mStoner’s blog turns 10

Ah, spring 2003.

In those days, we used dumb phones: there was no iPhone or iPad or Android. No Instagram. No YouTube. No Twitter. And Mark Zuckerberg was still in high school.

But there were blogs. People looked to the blogosphere for insight, information, and interaction. Furthermore, there was ongoing conversation as people followed and commented on what bloggers were writing about. We wanted to contribute to the conversation, so we launched a blog. I wrote our first post on 13 June 2003.

Though it’s hard to believe now [blogs are dead, aren’t they?], it seemed like a daring thing to do at the time. And though we didn’t have much of a vision for our blog when we launched it — nor had we given much thought to how we were going to sustain it — we had the vague sense that it could be a valuable resource. Eventually. Maybe.

Fast forward to 2013 and many hundreds of posts later.

Today, mStoner’s blog is stronger than ever. While we’ve had periods of time when we didn’t post for months, we sometimes post three times a week or more. Once, I wrote most of the posts. Now we have many contributors from across the company who contribute their own voices and points of view. Our blog reflects mStoner’s growth and the experience and vitality of our team.

It’s become a key channel for company news. We’ve used the blog to say goodbye to departing staff members — and we’ve welcomed some some great new people to our team. I’ve used it to report on the state of our business, since I consider regular readers to be stakeholders in mStoner.

And we’re very proud that mStoner’s blog has become a key source of information and insight for our professional colleagues. This is really important to us: We take our commitment to share what we’ve learned very seriously. And we want to use this space to engage and inspire (and maybe infuriate) our colleagues and friends.

Sharing insights from our practice

Over the past decade, some of our most important posts focused on insights we’ve gained from our consulting.

For example, I’ve always really liked the series of posts by Voltaire Miran, mStoner’s CEO, in which he shared his insights from using Indi Young’s mental models in his work with the University of Buffalo. (The big reveal is in this post.)

Mallory Wood, director of marketing, pointed out another example. One of Doug Gapinski’s posts explores “Using Navigation to Support Identity.” She noted, “While there are certain conventions in higher education around information architecture, I think Doug brilliantly outlines why and how IA can support an institution’s branding and identity. Plus, he shares four excellent examples of how this can be implemented in a smart and interesting way.”

And yet a third example, came from Kylie Stanley Larson, one of our project managers. She values Susan Evans’ post, “What Project Managers Need Most: People Skills.” Kylie observed, “I love almost all of Susan’s blog posts, but this one has been invaluable to me, personally. I send it out to our new clients as they are forming project teams and I think it’s been an excellent conversation starter.”

Inspiring new ways of seeing the challenges we face

While we share lots of observations about our work on our blog, we also take a great deal of pride in the posts that articulate new ways of thinking about our work (and yours!).

One of my personal favorites is from 2004, where I discussed “the shopping effect.” This was a time when applicants were just beginning to be aware that the web gave them a new ability to control their access to information about colleges — and how and when colleges had access to them. As a result, they were beginning to “shop” colleges in the same way they shopped Amazon.com or eBay. In a few years, they’d be widely known as “stealth applicants.”

Susan Evans cited “mStoner’s First Law of Branding” as a post that really inspired her; it’s also one of my favorites. She said, “I read this post long before I began working at mStoner. It reinforced my own thinking about comprehensive and cohesive communication strategy. I have used “Everything is connected to everything else” in numerous conference presentations. This post offers an excellent foundation for understanding the importance of integrated communication channels.”

In 2009, we began a series of posts that reported on successful social media campaigns in education. These featured some of the first looks at how institutions were using social media successfully. And their enduring popularity among visitors to our blog inspired our book, Social Works. Voltaire noted, “I loved the Flight of the Flyers because it was — and is — a great exploration of the use of social media and gamification for alumni relations.” (We revisited Flight of the Flyers and included an updated version of it in Social Works.)

Another favorite post is Doug Gapinski’s “Pwireframing: Paper Wireframing.” It was picked up by Smashing Magazine and other sites outside higher ed and continues to be one of the most-visited posts on our blog.

Finally, I really liked last year’s series of interviews with presidents and heads about how they use social media. I had an opportunity to talk to some brilliant and inspiring leaders in preparation for a CASE Currents article, “Hail to the Tweeps” [requires login] and wanted to share their insights as widely as I could.

Watching our blog evolve over the past decade has been fascinating and managing it, at times, has been challenging. But the lessons have been important to us. I’ll share some of them in a post next week.