This webinar covers a little bit of everything: how search engines work, why higher education should care about SEO and how colleges and universities might change their practices to rank higher in search results.

Who Should Watch this Webinar?

Do the letters SEO frighten you? Don’t worry! This webinar is for admissions, advancement (including alumni relations), communication, and marketing professionals charged with overseeing social media efforts who want to learn the basics of search and how social media plays a role in determine who gets seen where.

Want your own copy of the presentation, view the slides on Slideshare.

Questions for the presenter?

Leave your questions about the webinar in the comment section below and we’ll be sure to answer them.

Simplicity and speed: design and usability for multi-device websites

Speed and simplicity. Welcome to the age of sequential and simultaneous browsing. According to Google, 90% of consumers now use multiple screens to accomplish tasks on the web. Tablets and mobile remain hot topics for sales, use, and design. In an age when most users are accessing sites with multiple devices, top companies are focusing on fast and clean delivery of information.

This webinar will focus on how new realities are changing web design, web design process, and usability standards.

Session Outline:

• Sequential and simultaneous browsing
• The rise of the tablet
• Flat design for a lumpy web
• The need for speed
• Process: our successes and mistakes in designing for the multi-device web

Presenter:

Doug Gapinski, strategist, will lead this important presentation. Doug leads mStoner’s mobile and adaptive design practice areas. He has worked with clients including: Alverno College, Bethel University, the Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University, Brown University, Loyola University Chicago, Kenyon College, and The Pennsylvania State University. Doug has presented at High Ed Web, Penn State Web Conference, and has been a guest and a guest-host on Higher Ed Live.

When:
Thursday, May 30 at 2:00 p.m. EDT

Cost and attendance:
Attendance is free; registration required.

Questions for the presenter?

Leave your questions in the comment section below and we’ll be sure to answer them during the webinar.

All four of the sites I will mention here were winners. The Biola Undergraduate Admissions site was a 2011 CASE Circle of Excellence Silver Award winner. Washington State University and Pacific University won gold and silver, respectively, in the category of Websites: Student Recruitment Subsection of the 2013 CASE District VIII Communications Awards. The fourth site, Eastern Illinois University’s Admissions, won Gold in the 2012 UCDA Design Competition.

In my view, all of these sites are strong examples of what a student recruitment website needs to be. Are they perfect? No. Do they inspire? Yes. The four sites I reference here display four characteristics I think are important for admissions sites:

1. Be who you are.
2. Know your demographic.
3. Feature the academic programs.
4. Make it high impact.

Be who you are.
As soon as you land on the Biola University site it feels different. From the color palette, to the welcome to our world theme, this site is probably an immediate “Yes, I want to apply!” for some, and a “Nope, this isn’t for me.” for others. Biola understands that you get right fit students when you give prospectives an authentic view of what you are and what you are not. I think one strength of the Biola site is that prospective students immediately know this is an all-Christian community. The brand of Biola is clear and bold.
I also like:

• The student blogs on Tumblr.
• “Majors” and “Life at Biola” as front and center navigational elements.
• The use of illustration and graphics to enhance photography (see the Campus Culture section of the site).

http://undergrad.biola.edu/

Know your demographic.
The Washington State University site has an Instagram feel that is well-suited to the high school student demographic. The treatment of the photography, the choice of typography and the layout are all really appealing. With very little text, the homepage packs a punch and quickly responds to many of the interests, worries and fears of 16- to 18-year-olds looking at colleges.  (The site also looks good on a phone!) The Washington State University site connects with the demographic.
I also like:

• The fixed left-column menu.
• The many ways you can interact with the site.
• The WSU Admissions Pinterest.
• The Fields of Study graphic on the “Academics & Majors” page.

http://admission.wsu.edu/index.html

Feature the academic programs.
Pacific University uses five landing pages — “think. see. teach. heal. lead.” — to cover academics in a compelling and meaningful way. The left-column menu on each of the landing pages is the list of majors! Pacific offers detail about the academic programs in a digestible and informative way.
I also like:

• The short videos offering a sense of place and culture.
• The theme lines like “Sometimes the biggest ideas come from small places.” and “Bring your imagination to the global marketplace.”

http://www.pacificu.edu/discover/

Make it high impact.
The Eastern Illinois University Admissions site is high impact. The use of color and photography is strong and the texture in the background is cool. The copy on this site is also high impact: “The deal goes like this. You give us four years, and we give you a future. You give us your best effort, and we give you devoted faculty and staff who work with you to ensure you reach your highest potential.”
I also like:

• The simple navigation (the menu labels are super clear!).
• The Life @ EIU section.
• The theme lines throughout (“When overthinking is a good thing.)

http://www.eiu.edu/admissions/

More on student recruitment from the mStoner blog:

• How to build better major and degree pages. (Doug Gapinski)
• Telling Your Research Story (Kylie Larson)

What’s been catching your eye?
Let me know about your favorite student recruitment websites. I’d like to feature more of them here.

In an ideal world, all academic offering pages would always be a blend of concise functional information, useful contextual information, and colorful details full of personality unique to each individual institution. Since we don’t live in an ideal world, I’ve included several simple things .edu web teams can do to improve major and degree pages.

Provide all the necessary functional information for each major or degree.
Functional information includes program (and course) requirements, types of degrees available (such as BA or BS), options (such as concentrations or foci), and program-specific opportunities that give the degree an edge over competitors (such as internships, co-ops, and research opportunities).

Create content subcategories that matter to prospective students.
Given that prospective students will shop around for a major or degree, what does each specific college or university offer that a student can’t get down the street at Middling University? Prospective students want to know what careers options the degree will open up for them, and what other graduates have done with the degree. Who are the faculty members teaching the core requirement courses? What are the most popular or interesting courses available?

Include relevant visuals.
Academic offerings are the core products colleges and universities offer to the public, but many universities have major, degree, and program pages with no visuals for academic offering pages at all. The major or degree is what each individual student will be living and breathing during most days at a college or university. Degree pages are a perfect place for photography related to the subject-at-large (i.e. biology images), visuals specific to the college or university (new facilities or labs), or portrait shots to add humanity (faces of famous faculty).

Shorten the distance to a finished application by having next steps on major and degree pages.
Prospectives who investigate several different colleges and universities may not get to the end of a finished application if it takes too many steps to get from an major or degree page to an application. These pages should offer immediate next steps related to enrollment (request information, get tuition costs, apply) rather than asking visitors to re-navigate through the admissions section of the site.

Make sure each program page is buttoned-up for SEO.
Following basic practices for SEO will improve the chances of targeted leads coming to a major and degree pages through search engines. For starters, content on these pages should be regularly updated, page titles should be unique, and meta descriptions should be clear and concise.

Provide links to related majors / degrees.
A major or degree page shouldn’t be a dead end for a curious student or an undecided freshman. Visitors should be able to see links to other, similar offerings. Related academic offerings can be created based on the most popular majors, minors, and degrees within each school or college.

Perform usability tests specific to academic listing pages.
There’s no better way to improve a page or set of pages than watching users perform (or try to perform) critical assigned  tasks. Doing short usability sessions (~20 minutes) to assess navigation to specific academic offerings from different parts of the site and to assess how users perform critical tasks on these pages can produce ideas for making these pages more frictionless.

Starting small
If the above steps to improvement sound easy, consider that scale increases the difficulty level. Many of our clients offer between 40 and 100 undergraduate majors, so deploying and maintaining content for individual academic offerings becomes a challenge just by sheer volume. If you’re thinking about enhancing your academic offering pages but have limited resources, I’d recommend starting small: begin working on the five majors or degrees with the highest enrollment.

A sample content model
One tool for showing intent, declaring functional requirements for different page contents, and mapping the effort involved in creating new major or degree pages is a content model. I’ve included a sample content model for an undergraduate major as a public Google document.

Three good live examples
Biola University: Biological Science Major
North Park University: Biology Major
Wofford College: Biology Major*

*Special thanks to Kylie Stanley Larson for providing this example.

File this post under the following: #HashtagStrategy

Originally developed by Twitter users as a means to categorize messages, the # symbol has crept from platform to platform to become a universal way of connecting content.

Hashtags are supported on Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Google+ and Pinterest. The Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook is working on incorporating the hashtag into its service by using the symbol as a way to group conversations. Simply put, hashtags are increasingly a part of how to communicate and bring order to our online worlds.

As the NCAA starts limiting the use of hashtags on the field and Facebook finds a way to incorporate them into its platform, it’s time higher education started paying more attention to the # symbol and everything it means.

Your institution needs a hashtag strategy.

A recent RadiumOne survey found that more than 70 percent of consumers favor using hashtags on mobile devices and nearly half feel motivated to explore new content when hashtags are present. As hashtags increasingly become an acceptable way to coordinate content, it’s imperative that institutions put thought into how and when to use them.

The goal of any hashtag should be to convey a key message of your institution’s brand marketing strategy and to coordinate conversation around that message. Each hashtag created should be easy to use and clear in its purpose. A hashtag strategy does not mean having a different hashtag for every campaign. It means putting thought into what you put behind the # sign.

Here’s a few guidelines for getting started:

Set a goal.

As with any social media endeavor, be sure to be able to answer the simple question: Why are we doing this and what is the goal? Whether it’s to connect content, build brand awareness or form a conversation, know the reason for the hashtag before adding it online.

Do your research.

There are any number of services out there that can help when it comes to researching the history of a hashtag. Is it already is use? What does it mean? How much traffic does it generate now? What the Trend, Hashtags.org and Twubs are just a few tools to get started. Do your research and remember that hashtags are open to all.

Avoid creating spam.

Twitter makes it clear in its help center: “Don’t #spam #with #hashtags.” The microblogging service recommends using no more than two hashtags per Tweet. Tweets with too many hashtags are hard to read come across as a desperate attempt to fish for traffic. Ask Brian.

Know that hashtags never really die.

Content from years ago may no longer swim in a Twitter stream but that doesn’t mean that’s its gone for good. Hashtags are searchable and, like most anything else on the Internet, can be archived.

Have fun with it.

Hashtags are not the secret sauce to getting something to go viral. Not everyone will use your hashtag just because you created it. Hashtags often are experiments. Try them out, see what works and coordinate conversation to build better community.

Photo by Quinn Dombrowski used under a Creative Commons license.

The web analytics data around mobile traffic got me thinking about data visualizations and how visualizations can emphasize the importance of key metrics. In the business world, companies have been using data warehouses and business intelligence software to collect and report on their key performance indicators for years. In our work with higher education, we see increasing opportunities to use the wealth of data available to us to help meet all kinds of institutional goals.

I decided to take my web analytics data on mobile traffic and run it through a cool (free!) visualization tool called Tableau Public from Tableau Software. I thought I would I share my first experiment with the tool:

The visualization includes mobile web traffic data from a smattering of institutions of different types (Universities, Community Colleges, Liberal Arts Colleges, etc.) for May 2010, May 2011 and May 2012. There is a tab at the top for each date, and it starts in May 2010 with all the data points clustered quite close together as mobile traffic was pretty low across the board. Click on the May 2011 tab and then May 2012 tab to see how the mobile visits and percentage of mobile traffic move ahead, and there starts to be some stratification of the data, with larger Universities showing some of the highest traffic from mobile.

Each data point is clickable and reveals details such as the number of mobile visits, percentage of mobile traffic and type of institution. At the top left are controls to show each month, which really shows how both the volume of mobile traffic and the percentage of mobile traffic have exploded over the last three years.

This is just a simple example of what the tool can do, but my takeaways are:

• Visualizations of data can be fun and are a powerful way to emphasize key data points.
• Tools like Tableau Public really put powerful business intelligence concepts into the hands of users better than ever before.
• It doesn’t take much more than an interest in data and familiarity with Excel to be able to put together a small data set and produce visualizations.
• It’s exciting to think about how mobile traffic will continue to grow — I’m anxious to plug May 2013 data into my test visualization.

Are other folks using Tableau for visualizations? Are there are other tools higher education is using for this? I’d love to see other examples and ways we can visualize key metrics and put our data to use!

It’s complicated. Many schools and colleges within a university offer both graduate and undergraduate programs, so they serve the same mix of students as the broader university. Sometimes, the reputation of a professional school is as strong as or stronger than the brand of the university of which it is a part. Graduate and professional schools occupy a difficult marketplace.

Let’s think about separate web strategies for graduate and professional schools in the context of brand. Should your university be a branded house or a house of brands? Do prospective graduate students connect most with your school’s identity or, more likely, with your university-at-large?

Both, good questions. In our view, good answers are few and fairly incomplete. Google “web strategy graduate schools” and you’ll see that the conversation is just beginning.

Luckily, our exploration of web strategy for graduate and professional schools is off and running. More on this topic from the mStoner blog:

• Web Strategy for Graduate Schools Part 2: A Potpourri of School of Education Websites
• University = Schools and Colleges Why do they want to be different?
• Is web strategy different for graduate schools? Part 1: Business and Law

It’s not often those working in higher education on the web get a huge vote of confidence for spending time and money on any one particular feature. For those committed to providing accurate calendar information, that time may be now.

More than 92 percent of colleges and university find an online event calendar helpful, according to a recent survey conducted by Localist. Those numbers echo the 2012 E-Expectations Report in which 90 percent of college-bound students said an online calendar was worthwhile.

If you’re making decisions based on the 80-20 rule, focusing time and attention on an online calendar becomes a no-brainer.

So it should come as no surprise that 68 percent of survey respondents said an online event calendar was the most useful feature of a school’s website — well ahead of academic information (53 percent); news (48 percent); student and faculty directory (45 percent); map (30 percent); and, athletics information (21 percent).

And while getting people to recognize the importance value of an online calendar may be easy, the true challenge lies in getting them to submit information for it. Only a quarter of survey respondents said they ever entered an event on their respective institution’s calendar.

In the end, the data suggests your audience is looking for three things from an institution’s online event calendar:

1. Reminders about the events they want to attend. More than 80 percent indicated it was important to receive reminders about events in which they’re interested; 59 percent of respondents said they would like to hear about those events via an email newsletter.

2. A central place they can rely on for event information. A majority of respondents (56 percent) said that seeing all events in one place was their favorite feature of an event calendar.

3. More detail about the events already listed. Providing greater detail on events was the most popular response (61 percent) when survey respondents were asked what was the best way to improve an online calendar.

Looking to launch an online calendar of your own? Here are a few we’ve worked with in the past:

• Localist
• Trumba http://www.trumba.com
• ActiveData Exchange calendar
• EMS Master Calendar
• Bedework open source calendar

Why Big Data Is Awesome

If the internet is the engine of our digital world, data is the fuel that powers it. We wouldn’t have any of those cool social media tools without massive amounts of data flowing quickly and efficiently around the globe. These massive amounts of data continue to accumulate at such an exponential rate that we’ve now coined the term ‘Big Data’ to describe the innovations surrounding the possible uses of this unprecedented amount of information. Big data, combined with other recent technologies such as cloud computing, is already leading to remarkably transformative changes in all types of industries:

• GE’s Industrial Internet – or as they describe it, “The convergence of machine and intelligent data,” is changing the way that manufacturing industries work.
• The Hubble Deep Field project is using big data to map parts of the universe we’ve never seen before and changing astronomy in the process.
• In only 10 years, The Human Genome Project has used big data to reduce the amount of time it takes to map a human genome from 13 years to three days.
• The Obama Campaign used big data to get President Obama elected, twice.
• The Oakland Athletics used their ‘Moneyball’ big data approach, turning conventional baseball statistics on their head and forever changing the professional sports industry.

Big data is having an impact on many industries, and higher education is no exception…

Why Big Data Is Awesome For Higher Education

Why is data important to people working in higher education? Among other things, big data:

• Allows you to utilize Facebook as a killer marketing platform for free – because Facebook advertisers are willing to pay for ultra-targeted advertisements based on user behavior.
• Forces alumni and career services offices to increasingly rely on LinkedIn’s mammoth career and employment data stores to make connections for job-seekers.
• Causes your conference hashtag to trend on Twitter.
• Allows us, through predictive modeling, to become more and more adept at solving problems with student recruitment, retention, and job placement before they start.
• Provides a big source of analytical data (Google Analytics) to many websites, allowing us to make strategic decisions about how to improve our sites over time.

Why Big Data Is Awesome For Higher Education Websites

But what about websites in particular? Let’s take a minute to imagine what the typical college website contains — and then dream about what is possible with a website connected to and leveraging big data.

Without big data, we have static images and infographics to highlight statistics. With big data we can allow users to interact directly with our data through a tool such as Google Charts.

Without big data, we can embed Google Maps of our campus in our site. With big data, we can allow our users to dive deep into demographics – for example, using tools such as Polymaps to show alumni population density in real time.

Without big data, you can have a cool geolocation-based orientation game for tours. With big data, you could provide visitors an augmented reality campus tour using Google Glass.

With your default google analytics data you can generate useful reports, but imagine what is possible when you start to leverage big data practices to produce multi-channel conversion funnels.

Without big data, your alumni database is an island. With new tools such as EverTrue, you can begin connecting your system to the big data powering LinkedIn.

Without big data, you can showcase campaign progress through traditional profiles and videos. With crowd-funding tools powered by big data, such as Kickstarter, you can highlight progress in real-time.

Why Big Data Will Be Hard For Higher Education

What are the challenges standing in between today’s reality and tomorrow’s utopia?

1. Lack of good data: You can’t have big data if you don’t have good data. Good data involves:

• Data normalization – making sure there’s one authoritative source for data.
• Data standards – making sure there are clear rules and policies around data structure and use.

2. Shortage of good talent: You can’t have big data if you don’t know what to do with it. This will require:

• New skills to interpret and take action on all this data.
• Resources to clean up and improve existing data.

3. Lack of infrastructure: You can’t have big data if your systems don’t work with it. We need:

• Software systems that elegantly transform data into usable, actionable reports and user interfaces.
• Interfaces built to extract data from the myriad sources where it resides.
• Relational, instead of flat, databases.

4. Lack of awareness: You can’t have big data if you don’t know why it’s worth having.

• People need to be aware of the potential. Share this article with your coworkers!
• Campus leaders need to know where to go to get information and examples.

The challenge and opportunity for all higher education sites is to utilize big data to its fullest potential. Even the most beautiful, intuitive, and compelling sites stand to benefit from big data innovations in the years to come.

I’m not done with data.

I want to take a deeper dive into some of the amazing things we’ll be able to do with our websites thanks to big data, so stay tuned for more on this topic and its many permutations, including:

• Data Visualization
• Crowdfunding
• Predictive Analysis
• Augmented Reality
• Web Analytics

I’m also not the only one at mStoner who is paying close attention to these possibilities. With each new project we undertake, we’re looking for more ways to leverage data to create ever better, more impactful sites for higher education.

Success With Social Media
presented by Michael Stoner, mStoner co-founder and president

Are you aware that colleges, universities and schools around the world have demonstrated social channels to be a key driver in successful, multichannel campaigns? It’s true: there are many examples of campaigns that blend social and other channels to raise money, recruit students, or advance the institution. This presentation covered some of the strategies and tactics that lead toward successful outcomes. For Social Works, the first book exploring how many different institutions use social media in multichannel campaigns, 18 authors developed case studies of 25 of the most successful campaigns. This presentation draws upon insights from those case studies to explore success factors in creating and deploying an effective campaign.

So, it’s finally mainstream, right? Within education, what are the social media success stories? Who’s doing social in an interesting, unusual and surprising way? This presentation shared a set of success stories discovered through an open submission period. Use the best elements of these #crowdsourced cases to kick your own social strategy up a notch.

Helicopters or Helpers: Using Social Media for Parent Engagement and Fundraising
presented by Susan T. Evans, senior strategist

Parents of college students continue to hover as much as they did when their children were high school students. They want to be involved, they need to be involved, they WILL be involved. We also know that parent giving to higher education is on the rise and, interestingly, parents often feel more connected to the institutions their children attend than they do to their own alma maters. Social channels offer a powerful engine for driving communication and engagement with parents, especially when integrated with your website content. This presentation covered what works and how to get more bang—and maybe more bucks—from parents on social. Whether or not you have a formal parent program at your institution, you’ll benefit from this discussion about this important stakeholder group.

Social Media Analytics
presented by Patrick Powers, project manager

He who has the most followers doesn’t always win. There are a number of tools available to measure the success of a social media program. The challenge is determining which metrics are actually meaningful. Explore the ways to measure effectiveness on Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms, along with how to bring them in line with institutional goals.

Are You There? Social Media and Its Influence on SEO
presented by Patrick Powers, project manager

Social media is great at building community and fostering conversations, but some its most untapped potential remains its ability to influence search engine result pages, where two-thirds of all prospective students go to research colleges. Learn the fundamentals of how search works and how social media can play a part in determining if you are lost or found.