Archive for March, 2007

Spring might be upon us, but some folks at the University of Alabama at Birmingham have really their mind more focused on ice, snow and Web 2.0.

To promote their research team’s expedition at Palmer Station Antarctica, they launched, earlier this month, a dedicated website called “UAB in Antarctica” that uses a lot of Web 2.0 components (a blog by the researchers themselves, technorati tags, delicious links, a flickr photo stream right from the ice and even a few YouTube videos shot before everybody left for the trip).

While browsing the site, I read the blog entry by UAB Ph.D. Philip Bucolo, M.S. posted a couple of days ago and titled “Joining the Team”. Besides the fact that this marine biologist is a good writer, what caught my attention was the comment section of his post. Bucolo has taken the time to respond to each comment from coworkers but also total strangers such as Mr. Don Miller, an 80-year old reader whose son introduced him to the website.

Starting a direct conversation with a researcher thousands of miles away from you, that’s definitely exciting whatever your age is. What a great way to put a human face on research and… on researchers ;-)

I’m sure UAB didn’t pick Bucolo because he would be a good fit for this Web 2.0 experiment, but he will bring a lot to this side of the project.

Why?

He helps us put a human face on otherwise “obscure” research. Two comments about his video interview on YouTube seem to confirm it.

Jeff Keeton, Web Communications Specialist at UAB, explained in an email that, “the main goal of this website is student recruitment, both at undergraduate and graduate levels. But our recruitment plans go all the way back to grade school children, because sadly, science and math are not taught at the levels they should be in our state and nationwide. We are trying to get more students, at all levels, to think about science and research as careers.”

The site was featured this past week on CNN.com, so UAB definitely got something right.

How could UAB make its website even more effective?

I think they should use a meaningful url format for their blog posts (always useful for people and search engines alike) and embed their YouTube videos on the website.

While I tend to focus my posts on US higher ed institutions, I know that more and more readers actually work at Canadian universities and colleges. That’s why I’ve decided to interview for this series about higher ed media Peggy Berkowitz, the editor of University Affairs published in print and online by the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada.

1) How do you use the Web in your work? Do you prefer RSS feeds or email?

I use the web for so many aspects of my job that’s impossible to name everything but these include: finding university faculty members and administrators; tracking down university press releases and verifying news reports; looking for story ideas from institutions or other media; downloading reports and presentations; looking for university photos; reading previous work of freelancers who want to write for University Affairs; following useful blogs and alerts in higher education and in magazine and online publishing (we have both a print magazine and a website). I subscribe to a few RSS feeds but at the moment I still prefer email.

2) What are the most helpful features on institutions’ websites?

A media room or tab for the PR/communications department that’s accessible from the institution’s home page and that lists staff members with their email address and direct phone extension. A searchable directory for faculty members and staff is indispensable. When a website is organized by user groups (For Faculty or For Students), it may be difficult to find basic information about academic departments. I like an “About the institution” button to read its self-description and a little history about the institution for people who don’t know it well.

3) What’s missing on these websites? What would you like to see added on these websites to help you do your job?
I like university sites that offer easy-to-find and easy-to-use, high-quality photos with enough information to write a cutline and which can be reprinted at no charge. Very few university sites offer this, but communications directors would be surprised at how much exposure they can get just by making it easy for editors to download photos to go with stories. Often print editors need a generic photo of students or research labs and they’ll go back to the sites that makes this stuff easy to find.

Don’t worry, I don’t plan to run a five-part series on RealNebraska, the video show produced by the admission office of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. But, I HAD to tell you about this.

David Burge, the host of the show and the associate director for admissions at UNL, posted a comment to my previous post where he explained that while RealNebraska hasn’t gone viral on YouTube, he was featured on the TODAY show for 6 days as part of a contest just a month ago.

Interesting development for a show mainly produced to be distributed on the Web, don’t you think? That’s why I asked David about the strategy and the result behind this original initiative.

1) Why did you decide to enter in the TODAY show Anchor Contest? What were your goals?

Believe it or not we have been trying to get this type of thing together in a national venue since the beginning of the project. We entered an episode in the USA network “Characters Welcome” competition as well as the MySpace promotion for “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.” We feel as this is still an unconventional approach to recruitment/college marketing and likely to gather some national attention for its content. Our recruitment videos are already featured on our local cable network, both On-Demand and the Educational network.

Ultimately, we just wanted our video shown once on the TODAY show. After that, we had no idea what to expect. Once it became clear that they were going to make the competition about personality, we tried to highlight the university iconography as much as possible. For example, each day I wore my “N” pin. Ann Curry and I had a conversation about it on the first day. At every turn I tried to mention the university.

We also knew that if identified as a finalist, we could turn the activity on the show into side publicity. We had press releases, each mentioning the Real Nebraska project, I was a fixture on three morning radio programs, and featured on the evening news in both Nebraska and Kansas.

2) What kind of returns did you get from it? Can you share some numbers and a few examples?

We sent out an email to our inquiry pool and tracked how many people clicked on the link to Real Nebraska. By tying our project to the TODAY show, the link got clicked at 5 times the rate of any other link in any of our other emails. Web traffic to the site almost doubled as well. I was on the show for six days and each day enjoyed a 4 million Nielson share. We were featured on the front page of the Lincoln, Nebraska newspaper three days out of six (at the same time as the university getting some bad press about illegal student downloads). It’s tough to say the inquiry bump as we are in one of our heaviest periods of inquiry anyway.

What can’t be tracked, however, is the viral component. I had old friends contacting me that had received MULTIPLE emails prompting them to vote for the bow-tie guy from the University of Nebraska. I realized connections in my friends that I never knew existed, two friends from different worlds connected by just a few people. I hate to guess, but I guess that close to 20,000 emails were sent each day I was on the show through list serves, web-groups, and even company newsletters. The state of Nebraska was connected somehow but I also heard from folks as far away as Canada. When it was all over, I even got a congratulatory note from one of our Senators.

Anyway, some of this is anecdotal but there is good reason to think that this bit of national attention will pay some dividends in terms of enrollment.

My next column about social networking websites will soon be published in the April issue of University Business.

I wrote it a couple of months ago before having a chance to discover a very interesting MySpace page (with 883 friends at the time of this posting): the Colleges and Universities MySpace.

Heather Mansfield, Web editor at Drury University and a MySpace consultant for non-profit organizations at DIOSA | Communications, is the person behind this original initiative.

1) Why did you start the universities and colleges MySpace profile?

I started the Colleges & Universities MySpace in December 2006 to monitor the trend and watch its progress. Drury University was a very early adopter with its MySpace launched in July 2006. We wanted to see what other colleges and universities were doing on MySpace. Higher education institutions embracing MySpace was so new that there was no information out there. So, the Colleges & Universities MySpace was created to provide some organization and a central place where MySpace early adopters could chat and share ideas. It helped us feel more secure about using MySpace, because we saw the numbers of higher education institutions using MySpace growing daily.

2) What have you learned since you started it?

I have learned that MySpace is highly misunderstood by people who don’t use it. It is the most amazing online communication tool I have ever worked with. It continues to grow by 230,000 individuals of all ages everyday. MySpace is the third visited website in the U.S. and the fifth visited in the world. As far as colleges and universities using MySpace? I give kudos (a MySpace thing) to those early adopters and visionaries. Every target audience that colleges and universities are trying to cultivate are on MySpace in massive numbers – prospective students (traditional, nontraditional, international), current students, athletics fans, parents, alumni, nonprofit organizations, etc.

3) How should institutions use MySpace as part of their marketing strategy?

The first thing every college and university needs to do is set-up a MySpace account and grab its MySpace address, regardless of whether you plan on using or not. I think many colleges and universities will be very surprised when they discover a current student or alum has already grabbed the address and is already representing your institution on MySpace.

Second, get your MySpace profile professionally designed. First impressions are everything on MySpace. MySpace design is a new field and the really good designers are charging a small fortune ($5-20K) and designing mostly for bands and musicians.

Third, pick an individual to maintain the profile. Hire a student who can do most of the maintenance work required. An admissions or marketing staff person can direct the MySpace marketing strategy. There is a MySpace etiquette for colleges and universities which I have learned through trial and error.

Fourth, promote your MySpace on your website and in print materials. I can count on one hand the number of colleges and universities that have progressed to this level. When you get on MySpace and realize how the “Schools” function works, you are going to be shocked that it took your institution this long to get on MySpace.

4) How have you used it at your institution? With what kind of results?

Drury University has used our MySpace mostly to engage current students and alumni. Drury has numerous branch campuses throughout southern Missouri and our students at these campuses often feel disconnected from the main campus community and culture. They are some of our most active participants on our MySpace. Current students like the events information we bulletin, the polls, and the little ways we work to interact with them online. We also use our MySpace to engage alumni. Our alumni email list has grown significantly since we launched. On average each bulletin we send out asking for alumni to join our e-newsletter list generates a response of 10 subscriptions. We will ask alumni to subscribe via bulletins 1-3 per month. Our MySpace community grows by 150 each month. In the next few months we’re going to ramp up our MySpace outreach to prospective traditional, nontraditional, and international students.

I’m just back from a short and random tour of campuses in SecondLife. I typed “university” and “colleges” in the search engine of the application to see what any regular visitor will find.

My journey took me to a few different places including the SL Island of Vassar College. On Vassar Island, a small but nice campus, visitors are invited to sit in a red and black flying saucer (well, not exactly, but that’s what I thought about when I saw it the first time) to take a guided tour of the premises.

During the tour, I was told by my flying machine how the institution uses different spots of its SL island such as the castle or the media garden.

Once the tour was over, I left a note on the comment board where visitors can leave notes for Bret Rydell, the SL name of the person responsible for this island – another very neat way to offer interactivity even outside of business hours.

BTW, if you haven’t read yet, Sardionerak’s report about Australian SL campuses, you should as he does a great job comparing three different ways to handle an SL presence.

I’m always looking for innovative practices to showcase on this blog.

This past week I exchanged a few emails with Phil de Haan, director of media relations at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI. We talked about how we use social networking websites such as Facebook and Linkedin.

In his email, Phil explained how he uses Facebook in his daily work. Since there’s no reason why I should be the only one to find out about this interesting practice, I asked Phil the permission to publish his comments along with a screenshot of his Facebook profile.

How do you use facebook in your daily work as a media relations professional?

[In]various ways.

For example I’ll add stories from other websites to my Facebook profile and include a Calvin connection.

Also, all of my news releases now have a share widget on the page [Karine's note: scroll down to the bottom of this press release to see the widget - find out more about Facebook Share Links on this previous post] which includes a way to share the story via Facebook.

So I share many of my own news releases with other people on campus via Facebook, and I also post a link to the release on my own Facebook profile.

In addition I’ll do searches on Facebook for topics that are in my news releases and then message those people to let them know about a release that matches their interests.

And, of course, Facebook is the first place I go now when I need contact info for a student, a picture of a student, etc.

Do you use facebook, myspace, blogs, podcasts, wikis or any other new tools in your daily job as a Web, marketing or PR professional?

Let us know by posting a comment below or sending an email at karine@collegewebeditor.com. I would love to showcase other best practices.

In November 2005, I wrote about this great show produced by the admission office of the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. At that time, the episodes had just been made available as video podcasts a few weeks after the launch of the the video Ipod:

It didn’t take too long to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to repurpose its admission-oriented streaming videos available on the Admission website, “Real Nebraska”

As reported in “UNL podcasts reach out to prospective students” an article published in The Daily Nebraskan, this show is “modeled after The Daily Show staring Jon Stewart. Real Nebraska is a monthly recruitment video series started in 2003 that comically showcases student life at UNL.”

After watching their last show yesterday in iTunes (I’m a David Burge’s fan — the associate director of admissions who is also the host of RealNebraska), I searched YouTube to see if they were available on the video sharing website.

I found only these 2 episodes (Red Letters Days and Big Red Welcome) posted in September 2006:

At the time of this post, both videos were only viewed respectively 82 and 132 times, which I find surprising.

How comes they haven’t gone viral yet? Any idea?

Higher Education Web Professionals Association (HighEdWeb) defines itself as “a non-profit organization whose mission is to advance web professionals, technologies and standards in higher education.”

The organizers of HighEdWebDev, the great annual conference in Rochester, NY are the ones behind this new professional organization.

Here are the current members of the Board of Directors:

• Dale Grady, University of Rochester, President
• Steve Lewis, SUNY-Brockport, Secretary/Treasurer
• Jeremy Trumble, Rochester Institute of Technology

They will continue to serve on the Board of Directors after the addition of the new members. So, it’s my understanding that the association wants to assure a broader national diversity at its top by welcoming 6 new faces.

If you want to find out a bit more about the responsibilities that come with the title, they are clearly listed on the association website.

To be eligible, nominees must have experience on a board committee and it’s recommended they meet the following requirements:

• Active employment in a web-related field at a higher education institution
• Volunteer service to HighEdWeb (speaker, committee member, etc.)
• Active participation in web conferences, workshops or discussions
• Assistant director or manager position or higher
• Knowledge of established web technologies and standards

Higher ed Web professionals can nominate anybody meeting these requirements (even themselves) by filling out an online form by March 30, 2007.

Chances are you’ve heard about (or suffered from ;-) the dreaded website redesign by committee: a group of stakeholders making life and death decisions on the design created by the Web team or the external agency.

With the help of usability advocates like Steve Krug, more and more institutions have tried to balance this approach with a more user-centered process: educated decisions based on metrics, trends and the results of real testing done with members of target audiences.

To make the process even more transparent, a few higher ed teams in charge of their website redesign (Cornell, Duke, Ball State, etc.) have chosen to blog about it inviting feedback and comments from anybody.

As announced yesterday in a blog post titled “Facebook Sneak Preview,” the popular social networking website has decided to push the idea a bit further by inviting comments about the plans for its next redesign via a Facebook group(Facebook login required).

If you are a Web professional, you should probably try to follow closely this initiative as you might be able to use the same approach for your next redesign project..

Given the popularity of Facebook among our main target audience of students, it could be a great way to get input about any upcoming website redesign. Moreover, it could be used to gather feedback from prospective students – usually a pretty hard to reach target in this specific situation since they don’t have any formal link with your institution yet.

Have any of you already tried this approach? What do you think about it?

I’ve just spent a few minutes listening to lots of “Can you hear me, now?” at NMC Campus in SecondLife at the beginning of a stress test for SL integrated voice application. It’s supposed to be released in June.

And, this was pretty exciting and very… clear. It sounded like a Skype conference call or a Skypecast, but sure looked different ;-)

I couldn’t stay until the end of the test, but this is a very promising start for voice chat in SecondLife, which I identified as a very important step for the future of the platform in higher ed marketing and admission fields in my first post about SL last summer: “Should your institution hold virtual open houses in SecondLife (SL)?”:

Voice instead of instant messaging – In SL, communications between avatars are only done via the game instant messaging application. I’ve heard and read that voice over internet protocol is in the plans and should happen soon. When slow typers will be on equal grounds with their faster counterparts, exchanges will become easier. That’s what I’m calling online interactivity, the next best thing after face-to-face interactions ;-)

Now, it won’t be long until we can mark this one “checked.”