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Intelligence
NMHbook: the Award, the Trends, and the Takeaways

Intelligence

NMHbook: the Award, the Trends, and the Takeaways

May 20, 2010By mStoner Staff

Congratulations!
I’m writing this post to publicly congratulate our client, Northfield Mount Hermon, for winning a Circle of Excellence Silver Award in the Best Uses of Social Media in Student Recruitment and Marketing Category from CASE this year for NMHbook. Michael Stoner wrote a longer post on judging criteria you should read if you’re interested in more information on how social media was evaluated by CASE this year.

I’m also writing this post to give a little additional context on this project: what it is, thoughts on trends, and some takeaways to keep in mind if you are considering an aggregation project.

NMHbook

What is NMHbook?
It’s a social media aggregator that collects feeds from multiple social media channels and displays them on a single page. At the time this page was conceived of (around March 2009), to my knowledge, no one in higher education was doing aggregation pages. I remember coming across some of the early aggregation pages (sites such as popurls.com and the previous version of netvibes.com) that collected feeds from news sites and talking to the partners about how we might apply this idea in higher education.

Aggregation was a good fit for NMH because they were already maintaining good social media content on a number of channels including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and their own WordPress blogs. We pitched the NMHbook idea, then designed and developed it with Northfield Mount Hermon. We customized Drupal to collect decentralized social media content being maintained by NMH around the web in a single destination. The goal was to provide people interested in NMH a consolidated dashboard for quickly viewing all of the content with the option to jump off and participate in a single channel if they wanted to.

Some thoughts on aggregation trends
NMHbook was conceived of in early 2009, but in the last year and a half the idea of aggregation pages has become much more common. We partnered with Christopher Newport University to relaunch their site and a new aggregation page. We’ve have a couple of alumni-focused versions of this idea in development for a couple of clients.

Other great examples of this are popping up elsewhere. SCAD launched an absolutely killer aggregation page. Our friendly competitors at White Whale launched an aggregation page for USF.

The list is much longer, but my point is: you don’t have to look very hard to find this idea is a rapidly growing trend on the web and specifically in higher education. But the aggregator is the second part of the trend. The first part is individuals or institutions maintaining decentralized content around the web instead of only on a single institutional site. Maintaining content on multiple sites helps search engine results, allows people to find you on the platform of their choice, and (usually) allows readers to post on or respond to your content. Aggregation (the second part) is what follows: collecting these channels in as a dashboard view so that people have a consolidated source they can check on regularly.

My opinion on why NMHbook is successful:

They keep a primary audience in mind: prospective students. Other people aren’t excluded in any way, but they keep primary audience in mind with the content.
The aggregation page doesn’t post every comment made in these channels, only the institutional comments. This strategy corresponds to their comfort level about user contributions. This is one of the keystones of a successful social media project: understanding your own comfort level for sharing user contributions first.
There’s new content almost every day in most of their channels except YouTube. The information is fresh and relevant, giving audiences incentive to check back regularly.
There isn’t much overlap between channels unless it’s for events / calls to action. By handling it this way, audiences have an incentive to visit NMH on multiple channels.
They post content to inspire discussion. The kind of post that inspires multiple responses is a complex topic, but I encourage you to check out their facebook page and see where the action is.
The design of NMHbook follows conventions of social media: it’s simple and to the point.