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mStonerblog Turns Six

Intelligence

mStonerblog Turns Six

Jun 13, 2009By Michael Stoner

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Last year, Kyle James posted “The Six Month Post – Revisiting This Blogs 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.


  • Michael Stoner Co-Founder and Co-Owner Was I born a skeptic or did I become one as I watched the hypestorm gather during the dotcom years, recede, and congeal once more as we come to terms with our online, social, mobile world? Whatever. I'm not much interested in cutting edge but what actually works for real people in the real world. Does that make me a bad person?