As you’ve probably heard (or read in my previous post), the eduStyle awards include a people’s choice award for the best higher ed blog this year.
As a partner for this category and a fervent supporter of higher ed blogging, I’ve decided to publish a series of interviews with the 5 nominees for this award. My goal for these interviews was to provide a good and fair introduction to all these blogs — and help you cast your vote. So, don’t forget to vote by June 1st and let the most popular blog win!
Blog title: .eduGuru
First blog post: “Look, Ma. I’m a Blogger”
Number of posts since you started: 267
Total number of RSS/email subscribers: 960
Number of unique visitors in last 12 months: 65K
Launched by Kyle James – who left higher education to work for the inbound marketing agency HubSpot last January, .eduGuru is authored by a group of six bloggers: Kyle James, Karlyn Morissette, Rachel Reuben, Nick DeNardis, Nikki Massaro Kauffman and Michael Fienen.
The interview was done by Kyle James. Karlyn Morissette – also nominated for her personal blog – chose to answer my questions for both blogs. Her interview follows Kyle’s.
1) Why did you start your blog?
I started the blog as a way to network and share my experience working in an institution. There were some key areas in Higher Education web that I felt like nobody was talking about and were very important. Mostly Web Analytics, SEO, and Social Media (although Social Media has become the hot subject lately).
2) In your opinion, what is the biggest differentiator of your blog? What makes it different from the other higher ed blogs?
What makes .eduGuru so special is the community of writers. We have six strong writers and absolute experts in the industry writing on this one platform. It’s a respected group and we are all each a little different and have different expertise. It is a great collection of bright individuals who are all passionate about what they do and in the community and I think that comes through extremely well in each individuals posts.
3) What are your most popular posts? What’s your favorite post?
It is hard to really label a favorite post. Not all the posts were written by myself and each of the over 250 posts has had a special reason for being written. I put together a top ten posts of 2008 the beginning of the which highlighted a lot of the most visited and best performing posts over the first year. If you really had to single out a single post though i think it would have to be Rachel’s The Use of Social Media in Higher Education for Marketing and Communications, a post that has been passed around the web and even received a link on Mashable.
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Blog titles: KarlynMorissette.com and .eduGuru
First blog posts: “Re-introducing myself” and “New Standards for Email Subject Lines”
Number of posts since you started: 234 posts on KarlynMorissette.com – I’ve done 20 posts individually on .eduGuru
Total number of RSS/email subscribers and Number of unique visitors in last 12 months:
None of anyone’s effing business :-) (Seriously though, I don’t give out traffic stats for my blog. Those shouldn’t matter to people as long as the ideas are valuable)
Karlyn Morissette blogs at .eduGuru, but also on her personal blog, KarlynMorisette.com. Both blogs were nominated for this award.
1) Why did you start your blog?
Well, I’m nominated as a part of two blogs in this category so I hope you’ll excuse the longness of my answers, so I can address both :-)
I started (or I should say re-started) KarlynMorissette.com in January 2008. I had previously blogged about using the web to recruit students in 2006-2007. To my utter shock, people actually started reading it! Fast forward about several months later and I was presenting a conferences and getting more attention outside of the institution I was working at and I ended up experiencing what many higher ed bloggers who work for institutions experience – backlash from the people I work with. To make a long story short, I was given the ultimatum that I had to clear every post on the blog with my higher ups to continue it. Those of you who know me or have read me for a while probably realize that just didn’t sit well with me, so I had a few cocktails one night and deleted the blog altogether. A few weeks later, I quit the job entirely and moved on to another school.
The original experience with professional blogging scared me away from the medium for a bit. I moved on to a different job and laid low for a few months, but, since I’ve been a blogger in one form or another for about ten years, my return to blogging was probably inevitable. I originally viewed the blog as a continuation of what I had previously started, and kicked myself for deleting the previous blog before saving the posts from it! I keep coming back to blogging because I genuinely love what I do, and I love writing about it and sharing my passion for it with others.
I got involved with .eduGuru this past summer. Kyle and I had been talking a lot and he was looking to expand .eduGuru to make it a multi-author site. I loved the idea and immediately wanted to become involved with it because I felt that it could be a great resource for higher ed web people. I looked at it as a different sort of publication than KarlynMorissette.com, particularly because it was going to include multiple people from different backgrounds. I loved the idea of working either others, because ultimately I think that delivers a better final product. Plus being involved with two blogs just took my obsession and belief in the medium to another level :-)
2) In your opinion, what is the biggest differentiator of your blog? What makes it different from the other higher ed blogs?
For KarlynMorissette.com, the biggest differentiator definitely is the fact that I address a lot of things that I think are problems with higher education. I love this industry, but there are just a lot of things that do not make sense and I feel like addressing the problems in a forthright manner is the only way they are ever going to be solved.
For .eduGuru, the biggest differentiator is the format – six different authors who come from very different points-of-view and experiences. It’s not just marketing, or just social media, or just development, or just SEO and analytics – there truly is something for everyone on it.
3) What are your most popular posts? What’s your favorite post?
Tough question. On KarlynMorissette.com, definitely the most popular post was the Higher Ed Twitter List, which I swear one of these days I’m going to go back and update! The live-blogging posts from conferences are always popular too (especially my posts from An Event Apart, since Jeffrey Zeldman posted them on his website). I don’t have a favorite post, but I’ll give you my top 3 of the moment:
–A Twitter Discussion on Higher Ed Consultants
–Organizations Don’t Like Experts
–Back to Basics: An Email Marketing Framework
On .eduGuru, my most popular post was one I did comparing the Obama and McCain emails. My favorite post on there of the moment is the one I called Making A Case for Twitter, since I’m on a Twitter-kick :-)