On the Move

The mStoner Chicago office is moving! We are pleased to announce that as of August 9, 2010 our address will be:

mStoner, Inc.
4311 N. Ravenswood Ave.
Suite 304
Chicago, IL 60613

We love our neighborhood, though, so we’re not going very far. Seriously:

And our new office will really be a new office. The building is freshly rehabbed (ahem, it’s not done quite yet but we’re assured the necessities will be done by the time we move). For those of you who enjoy home improvement, we thought we’d share some photos.

The building is three stories and we’ll be occupying about half of the top floor. If you look closely, the sign out front reads “Bobby Moore’s Performing Elephants”. We love the sign and the landlord has agreed to move it inside to the lobby. We’ve been assured that elephants weren’t really kept in the building.

Look at all those windows! As you can see, we really were working with a blank canvas. With the help of a wonderful space planner, we’ve come up with a plan that suits our needs and keeps true to the mStoner atmosphere.

The natural woods are another great feature. When we first saw the space the wood was covered in peeling paint but now it’s back to it’s natural color and quite beautiful. Our landlord (we may be moving but we’re not changing landlords, we’ve been with Hayes Properties for about 10 years now) has done a wonderful job in keeping the vintage wood structure intact.

Overall, the new office allows for a better use of space and, most importantly, moves us far enough from the El train that it will no longer be drowning out our conference calls. We’re all pretty excited about the move:

• Voltaire is excited about the move because it puts us within walking distance of Spacca Napoli, one of the best pizza places in Chicago
  
• Jeremiah is excited about the move because he (and lots of other people) will be getting his own office
  
• Kevin & Laurel are excited because their section of the office is filled with natural light
  
• Sarah is excited because her commute will be only 7 minutes
  
• The entire group is excited because the nearby lunch options are have improved tremendously (though we’ve promised to make the .5 mile walk back to one of our favorites, Cafe 28)

We’ll keep you posted!

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CASE Awards of Excellence 2010: Winners, Comments, Judges’ Report for Category 11, Websites

The best professional development event I attend every year is the judging for the CASE Circle of Excellence Awards for websites, which I’ve led since the 1990s. At this year’s judging, held in early April at George School, we judged Category 11: Websites and Category 12: Best Use of Social Media. [There are comments and a downloadable Judge’s Report from the social media category here.]

What this means is locking oneself in a room for two days with more than a dozen smart, informed, opinionated people; looking at more than two hundred websites and social media sites; and arguing about which sites are good enough to get a award. It’s incredibly stimulating—and sometimes frustrating—to have strongly held opinions strongly challenged. No one knows where we’ll end up when we compile the final list of award winners.

For the record, as you scan the lists below, there are several sites that would never appear on my own list. And it’s safe to say that each of the other judges this year, as in years past, would say the same thing. But we all stand by the final list of award winners.

This year, the judges represented American and Canadian schools, colleges, and universities, both public and private. The panel included people with experience in design, web strategy, web content development, admissions, fundraising, student recruitment, social media, web technology, and marketing. Several of the judges work for institutions that have won national CASE Awards of Excellence for their websites. Two representatives from CASE attended the judging.

Results: Category 11

There were 54 complete institutional sites entered in Category 11A [Complete Institutional Websites] and 106 sites entered in Category 11B [Individual Sub-Websites]. Here are the winners:

Category 11a: Complete Institutional Websites
Gold: Fashion Institute of Technology
Silver: Northfield Mount Hermon School
Bronze:: Duke University; University of Puget Sound

Category 11b: Individual Sub-websites
Gold:: King’s College London, Online Prospectus; University of Michigan, University Housing
Silver: University of Toronto, U of T Magazine
Bronze:: Boston University, 2009 Annual Report; Columbia College Chicago, This is Columbia’s Moment Media Production Center; Hobart and William Smith Colleges, 3-D Web site; University of Iowa, Annual Report
Honorable Mention: University of Missouri-Columbia, Illumination

Observations and Trends

Each year, we begin this judging with a discussion of what makes an award-winning institutional website. Here were some of the important elements we identified this year:

• a sound strategy;


• sound information architecture, navigability, usability and search;


• valid, accurate, timely, and relevant content, effectively deployed across the site, including both text and images;


• the quality of resources-content assets, staff, and budgets-and how they were used on the site;


• a clear identity that is appropriate to the organization;


• an appropriate level of innovation—in other words, we want designers to push the envelope but we still expect information to be findable, content to be readable (or viewable), and the site to be well-designed. Cutting edge for the sake of being cutting edge didn’t persuade the judges to award anything.


• standardization of interface across the site;


• accessibility of the code; appropriate use of technology and adherence to standards (We awarded extra points for sites that had considered how they would display on a mobile device.);


• metrics; evaluation plans; results;


• and, new this year, a connection to the ecosystem of the web, which is particularly significant as the social web assumes a greater importance.

We asked ourselves repeatedly what each site does that’s unusual or innovative. Though we are tasked with judging the sites that are entered in this category and, to some extent, we must compare them with each other, we can’t ignore other sites we’ve seen. For example, we considered it legitimate to reject a site that was a collection of student blogs designed to recruit students. While it was well-designed, there was nothing about it that distinguished it from many similar sites nor did it do anything different than Ball State University’s student blog site has been doing for five years.

We were underwhelmed at what we saw this year. Sites entered for an award were missing basic elements like a sense of where an institution was located. And there were a lot of bland sites.

Some trends we noticed this year:

• People are trying to break out of the mold of what a traditional site looks like and are trying some radically different things that don’t seem to work or are very hard to understand from a user’s point of view. If they’ve tested these innovations and found that they are working, they haven’t shared any usability testing results or data that backs up the success of their risk taking.


• Perhaps because of a desire to be “different,” many sites had identity issues and did not provide us with a strong sense of what the institution was, what it stood for, or how it was truly differentiated from its competitors—and, therefore, why anyone would want to go there. The winners all did this well.


• It’s still hard to find calls to action on many websites. One judge recounted the difficulty of finding information about how to apply, much less an “apply now” button on a website he viewed.


• We saw many attempts to connect a website to the larger web through Facebook and Twitter badges and other devices, but often saw “share this” buttons in unexpected places where they appear to have been added as a afterthought, not baked into the design of the site.


• While .edu websites are much better organized and easier to navigate than they used to be, we still saw sites with “layers and layers of navigation all over the place,” which made them very confusing to navigate. This is particularly challenging on sites that don’t have a clear design hierarchy for pages or where choices are clearly dictated by internal politics rather than a sense of what a visitor to the site might want to do.


• On many sites, the space is just not well used. For example, pages about curriculum choices carried a big header and large images. What value does that have to a visitor to these pages? And related to this, while a big, splashy something may be suitable for a first-time visitor, what happens when repeated visitors tire of it and just want to reach the information they’re seeking?


• While we did see good content on some sites, some of it was buried on the site and hard to find. And some was good, but overused—like a site that featured profiles of six people that showed up everywhere. Another point that is often overlooked is that images, too, need to be refreshed and updated, especially when they depict events that happened some time ago.


• Some of the special-purpose sites, especially annual reports and some of the magazines, were totally devoid of interactivity and even links. I can’t stress too much how important the written submission for this category is—and how crucial it is to provide data about how effective the site is.

A last word about how important the written submissions for this category are. Comments in the submissions that outlined how much testing had been done or how successful the sites were convinced us to give awards to several sites that we might otherwise have passed over.

Likewise, some sites might have fared better if they had demonstrated that the unorthodox choices made by their designers were supported by usability testing rather than whim. One of the judges remarked: “It’s not just about the numbers, even if you have them. It’s about providing context for your content and trying to serve your customers. Posting content is no longer enough—you have to think about providing a service and include a task-based perspective; that’s where analytics shine.”

In terms of context, we paid a lot of attention to the organizational work and cross-campus cooperation that went into building the backbone of some of these sites.

Finally, knowing that sites were created in-house or with in-house solutions was also a plus.

Here’s a copy of the complete judge’s report for this category, with more details about the judging and comments about each of the award winners.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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CASE Honors Carol Cheney with Ashmore Award

I learned this week that CASE selected Carol Cheney, president of Cheney & Co., as the 2010 recipient of the Frank L. Ashmore Award for Service to CASE and the Advancement Profession. I’m delighted to hear that Carol will receive this award and want to extend my congratulations.

Carol and I have known each other for about 15 years—we first met when we were co-teaching at a CASE Summer Institute—and in that time, I’ve come to respect her as a colleague and value her as a friend. Moreover, I’ve learned a lot about how much time she’s invested in being a teacher, conference presenter, mentor, and volunteer (and not just for CASE). She’s given a lot to the advancement profession and it’s great to see her contributions honored.

I wrote a letter supporting Carol’s nomination for this award, as did many others, apparently. Here’s some of what I said that I think speaks to why this award is particularly well deserved:

Carol has done so much as a CASE volunteer, I hardly know where to begin.

Rather than enumerating Carol’s many activities, I’d prefer to note that in my mind she’s distinguished herself because so many of her volunteer activities for CASE have focused on a significant segment of CASE’s membership—advancement professionals at independent schools. She’s helped many, many individuals to develop their professional capabilities and knowledge of the advancement profession through dozens of conference presentations, communications and publications reviews, participation as a Summer Institute Faculty member, and many, many long-term personal relationships. I continue to be amazed at how many people credit Carol with helping them in significant ways at critical junctures in their professional development.

Carol will receive her award at this summer’s Summit for Advancement Leaders in New York.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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Hometown Newsmaker Shares News That People Care About

We’ve all read about how the news business is changing. About the death of newspapers. It’s pretty grim.

At least it’s grim for big metro dailies and national newspapers like the New York Times. I live in a small town in Vermont and here, our local (weekly) newspaper is thriving. And in the suburbs, the local newspaper is valued. People may have other sources for national and international news. But whether we read a newspaper every week, or use a local newspaper’s website, there is often no other way for people in small towns and suburbs to get local news.

And what are we looking for? In a community like mine, people want to know what their friends and neighbors are doing: we want to celebrate their accomplishments and join them in mourning their losses. And help them through the rough spots when we can. So news about local people is an extremely valuable commodity, one that people will read and share with their family and friends.

Don’t believe me? Consider these findings from research conducted for the Suburban Newspapers of America last year. They found that suburban newspapers, even free ones, were valued and trusted sources for local news:

• #1 Source for All Things Local – Suburban newspapers surpass metro newspapers, television, radio and the internet as the top source for community and neighborhood news, local youth and high school sports, local business news, local shopping and advertising, and local entertainment news


• Valued – Nearly 8 of 10 adults rate editorial quality as ‘good to excellent’


• Informative – More than 8 of 10 adults say their suburban newspaper ‘informs them’

This is one reason that I find readMEDIA’s Hometown Newsmaker so intriguing. This service distributes news that people care about-information about the accomplishments of students, such as academic honors and athletic accomplishments-directly to newspapers, which can easily repurpose that news on their websites and in print newspapers. Turns out news that can be borrowed from authoritative sources can be a valuable commodity.

Listening to their clients
I asked Colin Mathews, president of readMEDIA, how his company dreamed up Newsmaker:

The idea came from the colleges themselves. We had launched Newsmaker (a product that is aimed at combining traditional “local” press release distribution with high-end web/social media posting in an easy package), and some schools started asking if we could handle hometown news. I had no idea what they were talking about, so I went on a road trip and interviewed almost three dozen college media relations departments to find out if hometowners were important (yes!), if they were easy to do (no way!), and what they would do if they could wave a wand and make it appear.

Then, all I did was sort and sift those interviews down into some product requirements and then our very smart team build a beta version to try out. The things that didn’t work in the beta were my ideas—where I had added to what I had heard in the interviews. So we took that stuff out for the launch version and focused on making everything as easy as possible. Since then, every new feature comes from customer feedback.

There are a number of elements of his comment that I find compelling. One is that readMEDIA responded to a real need. Indeed, hometown releases like these were the bread-and-butter of college news offices when I was a young professional—and always difficult to produce and mail in those pre-computer, pre-Internet days. Second, their customers are driving product development.

A typical client, the Albany TimesUnion, runs Newsmaker content on its local news pages [here’s one for Schenectady] next to local news and sports events.

Content that people value—and so do institutions

Let me reiterate, for our local paper-and many others-this kind of borrowed content is extremely valuable. When it’s posted on a website, it offers possibilities that make it extremely valuable for students, parents, families and friends: the ability for it be shared on social networks.

It’s also valuable to colleges. St. Michael’s College in Burlington, VT, has used Hometown Newsmaker for about a year and a half. Buff Lindau, the long-time media relations person on campus and now its director of marketing and communications, emphasizes the value of these humble news stories to her college:

Although most small colleges claim it, Saint Michael’s has surveys of students, parents and alumni that show this college to be a remarkable community wherein faculty help students in and out of the classroom and care about their futures. Students make lifelong friends, and the rest of us feel a part of that vibe as well. Because of the strong sense of community, we are keen on reinforcing parents’ good feelings by finding ways to showcase their students’ accomplishments. Getting students recognized in print on online in hometown media outlets is just another way of enhancing these connections with the college and making parents proud and happy.

SUNY Oswego is beginning its second year with Hometown Newsmaker. Tim Nekritz, associate director of public affairs at Oswego, agrees, saying,

The main value is twofold. Most obviously, it’s great for the students and their families to have their accomplishments recognized in the local media. I have students tell me how excited they were to see their name in the local paper, which is cool. But it’s also great to get the Oswego name and message out there. And who knows—maybe someone will see someone in their neighborhood is studying, say, software engineering, at SUNY Oswego, not realize we offered a major they’re looking at and start considering us.

Lindau doesn’t confine her use of Hometown Newsmaker to the obligatory stories about academic honors and graduation. “In addition to dean’s list and graduation hometowns, I do stories on students who appear in a play or serve as writing center tutors, or go on a chorale tour, or serve as RA’s. I’ve gotten adept enough at the process that I use it frequently without spending too much time with it.” she writes. She’s careful to limit the time she spends on this activitiy, but notes that “I still think the time investment, which I carefully limit, is worth it.”

Nekritz, himself a former reporter who is now active in social networking, noted, “The media landscape is increasingly fractured, but people will never tire of seeing themselves or people they know recognized. Just when you think no one reads papers any more, you run into a student excited because their parents emailed them an article about them being on the Deans’ List. Or they end up posted on a Facebook wall, or tweeted as a link. No matter the delivery method, good news will never go out of style.”

One of Hometown Newsmaker’s clients that is showing how powerful this is is the New York National Guard. Mathews said, “They use Hometown Newsmaker to announce deployments, promotions, training exercises and the like and their Facebook traffic is terrific: each hometowner is getting ~5 additional page views via Facebook when a solider (or family member) pushes the story into their news feed.” And he told me, “We now get more referral traffic to hometowners from Facebook and Twitter than from Google News, which tells me that people are actively incorporating school-sponsored news about their kids into their social graph.”

Newspapers also benefit from this kind of traffic. Mathews said that TimesUnion staff has told him that they’ve has seen their page views double since pulling in hometowners. readMEDIA sees clickthrough rates between 5 percent and 10 percent on these stories—huge engagement rates, at zero editorial time and cost.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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Innovators: Roger Johnson, Founder of Newswise

Thom Canalichio (left: that’s @newswise to his followers on Twitter) and Roger Johnson.

Last week, Jeremiah Owyang tweeted a query to his followers, asking about the first social network that they had used. Jeremiah followed up his tweet with a blog post, in which he asserted:

People often make the mistake that Friendster, Tribes, or some early social site was the first social network. People also make the mistake that Facebook is the largest social network to date, in reality, the largest social networks are email. Let’s run the numbers: ... Hotmail has 375 million active accounts worldwide, Yahoo mail is reported at 280mm, and Facebook only has 200 million but growing. Email is the first-and largest-digital social network and will likely continue this path of domination, and hey, that’s coming from me, a social technology analyst.

I really appreciate Jeremiah’s perspective. I’m keenly aware of how email enhanced my own ability to network. [And in some ways, I could argue, email was a more effective bond for social networks than many of today’s options. But that’s the subject of another post.]

Roger Johnson, the founder and currently president and creative co-director of Newswise, is someone who appreciated early-on how powerful email and online forums could be. Before many people used the Internet-and even before Mosaic enabled people outside of a tiny community of researchers to use the Web-proprietary online services like Compuserve and Prodigy provided online communications (and social networking) through email, bulletin boards, and forums.

Roger, who was trained as a scientist, recognized how powerful these tools could be and founded Newswise to allow researchers; PR people from colleges, universities, and other nonprofit organizations; and news media to communicate with each other. According to the Newswise website:

Journalists look to Newswise as a trusted resource for knowledge-based news, embargoed research results, and expert contacts from the world’s leading research institutions: universities, colleges, laboratories, professional organizations, governmental agencies, and private research groups active in the fields of medicine, science, business, and the humanities. Newswise maintains a comprehensive database of current news, searchable archives, subscription wire services, and advanced information-management tools to enhance the value and efficiency of research-based news delivery for both journalists and source institutions.

Newswise also sponsors PIONet, a listserv (and social network!) for public information officers at colleges, universities, and other research organizations.

We asked Roger to respond to a series of questions about his experience founding Newswise and his observations about how the world of online communications has changed-and remained the same-since its founding.

What experience did you have in higher education before Newswise?
I earned a BS in chemistry from the University of Florida and a PhD in biochemistry from the University of Illinois Medical Center, Chicago. Then I was a postdoctoral fellow at both the University of Texas, Southwestern in Dallas, and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. While at Wisconsin, I changed careers from science research to journalism and participated in a science writers training program and courses in communication and writing.

I also later wrote for the National Institutes of Health, which is sort of a higher education institution, and worked for a scientific society (Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology) whose members were scientists at universities throughout the US. I wrote about their research and coordinated my work with theirs.

What gave you the idea for Newswise? How did you get started?
Since buying my first personal computer in 1980 (Osborne with 5-inch screen and CP/M operating system) I was keen on using computers to improve my effectiveness. In the early days of bulletin board services (1990), I came up with the idea of creating an online, comprehensive source for digital information about science and medical research and started the first such service in 1992 on CompuServe’s Journalism Forum.

This was before the Internet was widely used by academics, much less journalists, and before Mosaic was released [Mosaic, released in 1993, was the first web browser and made broader use of the web possible.]

What were some of the big challenges you faced in getting Newswise off the ground?
When I started Newswise, there was no demand and little perceived need among higher education news offices for digital information or delivery. Few people had email addresses. University news offices were mailing news releases; some were playing around with faxing. I gave our service away for three years because they were unwilling to pay for it.

What are some of the major changes Newswise has made to respond to changes in technology?
There have been many changes, including many operating systems and the move from CompuServe to the web. Now everyone in the profession, both PIOs and journalists, is online and has email. The introduction of video to the web has been big. Probably the most important improvement to the web has been the development of search engines, such as Google.

The media industry is changing; how will Newswise change in response?
The downsizing of major news media will not, in itself, change our service. Journalists are still important and providing the best technology for accessing them with research news by the most state-of-the-art technology will remain a major objective.

However, the decline of news media is correlated to the rise of the “new media,” and that presents a major new opportunity. This is bringing to fruition the goal of taking higher education information directly to the public. Newswise has embraced that new opportunity for helping our clients access a more diverse user base. We’re in the midst of working with clients to reach those users with a variety of social media tools and platforms, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs, etc.

What technologies are you tracking as you think about the future of Newswise?
It’s not so much the technologies as the strategies that are important right now. For example, you could say that Twitter is a technology, and most people in our profession have not even begun to try it, much less understand how it could be useful or made to be useful.

At Newswise, we’re pursuing a hypothesis for how Twitter would be useful—how could we create a broadcast channel? It involves two major problems: How do you create the content for the Twitter frame (140 character limit and ephemeral info) and how do you create an audience? These are the cutting-edge issues at this time with Twitter, which is the rave but clearly has unproven value. We are using Twitter to drive users to our clients’ research news on Newswise, and it is working. (Follow @newswise on Twitter.)

What key lessons have you learned from your experience in creating and running Newswise?
This is a tough question. Looking at the issue of relationship, it seems that the critical lesson is that our clients are really two groups with somewhat different-and sometimes even competinginterests. We have to maintain a balance between serving both those clients who pay us to deliver the info, and the journalists who read it. That is occasionally a delicate balance. It requires creativity, and that’s where the fun derives-to maintain the balance while being innovative. Similarly, a lesson is to always listen to feedback, even criticism, as if it were a contribution and the core of an idea for improving. The goal is to create partnership relationships. That is what makes work rewarding. It’s not much fun being categorized as a vendor.

When it comes to the technology part, summing it up seems too early-there’s too much happening right now. But one lesson is that with all of the changes in the medium, delivery, packaging, and platforms communication remains a separate thing, like the difference between brain and mind. For example, with the recent swine flu epidemic and the experience in the news media and the new media, I take a very positive view. It looks like collectivelythe news media, new media, government, and public-handled it very well. With the exception of the slaughter of pigs in Egypt (and I’m not sure that wasn’t an urban myth) there were no horrible outcomes.

Technology has improved communication. It has democratized the process and brought more people into the process. Guy Kawasaki (the Twitter maniac) says he uses information “as a weapon.” I don’t take that view. It can be a weapon, but with public involvement in a responsible system, it brings us all to a higher level of participation, and we’ve passed a threshold where the system has developed learning mechanisms and is behaving like an intelligent entity.

What’s the next big thing that advancement/marketing/PR folks in higher ed need to pay attention to?
Clearly the social media/new media is the big sea change right now. (Maybe this is the cause of the melting Antarctic ice cap?) It’s evolving so rapidly that it is difficult to settle on a plan, so the plan needs to be more of an experiment and rapidly responding system. It is also complex and diverse. Just to use Twitter effectively, for example, requires using at least eight applications. I just read a blog that suggested monitoring your brand with 13 different apps. Relating to bloggers is far more complicated than relating to journalists. Social media is like the web before Google.

What I’m hearing from the majority of higher ed PIOs is that they are novices at social media. Most don’t have a plan to utilize it. What’s more, most don’t understand how to begin to create a strategy or have an idea for what is possible or what they should be trying to achieve. Some are starting a Twitter feed, but they are unclear who is the audience, how to recruit that audience, and what content they provide that audience. I’m not critical—it’s hard to have a plan when the landscape is changing so rapidly and the best approach might be to experiment or even play around. But allocating time to playing around doesn’t seem to resonate well, because people feel pressured to jump in and don’t have time to play around.

We’re in the early days of social media, and just as in the early days of the web, Newswise is trying to provide leadership by creating a strategy based on a collaborative model. I hypothesize that one university by itself would have difficulty creating a content channel that would interest national journalists or thought leaders or knowledge workers. Newswise can add value by gathering the content into a collaborative channel that creates more interest among these users.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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mStonerblog Turns Six

Last year, Kyle James posted “The Six Month Post – Revisiting This Blog’s Purpose.” One of Kyle’s points was that a blogger needs to look back and take stock of what the blog has accomplished. After I read that post, I thought: “That’s a cool thing to do, I should do it.” So I made some notes and started writing a post of my own.

Then I realized that I wanted to publish that post today. Why? Because today marks six years since mStonerblog launched.

Ah, those early days!

It’s hard to believe today, but way back on 13 June 2003, there weren’t many blogs focusing on education marketing, branding, communications, PR, technology, admissions, advancement, and related issues. Not only was mStonerblog one of the first blogs to focus on these issues, but I believe we were the first communications consulting firm for .edu to blog. (I’m happy to be corrected in this and am interested in knowing about others that were launched before or around the same time; please leave a comment or send me email.)

In part, the story of this blog is the story of mStoner. Voltaire Miran, Rob Cima, and I launched mStoner in 2001. Rob and I had been working together since 1997 at a Chicago marketing firm where I was vice president for new media. I hired Voltaire in 1999. It was logical for the three of us to continue the great working relationship we’d established and launch our own company.

Our vision for mStoner was that we would be a different kind of communications consulting firm. In 2001, we believed, there was no other firm that focused on the website as the centerpiece of an institution’s communications and marketing. We envisioned mStoner as a company that would do that and—and support the development of stellar websites and other communications with the appropriate technology, technology that clients could sustain as well as own.

By early 2003, mStoner was thriving. We decided to create mStonerblog so we could share our insights and ideas-insights into useful tools, implementation strategies, best practices-and augment the workshops and conference presentations we were doing. At the time, blogging seemed to be a powerful and distinctive way of furthering our mission of sharing knowledge and building awareness.

And now: What’s changed, or changing?

We’ve been fortunate since the beginning of our company to have many talented staff members. mStonerblog was intended to be a company blog where all of us could share our ideas and insights. But the reality is that I’ve written the majority of the posts, sometimes blogging regularly and at other times not posting for weeks. Now, though, all of us at mStoner are trying to focus more on the blog, posting regularly and sharing what we’ve learned from our client work. So you’ll see more of our staff members blogging.

When we launched, blogging was less about building a community around your blog and more about sharing your viewpoint. While we’re still sharing our individual points of view in our posts, we’re also trying to do more to invite comments and gain broader engagement. Though I must note that our primary work is not our blogging, but serving our clients.

The blog has evolved over time. Initially, our posts were short, primarily sets of links with a little commentary about them. Now, we tend to do longer, original posts. I tend to write more about research than my colleagues do and, not surprisingly, Doug Gapinski and Laurel Hechanova write a lot more (and a lot more intelligently) about design than I do.

I’m spending more time on Twitter these days, so I tend to use it to share links to articles that are interesting, but that don’t evoke a strong reaction from me (I tweet as @mStonerblog: please follow me!). At one time, I might have written a blog post about some of them.

We’ve redesigned the blog at least twice. We launched a major redesign about a month ago, pegged to a redesign of our corporate identity that we implemented about two years ago. We’re still using Expression Engine as our blogging platform—and now it also powers our website.

And we’re talking and thinking more about how to measure the impact of this blog. Just how to do that is not as straightforward as you might imagine, though. I’ve never been someone who believes that having a huge number of followers or comments is important, so it’s not particularly important to me to amass a huge readership (or, for that matter, thousands of followers on Twitter).

OTOH, I’m well aware that our blog has impact. People tell me that our blog posts are valuable to them. I get emails about blog posts I’ve written. When I visit clients, I hear about how much they’ve appreciated something we’ve written. I’ve been in meetings with presidents, heads, or CEOs who want to discuss a blog post their staff has shared with them. I’ve seen our Google Analytics numbers go up before-or just after-I visit a prospective client. That’s all impact: but much of it is hard to quantify.

I also know that our blogging makes mStoner fairly transparent. Anyone who’s interested in hiring us can find out a great deal about how we practice by reading our blog. Much more, in fact, than any of our competitors. As a firm, we pretty much practice what we preach. I believe that’s extremely valuable.

But why should people pay attention to mStonerblog?

About a month ago, Karine Joly asked me to answer some questions for a post about mStonerblog prior to the conclusion of judging for the Edustyle awards.

Karine asked a good question, one that might not have occurred to me when I was writing this post: In your opinion, what is the biggest differentiator of your blog? What makes it different from the other higher ed blogs? I liked the question and have thought some more about the answers I gave Karine.

One of the key differentiators about mStonerblog is our credibility. The day job for (almost) every member of our staff involves solving problems for clients: collectively, we’ve worked on more than 350 projects involving issues of Internet strategy, web development, change management, identity development, staffing, web or print design, content management selection, coding—and more. We’ve served more than 200 institutions ranging from boarding schools, through liberal arts colleges, research universities, professional schools. Our smallest client was an institution that wanted to recruit about a dozen students a year; we’ve worked for state institutions that recruit thousands. Yesterday, Rob, our CTO, told me that we’ve done more than 150 content management system implementations. I was shocked: I’d lost count!

Our posts have a breadth that it’s hard for a solo practitioner, or a small group, to achieve. We’re not sharing observations based on theory about how things work or observations based on knowledge of a few similar institutions. Instead, our views are based on experience with many, diverse institutions that we’ve worked with to solve varied problems in admissions, fundraising, advancement, alumni and other areas.

As a result, we can be more authoritative: we have a good sense of what works and what doesn’t; where the sticking points are; what organizations are capable of and what they’re not capable of. It pleases me to hear that staff members use our posts to shape decisions that their leaders are making—that’s one validation of our ideas.

Ultimately, mStoner will be judged by the quality of our work, so we work very hard to deliver the first-rate strategy, content, design, coding and other work products our clients expect. But we also want our colleagues and friends to be able to count on our blog to deliver the kinds of unique insights they’ve come to expect for the past six years.

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@ShayTotten Reports: Using Twitter to Report Breaking News

Totten is investigative and political columnist at Seven Days, an alternative weekly in Burlington, Vermont. And while many reporters and writers have been quick to adopt new technologies-and many reporters are using Twitter-much of their tweeting is focused on trolling for leads, sharing resources and stories they’ve reported, and personal brand-building. Totten’s reporting illustrated how powerful Twitter can be in the hands of a pro reporting on a breaking news story.

Two weeks ago, Vermonters (and people in other states) were riveted by discussion in our Legislature about a bill legalizing same-sex marriage. Passed by both houses of the Legislature, it was vetoed by Governor Jim Douglas. There was never a question about whether the Senate could muster enough votes to override the Governor’s vetto, but no one knew what the House would do. The galleries were packed as discussion began.

Shay Totten was not content to sit in the press box and file his report when the debate was over. Tweeting as @ShayTotten, he offered real-time debate updates via Twitter, which were tracked using the #vtfreetomarry hashtag and became part of an ongoing Twitter conversation.* [If you don’t understand what these terms mean, see the introduction to Twitter below.]

A reporter’s insights about tweeting breaking news

We asked Totten to share some insights about using Twitter to cover an event like this. Here are his comments.

How did you decide to use Twitter to report on the Senate and House civil marriage debates?

At Seven Days, we’ve been experimenting with a different social media and other online tools to engage readers in real-time discussions during big news events. In some cases, we partner with other media (WPTZ and Channel 17) to provide live video streaming. But, at the presidential health care forum on 19 March, we used Twitter almost exclusively. This foray proved to be a hit with readers, so we thought I should try it again during the same-sex marriage debates—which we all knew would have much more interest to Vermont readers and readers around the country. It was also something different than hosting a live blog, which other media were already doing (along with a lot of live streaming). Also, this gives us a chance to cover breaking news, which is hard to do in our weekly newspaper.

Because you were tweeting about the debate, you were communicating in real-time with your followers.* It strikes me that that’s quite different than taking notes and digesting them in a report written after the debate is over. What was the experience like for you?

Communicating with readers in real-time is different than taking notes (in fact, it’s more like letting people read your notes in real-time), but it’s not completely unlike being in a press gallery where there are sometimes brief bursts of conversations, commentary, or “who said that?” queries. Live-blogging while reporting is much more arduous than replying on Twitter—and most of the questions that came in while I was Twittering were pretty straightforward and easy to answer.

That said, the reader queries served two important elements for my reporting: There are always some lulls in live debate coverage, so answering reader queries kept the coverage moving forward even when the debate wasn’t. And followers often bring up some of the “obvious” questions reporters often overlook while in the throes of taking notes.

In the end, though, I think reader interaction is what I’m after—whether through DMs, re-Tweets or @replies during the event.* I’m their eyes, ears, and typing fingers (if not a personal news ticker) during an event and I like to know there’s someone on the other end who is doing more than just scrolling along.

Did you face any obstacles in using Twitter in the House and Senate galleries?

Not many, but there does seem to be a technical glitch with the Statehouse wifi system when working in the Senate gallery. For some reason after a certain period of time, the security certificate for Twitter is rejected and therefore I can no longer use the laptop. So, I then switch to my iPhone, which can be a bit of a pain in the thumbs, but it’s not all that much slower. Makes for more difficult simultaneous note-taking, so I have to switch between the laptop and the phone more. The House gallery does not seem to have this issue. During big events like the same-sex marriage debate, it always pays to get there early and stake your claim as space is limited and once the TV crews show up they take up a lot of space.

You used a hashtag—#vtfreetomarry—for your tweets. Were you tracking the conversation associated with the hashtag. If so, what was it like to do that? Did it affect your reporting?

I was tracking the conversation associated with #vtfreetomarry, and at times (during the lulls) I was able to get a sense of what those who were impassioned about the issue were saying about either my Tweets, or observations of others, or their own observations based on watching a live stream or live audio feed. I wouldn’t say it affected my reporting, but it did reinforce for me that what I was doing was important and relevant in a different way than just making commentary. I was truly trying to achieve a dialogue of the debate-from all sides-to boil it down for those who might not have access to these other media.

One other fun tidbit regarding a conversation associated with a hashtag. At one point during the debate, #vtfreetomarry had trended in the top 10 on Twitter and I was the most reTweeted of that hashtag. My brief flash of Twitter fame and glory.*

Will Twitter be part of your reporting arsenal in the future? When might it be inappropriate to use it?

Absolutely. I’ve already done a little bit more at Burlington City Council meetings. I believe large protests, gatherings and major legislative debates are a perfect time to use it. As for when not to use it, I think it all comes down to what your audience wants to read and what it doesn’t. That’s an ongoing dialogue that columnists such as myself, and the newspapers we work for, have on a regular basis. I would say it might not be appropriate when in closed quarters with an interview subject, or when the news value is low (arduous debates about zoning regulations, for example).

What advice would you give to other reporters using Twitter to cover breaking events? Anything you wish you’d done differently?

To other reporters, I say give a whirl. It’s a lot of fun, and you can use the “transcripts” to inform your stories for the next morning, that afternoon or next week. I’ve used Tweets for same-day blog posts, and weekly columns. There are always aspects of a story that can’t be easily told in 140-character bursts. Tweets are components of a narrative, not the complete narrative. While I try to provide context while I live-Twitter, it’s more appropriate to provide such contexts in a long form.

If you work at a big-enough news operation that runs a simultaneous live-blog, you can have a hashtag feed into your live blog so reportage can inform-and inspire-debate on the live blog (this takes the onus off of reporters to report and reply all the time).

As for doing anything differently next time, I’m not sure yet. I think this last iteration of using Twitter worked much better than in my past attempts (election night, health care forum, city council meetings, etc.) as I learned how to inspire a dialogue and to get people to reTweet or DM during an event. Each time, I tend to hone my skills given the 140-character limitation. One thing I’m trying to do better is provide people with links to stories and blog posts (by myself and others) during a debate to provide additional resources. Already, I reTweet posts from colleagues in the media so people know there are other ways to track a debate.

*Intro to Twitter
A quick description of how Twitter works, for those who don’t use it: Twitter is a microblogging service, allowing users to send 140-character messages (called “tweets”) to people who’ve signed up to “follow” their messages. A person’s Twitter ID is indicated by an ”@” followed by a word or phrase (I tweet as @mstonerblog.) On Twitter, “hashtags”-designated by the ”#” followed by a word or phrase-to track a subject. Searching for a hashtag on Twitter helps you find out what people are saying about a specific topic. If you like something someone tweets, you can “retweet” it to your own followers; you can reply in public; or you can direct message (DM) them with a comment. Avid Twitter users follow topics in the news by watching the hashtags and topics that emerge as “trending topics” throughout the day. But now that even @Oprah is using Twitter, you need to find out about it for yourself.

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Blog Series on Community Colleges Starts Up

The series will focus on ”. . . highlighting the current trends and issues affecting community colleges around the country” according to its Facebook page.

The first post spotlights on Butler Community College in Kansas. Ryan Entz, the college’s executive director of marketing and communications, notes that:

“Community colleges need to harness social media not just as a way to ensure effective learning, Entz said, but as an overall communications strategy.

“The issue of communications is becoming more essential with each passing tweet,” he said. “This is not only a marketing issue, but it affects the entire college – from how faculty communicates with their students to how admissions communicate with prospects.

“How do we engage our students today across multiple platforms and in ways that allow us to interact more effectively with them?”

Community college officials are attempting to integrate Facebook, Twitter, and user-generated content into marketing efforts, too, Entz said.”

The series was created by Sarah Evans, director of communications at Elgin Community College in Elgin, Illinois.

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Budgetary Constraints Top the List of Marketing Challenges Facing Higher Education

We and Slover Linett Strategies, our research partner, recently invited 150 thought leaders in higher-education communications, marketing and PR to participate in a survey to learn what they considered their major marketing challenges in 2009. Respondents included senior professionals who lead marketing, communications, advancement and other areas at institutions ranging from Williams and Smith Colleges to Princeton, Harvard, Fashion Institute of Technology, the University of Texas, and Stanford.

Not surprisingly, more than half of survey respondents cited financial constraints or budgetary problems as the top challenges facing their departments—and nearly every respondent included financial concerns among the top three challenges. Citing such obstacles as “unexpected budget constraints,” “insufficient funding levels,” and “budget cuts,” respondents described a lack of necessary resources to reach institutional goals in fund raising, printing, web development, and more.

As one respondent put it, “At a time when electronic media should be in a heavy stage of growth and evolution, progress will likely be hampered by shrinking budgets at our institutions.”

Respondents also predicted negative repercussions from economic factors beyond their own institutional budgets. One respondent, for example, commented, “Economic changes in the newsroom have led to a shrinking news hole for higher-ed stories.” Another said the number-one challenge was to “market value at a highly selective college in the face of the challenging economy.”

What’s in a brand?
Beyond financial considerations, a number of respondents identified issues in articulating a strong brand. One respondent said the top challenge was “Creating agreement on a message that is pointed and clear (versus ‘We are good at EVERYTHING!’),” while another said it was “having the organization, particularly high-level administrators, recognize the need for marketing.”

Along with the difficulty of crafting a brand identity is the challenge of conveying it. “[Our target audiences] are bombarded from all directions, how do we get through the information clutter?” wrote one respondent.

For a number of survey participants, internal organizational issues presented significant challenges. “We are still working in silos,” wrote one participant. “The marketer is in a position of having to make friends and cajole to get the job done.” Another cited the challenge of “creating greater collaboration among development, alumni relations, and PR at the staff level.”

Finally, a number of respondents pointed to marketplace changes as a significant challenge. Some cited demographic changes (such as “declines in our major demographic market”), while others talked about harnessing new technologies and adapting to new forms of communication, including social networking and online videos.

Next step: What are your challenges?

The survey is the first phase of a two-part initiative. For the next step, we plan to conduct a similar survey among a much broadergroup of marketing and PR professionals. We welcome your participation; please take the survey. It will take less than five minutes.

For more information about the survey results, please contact Katie Jennings [katie.jennings@mstoner.com] or call her at 802.388.2408.

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The Press Release: Not Just for PR People Any More

People who send out online press releases want to increase visibility and credibility and announce news; that much hasn’t changed since the press release was invented. But:

Beyond the unanimously agreed-upon goals of increasing visibility and credibility, the researchers noticed significant differences among communication professions with regard to the goals of online news releases. While PR professionals placed more importance on traditional goals such as announcing news and enhancing thought leadership, marketing professionals reported SEO and reaching consumers as important goals for their online press releases. Small business owners were concerned with using the release as a sales tool and reaching customers directly.

While traditional media are still the primary target for a press release, bloggers and new media follow closely. Not surprisingly, PR practitioners target traditional media more than marketers, who are “more consistently interested … in reaching new media or consumers directly.”

People who write and distribute press releases still think about them very traditionally, focusing on writing a good headline/subhead with key words; making sure the content is interesting and newsworthy, incorporating keywords and links to the corporate website in the body of the release. And:

Only 57.8 percent of respondents indicated using SEO tactics, although some of the keywords and linking tactics in Table 4 are likely to help the release’s search engine rankings. This indicates a lack of knowledge about SEO on the part of most PR professionals, according to the researchers. Interestingly, very few respondents indicated using social media release formats (26.3 percent) and even fewer reported adding video (12.8 percent) or audio (9 percent) enhancements. Of all multimedia elements, photos were the most popular, used in online press releases by 49.5 percent of respondents. Even more puzzling is that less than half of respondents (48.8 percent) link to their own press releases after they have been posted online.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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