Recipes for Success: Independent schools break the mold when it comes to social media

My article “Recipes for Success: Independent schools break the mold when it comes to social media,” appears in the print edition of January’s CASE Currents and on CASE’s website [though a login is required to read it].

Here are some key takeaways:

• Because of their small scale and relative lack of bureaucracy, it’s often easier for schools to experiment with social media.


• Aside from embrace of social media—with some encouraging results at places like Baylor School and Beaver Country Day School—there’s some really innovative work going on. Northfield Mount Hermon has merged social media feeds into its website and Worcester Academy’s mashup brings the voices of many members of the school to WAMash.

CASE has generously given us permission to distribute a reprint of ”Recipes for Success.” [Thank you, Currents staff!]

And I wrote up interview notes from some of the people I talked to as a series of case studies:

• Baylor School, Small Staff, Smart Choices Yield Social Media Success So Far for Baylor School


• Beaver Country Day School, Social Media in Action at Beaver Country Day School


• Northfield Mount Hermon School, Northfield Mount Hermon: Social Media Done Right


• Proctor Academy, Innovator: Chuck Will, The Longest-Running Blogger in Education?


• Worcester Academy, Living Institutional Life Online at Worcester Academy

Posted by Michael Stoner
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Broad Engagement Abhors a Caveat: or, a Giant Learns to Fist Bump Without Crushing the Townspeople

NBC Chicago’s masthead. 03 November 2009

Today my city is “laughing about Jessica Simpson ripping Melrose.” I’m not specifically, but it’s plausible that many other Chicagoans are.

Clicking on the quote (notably displayed in NBC Chicago’s masthead) brings me to a page showing that over half of sampled Chicagoans find Ms. Simpson’s diatribe amusing. Further, a quarter of us could care less, and the rest of us are evenly split as being either “thrilled,” “sad,” “furious,” or “intrigued.”

How did a large corporation get us to admit this without coming across as our painfully-uncool-but-tries-to-be-hip Dad? Essentially, it did three things:

1.) It scaled itself down to a smaller, more personable entity. For the purposes of this audience, NBC became NBC Chicago. Bravely, “NBC” isn’t even stated. It’s implied by their logo. (Granted, it’s not that brave when your logo is as well-known as theirs, but for a media behemoth, this act is a veritable trust fall.)
2.) It lowered the barriers to participation. If you’re a member of their site, all it takes is some brief introspection and a mouse-click to voice your opinion on the subject.
3.) It overtly displays the results of participation. Your response to a survey gets added to the tally, the results of which show up larger than the headline of the story. This kind of treatment says, in a very immediate way, that what you think, dear reader, is as important as the subject matter itself. Stating a group’s opinion as a kind of citywide status message on the site’s front page, reinforces that message and invites discourse.

Plot twist!
Point number two is qualified: “if you’re a member of their site.” I’m not. I didn’t participate in the poll. Although, I made it most of the way towards doing so. I skimmed the article, formed an opinion, and clicked on “intrigued.” Then, one last hurdle popped up requesting my email address and a password in order to become a member. As a member of dozens of other sites already, I felt the weight of all of my username and password combinations (which are attached to one or more of my four main email addresses) bear down. In fact, each time a site asks me to create a new account I become increasingly wary and less likely to do so. This time was no exception, and I closed the window and left the site.

Obviously, this hurdle wasn’t too high for the others who participated in the Simpson/Melrose survey, so the value of getting an email address might be enough for NBC to keep it in place. One begins to wonder, though: how many others like me have they lost as potential participants? Moreover, asking for identification corrupts the notion that they genuinely want everyone to participate. I’d posit that more value is gained by getting me to dive into the site and stick around than by getting my email address. If they emailed me anything, I’d most likely just delete it. Or, I’d open it and immediately scroll down to the bottom to unsubscribe.

Them’s the brakes, NBC.

The Moral
While they did more than most to engage their audience, NBC might want to reconsider that last step. My advice to all of you: keep the barriers to participation as low as you can afford to, and keep the longview in mind when you define “low.”

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Small Staff, Smart Choices Yield Social Media Success So Far for Baylor School

Immersing yourself in social media isn’t easy when you manage communications and marketing for an education institution, even a small one. There’s already a lot on your plate: events to produce and publicize, magazines to put out, a website to update. That’s certainly true at the Baylor School, a boarding and day school in Chattanooga, TN, where Barbara Kennedy, associate vice president for external affairs, manages communications.

Kennedy’s team is responsible for marketing, media relations, publicity, PR, publications, a magazine, BaylorSchool.org, and programming and promoting the school’s summer programs. It’s a small staff: just Kennedy with a director for summer programs, a webmaster, a designer, and a freelance editor who helps with the school’s magazine.

Despite the existing workload, Kennedy knew that it was important to learn about social media and to incorporate these tools into her work. “I knew that I had to be responsive. I’m a 25-year PR veteran and I knew I had to adjust to these changes myself. And I know our audiences expect us to communicate in this way.”

So in spring, 2009, she and Bernard Fertal, Baylor’s webmaster, began exploring social media. “We wanted to be in the lead, but we didn’t want to proceed without really thinking through the advantages and disadvantages,” Kennedy said. “I think some people thought social media was just a fad that would soon fade away—and still others chose to ignore it. But we looked at it as a revolution in how we do our jobs.”

After some experience, she added, “Bottom line: we look at social media as a powerful way to leverage traditional marketing and communication tools that we already have in place.”

Pilot project focused on a class trip

After doing some exploration and research, Kennedy developed a pilot project to launch over the summer, when she had time to focus on it: a travel blog about a student trip to Washington D.C. with photos posted on Flickr. “This was only read by the students who were on the trip and their parents and there wasn’t much interaction, but it gave me a reality check on the time commitment. Then we started tweeting. And I had already been immersed personally with Facebook, so the Baylor School fan page was the next logical step once classes began in August.”

These continue to be her focus. “I’m amazed at how quickly the Facebook page took off: it has grown virally, as has @BaylorSchool [1216 fans and 103 followers as of 28 October 2009]. We plan to do a radio promotion directing people to follow us on Facebook and Twitter, so we’ll see how those numbers grow.”

Kennedy’s main focus is The Baylor Blog, which feeds the fan page. She said, “Since I am generating all of the news items on our website and much of the information that we share with parents and students on a regular basis, I do the updates on Facebook and the blog.”

Tweets are drawn from the school’s daily announcements and other web content and lead back to news stories on BaylorSchool.org. Fertal manages @baylorschool and handles most of the tweets.

As a communicator, Kennedy appreciates the flexibility social media gives her in telling a story—and allows her to watch how her stories spread. “As someone in communications, the feedback and data I get on posts is invaluable.” As an example, she talked about some photos she posted of Korean students celebrating a Korean holiday. “I’m interested to see how many of those kids will interact, showing me if it’s viable to reach students in Asia this way. I may not get much interaction, but I’m watching what happens.”

Kennedy also appreciates how much she can learn about her audience. “Our total fan base is predominantly ages 13-24, almost evenly split male/female. As a boarding school, it is also of great value to see that 1,002 of our Facebook fans are from outside of the state, and 39 of those fans represent 19 different countries. Having the data also informs my choices on what to post, and will no doubt shape our communication strategies in the coming months. For example, 100% of the interaction has been from females (ages 35-44, 40 percent), (ages 45-54, 40 percent), (ages 13-17, 13 percent), and (ages 55+, 7 percent).”

She continued, “This week, we have pulled in 17 percent participation from males and our younger fans are becoming more active. So I’m thinking harder about posts that I feel will keep connecting with them. Our next step is to leverage this information with admission and fund-raising.”

And this data helps her to gain support from Baylor’s board. “I felt that some of my colleagues were just being polite when I talked about social media, but when I shared some of this data with the board, they really responded. They got that it was a whole new way of communicating.”

Challenges? What challenges?

When asked about challenges in putting social networking into practice, Kennedy said, “It has been ridiculously easy, but it was personally scary for me to let go of some of the control. I was blocked for awhile on creating the fan page because I wasn’t sure anyone would respond to it. Silly, huh?”

Kennedy and Baylor have not encountered any discipline problems or issues with their own ventures in social networking, but that doesn’t mean that Kennedy hasn’t had “an aha moment” around potential abuses of social networking. “A couple of years ago, a reporter ‘friended’ some students on Facebook to get a quote regarding a controversial issue on campus. He ran the story with a student’s quote and I was just blown away. Because I also handle media relations, it was a teachable moment for me, the student, and others in our school community. That was my first experience with Facebook—and, when you think about it, it’s a miracle that I grew to love it!”

Although being an active blogger and Facebooker take more time in her day, it hasn’t been a big burden for Kennedy. “Honestly, it takes me just a few more minutes a day. I would be developing news content for the website anyway, so copying and pasting into the fan page and tweeting about it—is really just a few extra minutes.”

Even the interaction is manageable, Kennedy has found. “I don’t follow up much, though I do spend time reading comments and think about how they might inform what I post. For Twitter, I’m looking at what people are reading, RTing, and I’m thinking about they say. This takes 10-20 minutes a day. I could spend more time on it, but I don’t. I have to set some boundaries.”

The effort she’s put into social media—and its payback—have resulted in some plans for the near future:

• Silverpoint, Baylor School’s web partner, is designing a mashup page that pulls together the school’s various feeds; it should go live this fall.


• Kennedy is also exploring how she can incorporate a Flip video camera and iMovie into her communications retinue, and her immersion in social media is causing her to rethink how she will present Baylor’s magazine when it moves online. The current print magazine is mailed twice a year to 10,000 people. Kennedy isn’t sure what an online version of the magazine will look like, but she is sure that her effort won’t involve slapping a PDF on BaylorSchool.org. “I’m thinking about how we can tell stories through video and audio,” she said.


• Finally, there’s a need for other voices to join the conversation online. She’d like to include more student voices, but that hasn’t happened much yet. One of her concerns is the amount of time they could spend: “I don’t have a lot of confidence in their level of commitment to it—they have a whole lot of things going on,” she said. And she’d like to see other departments involved in contributing to and sustaining Baylor’s social media activities. “We need other voices to join the conversation and in doing so contribute to the effort,” she said.

Note: This post is the result of research and interviews for an article on innovations in social media by independent schools. It will appear in the January 2010 issue of CASE Currents. There are four related posts:

• An interview with Chuck Will, from Proctor Academy, Innovator: Chuck Will, The Longest-Running Blogger in Education?;


• A case study on how Northfield Mount Hermon School’s new website will incorporate social media;
• 
  
• A post about online life at Worcester Academy.


• A case study of social media in action at Beaver Country Day School
.

Update: The mashup page went live the week of 2 December:

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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.

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Flight of the Flyers: Social media and real-world action

Flight of the Flyers, produced by Nazareth College in Rochester, NY, was developed to be an amusing and engaging way for the college to connect its reunion alumni—and for them to connect with each other.

Nazareth also hoped to reconnect with inactive alumni; increase attendance at reunion (yes, its face-to-face reunion!); and improve the information it had on alumni. And to build pride in the Nazareth—one goal that has been surely furthered by the two CASE awards the site has already earned.

The judges’ report for the 2009 CASE Awards of Excellence for websites, in which Flight of the Flyers won a Gold, noted:

One judge remarked, “This is the coolest thing I’ve seen in this judging. A smart use of the web that promotes engagement and prompts action in the real world.” The site definitely exhibits a sense of humor—and appeal—given that 47 percent of visitors came back for two or more visits and pre-registration for Reunion is up 22 percent. Nevertheless, this is one of the sites that generated a lot of discussion among the judges. Some of the judges argued that the site deserved an award because of the way it linked the real world with the virtual one; others noted that it seemed a bit childish and its design is uninspiring. But, as one judge put it, “You can’t argue with success. That’s increased engagement in a time when perhaps people can’t afford to travel to reunions, or perhaps older people can’t travel to reunions but this is a way they can engage.”

The current Flight of the Flyers site represents the second generation of the project. According to Kerry Gotham, Nazareth College’s director of alumni relations, the program actually began in 2007 as a way to encourage participation in the college’s 2008 reunion—the second year in which reunion was to be held in spring, rather than fall.

“At that point, we wanted to grow our program. We had 450 people at our 2007 reunion and wanted to do better in 2008. I was intrigued by the Travelocity commercials featuring the roaming gnome and wanted to see if we could find a way to do something like that to build interest in our reunions. We wanted to go beyond the norm, do something different with the potential go have a peer-to-peer component.”

Thus was born Flight of the Flyers. The college decided to send stuffed “Golden Flyer” mascots to alumni in reunion classes and invite them to forward the birds to other reunion alumni. [That’s a total of 3,000 potential alumni who are registered members of reunion classes and can receive a (stuffed) Golden Flyer mascot by mail. Nazareth has 23,997 addressable alumni.] They set up a simple forwarding system using the U.S. Postal Service’s Click-N-Ship program.

Despite comments by naysayers—one of whom said, “Alumni will never pay to send these things to other alumni”—the program took off. During that first year, Nazareth staff logged in the travels of the Golden Flyers and added alumni comments to their website—by hand. “It was a lot of work,” Gotham said.

Planning a web-enabled Golden Flyers program

Believing that the campaign would be more engaging if it was web-enabled—and that the college could save a lot of staff time—the alumni staff began focusing on integrating the 2009 edition of Flight of the Flyers with some innovative social media tools.

The Flight of the Flyers website that Nazareth launched last year took the “Golden Flyer Challenge” to a new level. People who receive a Golden Flyer could take a photo of it in location, check in on a Google Map on the site, and send the Golden Flyer to another reunion classmate. Members of reunion classes can request a bird through a form on the site.

And alumni in other classes can participate by printing out a Golden Flyer and taking a photo of it, then checking it in on the Google map.

The site incorporates a lot of features that encourage alumni to engage with each other:

• Alumni could post their own updates and read info that others posted via the map and a profile generated by visitors to the site;


• Alumni could invite less-active classmates to participate;


• “Lost” alumni could request a Flyer and reconnect with the college, sharing their contact info through a form on the site;


• The College collected the updates and data in a database, rather than hand-entering the information as in the previous year.

All told, the site took about 310 hours of staff time to plan, build, and manage. Wall to Wall Studios provided strategy, design and development for the project. Gotham said that Nazareth was planning to use the same basic site for five years, allowing them to amortize staff time and direct costs and resulting in a very cost-effective campaign for Nazareth.
The Flight of the Flyers site was very much a team effort, Gotham said. “I have great partners here—it wouldn’t have been possible to do this without everyone pitching in.” In particular, he credits Mimi Wright,
Kerry VanMalderghem, Colleen Brennan-Barry, and Fran Zablocki.

Results

Nazareth is delighted with the results of the Flight of the Flyers—indeed, it’s successful by any measure of engagement for a small college.

“Demographically, we have a good range of participation pretty through the years, with as many as 60 participants in one class; we had 10-15 participants in the the classes with the lowest numbers. We had more than 260 people participate in all. We had 600 people at reunion this year.”

The broad response was a surprise to Brennan-Barry, the person in marketing responsible for oversight of the Nazareth website. “We had some initial concerns that our “older” alumni might not be as comfortable and engage with the site as much as new alumni. That was happily proven incorrect when we realized that the classes that were placing in the top three for Flyer miles traveled included the classes of ‘59, ‘64 and ‘74!”

This is an important reminder, she points out, “that we can certainly reach different segments of our core population via different media, and that the preferred media of those segments is changing and evolving all the time.”

Plus, Gotham added, “We’ve had a lot of great anecdotal and written comments about Flight of the Flyers. People said how how much fun it was to take the picture of their Flyer—they enjoyed being creative with the photo and showcasing where they live or where they were traveling.”

Also, the site worked in helping people to connect with each other. “People did make connections, they followed up, and we know that in addition to boosting attendance at our reunion, the site sparked informal reunions. People used a Flyer as a rallying point to get together in their area.

Brennan-Barry noted that visitors appreciated the absence of a direct “ask” on the Flight of the Flyers site. “I am glad that we made the decided choice not to use this site as a vehicle for direct fundraising, but more as a vehicle for connection. We did include a “Donate to Nazareth” link on every page, but we listened to users when they told us that they have solicitiation fatigue from ‘constantly’ getting asked for money from every organization to which they belong. Our choice to make this more of a place for us to connect with alumni and raise excitement for Reunion 09 was, in retrospect, a good one.”

As far as metrics are concerned, here’s some data from this year’s effort, from 1 June 2008 to 30 June 2009:

• 3127 unique site visits.


• 1867 visitors viewed 5.91 pages/visit and spent an average of 3.56 minutes on the site.


• 47% of visitors return for two or more visits.


• 180 alumni checked a Flyer in via the site (note: only four Flyers per each of 10 classes have been circulating since 6/08).


• 123 alumni used the form on the site to request that a Flyer be sent to them.

And of course, the CASE awards don’t hurt: the entire program won the Grand Gold in Alumni Relations in addition to the Gold for the Flight of the Flyers site.

Lessons and advice

When asked what surprised him about the Golden Flyers program, Gotham replied, “To be honest, I was surprised at how well it did take off, both years. I thought it was kind of a harebrained idea. We wanted to have some fun—I had no idea how much people would like it.”

One ancillary benefit of the Golden Flyers program is that it’s brought the Golden Flyer mascot to the attention of people on- and off-campus, Gotham said. “We’ve only had an athletics program for about 30 years, and many people just didn’t connect with our mascot. So this was a clever, visual, and direct way for them to make that connection. And they have.”

Gotham noted that there were a few skeptics when the idea was originally floated. “But I did have the support of my boss, our vice president. Without that, it wouldn’t have been possible.” In the two years of the program, only one complaint has surfaced about the cost of shipping the Flyer to the next recipient (it costs about $5 and it’s easy to print the Click-N-Ship label from a computer).

As far as the site production is concerned, Colleen Brennan-Barry noted, “We did some light usability testing about 2/3 of the way through the project and I cannot stress how important and useful this was! I know that testing is almost always the first thing to be cut if a project is short on time or resources, but never discount the value of user feedback as you’re creating this kind of interactive site. For a handful of $5 Starbucks giftcards, we received back a great deal of helpful information that saved us time and user confusion in the end.”

Speaking to the need for monitoring how people use it, Gotham noted that next year, Nazareth is planning to simplify the Flight of the Flyers site. “Even though the website is cool, we are going to make some changes in it. Alumni weren’t as interested in the individual birds as they were with connecting with other people in their class. We’ll make it easier to find who in your class has already received the birds, and who wants them.”

Brennan Barry noted, “As we look at revising and reestablishing Flight of the Flyers for the Reunion 2010 classes, we will be looking more closely at the communications by which we publicize the site and the program with the world. This year, the site received strong traffic and interaction with minimal communication; I’m excited to think about how we might be able to connect with our alumni if our communications are stronger.”

And next year, Gotham noted, they’ll work out a definitive solution for the fact that the site worked too well, disappointing some alumni: not everyone who requested a bird actually received them. That will change next year, he asserted.

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Powered By Orange: A Comprehensive Social Media Campaign

Powered By Orange, launched in March 2009 by Oregon State University, is the most comprehensive university social marketing campaign that we’ve seen to date.

With an integrated marketing communications plan already in place, OSU’s next step was to create a campaign to raise awareness of the university in Portland, Oregon’s biggest media market.

Unfortunately, the budget for TV time or outdoor advertising wasn’t available. But, drawing on insights from the original communications plan, a group of team members from the University Advancement division developed a plan and creative concepts to take advantage of an integrated social media campaign. They tested these ideas with a mixed group of campus staff and leaders, including representatives of the OSU Foundation, the OSU Alumni Association, college communications representatives, admissions staff, and others.

These ideas evolved into Powered By Orange, which is now well-entrenched at OSU and appears to be on the verge of going viral.

According to Luanne Lawrence, vice president for advancement at OSU, “The feedback was consistently supportive of the Powered By Orange concept. So, we developed the campaign a bit more and tested it at a few alumni events and in focus groups and discussions with faculty, staff and students. Each conversation improved the concept and grew it to where it is going (and is still growing).”

What’s Powered By Orange?

What’s Powered By Orange? Here’s the answer from the PBO website:

“It’s you—the network of alumni, students, faculty, staff, friends and fans connected to Oregon State University. It’s the positive impact you make every day in Portland and beyond—on the economy, the environment and the community. Use this Web site to tell your story and connect with the other practical idealists who are Powered by Orange.”

One of the key insights from the research that led to the integrated marketing plan was the necessity of connecting with younger alumni, who are critical to future giving. Testing showed that this audience in particular wanted reassurance that OSU was making an impact on the world. “Not only did the research gave us insights into the needs of some of our key audiences—but it was a no-brainer to reach out to young alumni through channels that they were familiar with,” said David Baker, OSU’s director of web communications.

In short order, Baker’s Web Communications unit, in collaboration with University Marketing, designed a website powered by Wordpress to serve as the hub for Powered By Orange. Planning and execution of the site and social networking components, Baker said, “took a couple of months from first concept to site launch. We were able to move quickly because we had that research.”

[Note: for those interested in the details, Web Communications at OSU has six staff members: a director, assistant director/developer, web designer, writer, multimedia producer and a social media specialist. Baker said, “This last role is brand new as of last month, and we currently have it filled temporarily by a recent grad with a marketing background. If it works out (and it’s going nicely), we’ll make it permanent.”]

The PBO online ecosystem

The PBO website aggregates a significant number of social media tools and social networks.

• A focal point of the site is a Google Map that allows people who are Powered By Orange to place a dot to mark their location. Baker said, “Lots of people are adding themselves to the map because they are connected to OSU and OSU has played a part in making them who they are. They’re showing that they are part of their community—and not just through their profession. In fact, this reinforces how community-oriented OSU students are.”


• Content from the PBO Blog is featured prominently on the site; it is also syndicated to the PBO LinkedIn group and to OSU’s Portland Metro website. It will also be featured on OSU’s top-level pages, which are currently being redesigned.


• OSU has also focused heavily on developing video content for PBO. A YouTube video is featured prominently on the PBO home page, and this is just the start. Videos are housed on a YouTube page that currently features 36 videos. The videos are created primarily by a graduate assistant with video experience, though Baker emphasized the importance of having a cache of Flip videos that can be loaned out to faculty and students; at OSU, Flip video is often edited into video shot with the university’s high-quality video camera.


• The videos are syndicated into the Powered by Orange - 10,000 Beavers page on Facebook. And there’s an extensive Flickr gallery where people can post photos of Benny, the OSU mascot, in various places. An image of Benny can be downloaded from a gallery that includes computer desktop wallpaper; a doorhanger; and PBO website tags.


• OSU’s Twitter feed (@poweredbyorange) and a LinkedIn group are part of the package, too.

PBO now far beyond Portland

Though originally targeted to Portland, the campaign took off quickly. “Believe it or not, we’re still in the quiet phase of the launch,” Baker said. “We haven’t done much promotion to speak of, no print buys, no advertising, no PR. But we already have more than 10,000 page views on the PBO site and more than 1,600 members in our Facebook group. PBO has resonated well with the alumni who’ve discovered it, both young & old.”

With such a bold campaign, Luanne Lawrence knew that she had to be proactive in unveiling it for many OSU constituencies. She observed, “Like all other states, Oregon’s immediate financial future is dim. With a higher-than 12 percent unemployment rate and university reductions in the 12-22 percent range, morale was low. So, I decided to try to take PBO out on a road show to gauge its ability to create excitement, shared vision, anecdotes, and dreams of how to implement it. We also wanted feedback on how to make it better.”

She continued, “The response has exceeded my expectations. PBO has become something for people here to ‘hold on to.’ Faculty, staff and students are defining what the campaign means in their own way. My goal is to not control this campaign, but let others run with it. I want Beavers of all walks of life to define what it means to be ‘powered by orange’—to define their contributions as Beavers to their professions and communities; to use our main color, orange, to express themselves artistically, to make it their own.”

One big surprise of PBO, Baker said, is that this has actually happened. “Other departments and units at OSU became so interested in adapting it for their purposes. That made us change our thinking and change our direction to enable people to use the campaign to be their own advocates. We’re trying to be flexible in giving up control. The flexible theme resonates with people who are used to having control over their communications, rather than having it dictated to them.”

For example, the Athletics department simultaneously rolled out the ”I am Orange” campaign. Luanne Lawrence noted, “We are seamless in using the color to self identify and create spirit … at least in this first phase.”

The campaign handed out PBO stickers to this year’s graduating seniors, who showed up at graduation with the stickers on their caps.

Luanne Lawrence reported, “We intended to keep this in the quiet phase until September when we planned a major public launch, but now I prefer to say that we are in the ‘viral’ phase before the public launch. It has been embraced by many people already.”

“It has really taken off on campus—students really like it,” Baker said. This could be just one more sign that the PBO campaign may be set to go viral.

Tracking results

Baker emphasizes that OSU is not only in a “launch and learn” phase with the PBO campaign—but also is assessing its impact. Most of the feedback to date has been anecdotal—and positive. He noted, for example, “Feedback from Luanne Lawrence’s presentations to different groups has been very positive so far, as it has from the focus groups we’ve conducted.”

Baker is also tracking the PBO Twitter feed. “We only have about 260 followers, but they are mostly business owners who are interested in sustainability. This could be very useful in the future.”

When asked whether audience members were contributing content—in particular blog comments or homemade videos—Baker noted that audience participation was heaviest on PBO’s Flickr gallery, where people were posting and tagging photos. “We found it very difficult for people to produce videos—which is an experience that is fairly common on other websites, too.” As for blog comments, he observed that the blog is an institutional blog and has less of a personality and, as a result, less engagement, than a personal blog might have.

In any case, OSU is quite satisfied with the results of the campaign so far.

Advice to others

When asked what advice he’d give to people at other institutions who wanted to launch a campaign like Powered By Orange, Baker noted three key points:

• Do some groundwork. “One of the reasons we were able to do this so quickly is because we had spent a year doing research and planning an integrated marketing campaign for OSU,” he pointed out. Still, expectation setting is really important, he emphasized.


• Launch and learn. Be prepared to make adjustments to your strategy and your campaign after you launch it.


• Think of it as a grassroots effort that builds over time.

There hasn’t been much pushback on the PBO campaign, Baker reported. And, what little has occurred, Luanne Lawrence noted, comes from communications professionals who are uncomfortable with the notion that OSU is launching the campaign and doesn’t intend to control it. “I run up against some who subscribe to older models—pushing out press releases, paying for ads, controlling events, etc. While we still have these tactics in our mix, we are risking as much as we can to empower larger communities.”

Lawrence added, “This is not a high-comfort area for some in higher ed, so I have learned that it takes a tireless and enthusiastic leader to ensure that this approach is successful. If I weren’t a vice president with such a passion for making this campaign viral and in using a mix of traditional with very nontraditional media, I’m not sure this PBO campaign would have seen the light of day.”

In short, to ensure success of a campaign like this, one has to take risks.

And no campaign with perceived risks will be successful without a visionary and indefatigable leader. Clearly, PBO has two such leaders who are willing to venture out, but not recklessly. OSU’s approach demonstrates that research, planning, and thoughtful experimentation increase the odds that such ingenuity will be rewarded.

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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.

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Trends and Judges’ Report, CASE Awards of Excellence for Websites

This year, I chaired the judging panel for the CASE Awards of Excellence Judging for websites. The judging was hosted by Roosevelt University, Chicago—a shoutout to Lisa Encarnacion, director of university outreach, who made all the arrangements for us, and to Lesley Slavitt, vice president, government relations and university outreach.

This year, 15 judges convened for two days in March for the judging. The judges represented American and Canadian colleges, schools, and universities, public and private. The panel included people with experience in design, web strategy, web content development, admissions, student recruitment, web technology, and marketing. We also had a number of consultants on the panel, one of whom spent years working as a high school counselor. More than half of the judges have won national CASE Awards of Excellence for their websites. (Typical panels that judge other categories in the Awards of Excellence competition number about six to eight.)

There were 56 complete institutional sites entered in Category 10A [Complete Institutional Websites] this year and 94 sites entered in Category 10B [Individual Sub-Websites]. This year we awarded a Grand Gold and two Golds. In Category 10A, George School won a Gold for its redesigned site. And in Category 10B, Xavier University won the Grand Gold for Road to Xavier and Nazareth College took a Gold for FlightoftheFlyers.com.

Short list of Award winners for 2009; more details about each in the Judges’ Report for 2009.

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


• good content, effectively deployed across the site


• effective management of the site


• appropriate look and feel, distinctive to the purpose of the site and consistent within the site


• appropriate use of technology and adherence to standards


• evaluation plan; appropriate results

We also ask whether the site does something particularly interesting or unusual. We’re not very interested in sites that merely look good. It’s easy to make a site look good, but is the site great at what it’s designed to do? If a site looks good but isn’t well-organized or lacks coherent messaging, it won’t get an award. Competition in this category is very rigorous, and winning is difficult.

Managing Conflicts of Interest
Judging panels for other CASE Awards of Excellence categories top out at about six people. There are a number of reasons why we invite such a large number of people to participate in judging this category. First, building websites is a complicated undertaking and we want people with different kinds of expertise in the room to comment on issues such as audience appropriateness, usability, design, and other issues as they came up. Second, we have a lot of sites to review and having a large group of people makes this process go faster. Third, having a large group of experienced people with strong opinions ensures that a broad range of opinions is heard. Finally, the large group ensures that conflicts of interest do not emerge in this judging.

We take conflicts of interest extremely seriously. Several of the judges represented institutions that had websites entered in Category 10, and several mStoner clients entered sites in this category. Judges with a relationship to a site being judged do not participate in viewing the site during the first “elimination” round; if the site survives this round, judges are expected to recuse themselves from judging the site, are not allowed to comment on it, and are asked to leave the room when the site is being discussed during the final round when awards are given.

Trends
I’m sorry to report that the judges were underwhelmed at what we saw this year. One remarked, “I felt as if I was looking at websites from 1997. I was disappointed and surprised at how bad they were.”

Some sites we explored are clearly reaching for “wow,” but wow in and of itself isn’t enough. Without functionality, wow quickly becomes annoying. We noticed a lot of gratuitous elements that had no purpose and/or were not useful; examples of bad design; and many generic websites. One judge remarked, “I don’t see many best practices emerging this year.”

It was particularly galling to see sites that completely lacked any sense of branding or even a sense of place: the institutions could have been anywhere. For example, we looked at one site from an institution on the California coast and couldn’t find a single image that showed us where it was located.

And as important as authenticity is today, many of the sites we looked at seemed to lack authenticity. Authenticity was one of the elements that people liked about George School’s site, as well as Northland’s and Nazareth College’s Flight of the Flyers.

Another shortcoming overall was a decided lack of great content—we saw very little excellent writing or video on any of the sites we viewed. Too much of the writing was characterized by the usual university-language clichs. Sites need to be edited—and not just for misspellings (we observed far too many). And, often, excellent content was buried deep inside the site: this is good content used poorly, where one had to stumble upon it in many cases. This is not only a waste of time (and/or money), but also attention: visitors want good content!

One judge observed, “When I’m looking at your site, all I have is what is on the page. Don’t assume I know who you are; or where you are.” [Note: one of the strengths of the award-winning site for the George School is that the site provides a sense of what George School is, in words, images, and video.]

There were a number of sites that did a nice job in tying real-world experiences into the web—particularly Nazareth University’s Flight of the Flyers site. This site, McGill’s Six Word Stories site, IUPUI’s Events Calendar, and The Road to Xavier were particularly good at engaging visitors with the sites and encouraging them to share information in a variety of different ways and on different platforms, including social networking sites.

Some final comments:

• One judge noted, “What’s with the small fonts?” It wasn’t just older judges who complained about the lack of readability of small type on websites.


• We noted that a lot of sites used Flash and provided no alternatives, so they were inaccessible.


• We noted that many of the people who entered sites this year hadn’t spent much time thinking about how to evaluate the results of the all the work that went into their site. There were some clear exceptions, two of them being George School and Xavier University. At Xavier, a robust analytics toolset allows people on campus to monitor how the site is being used and respond to groups or individuals appropriately. Bravo to these award winners—and to others who thought through this key step to making a site “effective.”


• Many of the entries were a bit cagey about the use of consultants in the redesign process. Some of the winning sites were designed by on-campus teams; others were designed by consultants. We’re not particularly focused on how much a site costs, but on how good it is and what kind of results it gets. Please credit consultants for their work and be transparent about the share of the costs allocated to consultant fees when you prepare your entries. We’ll recommend that, next year, entries that reference consultants but don’t break out their costs be eliminated.

Additional Resources

Short list of Award Winners for 2009

Judges’ Report for 2009

Judges’ Report for 2008

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Award Winners, CASE Awards of Excellence 2009: Category 10, Websites

There were 56 complete institutional sites entered in Category 10A [Complete Institutional Websites] this year and 94 sites entered in Category 10B [Individual Sub-Websites]. This category includes special-purpose websites ranging from campaign sites to alumni sites, virtual tours, admissions sites, annual reports, search sites, and others.

Full report on the judging, complete with comments about each of the award winners, is here [it’s a PDF].

The entry form for the category states:

Grand Gold, Gold, Silver, and Bronze medal awards may be given for innovative Web sites or pages developed for any institutional use. Do not enter only your homepage for evaluation. Judges will only be looking at multi-page/layered sites or pages.

Category 10A: Complete Institutional Websites
This category included sites designed to represent an entire institution, from the home page down. In the past, we’ve noted that it’s difficult to have all the parts of a great site come together at once at an institutional level, and this year was no exception. You’d think that a small institution—a school or a college—would have an advantage here because the scope of work is narrower than that of a large university.

Gold
George School

Silver
Northland College
SUNY-Potsdam

Bronze
University of Virginia
Georgia Tech Research Institute

Category 10B: Individual Sub-Websites
These sites—developed for special purposes for particular audiences such as prospective students, alumni, or others—allow institutions to develop a coherent, deep web experience for visitors. It’s often easier to build a special-purpose site: there are usually fewer political issues, a clearer purpose, and more of an opportunity to measure results—assuming, of course, that there is a plan in place to do so.

Grand Gold
The Road to Xavier, Username: hopsonk1, Password: Twitter1

Gold
Nazareth University Flight of the Flyers

Silver
Boston University Annual Report
[url=http://www.bu.edu/admissions]Boston University Undergraduate Admissions Website{/url]

Bronze
Boston University, College of Fine Arts Website
Cornell University Photography Image Library, login: case; password: case1
Hobart and William Smith Colleges Daily Update
Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis Events Calendar
McGill University
Virginia Military Institute Don’t Do Ordinary Website

Additional Resources

Judges’ Report for 2009

Judges’ Report for 2008

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Rethinking “Visitors”: Just Call Them … Friends

Three years ago—Tuesday, 30 May 2006—to be exact, I posted ”Just Call Them Visitors”, which remains one of my favorite posts on this blog. I believe it’s one of the most important, too.

I stand by most of the sentiments expressed in that post, starting with this one:

People don’t “use” websites, they “visit” them. So just call them visitors, please, and design websites to make visitors feel welcome, to help them find what they want, and to delight them.

People visit websites to learn something, or to do something that’s important to them. It’s not about the way the site looks, but about making sure that it’s built from the ground up to facilitate your visitors achieving their objectives. Note the emphasis: it’s all about them and what they want.

Of course, 2006 was a long time ago—decades, maybe even centuries, in Internet time. The term “Web 2.0” was just two years old and the meme hadn’t yet slipped into wider consciousness. Now it seems almost passe, since early adopters desperately seek a new buzzword to make them sound cool. Four months after my post, Facebook, which launched in 2004, opened itself up to everyone age 13 and older with a valid email address. No one had even heard of Twitter, which launched in 2007.

So it was different back then. Now, we not only have “visitors” to our websites, but also we have “connections,” “fans” and “followers.” And today a web presence should be larger than a single website. We need to go where the people are and many of them are hanging out on other websites and spending time on social networks. The conversation is going on around us (and in some situations, without us). And in 2009 it’s essential to be part of those conversations.

Still important: Take a deep breath, pay attention to fundamentals

Social media seem easy, deceptively easy. As social media and social networks assume more importance and complement (and maybe someday—though not yet—replace) our websites as places to connect and learn, let’s keep in mind that there are still fundamentals that must be considered before launching a cool Facebook widget or get too far into planning a social media initiative.

I know that sounds so—how can I say it?—old-fashioned. Uncool.

But we still need to ask: for whom are we doing all this stuff, anyway? Whether we are producing an institution’s website or developing its social networking or social media presence, we’re designing for … people. Or at least we at mStoner are. And that should be your paramount consideration, too.

Start with your own website. To help people find information about your institution, you have to design your website for the needs of your visitors. Discovering that what they come to your site to do, to find, to learn is the fundamental challenge of a redesign. What do visitors care about? When you determine their needs, then you can provide information that is relevant to them and make sure they can find it through intuitive organization of that information and great search.

You want to develop compelling content that communicates essential truths about your institution. And you want to ensure that you’re using your content strategically across your site, syndicating it to places where it is relevant and where visitors will discover it when they arrive on a page through an external link or a Google search. Your content should be so compelling that it motivates visitors to take actions that are important to you: explore further, ask for more information, apply, give, sign up, engage.

But today you don’t want to keep content locked up in your site: you want to syndicate it to sites across the web where it can help you to connect to people who already care about your institution—or may come to care about it. I’m thinking of places like Flickr, Youtube, LinkedIn, iTunesU, Facebook. In other words, go beyond your own site to where your audiences are and make sure they can find your content there.

Wait: there’s more

Note, please, that it’s not just about great content in 2009. Today’s visitors don’t just want to visit your website for great content, they also want to engage—that’s why there’s “social” in social media and social networking

It’s time to ponder the deeper implications of “social” media and what that might mean for your institution.

You need to pay attention to the depth of commitment engagement can take and the effect that it can have on how offices run. If you launch a Facebook presence and don’t have plans for tending it and participating in and engaging with the community that will develop around it, why bother being on Facebook in the first place? It was one thing to develop and launch an alumni community in the 1990s: then, you had to convince your audiences that there was value in being part of the community and selling this notion was hard work. Fast forward to 2009: many of the people you’d like to reach are already using Facebook. Many of them are eager to connect with their institutions: in fact, so eager that they probably launched their own affinity groups before you joined the party.

So the real question for today is not about the “how” or “why” of being part of this community, but “when.” It’s not enough to designate people who will develop your content and keep it flowing. You need to think through who is going to manage your community presence and, crucially, what else he or she won’t do, because site management will take a fair amount of time and you’re not likely to get another staff member any time soon.

And for those people that you’re engaging with through Facebook, LinkedIn, or your own social network, maybe it’s time to come up with a name besides “visitors.” Shall we call them “friends?”

So, let me ask this: are you prepared for what will happen when your friends visit your web presence in 2009, not only at YourInstitution.edu but on Facebook, LinkedIn and everywhere else on the Net?

Note: I’d like to thank my wife, Denise Lyons, for her input on this post.

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