Human RSS

Need another reason to work with smart, interesting people? They act as a living feed reader. Hook your coworkers up to a quick-communication tool like Yammer and Hello! A human filter for your Internet. That’s pretty much the setup here. Below is some of what the mStoner hive mind fed itself recently:

From Volt: Harvard professor and staff writer for The New Yorker, Louis Menand has a new book out titled The Marketplace of Ideas. In it he argues that the intellectual sanctuary currently occupied by the American liberal arts professoriate has turned their main task into one of increasingly pointless self-replication (e.g. English Literature professors are best at making more English Literature professors). Oh snap!

From Rob: Tech evangelist Robert Scoble interviews George Revutsky and Dustin Kittelson of ROI.works on how search engines like Google and Bing are getting wise to the tricks of SEO hacks and giving content its throne back bit by bit.

From Jeremiah: PDF My URL. Aside from sounding oddly inappropriate, it does what it says and turns a webpage into a handy PDF.

From Kevin Z.: The New Rubik’s Cube is now weirder to use and more expensive! If the ability to retain the mental list of algorithms required to solve the original cube wasn’t alienating enough, you can now own a version of the puzzle intended for use in a dark room by rich people!

From Doug: How much did your iPod cost…the planet? Sourcemap, a collaboration-based online tool can feed your guilt the facts about where the things you carry came from and how much carbon it took to put it in your hands. (You’re welcome.)

From Patrick: Disney/Pixar’s Up plus some Australian guy’s genius for mixing samples = a convincing argument for easing up on copyright restrictions. The seemingly sanctioned “Upular” borders on magical.

From Kevin R.: “Here we are now, entertain us…” Through submitted photos and short quotes, Jason Lazarus’s Nirvana documents the moment people were introduced to the iconic Seattle band. It’s a great look at the less broadcasted side of pop culture—the side of the receptors.

From Beth: Lastly, a WikiHow on “Deskercise”. Self-explanatory, I believe. You probably don’t even have to consult your physician. As a bonus, the video at the end can be viewed on its own as a scathing dissection of what it means to be a 21st century office worker.

Posted by Laurel Hechanova
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Learning from Teens About Social Media

Not surprisingly, teens are pretty smart about the way they use social media. Tim Nekritz wrote about this in a smart blog post on 22 October:what 15 freshmen taught me about social media. Here’s one of the most telling lines of Tim’s post:

I asked if they would feel different joining a group started by an institution vs. one started by a student. The enlightening response: We don’t even look for that or care. We just want to meet other students. Some even said they would prefer the groups be created by the college because they would trust the information more.

For these teens, it’s pretty clear: Facebook is a social experience. Tim’s small sample confirms what lots of other researchers, including danah boyd have to say. Karlyn Morrisette made a similar point:

Teenagers have always made a really clear distinction between things they use for their social lives and things they use for “business”. Friends are for social media. Colleges are “business.”

Disentangling professional and personal

So I’ve decided that I need to emulate those teens and straighten out my social networks. Maybe it’s because I’m trying to avoid engagement fatigue, or just organize my online life more effectively. Or maybe because my inner introvert nature is asserting itself.

But, whatever. Here are some of the changes I’ll be making.

Facebook: I resisted Facebook for a long time. Now that I’m using it regularly, I’ve become aware that its value is for me to communicate with friends and family. I really like the fact that a lot of people from my local, physical community are on Facebook. It’s a reality of my life that I can’t be as involved as I’d like to be with some of my neighbors in FTF relationships and Facebook offers a way for us to keep in touch: it’s better for me than the telephone. Same with family and more far-flung friends.

Some of my Facebook friends are people I’ve met professionally—folks with whom I have a relationship that goes well beyond what LinkedIn can offer. I’ve learned about their spouses and kids and it’s nice to have the glimpse of their lives that Facebook affords.

But the truth is that I’ve also friended a lot of folks I barely know, for the vaguest of reasons. So in the next week or so, I’m going to unfriend a slew of people and resign from a mess of fan pages. No offense to anyone: but I need to keep Facebook as a place where I stay in touch with people that I know fairly well.

LinkedIn: Yeah, I agree: LinkedIn has some deficiencies, but it’s the best we’ve got right now for professional networking. And it’s what I’m going to rely on for business relationships. If you are primarily a business friend/acquaintance, I’d welcome the opportunity to connect with you LinkedIn if we aren’t already connected. But not on Facebook.

Twitter: If you follow me on Twitter, you’ve probably guessed that I’ve grown to like it. [Thank you once again for the incentive to join, @KarineJoly!] It’s amazing to see how much you can communicate in 140 characters. I work alone some of the time, so Twitter provides a bit of a watercooler experience for me. And I really like the fact that Twitter provides the opportunity to segment one’s identity.

I have three Twitter IDs; most people reading this blog post will be interested in following either mStonerblog, which I use for business-related tweeting, or, for the next few months, CASE5sm. We set this up to communicate around the pre-conference workshop on social media at CASE V. I’m going to do some selective pruning of the people I follow on @mStonerblog: nothing drastic, but shedding some people whose insights are less valuable to me than others.

Making choices
I’m focused on these three tools because I’ve already found them personally valuable and, for now, they’re where I want to focus my activity. I am well aware that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other communities in which I can participate if I choose to do so. I’m not much of a photographer, for example, so I’m really not into Flickr, and though I watch videos on YouTube like any netizen, I don’t spend a whole lot of time commenting on them. So Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter offer the best possible options for connecting with the other people I value in my personal and professional life.

Others are making similar choices. For example, I was interested to see last week that even Mr. .Edu Social Networking himself, Brad J. Ward, pruned his Twitter account. The blog post explaining the how and why makes fascinating reading.

One of my continuing realizations is that I just don’t have enough time to have a healthy marriage, do my work, stay connected with my mStoner colleagues, our clients, and the people I value in my personal life, and try every new tool or social networking trend that surfaces.

And, you know what? As social networking mania fades, people will make the same kinds of choices I’m making. Our audiences, members, supporters, alumni, donors, prospective students, etc.: they will also experience their own “a ha” moment, if they haven’t already, and start to think a lot more carefully about how they manage their online social life.

Can they really follow every fan page for every group they’ve had a tangential association with? How many updates from people they barely know are they willing to read when they open their Facebook page? How many Facebook games can they play? How many tweets from how many sporting events can they stomach on a Sunday morning when they log into TweetDeck or Nambu?

It all comes down to relevance. How relevant the content we’re consuming—in the form of tweets, blog posts, YouTube videos, Flickr images—is to our personal needs and interests. Time and attention are my most precious resources and I want to use them as wisely as possible.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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Redeveloping Your Website: Asking the Right Questions, Finding the Right Partner

How do you know when you need to do something about your website?

Maybe you’ve heard from your admissions team that the site doesn’t stack up against your peer or competitor institutions. Maybe faculty members have spoken up about much-needed services. Incoming freshman may have pointed out holes in the information they were searching for last spring. Maybe visitors aren’t using the site the way you want them to. Or maybe the site is just dated and ready for attention.

For many of our colleagues in education, deciding that it’s time for a website redesign isn’t hard. The challenge is figuring out how to get started. A successful website redesign requires funding, executive-level support, campus-wide buy-in, and thousands of hours of involvement from faculty, staff, and students from throughout the community. For the small group or individual charged with getting the ball rolling, the hurdles can seem impossibly high, even if your institution is a small and close-knit independent or professional school.

mStoner has completed hundreds of web development projects with schools, colleges, and universities of all sizes, and we’re the first to admit that there’s no single, magic solution.

To help clarify some of the basic decisions you need to make—and to help you know where to go from there—we wrote “Redeveloping Your Website: Asking the Right Questions, Finding the Right Partner.” Our white paper lays out some of the questions you need to ask about your needs and how you might begin to approach them. Some projects don’t need help from outside vendors or consultants, but if yours does, the white paper suggests how you can find the right partner to meet your needs.

For a copy of this white paper, contact Katie Jennings (katie.jennings(at)mStoner.com) and she’ll be happy to send you one.

And if you’ve read “Redeveloping Your Website: Asking the Right Questions, Finding the Right Partner,” please contribute your thoughts and comments about the issues it addresses in the comments to this post.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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Michael Stone Moves On

I got an email yesterday from my friend Michael Stone announcing that he was retiring after more than 35 years at UCLA. It took me back, way back, to 1995 and my first big consulting gig.

In 1995, UCLA’s vice chancellor John Kobara liked my idea of a “communications audit” of UCLA.edu. He thought it would be a really good idea to think about how all the separate websites in the UCLA domain could link up and how University Relations could work with other units to be proactive in developing UCLA’s site. He hired me to lead the intake and charged staff member Michael Stone with leading the project. Imagine, if you will, the administrative assistant who was making calls and telling people—among them, faculty—that she was making an appointment for Michael Stone and Michael Stoner to talk with them about the university’s website. I’ve imagined the responses she received and chortled over them many times in the years since.

Michael and I spent days meeting with units all over campus from academic units to students. I’d worked at Lehigh and Princeton (and attended a liberal arts college, a state university, and the University of Pennsylvania), so I had some idea of what what higher ed was like. But I often felt as if I was back in a folklore or anthropology class, doing fieldwork for an ethnography of kinship systems and power dynamics in a feudal state.

Our work led to a report and an approach that helped University Relations structure a relationship with other units on campus and create a new approach to UCLA.edu. According to Michael,

Our early work together on the UCLA web site was instrumental in my building credibility for what was then called University Relations to take over the UCLA Gateway and to work effectively with colleagues across the campus.

As for me, I learned a great deal from that project. I didn’t know much about marketing then, certainly at the level that Michael had practiced it as head of marketing for the UCLA Extension, and I gained some great insights from questions he asked and observations he made. And the process we used for that project—including the necessity of involving many people in listening and feedback sessions—became a cornerstone of the process that mStoner still uses.

Michael and I haven’t kept up with each other much over the years, though I knew that he remained at UCLA and continued to contribute to marketing efforts there. In his email to me, he noted that, “Old marketing guys never die, they just start to transform themselves.” He’s already worked out a gig with a marketing company that works with the travel industry: I can see that there are going to be horizons a bit more interesting and scenic than the ones in Westwood in his future.

So, Michael: Thanks for that important early partnership and what you taught me. Have fun reinventing yourself. And best wishes.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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The Recession: the Prospective’s Perspective

According to a survey conducted by the National Association for Business Economics, leading forecasters predict the end of the recession to be imminent: “About 74 percent of the forecasters expect the recession—which started in December 2007 and is the longest since World War II—to end in the third quarter. Another 19 percent predict the turning point will come in the final three months of this year, and the remaining 7 percent believe the recession will end in the first quarter of 2010.”

But while it lasts—and even after it’s over—what kind of impact will the economic downturn have on college enrollment? We marketing and admissions consultants and institutional professionals have had plenty of time to think about our points of view and ponder some of the big questions, such as: What will happen to admission trends in the next 10 years? Is there going to be a marked shift in the admissions landscape?

Meanwhile, consider the perspective of future students and families looking to send one or more children to college. They are worried about their own challenges. Loans have been much harder to come by and many households have one or more breadwinners out of work, so finding affordable ways to send students to college is a common source of frustration for American families.

Sometimes hearing personal stories is the best way to understand how the recession is affecting the people our institutions serve.

I found this collection of NPR stories and streaming audio from the last 11 months. If you’re interested in hearing a series that takes an empathetic approach to telling the story of the recession from the point of view of students and families who want to send their child to college at a bleak point in the American economy, check out the link. The streaming audio gives you the freedom to listen while you work .. after all, we’re not out of the recession yet!

Posted by Doug Gapinski
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Teens to Advertisers: We Don’t Want Your Texts (and Other Insights from YPulse Mashup)

I’m attending the YPulse Youth Marketing mashup in San Francisco, hoping to learn how top brands among teens and tweens manage to be successful in marketing to this incredibly discriminating audience. [You can follow #ypulse09 on Twitter if you’re interested.]

One of the best panels I’ve heard so far was a presentation by Bill Carter, a partner in Fuse Marketing, who talked about a study that Fuse did in conjunction with the University of Massachusetts on brand advertising aimed at teens. The survey—done with teens in “Sarah Palin’s America” (e.g. not just teens from the coasts and big cities)—aimed at whether advertising was memorable and presented in a channel that appealed to teens.

Carter emphasized the disconnects between what marketers believe is true about the power of various channels and what teens and tweens think, using these examples:

• TV is not dead to teens: 75% prefer and/or believe it’s appropriate for brands to reach them via TV ads.


• Teens are not interested in interacting with brands on social networks—at least the way brands represent themselves currently. Teens use social networking sites to connect with friends and do things that are fun—they don’t relate to brands online. Only 30% of teens have “friended a brand” on a social network.


• Official company websites aren’t dead: 80% of teens have gone to a official company’s product site and used them to make purchase decisions.


• Only 10% of teens approve of advertising in video games—teens just don’t believe that having advertisers in a game makes it more realistic. Carter said that ads for Burton snow boards in a videogame about snowboarding could make sense, but only because they’re in context.


• Teens aren’t interested in or receptive to ads in text messages: only 10% of teens approve of texting by advertisers; this ranked dead last in approval ratings by teens in what was acceptable in communications. Carter said that he believes this is mostly due to the way that current advertisers are using the medium, but it’s currently the case.


• Teens still read magazines: magazine ads receive high approvals and are the second-most-effective medium in reaching them.


• Teens say that the most effective advertising includes “people who look like me.” Only 20% prefer ads with celebrities or athletes as endorsers. The most memorable ad among teens was Verizon’s “can you hear me now” guy, Carter said.

In the Fuse study, 83% of those surveyed were average or heavy users of the Internet; 80% were average or heavy users of TV; 63% were average or heavy users of email; and 47% were average or heavy users of social networks.

Of the 80% of those surveyed who visited an official product website, 80% somewhat or strongly agreed that the site was valuable.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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Carry On, My Wayward Sean

It’s never good to lose a member of the company, but when someone leaves to follow his passions, we like to wish him well. mStoner collectively offers best wishes to Sean Lee, who has been working with us part-time in the role of Assistant Producer. Sean is leaving us to work in Egypt, in a position well-suited to his undergraduate studies and to follow a career path he’s highly interested in.

In Sean’s own words:

“I’m going to be on the Amarna Project, as a member of the physical anthropology team. Amarna is a particularly interesting site, because of the 18th dynasty (King Tut, Ahmenhotep etc.). During that period of time, known as the Amarna Heresy, Pharaoh Akhenaten moved the Egyptian capital to Amarna and pulled the kingdom under monotheistic worship of the god Aten. His rule also created a shift in artistic styles in Egypt to be more realistic.”

“This new job is like a more international version of [my other part-time job] at the Field Museum: analysis of human remains. There are obvious things that can be gauged from a survey of a skeleton (inter/intrapersonal violence, deformity, grave theft) but then some not so obvious things. For example, my undergrad research focused on evidence of butchering/cannibalism in Native American remains. On the Amarna Project, I will be looking at signs of metabolic stress and disease on the human body. My goal is to draw on the information about dietary stress and prevalence of disease in ancient remains, and draw comparisons between modern populations that show statistically significant similarities in their demographics. From that I want to reciprocally create public health profiles of both populations drawing on information from each to better understand the other. This will focus largely on fecundity, life expectancy, and cultural factors that contribute to or inhibit disease.”

Wow, Sean. Good luck with all of that!

Patrick DiMichele (Sean’s former manager) is looking at part-time replacements for Sean, who helped us with a number of projects, including usability testing, survey reports, and data migration.

Posted by Doug Gapinski
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Don’t worry about Swine Flu… Worry about ZOMBIES!!!

Swine Flu is capturing a ton of media attention these days… Hopefully, there’s a very slim chance that this super-epi-pandemic arrives at your campus any time soon. But zombies? They’re likely already there.

More and more college campuses are being invaded by Humans vs. Zombies. HvZ is essentially a complicated version of ‘tag’ that involves scores of college kids careening through campus in a desperate attempt to avoid being turned into zombies (or in a desperate attempt to turn the other ‘human’ competitors into zombies). HvZ is spreading across the nation at a rate rivaled only by the aforementioned pork virus.

Why should you care? Because the crux of the HvZ debate is, where (if at all) does an institution draw a line between student activities and something that (to a casual passerby) might be misconstrued as some sort of chaotic, relatively inexplicable, armed uprising.

To quote a recent article posted on Boston.com:

“The game provides students with a distraction from studies as they chase one another from classroom buildings to dorms. Students say HvZ is a healthy way to keep them on campus on the weekends and away from drinking. But the game has come under scrutiny. Reports of large groups of students wearing bandannas and shouldering 2-foot toy guns have alarmed passersby on some campuses. The game has been banned at some schools, including Butler University and Washington State University.”

So what do you think? Harmless diversion or armed rebellion in need of some quashing? I think it’s the former but am up for a healthy debate.

Posted by Patrick DiMichele
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When the Right Consultant Can Help

First, Karlyn Morrissette (she tweets as @KarlynM—and if you aren’t following her, you should be) provoked a minor Twitterstorm by asking: “Why are higher education consultants given more credibility than full-time staff who say the exact same thing?” Forty people—practitioners at all levels, faculty members, and consultants—weighed in. Karlyn created a mind map of the results and posted it on her blog.

Update, 30 April: Karlyn posted her own thoughts about “When to Hire a Consultant” this morning.

Then, Higher Ed Experts hosted a web redesign conversation and there was some talk about the role of consultants in the large web redesign project being discussed. I followed the discussion via the Twitter hastag (#heecamp): HEE is a closed community, and as a consultant, I can’t participate in HEE discussions.

I believe I can appreciate the multiple perspectives on these discussions. I worked as a staff member at three very different institutions (Lehigh University, Princeton, the College Board) in different roles; I’ve worked as a consultant since 1994 and consulted with about 250 organizations in that time; and mStoner has completed more institutional web redevelopment projects in education than any other consulting firm. In the early years of our practice, I led many of these projects personally; now, although I participate in some of them, I have other responsibilities at the firm. One of these involves interacting with key stakeholder groups at our client institutions around strategy, practice, and change management.

In short, my viewpoints are based on personal experience in the trenches as an insider and outsider. And they are seasoned with a dash of intergroup relations theory about how groups can scapegoat people.

I can understand why internal staff members would feel insulted, even threatened, when institutional leaders choose to hire a consultant to do a project that staff believes they can do. It’s especially problematic at institutions where leaders routinely ignore staff advice believing they somehow know better.

When the right consultant makes sense

But I also know that there are very good reasons to hire the right consultant. Here are some of them. [I’ll add others as I think of them—and you can add your own in the comments.]

1. A good consultant has done it before. Often many, many, many times. While the Internet certainly has made information widely available, information isn’t the same thing as knowledge or experience. It’s possible to exhaustively research process or products by doing a Google search and spending enough time online. But there are limitations to doing this kind of research. You often don’t know what important questions you’re not asking when you do your own research.

Case in point: I know of a campus IT team that spent hundreds of hours investigating content management systems, wrote an RFP, scheduled vendor demos, selected a CMS, paid a down-payment to the chosen vendor, and arranged a workshop for various on-campus users to unveil the product that they would all be using. The president of the company flew in; when he started his demo, his system crashed and it was downhill from there. He should have guessed that there were problems when the murmering began; finally, the director of one of the largest units on campus stood up and said, “I’ve seen enough. This isn’t going to work for us. We’ll find our own CMS.” He and his staff led an exodus from the meeting.

Can you guess what the problem was? Technically, the system seemed very sound, which is what really excited the IT team in the first place. But the UI was terrible and as soon as people who were evaluating the system for its effectiveness got a look at it, they were appalled. The director who left knew right away that none of the admin staff in his unit who were charged with updating websites would have the patience to figure out such a kludgy UI, especially when there were simple alternatives.

Our project managers have collectively managed dozens of projects. And we have developers who have implemented multiple content management systems multiple times. No campus I know of has staff with this kind of experience. Our clients benefit from our experience and it ups the odds that the project will run more smoothly.

Moral of the story: A good consultant will help you ask the questions you haven’t thought to ask and bring lots of experience to bear on your project—much more than you have internally.

2. A good consultant can help break up political logjams. As a campus communicator, I hated politics: politics gets in the way of getting things done. Just think of all those discussions that go round-and-round, with no resolution.

But politics is a fact of life on every campus. There are many times when an experienced outside voice can break through the chatter and help to move things in a different direction. Maybe it’s a different voice, with experience and perspective (those words again), who can give permission to take a different direction.

It also helps if your consultant understands education and what to say and what not to say to different audiences. I don’t believe I’m being less than authentic when I avoid the term “branding” when talking with faculty. There are other ways to get the concept across without using a term that they will immediately find objectionable.

In fairness, I’ve also seen cases where someone—whether a VP, a faculty member, or a president—just doesn’t want to be convinced, by anybody, that a change is necessary. So hiring a consultant to help change institutional leaders or cultures that are intrinsically resistant to change won’t always work.

Moral of the story: I’m not saying that it’s right that this phenonmenon occurs. But it’s the reality. So be smart and use a consultant as a catlyst to help make changes that will make a difference for your institution and for your life.

3. Staff can’t do the work. One of the reasons that people hire us—or another consultant—to do a huge project like an institutional website redesign is that they don’t have enough staff, with enough time, to accomplish what we can accomplish.

I know that people (like many university staff members) think that some big web redevelopment budgets are huge. But that’s at least partially because internal cost estimates don’t take into account the most important internal variable, staff time, and factor in how much time it takes, or how long it takes, to get a project done. If you track time accurately, you often learn that consultants can be cost-effective because they can save time.

It’s as if people think that because staff get paid a salary, there’s no cost for having them work on a project. To me, that’s patently false. I have to ask: what else could those staff people be doing? What other tasks might they have accomplished?

Typically, the biggest “expense” for a college or university—staff time—is also its scarcest resource. I’ve never met an IT team that has too little do do.

So, I put the question to you, “If you are doing a site redevelopment project, what else won’t you be doing while you’re doing that?” Can you afford for that other work not to get done?

What do you think it cost the University I mentioned above to have its IT staff choose a CMS and have its recommendation tossed out? For one thing, there were hundreds of hours involved in evaluating CMSs to begin with. You want to take a guess at about 1,500 hours conservatively? That’s 28 weeks’ worth of time or about $30,000 at $30/hour. I’ll bet there were a lot of other projects that went undone, some of which were probably important.

Moral of the story: Consultants can help you accomplish in lot, usually in less time than it would take you to do it internally. While the instititution may pay a premium, sometimes that’s the best way to get the work done quickly.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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Contest WIll Reward Edubloggers for Their Labor of Love

The contest is open to any blogger who focuses their blog on topics related to K-12 or higher education at large and is open until 17 March—St. Patrick’s day. More details here. One of the criteria for entry is popuarity: you must post one of the badges on your entry for it to be considered, and your entry must rank in the top 20.

BTW, two entries have already appeared. We encourage you to visit them now, and often, over the next several weeks:

After clicking the 2009 EduBlogger Scholarship Contest badge (do it several times!, you can learn how Karlyn Morrissette earned her online MBA during a very difficult two years.

Andrew Careaga offers his take on the “edublogger eocnomic stimulus package.” Again, you’re free to click the badge (or not). Andy promises a “real” entry—presumably soon!

Posted by Michael Stoner
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