Kristina Halvorson wrapping up Day 1 at Confab Minneapolis 2013.

Last week, I attended Confab Minneapolis 2013. And it rocked. I was joined by an international community of content professionals to challenge our thinking and help advance the evolving discipline of content strategy. We also enjoyed a lot of cake.

As in past years, the higher ed community was well represented. If you missed the event, don’t fret. Confab Higher Ed has yet to come (more on that later).

Like many Confab-ers, I left Minneapolis feeling extremely inspired — along with a renewed sense of urgency for making meaningful change in higher ed.

Here are some of the themes that emerged.

Your Voice, Your Values

Last year at Confab, Kate Kiefer Lee from MailChimp said, “Content doesn’t just make people do things, it makes people feel things.” It’s these feelings that enable us to build meaningful relationships with our users — students, faculty, staff, alumni. Our community.

In her Confab Minneapolis 2013 talk, “Voice Lessons: Finding Your Company’s Personality,” Tiffani Jones Brown shared how Pinterest builds these emotional user connections with its voice. Brown described “voice” as your brand, your personality, your "vibe.” In other words, your communication style.

Of course, the big challenge says Brown is that “we don’t exactly own our voice…Getting your voice right takes a village.” Your institution’s voice is not defined by the PR and communications teams; it’s defined by your community at every touch point — through admissions policies, course descriptions, campus tours, career services, and so on. We have to own our voice and plan for using it effectively.

Owning your voice and using it effectively means understanding your institution’s values: Who are you? Who do you want to be? Being able to answer these fundamental questions will enable you to communicate with a voice that represents you.

Since your voice is defined in part by your community, Brown recommends looking within your institution: “You can’t overdub a voice on your organization.” How does your community talk about you? What is the “vibe” that defines you? Learn it and own it.

Less “Me,” More “You”

As a nice follow-up to Brown’s talk, Stephanie Hay talked about building trust with our users. We need to be careful with the words we use to communicate. The words we use need to be honest, up front and genuine. Anything short of that causes users to doubt our intentions.

"Stop using marketing words,” says Hay. “If you’d sound like a tool saying it to your mom, you probably sound like a tool.”

In order build trust, we need to build relationships with our users and give them a reason to care about who we are and what we do. We need to flip our messaging from “Me” to “You.” Want users to care about you? Use clear language and be up front about your value. “Users trust what they know,” says Hay.

At the end of the session, an attendee asked, “What if my newsletter really is award-winning?” In other words, what if “marketing words” are honest? Hay says you can still use these words, but first ask yourself, “What do my users care about?” If your users care that you have an award-winning newsletter — if that is relevant, useful information for your audience — then it’s appropriate.

Building trust with our users is hard. We need to be thoughtful about the words we use, making sure they communicate clearly and reflect the voice of our institution.

Invest in Relationships

A theme from this year’s conference, which may already be evident, is that as content professionals, we’re in the business of building relationships — with our audiences as well as our peers. Amanda Costello from the University of Minnesota talked about creating content with internal stakeholders — experts and specialists.

We need to put the same work into building relationships with internal content stakeholders as we do with our external audiences. This means listening to their needs and helping them to do good work on the web.

Costello says meet with people on their turf. Go to their office. Go to their meetings. Learn about what they do and how you can help each other.

Perhaps the most important skill for content professionals is listening. Costello talked about being an expert listener. Build working relationships. Build trust.

By listening, you not only build working relationships with subject matter experts, you also learn. Costello made a great point: Subject matter experts know your audience because they know your content. Learn from them.

Be Interesting

Melissa Rach, co-author of “Content Strategy for the Web, Second Edition,” explored the importance and value of interesting content — why you need it to capture people’s attention and get them engaged. Here are two of her ideas about making content interesting that really stuck out for me:

Get yourself interested

Most content professionals create content on numerous subjects — many of which may not be interesting to write about. Maybe you’re writing about a new faculty initiative or admissions FAQs or academic advising policies. Whatever the topic, take the time to learn about the subject.

The more you learn about a topic, the more interested you and your users will be in the content you create.

Find information gaps

There is a lot of opportunity on the web to create content that fills information gaps and encourages curiosity. Users often come to our website looking for specific information, which (hopefully) we plan for and provide. But what about information they didn’t know to look for? What about the information they discover and are curious about? Are we planning for that as well? Are we creating content that encourages people to learn more than expected?

In higher ed, our websites can be incredible resources for learning and discovery. Rather than just creating content to describe an academic program, get people excited about the subject — provide learning resources or examples of in-class learning and discovery. Give people a reason to care about you and learn more about the value you offer them.

When to Slow Down

Conventional wisdom says to get our web users from point A to point C as quickly as possible. We’re taught that people come to our website to perform tasks, not to “experience” our website. Margot Bloomstein swung the pendulum the other way to challenge this conventional wisdom, asking: Are users frustrated because the experience is slow, or does it feel slow because of a bad experience? Done well, a slow web experience can offer value.

Bloomstein says users can appreciate slow experiences when they’re:

• Engaged
• Anticipating
• Creating memories

In higher ed, this might mean a lengthy slideshow of commencement or an interactive training guide or an alumni video. I think it’s worth exploring this concept more. If we have clear content goals, we must consider the user experience and how it contributes to these goals. Indeed, fast is not always better.

Content Problem or Culture Problem?

On Meet Content, we talk a lot about content strategy as change management. In higher ed, content strategy tackles outdated thinking about how we plan for and create web content. Jonathan Kahn discussed this issue, saying digital governance fails because we’re afraid of cultural change. He says that while content strategy can help make change, it may not be enough if our institution’s culture is not ready for it.

“The work we’re trying to do with content strategy is incompatible with the structure of our organization,” says Kahn. Looking at organizations that have succeeded in shifting their culture to support meaningful change, such as GOV.UK, Kahn recognizes new or lesser-known practices that that have been successful in supporting change: service design, agile development, cross-functional teams and the Lean Startup.

This is a heavy topic worth exploring more. Does our higher ed culture prevent us from making meaningful change? Can higher ed succeed without reinventing itself?

Embrace Constraints

During the closing keynote at Confab, Paul Ford said, “You can’t have creativity without constraints.” Once said, this seemed obvious to me, yet it’s something I often don’t appreciate.

We’ve got a lot of constraints in higher ed, including limited resources, expertise and time. Yet we’re still able to accomplish a lot. I think our ability to succeed given our limitations is that we acknowledge and embrace our constraints. They challenge us to think differently and to problem solve.

It’s this creative, thoughtful process that allows you to develop a content strategy that works for your institution — creating content guides, tools and processes that set you up for success.

So, what constraints do you embrace?

Get Ready for Confab Higher Ed

After spending a week at Confab Minneapolis, I’m even more excited for Confab Higher Ed this November. Working with Confab Events, we are planning for awesome. Imagine all the passionate sharing and learning about content strategy at Confab, all focused on higher education! Gives me goose bumps just thinking about it.

Last week in Minneapolis I met up with some Confab Higher Ed speakers who shared a bit about their upcoming presentation topics. Grab your coffee and check it out:

The post Higher Ed Takeaways From Confab Minneapolis 2013 appeared first on Meet Content.

Clockwise from top left: CTU faculty bloggers Dr. Myles Vogel, Rich Holloway, April Migel, Dr. Emad Rahim, and Dr. Kathy Wood.

What if I told you that you have a team of expert writers at your disposal? It’s true. Content professionals in higher education are sitting on a potential gold mine of untapped authors. University faculty are subject-matter experts in their field, and many also have excellent writing chops. But how can you best use these experts and turn them into a team of contributing web writers?

At Colorado Technical University (CTU), we launched a faculty blog in summer 2012. During the blog’s early stages, we encountered several challenges. There was a common belief among university staff that we’d never be able to convince our faculty to write for us. Once we overcame this challenge, we still faced another problem: The content we received was extremely inconsistent in tone and quality and required extensive editing.

Also, as excitement over the blog grew, we found we were answering similar repeat questions from new writers curious about how to get stared. And once an author published, we were having trouble motivating them to write for us again.

Despite these obstacles, we now — just under a year later — publish an average of three to five faculty-written posts per week and build traffic to the site every month. I’d like to share with you how we got there.

Our Initial Challenges

Here are some of the obstacles we faced and how we defeated them to get to where we are today.

Getting Past Uncertainties

Our biggest challenge was overcoming uncertainty. Blogging was a brand new medium for many of our faculty — and like many working professionals, they were busy, highly focused individuals. My team and I explained that we weren’t asking for academic papers that took months of research. Rather, we sought short, powerful blogs in the range of 300 to 700 words, roughly equivalent to a long email.

In fact, we offered this tip: In the time it takes to write a long email, you could have just written a blog post.

The comparison proved to be an effective message in helping to clear up our faculty and leadership’s misconceptions about blogging. We used the reference often in our communications soliciting university writers. The day I overheard one of our deans use the line to convince a colleague that he should write a blog post, I knew we were on to something.

Creating Incentives

To jump-start our faculty author program, we initially offered a $200 payment per published blog post. This small amount of money was enough to galvanize initial efforts and build early enthusiasm. But our content team wanted to go broader and build a program that could be powered without financial incentive. So we emphasized how our blog could serve as a platform to position faculty writers as thought-leaders in their field.

Incidentally, several of our faculty bloggers were contacted by newspapers, magazines and radio shows to speak as subject-matter experts on topics they had blogged about. And the neat part was, we didn’t pitch the stories at all — these news outlets found our authors through organic search rather than PR outreach. What we did do, however, was celebrate these wins and circulate them throughout the university as examples of the exposure that could be gained through blogging.

It didn’t take long for word to spread internally as more and more writers were published on our blog. A culture shift occurred in our institution, and within a few months, we no longer needed the financial incentive. Increasing numbers of faculty and staff were eager to contribute — in an average month, new bloggers contributed around 25 percent of our posts, representing five posts a month.

Providing Guidance

Our writers needed tools to guide them and resources to manage the coordination and editorial processes. Author bios and headshots needed to be written and collected. New blogs needed to be reviewed and edited. So our team expanded to include a dedicated coordinator (who handles blog calendar planning and routes blogs from writers to our editor and finally to the web team for publishing), a freelance editor, and a copywriter.

Once faculty blog posts started coming in, we noticed a wide disparity in length, quality and tone. Bloggers needed guidance and parameters to ensure consistent quality. We also continually received the same set of questions from new authors. Their questions needed answers, but we needed a more efficient question-answer solution.

As a result, we developed a set of blogging tools to help guide our authors. This included a content template to serve as a reference when formatting a post, as well as a document offering blogging best practices. We even crafted a voice-and-tone guide as an extension of our brand standards guide in order to define our writing style.

In addition, we created guidelines to address the most common questions and to outline our submission process: how to submit a post, when and to whom to submit it and when to expect a reply. We also wrote guidelines to summarize the review and web publishing process, including editing and legal compliance review.

These content tools improved our processes tremendously. Our writers were now equipped to focus on their articles, and we spent far less time editing posts and answering repeat questions.

Sustaining Motivation

Once we had an established group of writers, we wanted to keep them motivated to continue writing. We made a concerted effort to show our appreciation as often as possible — initially through thank you notes and CTU peer-to-peer recognition awards that show appreciation for fellow employees.

Then we took the process a step further and built a formal recognition program specific to our blog, both to show appreciation for our regular contributors and to motivate new authors to join in on the fun. By contributing at least three posts per year, a writer earns the distinction of official “CTU Faculty Blogger.” In addition to an exclusive email icon blogger badge, writers also receive a development credit toward their professional development goals, a requirement for adjunct faculty.

My team has found our recognition program to be very successful, producing both visibility for regular contributors and healthy competition among other faculty who want to earn their own badge.

Four Tips to Build Your Program

In just under a year, we have over 75 contributing writers and over 200 published articles. Here are some tips to use when building a team of academic writers at your institution.

1. Set Expectations

Your faculty’s definition of writing may be far different from the guidelines on your blog. A 3000-word journal article is a much larger time commitment than a 400-word blog post. When asking your faculty members and academic leaders to spend time writing original content on behalf of the university, be clear and specific.

Create parameters: Do you have a maximum or minimum word count? What should the focus of the post be? Share examples of the type of writing you’re looking for to help potential contributors determine if their schedules will be able to accommodate the work.

Start at the top: If executive leaders show support and contribute to your program, university faculty are more likely to pay attention.

For example, at CTU, Eric Stortz, vice president of operations and regular blog post contributor, was one of our earliest supporters and helped us gain the attention of university leaders. Dr. Connie Johnson, chief academic officer and provost, was also an early advocate of faculty blogging and is still today one of our most frequent contributors. This executive support was influential when soliciting new faculty bloggers.

Ask your university leaders to start first and set the example for others to follow.

2. Explain Value

Describe the benefits of being a published thought-leader. Help contributors see how writing for your blog will be to their advantage. Why will the effort be worth their while? Here are some incentives you might offer.

Beef up their resume: Remind your writers that once published, they too can reap the rewards. A link to a published blog or whitepaper will complement their LinkedIn profile nicely.

Become a recognized expert: Through your distribution and outreach plan, contributors will benefit directly from the added exposure and PR they get for being an expert in their field.

3. Make It Easy

Giving your writers useful content tools will help ensure a quick and efficient process.

Develop content templates and other resources: As mentioned above, these tools make the process easier for everyone. They will help your new writers build and format their posts. They also speed up production time, getting you closer to the final product earlier in the process.

Offer training: Workshops can be a useful tool for training a team of writers. Bring in an outside expert to explain the basics of blog writing and to share best practices with your team. Or use training as an opportunity to convene with your regular contributing writers and take their skills to the next level.

4. Recognize and Reward

Everyone likes to feel appreciated; academic faculty are no different.

Write hand-written notes: Do you recall the last time you received a hand written note? With the rise of digital communications, people today rarely use this form of thanks, which is why it’s more appreciated than ever.

Take advantage of internal opportunities: Share published blog posts with your senior leadership team and encourage them, in turn, to share the posts with their teams.

Use formal recognition programs: If your school offers peer-to-peer formal recognition programs, take advantage of the platform to formally thank your stand-out contributors. Or consider building one of your own as we did.

Access to a large network of highly educated subject-matter experts puts you in a unique position that many content marketers in corporate settings would envy. With the right messaging, tools and reinforcement, a thriving content development team is within your reach.

Do faculty write blogs or other online content at your institution? What have you found helpful to encourage their participation?

Homepage photo credit: CTU blogging superstars Emad Rahim, Ph.D., University Dean of Business & Management and Rich Holloway, J.D. University Program Director of Criminal Justice at Colorado Technical University.

The post How to Activate Faculty to Fuel Your Content appeared first on Meet Content.

“Relentless” is a documentary film about Oregon State University’s student formula racing team.

Video content is a powerful tool for higher education marketing and communications. When done well, it can turn your brand into a channel and connect with your audience at an emotional level. Add technological developments that make advanced digital cinema tools accessible for any budget, and the potential is huge.

Yet, most higher ed websites stumble with making video content work. To be successful, we need to step up to the plate and treat video as an integral part of our content strategy.

The good news: As colleges and universities, we’ve got a rich universe of content to draw from. Our researchers study climate in Antarctica, shape public policy and explore genetic mysteries. Our students are world travelers, Olympic athletes and community organizers. It’s hard to walk across any campus without running into a compelling subject.

The bad news: Many colleges and universities fail when it comes to video content. Entire cable networks dedicated to university programming fizzle and fade or plod along unwatched. Higher ed YouTube videos languish as brilliant lectures online take a backseat to cute cat videos.

But video content for marketing, when done well, can earn views and build your brand. You need to tread the fine line between marketing and storytelling — include your message subtly, and surround it with a great story. University of California Davis illustrates this in “The art and science of beer”:

One of the keys to creating great video content is finding the right talent. There are a few routes to take when staffing up, but they all start with finding a great visual storyteller.

Option 1: Grow Your Own Talent

The era of the Flip camera turned us all into Francis Ford Coppola wannabes. Though only a few years ago, it seems like an earlier age. Before our phones all had amazing HD video capability, those simple, one-button Flip cameras — barely larger than a pack of chewing gum — made it seem so easy. Sure the handheld video was shaky and the audio was low-quality, but the image was stunning and better than anything we’d seen before.

We even invented a conceptual framework that allowed us, as digital marketers, to embrace this amateurish video: It’s more authentic, low-fi is in, too much polish smacks of untrusted commercialism, it’s what is popular on YouTube, and so on.

But the fact of the matter is that most of what we created in the Flip Camera Era was unwatchable. Looking back at our 2008 video content today, it feels dated. It’s more unrefined than it is authentic. The notion that we can turn anyone into a web video producer turned out to be fantasy.

However, this doesn’t mean that you can’t grow your own video content marketing talent.

The next big video innovation after the Flip camera was the advent of the DSLR (digital single-lens reflex) camera. When Canon added HD video capabilities to its prosumer and high-end still cameras, the power of a good quality lens gave an instant cinematic look to the video it produced.

Add an affordable audio device like the Zoom H4N, and DSLRs remain our mainstay for video production. Even broadcast producers use these cameras on major television programs. With the right talent, DSLR cameras allow users to bring a photographer’s sense of composition and a photojournalist’s knack for storytelling to the arena of digital cinema. And that’s where great content marketing begins: with the story.

Despite what many like to think, however, you can’t just hand a Flip camera, an iPhone, or even a DSLR to anyone on your team and expect to capture watchable content. Sometimes you might get lucky, but much of your content will drift aimlessly in the ether of YouTube.

Odds are, though, you’ve got someone in your group who’s an avid photographer with a strong sense of composition. Pair that person with a writer who has interviewing skills, hand them a Canon 7D and a tripod, and you have the makings of a documentary film crew.

The key to growing your own talent is to seek out team members with a passion for the craft. They can’t learn it all on the job — there just isn’t enough time. But if they have enough passion to learn the needed skills (and conduct much of this learning on their personal time), then you just might be able to cultivate a homegrown Michael Moore.

Option 2: Hire a Filmmaker

Filmmaker might seem like an odd position title. I bet that title doesn’t show up on your institution’s HR website.

But if you don’t have the time, or the right mix of interest and ability on your team, hiring a filmmaker might be the best way to go.

There is a difference between a marketer, a videographer and a filmmaker. Great marketers know advertising and messaging. Videographers are detail-oriented technicians. But filmmakers always put the story first, and stories are what you want for content marketing.

When hiring a filmmaker, ask to see each applicant’s demo reel. If it’s a technically precise collection of shots from various commercial or professional projects, that person may not have what you’re looking for. But if you see some visual poetry, experimental footage, time-lapse sunsets, interviews with a grandmother or a local mechanic, you may be onto something.

Any web-savvy filmmaker should have an online portfolio of professional work and personal experiments. I look for a Vimeo account. Vimeo is a video sharing community that tends to attract a more artistic following than YouTube, where cat videos still rule the day.

Browse through their portfolio to see what they’re producing. Based on their work, you should easily be able to learn if you’ve got a committed storyteller on your hands. Look for flashes of artistry, but also watch for play and experimentation. Video technology on the web is a rapidly evolving environment, and your filmmaker will need to continually adapt and learn.

Film schools churn out budding filmmakers by the thousands every year, and more of them wind up on their parents’ couch than in a Hollywood director’s chair. If you can turn one of them loose on your school’s amazing stories, you might have the perfect combination: You feed them with great stories and a steady paycheck, and they’ll feed you well-crafted content marketing videos to carry your brand to an engaged audience.

At Oregon State University, we chose this route. When we became serious about video content, we hired a filmmaker. Our filmmaker, Justin Smith, has film industry experience and a film degree. He’s also earned an MBA and has marketing sensibility. During the week, he produces amazing content for OSU — this has included two longer documentaries (Kel Wer and Relentless) that have screened in a local IMAX theater and on public television, as well as on the web. On the weekends, he sharpens his filmmaking skills with side projects and experiments.

Option 3: Look to the Outside for Talent

A third option for creating video for content marketing purposes is to hire a freelancer or agency. You’d want to use the same evaluation criteria that you would apply to bringing full-time staff on board. Do they have a professional portfolio? Does their work reflect their passion? Can they tell a story?

If a freelancer or agency portfolio contains only traditional broadcast commercials or dry corporate video, you probably want to look elsewhere. But if you spot some strong, compelling examples or experience working on documentary films or broadcast content, then that freelancer or agency probably has some of the story sense you’re looking for.

Agencies that specialize in video content marketing are cropping up more and more. (Disclosure: I know this because I started one called Slipstream Cinema.) Such agencies should give you a higher production value than a lone freelancer. At Slipstream, we’ve developed aerial camera platforms that allow us to get dramatic shots that add a big film look to campus tours or documentary films. A good agency approaches your project with the vision and resources of a feature film crew.

But if you’re working on a budget, a lone freelancer can also be a great option. Local Corvallis, Oregon, filmmaker Eric Buist is an excellent example. Eric’s portfolio site and Vimeo account highlight the perfect combination of story sense, artistic quality and technical competence. At our campus, we work with Eric frequently and trust him to find the right balance between message and story. When we need someone to supplement our team or to recommend to an organization on campus, Eric tops our list.

Cinema-quality video is now par for the course when it comes to content marketing. It’s hard to grasp the transformation that’s taken place over the past four years. The tools are getting better, smaller and cheaper, and the distribution channels are free. But telling a great story is just as challenging as ever.

The good news is that you can choose from multiple paths when it comes to building a video content marketing team. And the potential and power of video content is inspiring. I’ve seen a film, produced by a single staff member with a humble DSLR camera, leave an audience of hundreds breathless.

Universities and colleges have amazing brands and stirring stories. It’s time they found an audience.

Here are a few strong examples of video content marketing in higher education and beyond:

• Relentless, by Oregon State University
• How to write a short story, by Florida International University
• Our Story, by Sierra Nevada Brewing
• Deschutes Landmarks, by Deschutes Brewery
• The Cascade Hop, by Oregon State University

(If you notice a craft brew theme to this selection, it’s reflective of the innovation found in that industry, the predilections of the author, or both.)

How do you use video content for marketing at your institution? What examples of compelling video content have you found?

The post Add Filmmaking Talent to Your Web Content Team appeared first on Meet Content.

The only way to be different is to be yourself.

In a recent post, Rob Engelsman talked about using students to create “authentic content” through social media. Indeed, this can be one of the greatest benefits of social media content. It’s often raw and unfiltered (or less filtered). It’s “authentic.” However, authentic content is not reserved for social media.

In fact, all content should be authentic.

But why is authenticity good for content? What does “authentic content” mean and how do we plan for it? I think this term is used too casually, but it represents a fundamental quality of effective content. Authentic content takes courage. It’s risky. Although, the risk of creating inauthentic content is much worse.

What Is Authentic Content?

Let’s bring meaning to this vague term. To help make sense of “authentic content,” I reached out to the Meet Content community on Twitter. Man, they’re smart. Here’s what they said:

What is authentic content?

Storified by Meet Content· Thu, Apr 18 2013 03:11:02

I think the prevalent theme here is “be yourself.” It’s your voice — your institution’s brand — and all its wonderful imperfections that make it unique and "ooze with personality."

For me, authentic content accurately represents who you are and what you do. These are essential communication goals for any content strategy, and authentic content is the key.

Authentic content is not an unedited YouTube video or aggregated event tweets. Authenticity is not defined by what you say but how you say it. People confuse "unpolished" content with authentic content. Typos, fuzzy images, and unclear Facebook posts will not help people know you or connect with you.

Authentic content requires planning, just like all purposeful content.

What Is the Value of Authentic Content?

Why is being authentic important? Why do we want "content with an identifiable voice" that "is true to the personality of [our] institution"?

Well, if you can’t accurately communicate who you are and what you do, you’re just another brand. Generic and unremarkable. Authentic content allows you to build meaningful connections with your audience. Author Simon Sinek describes this value as building trust and creating support for your brand (video):

When you develop meaningful connections with your audience, they become a partner — willing to share your message (promote your brand) and forgive you when you mess up. People don’t develop connections with generic brands.

People won’t care about you unless they know you.

Why Authentic Content Is Hard

Being authentic should be easy. Just be yourself, right? So why is authentic content so rare?

It’s hard to be yourself. I know. It’s much easier for me to tell you to be yourself than to follow my own advice. Opening yourself up to critique and criticism is tough. All institutions want to be different and stand out, but very few take the steps to achieve this.

Rather than creating content that represents the values and culture of their institution, most organizations try to pretend they’re someone else — someone less flawed. Someone perfect. They want to be different, but they still act like everyone else.

The only way to be different is to be yourself.

I found it much easier to be myself when I was a kid, when I wasn’t worrying about all the things I was trying to say or how I wanted to be perceived. I was the first one in drama class to volunteer for the spotlight. My sixth-grade performance of “Johnny B. Goode” made me a star. (Well, among third graders.)

These days, it takes a minimum of two margaritas for me to do karaoke. While I cringe when my family brings out the VHS tapes of my childhood performances, I’m secretly proud of them. That was me. Goofy, awkward, fun-loving me.

Being proud of your institution (and yourself) gives prospective students and your community something to be proud of. If you want people to fall in love with your institution, then you need to give them a reason to. If you want your audiences to be proud of your institution, you need to stand tall and be proud of yourself by being yourself.

The Risk of Inauthentic Content

When we’re afraid to be ourselves, what we’re talking about is shame. That’s a strong word, I know. But maybe by using this word, we’ll realize that inauthentic content is a problem we need to solve.

In her TED talk on the power of vulnerability (video), Brené Brown describes shame:

“Shame is really easily understood as the fear of disconnection: Is there something about me, if other people know it or see it, that I won’t be worthy of connection?”

We’re afraid that if we open up and act like ourselves, people won’t like us. They won’t want to be our friend. They won’t want to attend our institution. Yet, people need to know us to determine if we can be good friends — if our institution is the right fit for them.

“In order to allow connection to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen — really seen,” says Brown.

You need to remind yourself that you want to build connections with the right people — people who will benefit from and have a positive experience attending your institution. By misrepresenting yourself, you’re doing a disservice to both your audiences and your institution.

The irony is that this is a lesson we all know. We learned this in elementary school, in high school, in the workplace, on Facebook and Twitter. When we allow people to know us, we build meaningful connections.

We need to be willing to say, "This is us — love us or hate us." This message will attract the right people and weed out the wrong people.

We’re not creating content to attract everyone. We’re creating content to attract the right ones.

Of course, this thinking isn’t popular at board meetings where people are looking at application and enrollment numbers. However, the hard truth is if you cater to mediocrity, that is what you will get. And become. The easiest way to marginalize your institution’s value is to act like someone else.

How to Plan for Authentic Content

So, again, we arrive at the question: How do you create authentic content?

To sum up, you need to first know who you are. It’s not enough to talk about what you do, you need to talk about how you do it. If authentic content is content that represents your personality and core values, how can you plan for it without knowing yourself?

Yet, most institutions don’t know who they are. Sure, most have some sort of branding guidelines, defined core values, or the ever-popular mission statement. But do those descriptions represent authenticity or just brand vision? Do content contributors know how to use these descriptions to convey who they are through the content they create? For most organizations, the answer is no. And the result is a mishmash of competing messages and personalities — or, possibly worse, a distinct lack of personality.

Authentic content — effective content — needs to reflect who you are and what you do. This requires having clearly defined communication goals, including voice and tone.

Most higher ed web content talks about what institutions do but not how they do it — or how the institution’s qualities add value to its offerings.

If you’re creating authentic, trustworthy content on Facebook but guiding people to your website containing inauthentic content, your website undermines the trust you have built with your users. Similarly, if your marketing landing page content is friendly and welcoming but your academic program page content is cold and distant, you lose that initial connection you established with your users.

The need for clear, consistent communication is why messaging should be the foundation of your content strategy. Clear communication doesn’t happen by chance. Create a message architecture. I offer examples in my talk, "Editorial Style: Your Guide to Clear Communication on the Web."

Margot Bloomstein shares her method for developing a message architecture in "Content Strategy at Work." I find it immensely valuable.

What does “authentic content” mean to you? What does authentic content look like at your institution? We’d love to know!

The post Be Yourself: Embrace Authentic Content appeared first on Meet Content.

“Ten disposable cameras. Five locations. One authentic view of a day at Ithaca College.”

For me, one of the best parts of higher ed is getting to work with students. Involving them in your social media efforts to create authentic content is a huge advantage — just ask Amy Grace Wells from Texas A&M AgriLife Communication. Good authentic content can increase engagement and build community, which is why I try to create as much of it as I can at Ithaca College.

I began running Ithaca’s social media presence when I was still a senior and almost immediately after graduation felt my grasp of day-to-day campus life slip away. So much of what I’d covered on social media came out of conversations with other students, and knowing what the big topics were from dorm to dorm helped keep me consistent and authentic.

The obvious solution to losing my roots was to dress like a college student and move back on campus … kidding. Although I do still dress like a college student. The solution was to hire students. A whole herd of them. Or as one friend coined them, my Klout Army.

Building a Social Media Workforce

The first time I put out the call for student interns was in January 2012. I posted the application only on social media and received about 15 applicants. I hired half to be the guinea pig version of what was then called the Ithaca College Student Social Media Team.

We met weekly, ate pizza and talked about social media trends, what the college was up to online and what events were happening that we thought warranted coverage on our social media. It was fairly unstructured, but we quickly established a Google calendar so that students could input events they had heard about for us to discuss at the meetings. We also tested some promotions, short videos and emerging platforms.

It was an overwhelmingly positive experience because I could feel the beginning of a strong tilt toward authenticity and community-built content, but a few speed bumps along the way forced me to rethink my approach a bit.

What emerged in fall 2012 was a new 18-member team split into three categories: strategy (long-term projects), coverage (daily events) and production (content requiring technology more advanced than an iPhone). We still met weekly, dedicating the first half of the meeting to discussing social media as a big group and then splitting into the smaller teams. Returning members from the spring acted as leaders to help guide the larger team.

The new approach worked well, but when it came time to execute projects, the students involved fell out of their small teams and relied more on who was actually available to help. The team also felt a bit bloated; with a group so large, there was barely enough event coverage and project work to go around.

We did make do, however, and produced some pretty damn cool work — like the disposable camera project Life at IC, a behind-the-scenes look at student media coverage of the election, and the launch of our Tumblr. But about two-thirds into the semester, I decided to abandon the three-group strategy and return to one united team.

#ICsocial at Work

Now in its third semester, the student social media team is thriving with about 13 members. We’ve coined a shorter name for the team, #ICsocial, and use that tag to post interesting articles on Twitter. We also occasionally run live Twitter chats that allow my student staff to talk with other higher ed professionals and alumni about the way media is changing.

When an idea for a project comes out of a meeting, students from the team volunteer to be project managers and take the time to fill out a creative brief — the same one that our Marketing Communications office uses. Once approved, the project manager stewards the effort through to completion, recruiting other members of the team to collaborate and assist when needed. To manage this, we use an online project management tool called Asana.

This process is more efficient than the free-form project management I used with earlier versions of the team. Plus, it allows different students to step up when they want to and teaches students about effective project management.

Because we have a revolving group of team members from semester to semester, I give a one-on-one presentation to new members before they join. It details the history of Ithaca College in social media, where we want to go and how important students are to that process — it’s our baseline strategy.

Arming Students With Strategy

The hope is that by showing students the reasoning behind past projects, they can get a feel for what we want to accomplish moving forward. When we strategize during meetings, it’s generally done in the context of past projects. “This new idea will be like this one with its target but this one with its execution.” It means we’re all speaking the same language when we work on the day-to-day creation of content.

Our overall strategy can at times be difficult to apply to individual posts, so just in case it doesn’t sink in, I have an extra checkpoint built into our posting method: All social media content goes through me. My students don’t have administrator access or passwords to any of our pages. Instead, they feed me in real time via text and/or email the content they create so that I can post it, ask them to improve it or take a pass on it. I pass on a lot of things, not because they’re all bad, but because I want to hold us to a certain standard.

Admittedly, that standard can at times be pretty ambiguous. We’re in essence trying to marry Ithaca College’s branding campaign and marketing priorities to the voice and pace of frequently updated social media accounts. At its simplest, we’re asking, “Does this sound like us? Look like us? Will people be surprised this came from us?”

If it gets more complicated than that, I try to work out the specific pros and cons with my students. Sometimes I already know which way I lean on an issue, but it seems more beneficial to let the students work their way to that conclusion on their own. That way, over time, they think more strategically.

The Payoff? Great Content (and Pizza)

So what’s the ROI (return on investment) of a student social media team? Well, I pay in pizza and soda, and in return get student-generated content to post online almost daily — and often more than once a day. Recent examples include a Q&A with a successful alumnus, a student-generated playlist for midterms and a GIF to show off a big campus event. A student social media team also keeps me from having to attend an impossible number of events and adds a more authentic touch to what we post.

In return, students get to participate in (hopefully) enriching weekly discussions and have an impressive line to add on their resume. At the end of each semester, students fill out an evaluation that helps me see where we can improve or adjust, and many have commented that they find value in the weekly discussions. In addition, I’ve written recommendation letters for students looking to use their experience to land social media internships all over the country.

In the future, maybe one of them will have my job …

The post Creating a Student Social Media Army at Ithaca College appeared first on Meet Content.

Building a content governance culture means we all need to be teachers — and students.

When people think about content governance, they often think roles, responsibilities, workflow and documentation. But there’s an element to content governance that is equally important and often overlooked: training.

Content governance means understanding existing expertise and knowledge gaps and training content contributors on policies, guidelines, workflow and best practices. To make sure your staff has the necessary expertise and the ability to do great work, training needs to be part of your governance plan.

Fundamentally, content governance requires educating everyone involved in the publishing process. But even more so, successful content relies on a cultural support for governance with active sharing and learning.

Building a content governance culture means we all need to be teachers — and students.

Who’s In Charge of Training?

You.

Content training can’t exist in a vacuum. It has to be part of the governance process. This means training happens at every level within your institution.

An inspiring moment early in my career was hearing a website owner say, "Our website sucks because content owners don’t take responsibility for their content." This person was referring to department heads who ignored their content by not regularly publishing new content or maintaining existing content. They also didn’t know it was their job to do so — and even if they had known, they weren’t trained on how to do the work well.

If you’ve ever blamed content contributors for bad content when you haven’t provided them with the tools and training to do their work effectively, I’ve got some tough love for you: It’s not their fault the content is bad — it’s yours.

Of course, training can’t happen haphazardly. We need to get organized.

While your editor-in-chief should set the stage for content training, it takes a team to make training work. Consider identifying a small set of content professionals — content publishing experts and other people in leading content roles — to become trained experts on your content strategy, including related documentation, tasks and workflows.

Like all elements of content governance, training needs ownership to ensure that it happens — that proper training guides and lesson plans are created and that necessary training tools are made available.

Planning for Content Training

In order to create an appropriate content training plan, you need to understand available staff expertise, knowledge gaps and your audience.

Identify knowledge gaps

Because digital publishing requires such varied proficiencies, there will always be knowledge gaps for content contributors, regardless of their role. That’s to be expected. What’s important is that you’re aware of the gaps so that you can organize training sessions or acquire outside expertise as needed.

Here is a list of some common web content publishing areas of expertise that you should account for:

• Web writing
• CMS and other publishing tools
• Copyediting
• HTML/CSS/JavaScript
• Metadata and taxonomy
• Information architecture
• SEO and findability
• Accessibility and usability
• Photography / editing
• Video / editing
• Page design and layout
• Community management

After assessing knowledge gaps and available expertise, identify opportunities for internal cross-training or outside professional development. Content groups, which I’ll get to later, provide a valuable forum for cross-training.

Let’s consider two types of audiences for training: content experts and contributors.

Train content experts

Yep, train the trainers!

In order to bring everyone up to speed and establish a training model for content experts to support your governance plan with, you need to train them to do that work. In other words, help them to train others. Everyone needs help with training. No one can do this work alone.

Train content contributors

Once content experts are trained, it’s time for them to spread the love. Content contributors can be subject matter experts, content creators, approvers or publishers. Often they are the people on the front line of the publishing process — people who are actively involved but not content publishing experts.

Every step in the publishing process is a chance to educate. Rather than griping with colleagues by the Keurig machine about a poorly written enewsletter, use the situation as a learning opportunity. Content contributors can’t do great work if they aren’t trained to do so.

What if people don’t want to learn?

I’ve never heard someone say, “I love creating crappy content.” However, I have heard content contributors express frustration about not knowing how to create quality content.

Teaching requires patience and persistence. If people don’t respond well to your instruction, reevaluate your teaching methods. Content is political, and no one likes being told they’re wrong. Make training a positive experience.

Rather than just pulling out your red copyedit pen, demonstrate examples of good work and encourage dialogue so people understand why change is necessary, not just what needs to change.

Teaching is tough, no doubt. We could all stand to be better teachers.

Content Training Checklist

So, where do you start with training? What topics should you cover? The following checklist provides a starting point for evaluating training needs:

• Are staff trained on content policies, processes and guidelines?
• Do you have adequate documentation, including guides for editorial style, SEO, accessibility, usability, delivery methods, content types and formats?
• Have you made messaging and communication goals useful and usable for content contributors?
• Do you make content contributors aware of changes in web policies, processes and guidelines?

Foster a Content Culture

As I mentioned, a successful content strategy relies on cultural support for governance. To help foster a supportive content culture, provide forums for sharing and learning about content strategy. While formal training sessions can be helpful — particularly when you’re discussing big changes in policies, processes or tools — I find less formal discussions to be most effective. Make learning fun.

One of the greatest challenges of working on the web is that there’s always something new to learn. None of us can know it all. Publishing on the web requires dozens of skill sets and varied expertise. Let’s learn from each other.

Content groups

To encourage support for your content strategy and to enable collaboration and training, create content groups as a forum for sharing and learning. You can keep content group meetings small to allow for more dialogue or large to allow for broad training.

Content groups can be used for:

• Discovering content and publishing problems
• Encouraging feedback from content contributors in all roles
• Enabling cross-training and information sharing
• Informing staff on content governance policy and workflow changes

Keep meetings focused and useful, but encourage open discourse to uncover problems, solutions, concerns and opportunities.

To foster cross-training and information sharing, assign a training topic to someone for each meeting. Use regular meetings to share expertise.

Maybe one day Steve from your editorial team presents on word usage and grammar, and another day Sally from the design team presents on wireframes and responsive web design. Encourage assigned trainers to demonstrate expertise in a particular area or to research and present on a topic of interest.

Think interdisciplinary. Content doesn’t belong just to content editors; it belongs to everyone in the publishing process. And if we’re going to learn what we need to know in order to do stellar work on the web, we must consider the full scope of expertise.

Publish content guides

Okay, getting back to basics, consider your content guides for training and learning. To be useful, content guides and tools need to be easily accessible. Hard-to-find or hard-to-access documentation becomes a deterrent for content contributors and hinders buy-in for your content strategy and the content culture you’re trying to foster.

Publish documentation in a shared workspace. When deciding where to publish documentation, consider what will make it as easy to access as possible.

Encourage and document feedback

Real FAQs rarely happen in planned meetings — they happen when someone is trying to format a pull quote, optimize a photo for the web, copyedit a news story and so on. Make it easy for people to ask questions and find answers when it really counts.

An internal wiki or “knowledge database” can be a great training tool. Encourage people to post questions and answer others’ questions. Curate these real FAQs into searchable learning guides. These topics also become great fodder for more formal training or content group discussions.

How do you support content training at your institution? What methods work well for you?

Photo by HighEdWeb / Flickr Creative Commons.

The post Training: The Missing Element of Content Governance appeared first on Meet Content.

It’s never too late to do something right.

Any digital initiative — be it a website redesign, a social media campaign, or an enewsletter — should follow a content-first approach. But, as content strategist Corey Vilhauer reminds us, “There is no universal content strategy methodology.” Thanks to the insights shared from our peers across higher education and the broader world of content strategy, we have a lot of models to learn from and adapt for our needs.

Yet, as we know, things rarely go as planned. We don’t always have the luxury of implementing that carefully crafted methodology. Maybe we just got brought in to that admissions newsletter project, or looped in late to the medical school’s redesign. The deadlines are fixed, the pressure is high — and the attention to content has, to date, been lacking.

When confronted with this reality, all of the right questions may barrel through your mind:

• Who is this for?
• What are we trying to accomplish?
• What content is needed to succeed?
• What is the state of preexisting content (if any)? Has it been audited? Is it being revised?
• Where is new content (if any) coming from?
• Who will manage this content going forward?
• What is the process for evaluating the effectiveness of this effort?

You may not, however, get the answers you seek. Or any answers at all.

So, now what? Our methodology may no longer be applicable, but at least we have a seat at the table — and better late than never. And we have a sense of obligation to see that this project is as successful as it can be, even if the process is imperfect.

How do we salvage this situation? It’s time for a content strategy Hail Mary. Our game plan may be foiled, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still win. In the closing minutes of a tight game, the winning quarterback must showcase three traits: decisiveness, leadership, and improvisation.

A Different Game Plan

One of the hardest parts about coming in to a project late is gauging the reality of where you’re at in the process.

• Has content been considered at all, or perhaps in part?
• Is the timeline realistic?
• Are the available resources adequate?
• Is everyone involved working with a shared understanding of the project’s strengths and liabilities, or are there any misconceptions?

The best tool to bring into these scenarios is a good question — preferably, a stack of them. Don’t make or accept assumptions — keep asking and probing until the truth reveals itself. It may not be pretty. But it’s essential to reveal and accept that truth in order to know what the next steps should be.

That said, no matter how ugly the reality of this project and the state of its content is, now is not the time to point fingers. Casting blame never does anything except distract attention from the real problems that need solving. What’s done is done. Focus forward and stay positive.

Now that we’ve assessed and accepted the reality of the project, it’s time to bring content to the forefront. This makes the assumption that you are coming into the project with some degree of influence. Any measure of influence is valuable and can be magnified by how you wield it and by demonstrating the value of your involvement.

The first step is to see how much you can re-engineer the project plan.

• When is the deadline or launch date? Is that date fixed?
• How many resources and how much dedicated time can you bring to bear within that window?
• What needs to be done at launch in order to satisfy the top stakeholders and satisfy the top echelon of user needs?
• With those tasks identified, how do you prioritize them within the time given?
• What can be completed in a preliminary fashion now and fleshed out later?
• For all remaining content tasks, how do you prioritize them for any extra time pre-launch and for the time immediately following launch? What can be retrofitted later?

With that planning done, it’s time to get cranking.

We Can Be Heroes

At this phase, we’re really just improvising, which is a nice way of saying “making things up as we go along.” This isn’t ideal, but it’s not a bad thing either. We’re applying past experience and best practices within a given context to try to achieve a desired result. We’re being adaptive, taking risks, and favoring progress over perfection. It’s actually a great way to get things done, eleventh hour or otherwise.

Improvisation is a critical skill in this context. Some additional considerations:

• Find a champion. Who will support you as you advocate for content to be a primary consideration? This may be your boss, or your boss’ boss, but as content strategist Elizabeth McGuane reminds us, maybe it’s someone who falls below you in the hierarchy, or someone in an entirely different group on campus. It doesn’t matter. The key is to have someone willing to back you up and support you as much as they can.
• Be decisive. The clock may be working against you. The pressure may be on. By speaking up and trying to guide the project down a more productive path, all eyes are on you. It’s important to keep things moving forward, and that means making decisions and setting priorities. Take input and seek knowledge wherever possible to inform those decisions, but don’t get caught in stasis. Choose progress over perfection.
• Delegate. You often can’t (and shouldn’t) do everything. Delegating tasks will help the project move forward, while also giving people investment in the process and perhaps even exposure to new ways of thinking about content.
• Be resourceful. Can you find new resources — people, applications, processes — to help the project move along? Be creative. This is where tapping some of the relationships you’ve been cultivating across campus may come in handy. Sometimes, the most help can come from an unexpected place.
• Schedule a post-mortem. You may have been able to come in mid-project and bring a much-needed content-centric perspective, but it shouldn’t have gone down like that. Content should have been a focus from the start. Before memories fade, it’s important for the team to sit down and discuss what worked and what didn’t, so that future projects stand a better chance of success. Don’t just talk about it — schedule it. Book a room. Order lunch. Make it happen.
• Remember: There’s always day two. Launch is never the end of a project — it’s more like a beginning. You can always continue to iterate and improve post-launch, so don’t feel like you need to solve every problem right now.

The Secret to Content Strategy, Revealed!

For a moment, forget about methodologies. Forget about audits and measurement and style and workflows and the rest of it. Here’s the overarching truth:

The secret to content strategy is leadership.

“The only way out [of a bad situation] is to stop waiting for permission, and to start leading,” says Jonathan Kahn of Together London. “This isn’t technically complex, but it takes courage: the willingness to leave our comfort zones, face our own fear of confronting the status quo, and overcome our resistance to shipping.”

We can’t wait around for someone else to speak up for the value of content. Remember, we need to be selling content strategy at every turn. No one’s going to do that for us. Sometimes, we need to be the leader we’re waiting for.

“Underneath it all, a master content strategist must be an advocate and a diplomat,” Rachel Lovinger, content strategy director at Razorfish NYC, wrote in A List Apart. “We must advocate on behalf of the end users, the business users, the stakeholders, and the content vision itself. And we must use diplomacy to influence a wide range of people over whom we don’t have any actual authority.”

Even if it’s imperfect or incomplete, it’s never too late to do something right. So, if given the opportunity to help correct a project gone wrong, even at a late stage, let’s find a way to make something of it — not just in the name of quality content and best practices, but because it’s the right thing to do for our institution.

Homepage photo by graymalkn / Flickr Creative Commons. Top photo by tschiae / Flickr Creative Commons.

The post Eleventh Hour Content Strategy appeared first on Meet Content.

Do you know what web content your users care about? If not, it’s time to ask!

For most organizations, the go-to method of content analysis is web analytics. People love numbers: 2,000 inquiries, 500 sign-ups — oh, baby! Unfortunately, these numbers don’t tell the whole story, and if we base our content strategy on quantitative data alone, we’re missing a big piece of the content measurement puzzle.

Web analytics is great at answering "What?" What pages do people view on our website? What actions do they take? But it doesn’t adequately answer "Why?" Why do people view a webpage? Why do they take action — or not take action? And these are questions we need answers for if we’re going to make smart decisions about our content.

To understand what content our users care about and how our website can meet their needs, we have to ask them. All the web analytics insights in the world can’t replace a single user telling you why they came to your website and why they left. Focus groups help us find these answers.

Let’s talk about planning and conducting web focus groups for user research and how to make sense of your findings.

1. Define the Purpose

Just as with all forms of analysis, in order to find answers, you need to first define the questions. What is the purpose of your web focus group? Are you preparing for a full website redesign? Are you looking to update and improve your career services website? Are you trying to figure out how to best use social media to support your website goals? Before moving forward, clearly define your purpose.

2. Decide Who to Invite

Choose web focus group participants based on their direct knowledge of the content being assessed. For example, if you are assessing admissions content, try to find newly admitted students who recently experienced your website as part of the admissions process.

The more removed participants are from the subject matter, the less relevant their responses will be. In the previous example, you can use current students instead of newly admitted students (which is a common and practical alternative), but their opinion of your website will change significantly the moment they arrive on campus. It’s worth the effort to find fresh opinions, if possible.

To get started, create a list of web user attributes that will help you select appropriate participants. For a student focus group, you might consider age, gender, geographic location, area of study, on/off-campus housing, graduation date and so on. It’s nearly impossible to have the perfect mix of attributes in your focus group, so it’s important to prioritize them to make sure you get the best mix possible.

3. Choose a Size That Fits

I find eight to ten participants to be a good focus group size in most cases. You want the group to be small enough to encourage open discussion but big enough to provide adequately diverse opinions. It’s common for a participant to change his or her answer after hearing others talk — and that’s a good thing. Open dialogue is important to uncover insights that both you and focus group participants didn’t know to look for. (More on this later.)

4. Get People to Help

Food and gift cards! It’s hard to turn down a free pizza and an Amazon gift certificate.

However, what you really want are dedicated, interested participants who are motivated to help — not just any hungry student. Talk to knowledgeable staff or faculty for recommendations. Or, if you’re really stuck, you can always ask student staff to help while on the clock. But, yeah, food and gift cards will help seal the deal.

5. Decide What to Ask

When defining your questions, focus on the purpose of your web focus group and what you want to learn. The questions you ask will shape the discussion and affect the outcome, so take care in crafting them. Consider a funnel approach: Start with broad questions that will foster engagement, then offer more specific questions to guide participant responses.

Focus group questions are most successful when they are open and neutral.

Sample questions:

• What is your overall impression of the XYZ website?
• How often do you use the XYZ website?
• What is the primary reason you visit the XYZ website?
• What other reasons do you have for using the XYZ website?
• What types of content do you expect to find when accessing the XYZ website?
• Are you able to find the information you need on the XYZ website? If not, what is missing or difficult to find?
• What suggestions do you have for improving the XYZ website, including design, information and functionality?
• Describe a positive experience you’ve had with the XYZ website. What made it a positive experience?
• Describe a negative experience you’ve had with the XYZ website. What made it a negative experience?
• How do you search for content on the XYZ website? Do you use the navigation or the search box, or rely on email or other external links?
• What devices do you use for accessing the XYZ website? Desktop computer, tablet, smartphone?

Your list of questions should be much shorter. You will likely have time for only five or six questions in a one-hour meeting. Plus, you want to have the flexibility to be able to ask unplanned follow-up questions. Although you’re guiding the discussion, you don’t know where you’ll find all your answers — allow the conversion to move off course when appropriate.

Professor Glenn Blank of Lehigh University offers good advice on conducting a focus group, including tips for leading the discussion.

6. Evaluate Your Findings

One of the challenging aspects of focus groups as a form of content analysis is that participants’ answers leave a lot of room for interpretation. It can be hard to translate diverse opinions and discussion into actionable insights. This is why special care should be taken to document and articulate participants’ feedback.

In addition to evaluating what participants say, also consider how they say it. Are they enthusiastic? Are they frustrated? Are they indifferent? To capture these subtleties, use a voice recorder in addition to written notes to document the discussion.

Focus your findings

To help make sense of your findings, evaluate participant feedback within the context of your content goals and the purpose of your focus group. For example, if you’re evaluating your admissions email communications, what do participant responses tell you about the effectiveness of those communications? The questions you ask will uncover these insights from different angles. It’s your job to piece these findings together to make them meaningful and purposeful.

Identify themes

One of the tremendous benefits of user research is not just addressing known content problems but discovering unknown content problems and new opportunities. To uncover such insights, take note of themes that arise from the focus group. Were there comments that were unexpected or surprising? Were opinions contradictory to your assumptions? Zeroing in on these themes will help you paint an accurate picture of your content and improve questions for future focus groups.

Measure trends

In previous posts, I’ve written about how as your institutional goals and users’ needs change, so does your content strategy need to change. This begs the question, How do you know when your users’ needs change? With qualitative user research, we can answer this question just as we would with quantitative analysis: measure trends.

Conducting a focus group can’t be a one-time event. It has to be part of your content measurement plan. How do people respond differently to your questions over time? How do their content needs change over time?

For example, maybe students are looking for more than FAQs from your mobile website and are looking to conduct real business — like checking their student loan status or registering for a class. Maybe alumni are looking for more than a list of upcoming events and want to find and connect with fellow alumni online. You won’t always like the answers you find, but effective content requires adapting to changing user needs. We have to stay on top of these changes in order to maintain successful content.

What About Surveys for User Research?

Absolutely! User surveys are a valuable measurement tool in your content strategy toolbox. In particular, they are incredibly helpful at quantifying user research, making it easy to evaluate results. The downside is that you lose out on the valuable dialogue from focus groups that can uncover previously unidentified content problems and opportunities. However, depending on your user research goals, a web user survey might be the right choice.

Your Content Measurement Plan

Web user focus groups are only one piece of the content measurement pie. To gain an accurate understanding of your users’ content needs, you need a balance of qualitative and quantitative user research and content analysis methods. Along with focus groups, also consider usability testing, web analytics and web user surveys (as just discussed) to help you glean a more accurate picture.

When developing your content measurement plan, it’s important to consider how these research methods work together. Michael Powers, director of web services at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, offers some good advice on creating a comprehensive (and affordable) user research program.

How do you tackle web user research and content measurement at your institution? What methods have you found to be especially effective or problematic?

The post Web Focus Groups: Know Your Users, Know Your Content appeared first on Meet Content.

What content treasures lurk within your university archives?

When considering how best to use social media platforms such as Twitter or Facebook, we are often thinking in real-time. What are people talking about right now? How can we communicate the vitality of campus life? How can we be proactive listeners and responsive publishers?

However, one of the most intriguing ways to use real-time platforms comes from looking into our past. Many institutions are finding that highlighting archival university content — whether it’s a photo of students from the 1940s wearing beanies and bobby socks or a post citing a memorable milestone in campus history — can appeal to a range of audiences and support an array of communications objectives. Additionally, the cache of content available to you may be significant, depending on how much has been digitized.

This content may originate from your communications office, your university archivist, or a partnership between the two. What matters most is how it is planned and published. Here are a few examples of how institutions are making the most of their archival content via social media.

University Archivist Turns Publisher at UW-Madison

Tweeting and Tumbling Toward Community

Vicki Tobias, images and media archivist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, created the Twitter and Tumblr accounts for her office in 2011 in order to “ to engage new audiences and build greater awareness of the university archives by creating community around our shared campus history.“

“Twitter provides an opportunity to share campus history facts in short bursts,” says Tobias, as well as to promote services, resources, events, and projects relating to her office. She also uses Twitter to field research questions — and in a few cases, Twitter conversations have prompted donations of historical materials to the university.

The Tumblr account, however, is “a platform for telling stories” that hews close to its title, “Found in the Archives.”

“Each week, I (or a student worker) will draft a short story about something interesting (photo, audio clip, film, correspondence, etc.) discovered while processing a new or existing collection,” explains Tobias. “It has to be provocative and tell an interesting story about our campus history, one that perhaps hasn’t been heard before.”

For Tobias, these channels help people understand history in a new and more meaningful context.

“Social media is a fabulous way to engage audiences in history,” she says. “A successful post or tweet, in my opinion, is one that elicits such responses as ‘Wow, I didn’t know that’ or ‘Tell me more, that’s fascinating.’”

Bringing History to Life

Tobias uses creativity and humor to hook the reader, but she also tries to tap into the power of shared experiences.

“For example, our campus is bisected by a large and painfully steep hill – Bascom Hill. Anyone who’s been on this campus has climbed it hundreds if not thousands of times in all weather,” she explains. “I posted a cartoon from the 1930s showing students complaining about the hill and the response was overwhelming: ‘I know the feeling.’ ‘I hated that hill.’ ‘I loved sledding on that hill.” And so on.

“This kind of response has helped direct our content decisions to include more posts and tweets that celebrate shared experiences and start a conversation around that experience.”

In selecting content, Tobias balances a light touch with respect for campus history and equal representation of a variety of campus groups, individuals, and events.

“History is not always ‘pretty’ and every university has had its darker moments,” says Tobias. “We don’t avoid heavy topics such as the Dow Riots in ’67 or the Sterling Hall bombing, but we do approach such topics with a careful attitude.”

Whenever possible, Tobias strives to plan content that complements current campus activities and events, such as commencement or basketball season.

“For example, the Engineering Expo occurs in April 2013. We have historic film footage from the 1966 Expo. I’ll craft a post highlighting the film footage then share the post with the communications staff from the Engineering department,” she says. “We love to see our content re-used by departments!”

‘Throwback Thursdays’ Bring Content Wins to University of Arkansas-Little Rock

One-Off Hit Becomes Weekly Standard

Meaghan Milliorn, web communications specialist at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock (UALR), and Jennifer Godwin, web communications manager at UALR, help maintain the university’s Facebook page. In July, they posted a photo of a campus Apple computer lab dating to the 1980s. They posted it with the witty caption, “We’re really excited about some of the updates made in the Mac lab this summer.”

“It was an instant hit, by our metrics,” says Milliorn. “We hoped we were on to something.”

While Milliorn was on maternity leave in October, Godwin launched a weekly feature of similar content for Facebook, dubbed “Throwback Thursday.” In addition to sharing archival photos and placing them in historical context, some weeks the photos are accompanied by a trivia question, with correct respondents winning UALR swag. But prize or not, the content has proven to be popular among UALR’s Facebook followers.

“The pictures that are the most unusual or interesting receive the most engagement. The picture of the 1974 rock concert was fun and many liked/shared/commented on it, but the photo of our chancellor from the 70s had less positive feedback,” says Milliorn. “Photos about one person have received less engagement than the photos of events or locations on campus. We’ve found people love to see how the campus has evolved over the years.” The aforementioned rock concert, for example, took place in a location that is currently a parking lot.

Extending a Legacy Through ‘Likes’

Milliorn and Godwin draw “Throwback Thursday” content from the photo archives in the Office of Communications, as well as the Alumni Association and Center for Arkansas History and Culture are participating. Trivia items are sometimes drawn from “The People’s College,” a 1987 history of UALR authored by Jim Lester.

The top criteria for “Throwback Thursday” photos is relevancy.

“If it’s registration week, we’ll use a photo of registration as it was 50 years ago – lines snaking out the door and down the sidewalk. If we had an inclement weather day, let’s show the campus back when the bell tower iced over… many of our students didn’t even know we had a bell tower – which no longer works, unfortunately, and is probably why they didn’t know it existed.” explains Milliorn. “Beyond that, we are looking for images that tell the UALR story, from the evolution of our physical campus to the Trojan community members who played a role in shaping our university.”

By using Facebook to host the “Throwback Thursday” feature, Milliorn and Godwin see the promise of social media in helping the UALR community engage with the university’s history, as well as its potential.

“We have a proud tradition as a metropolitan university. As Little Rock has grown, so has our institution,” says Godwin. “By highlighting that growth and our successes over the years, we are sharing with our audience not just our collective past and traditions, but our current connections and shared futures.”

A Productive Partnership: Simmons’ Facebook Timeline

When Facebook introduced its Timeline feature, which presented the opportunity to showcase historical milestones on a Facebook Page, Simmons College social media manager and web editor Amanda Voodre turned to Simmons’ archivist, Jason Wood. The two had teamed up previously for a Facebook featured called “Friday from the Archives.”

Voodre asked Wood to help identify key historical moments, interesting facts, and any other content that may be relevant. “He’s the expert [on College history],” she explains. “My one request was that each milestone had a photo (so a lot depended on what was digitally archived) and that we were telling the story of the evolution of the institution — who was the founder, why and how was the college established, what did students study in the 1900s, what was it like to go to Simmons during the civil rights movement?

“One thing I debated on including was the construction of buildings. I ultimately decided to add them because I think people love to see early historic photos of campus and the Fenway neighborhood.”

In addition, Voodre felt the Simmons College Facebook Timeline should answer the question of why the College’s history is important. “I think our Timeline shows that Simmons has remained true to its founding mission.”

Wood provided the timeline, photos, and copy, while Voodre published the content on Facebook. For Voodre, the partnership enlightened her to a host of content resources at her disposal.

“I’m amazed by the amount of digital photos we had available, and our Facebook Timeline is only a tiny fraction of it,” she says. “I see it as a process to be revisited as more info becomes available.”

An Archivist State of Mind

How are you using your institution’s archives to support your content plan? How do you manage the relationships between communicators and archivists? How have efforts to digitize university archives influenced your content efforts?

Speaking of content digitization, in a future post we will explore how university archivists are working to preserve the content we publish each day — webpages, news stories, social media content, videos, you name it. If you have examples or insights on this topic, please let us know.

Homepage photo by uwdigicollec / Flickr Creative Commons. Top photo by loughboroughuniversitylibrary / Flickr Creative Commons.

The post Mine Your Archives for Content Gold appeared first on Meet Content.

Who is guiding your content strategy for the web? An editor-in-chief is an essential role to stay on course.

Web content workflow and governance include many moving parts. In order to keep the wheels turning, roles and responsibilities must be defined to make sure that all work gets done and that content contributors have clear expectations about their own and others’ responsibilities.

As described in Content Strategy for the Web, 2nd Edition by Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach:

"It’s critical for each person to know what their role is and how it fits into the larger content process. This is why defining ownership and roles is one of the most important aspects of workflow and governance."

Yet, one of the most important roles is also the most neglected. Let’s talk about why a web editor-in-chief is an essential role for all higher ed institutions and the false barriers that often prevent this role from being filled.

Why You Need a Web Editor-in-Chief

Content governance needs ownership

Content guides, tools, processes, and tasks require ownership to ensure they are complete, accurate, and effective. Without ownership, content governance breaks down. And without roles and responsibilities, confusion prevails regarding who is responsible for what.

"Web Editor-in-Chief" is not necessarily a job title — in fact, it rarely is in higher ed. Rather, it’s a role and set of responsibilities that need managing.

Halvorson and Rach offer this description: "The web editor-in-chief helps to establish and enforce all web content policies, standards, and guidelines." This person makes sure that your content strategy works and is being maintained. Content requires a lot of care and support from requestors, editors, authors, subject matter experts, analysts, publishers, and many others. Who’s paying attention to these working relationships and your content workflow? Content governance needs ownership.

Politics will kill your content strategy

One of the biggest contributors to poor quality content is internal politics. With seemingly competing institutional priorities and content goals, it’s often hard to get things done. For content, politics can be deadly.

The foundation of content strategy is the establishment of content goals that align business-unit goals with institutional goals. In other words, it helps to get people on the same page about content goals and priorities. However, this is all for naught if no one has the power to enforce your content standards. Your institution needs an editor-in-chief so someone can say "no."

Without an editor-in-chief, bad content gets published, good content gets neglected, and content communication goals are in conflict. In this game of "my way is better," no one wins.

Someone needs to break the silos

Departments tend to focus on their own work independent of other departments. However, content can’t function effectively in separate silos. It requires internal communication to make sure it supports other departments and the institution as a whole. For example, marketing content should support admissions, and academic advising content should support career services — and vice versa.

An editor-in-chief sees to it that content communicates clearly across all content areas.

Why You Don’t Have a Web Editor-in-Chief

You fear giving up control

Web professionals often worry that by assigning an editor-in-chief, they will have to give up the ability to control their own content. They fear this role will interfere with their work and prevent them from taking the actions needed to meet their content goals. These are unfounded fears.

The editor-in-chief is responsible for supporting your content goals, not hindering them.

I think the real fear here is that people don’t understand what their communication goals are, so they can’t trust that an editor-in-chief can support them. That’s a legitimate concern. If this is you, it’s time to return to the basics. Without communication goals, your content can’t succeed with or without an editor-in-chief.

You don’t think you’re a publisher

While most web professionals agree that content is important, many still don’t consider themselves publishers. They treat their website as a series of projects rather than as a continual process that requires defined roles, responsibilities, workflow, maintenance, and measurement.

The truth is, if you’re involved in the planning, creation, maintenance, or measurement of content, then you’re a publisher.

Publishing is a process, not a project. It requires many different skills and oversight. As I mention in Evaluating the Mantra "Think Like a Publisher", we all need oversight to ensure that the content we create and publish is on-brand and supports our communication goals, not detracts from them.

You worry about political turmoil

As I mentioned earlier, internal politics is a huge problem for content. And many people think an editor-in-chief will exacerbate this problem by causing conflict through power struggles. However, the reality is that an editor-in-chief resolves conflicts by helping stakeholders see how the content they create aligns with other departments and supports those departments’ communication goals.

This benefit is a big win for institutions that struggle with limited resources and expertise to maintain an effective website.

Why a Shared Role Doesn’t Work (And When It Does)

In order to gain support for an editor-in-chief and safeguard against political fallout, institutions often try to divide the responsibilities of this role among more than one person. This becomes a problem. Remember, we’re publishers. Imagine a traditional daily newspaper with multiple editor-in-chiefs — each making decisions about content priorities, scheduling, and roles and responsibilities. It would be impressive if that paper ever went to print on time.

Without clear leadership, content governance can easily fall apart. Here are a few of the reasons why a shared editor-in-chief role doesn’t work.

Shared responsibility:

• Limits ownership and accountability
• Hinders messaging and communication (Because no one person oversees communications, there is risk of duplicate or competing messages.)
• Causes content goals to become misaligned

However, in my experience, the most important guiding principal for content governance is that your plan is realistic, not idealistic. So, while I strongly recommend that the editor-in-chief be a role filled by one person, there are institutions that have made a shared editor-in-chief role work.

For example, as highlighted in Content Strategy for the Web, 2nd Edition, the folks at Normandale Community College have developed a shared leadership model — see "Higher Ed Rocks Confab: Web Governance at Normandale" for our video interview with the group that led this charge. It’s a wonderful case study that helps break the stigmas associated with governance in higher ed.

Although a shared editor-in-chief role can succeed, it puts additional responsibility on the two or more people sharing the role to regularly communicate, especially if they’re not involved in all content planning and policy meetings. Shared ownership is therefore a risk that needs to be actively managed.

How about you? Do you have a web editor-in-chief at your institution? If not, who owns content governance? We’d love to hear about your success stories or any governance problems you have yet to solve.

The post The Case for a Web Editor-in-Chief appeared first on Meet Content.