Archive for January, 2009

In the summer of 2007, I created a survey about the state of print and electronic publications in higher education. At that time, more than 200 institutions took the time to complete this survey.

Later, I produced a 5-page executive summary PDF file presenting the main results and wrote a column “Demand Print or Print On-Demand,” published in October 2007 in University Business.

Last week, I was interviewed about the digital future of alum magazines for an article to be published in the March issue of CASE Currents, and as I was discussing best practices, I realized that this topic has never been THAT timely.

With the current budget crisis accelerating the shift from print to electronic when it comes to higher ed publications, I think it’s time to find out how things have changed over the past year and half.

This is the reason why I’ve put together an updated version of this previous short online survey to get a better idea of the state of print and electronic publications in higher education and the impact of the economy downturn on the gone-digital-going-paperless trend.

The results of this survey will be used for a research I’m conducting, a subsequent white paper and depending on the results for a future University Business column.

My goal is to assess how the Web and other electronic media (email, blog, RSS, etc.) are used in universities and colleges as complements or replacements for print publications.

This online survey has only 20 questions. It should take you 3 to 4 minutes to fill it out. The data you provide will only be used for its statistical interest.

If you include your name and email address at the end of the survey (although this isn’t mandatory), you’ll get a chance to win one of the 2 free passes to be drawn among responders for a future webinar series from Higher Ed Experts, a way for me to thank you for your participation.

So, please take 3 minutes now to do this survey!

My second UB column for 2009 is now available in the February issue as well as online (featured on the homepage of University Business today): “More with Less: 7 Ways to Survive the Budget Crunch”

Here are the 7 ways/tips in a condensed form:

1. Look more closely at your print publication budget
2. Embrace (free) social media to reach your target audiences
3. Try new performance-based advertising channels
4. Fine-tune email marketing initiatives to supercharge their ROI
5. Say “good bye” to new web servers and “hello” to on-demand cloud computing
6. Don’t discard the DIY approach
7. Watch out for team morale by focusing on budget-friendly professional development alternatives including next week’s 2-webinar series “Saving Big” for which you can still register until this Friday

By the way, if you are a University Business reader who has just discovered collegewebeditor.com, welcome! Don’t forget to subscribe to this blog via RSS or email.

This is the second installment of my new series dedicated to vendor deals and other bargains to help you survive and thrive with tighter budgets.

After the first installment about a very interesting offer to send up to 10,000 email per month for free for institutions with non-profit status, this time we’re talking about a discount on a conference fee for the next Xpert Summit taking place in Las Vegas next month.

Organized by Brian Niles’ Target X for their clients – mainly folks working in admissions offices or in charge of marketing/communications to prospective students, this conference is open to others, but for a $200 fee.

Brian and his team are regulars on the conference circuit and are always providing great value (without too much pitching in their presentations). So, when Adrienne Bartlett, Client Concierge at TargetX, emailed me with this offer, she got my attention.

What’s the deal?

If you’re looking to get some practical tips on email, social media or college visits, to network with some of your peers and can find a good deal on hotel & travel, you can attend this year’s Xpert Summit for free even if you’re not a client. That’s a $200 saving.

What does the fine print say?

Be prepared to listen to some sessions including some product information – hey, it’s a user conference after all.

Want to have a look at the schedule and the different sessions?
Just download this PDF file.

How do you get started?

If you’re interested and want to sign up without paying the $200 conference fee for non-clients, just email Adrienne and to get the fee waived let her know you’re a collegewebeditor.com reader.

Once again I found in my inbox this morning a message from someone who wanted to register for the upcoming webinar series: “Saving Big″ (the initial registration deadline was yesterday at 9PM).

As a result, I decided to postpone the registration deadline until next Friday (January 30, 2009) at 9PM ET.

Register for Saving Big Webinars

If you want to learn about a few creative ideas to save big on your publications and admissions marketing while getting great results, this 2-webinar series featuring Rachel Reuben (SUNY at New Paltz) and Joe Hice (The University of Florida) will be worth your time and its cost (just $240 per connection – why not pack a room with your marketing, PR & admissions teams to watch both webinars to fire up a great brainstorming session?)

Some of the institutions registered for this series include:

• Yeshiva University
• Upper Iowa University
• Valparaiso University School of Law
• University of New Haven
• Emory University
• Cornerstone University
• University of Melbourne (Australia)

For more information and to register online, just go to www.higheredexperts.com/savingbig

Since we’re all experiencing tougher times in higher education, I’d like to extend a special offer valid for today only:

if you register and pay today (Jan 27) for Saving Big at www.higheredexperts.com/savingbig, you’ll get a free pass to watch on-demand one of our past webinars (you can choose among more than 30 great webinars).

If you have any problems or issues, just send me an email at karine@collegewebeditor.com

Andy Shaindlin and Elizabeth Allen from Alumni Futures has just published a very interesting white paper: Activating Alumni Networks with Twitter.

This free 36-page PDF file includes a good primer about Twitter (aimed at the non-user), an overview about different uses, some recommendations as well as the results of a recent online survey conducted from January 6 to January 13, 2009 with 330 folks working in higher education.

I read Andy’s white paper this morning and so should you (download a copy and share it with your alum association).

Here’s an excerpt of what the practical-tip addict I am found the most interesting in this research paper, i.e the 8-step plan to get your alum association on Twitter:

• Create Twitter accounts in the name of your school and alumni association even if you do not intend to use Twitter for institutional purposes. This will prevent unauthorized or unexpected use (“squatting”) of the names by opportunistic students, alumni, marketers, or others.
• Describe Twitter on your web site and direct alumni to your association profile and other school-related users.
• Consider establishing a professionally oriented use of a personal Twitter account, as an additional channel
  for connecting with constituents with whom you have established an institutional relationship. An alumni
  director might tweet individually and follow his alumni board members.

• Schedule institutional tweets for the weekday, when most users are watching the Twitter stream, and pay attention to time zones. Overnight and weekend tweets will be long gone from the public timeline when alumni log on in the morning.
• Establish a user-populated directory of alumni Twitter usernames.
• Profile publicly how alumni are connecting with each other – not just with the institution – by using Twitter.
• Tell alumni to seek out other alumni among the institution’s or the association’s followers on Twitter.
• Add alumni Twitter usernames to alumni records in the secure online directory and even in the development
  database, and encourage alumni to update their own records with this information.

What did I find interesting in the survey results?

• 36% of respondents are currently using Twitter; a comparable number (37%) know what Twitter is, but have not used it.
• Of those currently using Twitter, 44% are Twittering both for their school and themselves (Karine’s note: this result might be a bit skewed as Twitter users might be more inclined to do a survey about Twitter usage)
• 85% of institutional users are sending out event updates and invites; news of updated web content is broadcast by 59% of institutions, and news of students, faculty and alumni accounts for some tweets from half the respondents.
• Half the institutions using Twitter had fewer than 25 followers. Another 17% had between 25 and 50. 19% boasted more than 100 followers.

First, let me start by a quick disclaimer, I might be a bit partial on this topic for 2 reasons:

• I’ve known and collaborated for almost 3 years on different projects (conferences, webinars, etc. including the upcoming “Saving Big” Webinars for which registration ends tonight by the way) with the blogger behind this blog – Joe Hice, AVP of Public Relations and Marketing at the University of Florida.
• I’ve shared a few pointers about blogging (including my 12-step plan for better blogging) with Joe when he decided to start his blog last Fall.

Now that Joe’s blog, Gator Grotto: A refuge from hastly jugdment, has a few posts behind its (crocodile?) belt, I really see a great institutional yet conversational – and sometimes even controversial – blog in the making.

Joe is a seasoned communication professional, a great presenter and writer (he worked as a journalist earlier in his career) with a unique voice and it really shows on his blog.

While the blog has been live for just a few weeks – close to 2 months, it has already managed to develop a readership of about 300 regular readers, mainly based in Gainsville where UF is based.

Dealing with topics as diverse as an old myth around the place of birth of the famous Gatorade, budget cuts, rankings or research, Gator Grotto is a refreshing take on the executive’s blog genre.

In an email exchange we had last week, Joe shared a few behind-the-scenes comments about the whole process. I’m publishing below a few excerpts of this email with his permission.

After 2 months blogging, what can you say about this experience?

We’re still trying to find our voice as we move forward. Our president has endorsed and supported the blog, so we are a point of contact with UF. That’s good, but it also means we’ve got to take the University’s official position into consideration with everything we post. That has kept me in check, somewhat, and I think it’s the right way to go.
[...]
It is more challenging than I anticipated. It’s easy to just cut and paste things, but when you start including your thoughts and comments, taking into account UF’s position on issues, trying to provoke discussion, etc., it’s quite a task. For UF, and me especially, it has been a great learning experience. I’m certainly no expert, but feel more confident every day. I can also manage WordPress pretty well.

Any blogging success story yet to share?

I was proud to help uncover some previously unknown, or at least, unsubstantiated facts in the development of Gatorade. People have said from time to time that FSU had a sports-related drink in development several years before Gatorade. That was actually posted as fact on national television during the Florida State vs. Florida football game. Well, a number of people were offended and I did a post about Gatorade being the original. It was actually the first post we did on the blog.

Literally hours after the post went up someone sent us a pdf of a news story that appeared in the Tampa Tribune about three years before Gatorade was launched. In the story, the writer referenced Seminole Firewater. That created a stir and I posted the update along with a picture of the old article. That interested the Florida Alligator newspaper in the story and the reporter actually tracked down a few members of the FSU football team who had supposedly been drinking Seminole Firewater. But the best was yet to come. One of those team members was T.K. Wetherell, the president of Florida State University. He did say that the team give them something to drink, but it was nothing more than a Cool-Ade flavored drink accompanied by an orange slice, ice and salt tablets. The Seminole Firewater myth was exposed by the president of FSU. Pretty cool, I thought, and the Gator Grotto blog played a part in the discovery. It was a great way to launch the blog.

Does your VP or president have a very original take on blogging? Should they? What do you think?
Let us know by posting a comment.

Unless you’ve been on a very, very long vacation (or are one of the lucky few), you are currently facing budget cuts at your institution.

I know I wrote a lot about this lately, but I’m trying to find ways to help you weather that storm.

In a few days, my next University Business column to be published in the Februay issue will even provide you with some very practical tips to do more with less. And, you probably know by now that you can also register for Saving Big Webinars scheduled on February 4 & 5 to listen to 2 of your colleagues, Joe Hice from the University of Florida and Rachel Reuben from SUNY New Paltz, to find out about creative ways to save your institution big money while getting great results.

In the meantime, I’d like to share with you some of the notes I took while reading a very interesting and timely white paper written by Philip J. Goldstein and published as a 10-page PDF file by Educause this week:

Managing the Funding Gap:
How Today’s Economic Downturn Is Impacting IT Leaders and Their Organizations

This paper summarizes the discusssions that took place in December 2008 at an ECAR workshop for IT leaders.

What tactics have been implemented by IT leaders to cut costs?

Most approaches started with freezing open positions, cutting budgets for travel, discontinuing plans to expand services, and the cancellation of discretionary projects. As the budget situation has worsened, other tactics are also being implemented:

• Deployment of software to turn off desktop computers to reduce power consumption
• Accelerated plans to implement server virtualization, accompanied by increased server consolidation
• Retirement of underutilized technologies where viable alternatives exist (such as modem pools or legacy applications with small groups of users)
• Elimination of less-strategic or less widely used services
• Expanding use of videoconferencing as an alternative to travel

Is it all that bad? Aren’t there any opportunities out there?

However, some participants saw opportunity in the degree of challenge institutions face today. Perhaps never before have institutions and institutional leaders had more reason and need to try to work differently. Things that even a few months ago might have seemed politically impossible to accomplish now seem possible.

Winning strategies include:

• Rebalancing Services: rationalize services by centralizing IT services for bigger institutions.
• Sourcing Externally: explore open-source services, the cloud and collaboration with other institutions
• Targeted Operational Efficiency: focus on smallest projects that improve a particular business process to save money or increase productivity across the institution.

These participants believed that institutions would become more willing than they were in the past to make the changes required to benefit from technology.
[...]
Some IT leaders have been reticent to engage in collaborations or be early adopters of new technologies like cloud computing because their institutions had little tolerance for risk and provided little reward for innovation. Perhaps institutions, IT organizations, and IT leaders will now be more receptive to these risks.

So, there’s definitely an opportunity for Web professionals to push for more cost-effective solutions (aren’t all Web solutions more cost-effective by nature?) in institutions looking for ways to do more with less.

Have you managed to get approval lately on a project that you tried to push for months or years?
Tell us by posting a comment!

According to the 2009 Horizon report, while mobiles and cloud computing are already well established on many campuses across the world, geo-tagging and the personal web should be widely used in higher education by 2012.

Released yesterday by The New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), an EDUCAUSE program, this report is definitely a must-read as it offers an interesting overview of the current trends and technologies that should impact the world of higher education in the near future:

To create the 2009 Horizon Report, the 45 members of the 2009 Advisory Board engaged in a comprehensive review and analysis of research, articles, papers, and interviews; discussed existing applications and brainstormed new ones; and ultimately ranked the items on the list of more than 80 technologies that emerged for their potential relevance to teaching, learning, and creative expression. The 2009 Advisory Board included representatives from eight countries — the United States, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Finland, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Board members conducted most of their work online during the fall of 2008 using a variety of collaboration tools, including a special wiki dedicated to the project.

This 32-page report is available as a free PDF file under a Creative Commons license

What really makes this report a great resource is the way the highlighted technologies are presented:

• an overview
• why they are relevant to teaching, learning and creative expression
• current examples in different institutions (with links)
• online resources for further reading

Our good friends from the Pew Internet and American Life Project have just released a very interesting 17-page report about adults and social networks websites.

The big news in this report is the increased interest shown by online adults for Facebook and Co according to the results of two different surveys done in May and December 2008.

The share of adult internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years — from 8% in 2005 to 35% now,1 according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s December 2008 tracking survey.

Below are some of the most interesting findings I grabbed from this report:

• 75% of our college crowd, young adults aged 18-24 have a profile (no big scoop here, but always nice to have some recent data, don’t you think?), 57% of online adults 25-34, 30% of online adults 35-44
• In February 2005, just 2% of adult internet users had visited an online social network “yesterday” while 19% of adult internet users had done so in December 2008.

• Social network users are also more likely to be students — 68% of full time students and 71% of part-time students have a social network profile, while just 28% of adults who are not students use social networks.

• Nearly one third 31% of online white adults have a social networking profile, compared with 43% of African-Americans and 48% of Hispanics.
• So, where are those networking adults?
  • 50% of adult social network users have a profile on MySpace
  • 22% have a profile on Facebook
  • 6% have a profile on LinkedIn

  MySpace users are more likely to be women, Hispanic or black, to have a high school education or some experience with college. The median age of a MySpace user is 27 years old. Facebook users are more likely to be men and to have a college degree. The median age of a Facebook user is 26 years old. LinkedIn users are more likely to be men, to be white and to have a college degree. The median age of a LinkedIn user is 40 years old.

• When users do use social networks for professional and personal reasons, they will often maintain multiple profiles, generally on different sites.
  51% of social network users have two or more online profiles
  43% have only one online profile

There’s even more interesting data about the type of use depending on the websites. Go download this free PDF report now – and use to back up your social media initiatives.

I’ll be hosting a 2-webinar series for Higher Ed Experts about this topic early next month presented by Joe Hice, AVP at the University of Florida and Rachel Reuben, Director of Web Communications at SUNY – New Paltz:

Saving Big: Winning strategies to get better results even with a crunched budget: February 4 & 5, 2009

“Saving Big” is a 2-webinar series that will show you how embracing the right digital approach can help you dramatically cut costs while still meeting the needs of your target audiences. It will show you why and how social media can become a very budget-friendly asset in the battle to attract, engage and win over the brightest, but also why and how to save on any publication budgets without alienating readers and compromising editorial quality.

February 4, 2009 1PM-2PM ET – Rain date: February 11, 2009 1PM-2PM ET
Recruiting on a budget 101: Master plan to win the social media jackpot with prospective students
Rachel Reuben, Director of Web Communication and Strategic Projects at SUNY New Paltz, will explain how to make the most of social media to upgrade your recruitment strategy and differentiate your institution. She will also share a road map to help your admissions office catch up with the latest recruiting techniques at a fraction of the more traditional approach’s cost.

February 5, 2009 1PM-2PM ET – Rain date: February 12, 2009 1PM-2PM ET
Taming the print beast: How to stretch the publication dollars of your institution
Joe Hice, AVP for Marketing and Public Relations at the University of Florida, will help you understand why you should give a closer look at your publication budget in these tough economic times. He will also share the winning strategy (as well as some practical tips) that led UF to save more than a million dollars on its publication budget.

I’m looking for some extra practical examples to flesh out the planned Q&A of both webinars.

Please share – by posting a comment – something you’ve implemented in the past few months to save money while making the most of your marketing and communications initiatives.