique click throughs against the unique number of messages that were opened.

Oftentimes, I see people calling a click-to-open rate a click through rate (I’m pointing at you Brad J. Ward!) It’s an unintentional mistake, but when it happens it amounts to comparing apples to oranges.  Personally, I believe that click-to-open is a much better rate to look at, but we need to make sure we’re all using the same nomenclature so we understand what we’re comparing.

So what do you do?

Instead of comparing your program to generic and meaningless benchmarks, start by looking at your own data.  Assess the numbers you’re hitting right now (whether you think they’re good or bad) and put mechanisms in place to periodically track them.

Next, take a hard look at your email plan.  Is it perfect?  I think if you’re honest you’ll say there are areas you could improve.  What do you think your rates could be if you made improvements?  Work towards that goal.  Marketing is about continual assessment and refinement.  If you aren’t meeting your goals, then what other schools are doing really doesn’t matter.  One the other hand, if you are satisfied with your results, do benchmarks really matter?  

I’ll leave you with one last thought: Benchmarks are averages.  Are you really striving for your email program to just be average?  I find that oftentimes when you’re looking at benchmark, average suddenly becomes good enough for the director-types.  You should always be striving to be better than that and if you’re putting together a solid email plan, you will achieve more than an arbitrary open or click rate will tell you.

Related posts:

1. Email Stats Can Be Deceiving
2. New Standards for Email Subject Lines
3. Time to get serious about email

One of the things that was to segment the emails by class and each class was sent a unique email.  Now the only thing really unique about these emails was the class year mentioned in the email, but it was still segmenting our audience.  (Click on the thumbnail to the right to see an example)

Links in each email were tagged separately but all were a part of the same campaign “top_challenge” but each was applied to a different source, “Top 5_2008″ for example.  This allows us to view traffic data in Google Analytics both as a campaign but also by individual emails (the source).  Using the new Advanced Segments feature we can create Segments of each Source and view that against the whole campaign.

So now that I have created my segments looking at Source it’s time to head to the Campaign report and drill down into “top_challenge”.  Below is the report with the segments applied and comparing against three segments.  Note:  Google Analytics currently only allows you to apply against three segments.

I pulled this data today almost two months after the emails were sent out and they are still driving trickles of traffic to the site.

Because I have six segments I went ahead and created PDF’s of each.

• Campaign 03, 04, 05 Segments
• Campaign 06, 07, 08 Segments

It’s a little hard to view the segments in that graph.  So here is a weekly graph where you can distinctly see how the various segments measure.

So there you go an actual application for the new features.  If you are tracking campaigns in Google Analytics you might as well be viewing your segmented data a little clearer.  I’ve been playing around digging into reports looking at depth of stay on site and seeing how that compares across these groups, meaning creating custom report of three or more page visits against these segment groups.

So I challenge you to play around with these new features and share what you discover.  Hopefully they have been rolled out to everyone by now?

Additional Links showing Google Analytics new features

• David Harry (aka The Gypsy) recently wrote an excellent two part post showing creating custom segments and reports for keyword analysis.  Part I & Part II
• Avinash Kaushik introducing the new features and showing everyone how to Be an Analytics Ninja!

Related posts:

1. 3 Quick Tips to Tag and Track with Google Analytics
2. 7 Google Analytics Filters To Help Understand Your Visitors
3. Is Google Analytics Installed Properly?

Neuromarketing discusses the three parts of the brain and their function: 

• New Brain: Processes rational data.  This part of the brain may not be fully formed until you are 24-years-old.
• Middle Brain:  Processes emotions and gut feelings. 
• Old Brain: The real decision maker.  This is the first part of the brain to develop and makes all decisions.  It’s sole concern is the physical survival of the body.  The old brain is 45,000 times older than the written word, which means that written words don’t impact it. 

When the old brain makes decisions, it consults with the new and middle brain.  This leads to emotionally-led decisions, which are then justified rationally.

So how do you reach the old brain, since it doesn’t understand words?  The authors offer several suggestions to appeal to the old brain in terms that it recognizes:

1.  An Audience-Focused message: The old brain is not concerned with anything not related to its own well-being.  Therefore your messages must be 100% audience focused.  They don’t care about your organization.  They care how your organization can help THEM.
2. Contrast: Use contrasting examples, such as before/after, risky/safe, with/without, fast/slow, etc.
3. Tangible Input: Ideas should be simple and easy to grasp.  Make sure your audience can easily recognize and process your terms (such as dollar value).
4. Focus on the Beginning and the End: Put the most important points at the beginning of a message (this can also apply in a presentation). The once the old brain has assessed that there is no immediate danger, it will try to conserve energy by paying less attention to the middle of the message.
5. Visual Stimuli: The old brain responds to visuals before the new brain has time to process what they mean.
6. Emotion: We remember events better when we’ve experienced them with strong emotion.  If customers can’t remember your message, why would they choose your product? 

Now that we know what the old brain will pay attention to, the authors offer a four-point plain for integrating these strategies into our marketing plan:   

Diagnose the Pain:  You have to figure out what “pain” your audience is experiencing – what do they really want/need? What benefits do you have that relieve that pain?  For example, when Dominoes found out that the real reason customers weren’t utilizing delivery was that they were worried about the time it would take for the pizza to get to their house, they implemented a 30-minute guarantee.  The pain of your audience falls into three categories: financial, strategic or personal.  Marketing efforts should focus on the things that cause the MOST pain, rather than things that your audience doesn’t really care about.  Finally, your audience must acknowledge that they have a certain pain in order for your offer of relief to appeal to them. 

Differentiate Your Claims: The old brain responds to clear, solid contrast.  How are you different than your competitors?  How are you different than doing nothing?  What’s UNIQUE about what you’re selling?  Don’t just say that you’re one of many companies that offer basically the same thing.  You may have to be creative about your claim of differentiation but if you aren’t different, you’re basically selling your competitors products for them.  

Demonstrate the Gain: Now that you’ve differentiated yourself from your competitors, you have to demonstrate through a tangible message that your audience will benefit from your product. You can do this through stories, an actual demo, data that relates back to tangible value or a vision statement (though this tactic is the least affective because it requires faith.  

Deliver to the Old Brain: It’s critical to deliver this message in the way that the old brain will understand, which you can do by grabbing the user’s attention right off the bat, using big picture analogies, making sure your claims are clearly articulated and using phrases that appeal to our self-centered nature by using key words like “you”.  

Overall, this book is definitely worth the $22 I paid for it.  It’s full of practical and applicable information that can be incorporated into any marketing campaign.

Related posts:

1. sex…Sex…SEX! Now I Have Your Attention.
2. Book Review: Buzzmarketing: Get People to Talk About Your Stuff
3. Book Review: Inbound Marketing the Book

a process for converting data that has more than one possible representation into a “standard” canonical representation

Ok so that helps a lot!?  Let me be a little more specific here www or non-www URL Canonicalization of your websites URL.  Following me yet?  For example at Wofford www.wofford.edu takes me to the same place as wofford.edu.  Big deal right?  Well actually it is a big deal and it’s important to do this right.  You want to make sure that a visitor who comes to your site always gets to the right page no matter if they use the www or not.  From a SEO perspective this is a BAD thing because you have duplicate content.  That’s right www.wofford.edu and wofford.edu are seen on search engines as two separate pages and you’re splitting your linkjuice on your site in half.  Now think about your entire website with this issue…

Not only do you have to worry about this duplicate content, but what about:

• www.wofford.edu/default.aspx
• www.wofford.edu/
• wofford.edu/index.html
• wofford.edu/Default.aspx

See how this problem quickly gets exponentially worse? Not only is this really bad for SEO, but deciding on www or non-www can be an important marketing decision for brand awareness.  As a great example we use www.wofford.edu because well that’s how we have traditionally used it for years now and our audience expects it.  Not to mention it’s got a nice balanced look to it.  On the other end of the spectrum this blog uses doteduguru.com because I like the shorter and quicker look of it.  There is no one way that is better than the other, but it is important to make a decision and stick with it.

You want to redirect all your pages from one preference to the other using SEO friendly 301 redirects. I would not recommend going the delayed redirect route.  (If someone knows someone who works there, please forward them this post to fix their http://columbia.edu/ link.  I’m sure there are other schools out there that do this, but come on don’t make your visitors wait or annoy them.  It’s all about the user experience and this takes five minutes and you can automate the entire process for your user instantaneously AND think about your SEO.  We are talking about a super powerful homepage that has a PageRank of 9 splitting resources here).  You also do not want one of these options coming up as a dead link either, your wasting your visitors times trying to type it perfect and potentially causing them not to come back.

Luckily there are a few best practices and steps you can do to help stem this problem and get control of your duplicate content.

How do I check and Fix a URL Canonicalization problem?

The first thing I would recommend doing is to run your homepage URL through this Redirect Check Tool.

I’ll talk more about 301 redirects in a later post, but for now all you need to know is that they are SEO friendly and the proper way to redirect a website.  The results should return one 200 response if you have handled all your duplicate content properly.  So how do you go about resolving this issue?

Solving URL Canonicalization on Apache

It’s really easy to fix this issue on an Apache.  All you need to do is edit your .htaccess file in your root directory and add the following.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.doteduguru\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.doteduguru.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This example would make all traffic to doteduguru.com be redirected with the www at the beginning.

Solving URL Canonicalization on IIS

Solving a URL Canonicalization issues on IIS is a little bit more difficult than Apache, but still not very bad and easy enough to resolve in less than five minutes.  Instead of trying to explain it in this post here’s a great post that will tell you all about it and I following it works.  How do I know?  Because it’s the instructions I followed months ago when I setup wofford’s permissions properly.

Solving Canonicalization with IIS with SEO friendly 301 redirects

Canonicalization Best Practices

Let me also emphasize the importance of setting up all links to directories properly.  This means no matter of your platform is on .net, php, static pages, or whatever you should always link to the directory not your default or index page specifically.  An example of this would be linking to www.wofford.edu/admission/ not www.wofford.edu/admission/default.aspx.  Not only does this make it easier on your redirects, but it’s good practice should you ever change coding languages down the road.  This is also helpful in reducing duplication of your web analytics tracking and many other other issues.

Want more on URL Canonicalization?

For additional reading on this subject check out Matt Cutts post about URL Canonicalization

I would also recommend reading SEOmoz’s post about Canonical and Duplicate Versions of Content

Related posts:

1. Dealing with a “404 – Page Not Found Error” Properly
2. WhippleHill Summit Slides: SEO Best Practices: Hitting the Low Hanging Fruit
3. Using Redirectors for Offline Campaigns

Here are two great articles that can explain StumbleUpon much better than me trying to rewrite something that someone has already done better:

• A Quick Guide to Using StumbleUpon
• How to Write Posts That Set StumbleUpon on Fire – This article can easily be translated to content on any site

The Stumble Effect

Because of it’s unique approach you will always generate some traffic for anything URL that has been stumbled.  Also because of it’s unique nature the traffic that you generate will also be targeted to your audience.  If your audience is prospective students then it is possible to generate that sort of traffic just as if you were interested in college sports.

To give an example StumbleUpon has far and away been this blogs greatest source of traffic.  I’ve gotten more than 1,000 visits from StumbleUpon over the last month which accounts for almost half of my traffic sources not counting direct traffic.

What type of Higher Ed pages will do best with StumbleUpon?

I don’t have any statistics to back this up, but I think college sections geared towards prospective students using video, virtual tours, and interactive features will do best on StumbleUpon.  I posted Wofford’s Arboretum website to StumbleUpon and we have actually gained some traffic, although I’ll admit it hasn’t been huge.  The Arboretum is a site where individuals can download audio and maps and walk around campus enjoying the arboretum on a printed out PDF and each plants explanation on their mp3 player.

What is the best way for Higher Education to use StumbleUpon?

Because StumbleUpon, like any other social network, relies on the support of the masses it takes more than one person to get the ball rolling.  Take a look at your college’s website and find 2-5 pages that really stand out as a great representation of your institution and get 4-5 people to submit it making sure that you all use the same tags.  Then forget about it and check your traffic statistics in a month.  Don’t get your hopes up that you will generate thousands of hits, but you will bring steady, targeted traffic to you best sections which hopefully builds up more long term name recognition and relationships.

DO NOT attempt to submit everything, simply your best and hope that the stumbler finds enough on the landing page that they surf more around your site.  Keep in mind that this audience probably knows little to none about your school so having links like a fast facts page easily viewable are definitely recommended.  One of the most difficult things to do with Stumble traffic is to complete the conversion.  Just because they come to your site and enjoy your campus tour doesn’t necessarily mean that they will ever come back.  This sort of traffic usually doesn’t stay very long so make sure that you make it as easy as possible to convert them by offering email signups, RSS feeds, and such.  Keep your most important information and what you want them to see on the screen without having to scroll.

Photo provided by xiaojuntong

Final Thoughts

Stumbling is so much fun and is definitely one of the easiest sites to suck your time.  Using your best content it is possible to take advantage of others stumble addiction to expose new individuals to your institution and brand.  You shouldn’t expect amazing results, but StumbleUpon is an area of Internet marketing and exposure that should not be overlooked by anyone.  It is very quick and easy to submit your site and you can realistically expect a steady flow of targeted traffic.  Submitting sites to StumbleUpon also works best if you can get multiple people to submit and tag a piece of content.  Don’t count on StumbleUpon to be your only traffic source, but it definitely provides a nice supplementary role. 

In closing, out of all the Social Bookmarking sites I’ve written and haven’t written about, StumbleUpon presents the best social marketing possibilities for Higher Education.

Next week we’ll look at Del.icio.us.

Related posts:

1. Social Survey: Digg
2. Social Survey: Facebook
3. Social Survey: Del.icio.us