#PSEWEB

Presenter: Terri Vaughan, Web Customer Support Specialist, Clemson University

Abstract:

Are you one of the lucky individuals who provide support for your organization’s Web content providers who have little, if any, Web experience? Does your organization think typing and word processing skills are all that are needed to be a Web content expert? Is the “Webmaster” role part of a job description’s “other duties as necessary,” If you answer yes to these questions, this presentation is for you. You can transform your Web content providers into Web content experts by teaching a few simple skills. Reveal the “magic” of the internet and how it differs from “the Web.” Show how their Word skills can help them create interesting and informative Web content. Explain writing for print and writing for Web and why it’s important to know the difference. Inspire your content providers to learn these skills and more to transform them into Web content experts and you into a Web support genius!

Notes from presentation …

Many content providers given the job without volunteering and without specific skillset (they can type).

What they want:

• Someone else to do it for them.
• Want their web files and folders to be organized like on their desktop.
• To never learn markup.
• Drag and drop.
• Word like interface

What they get:

• Unfamiliar file structure.
• Inadequate graphics tools – training.
• Unclear or hard instructions.

What they do:

• Put off content.
• Insert improperly formatted graphics.
• Create unfriendly urls.
• Upload documents instead of web pages. (Don’t make users download.)

Clemson is on cascade, good because feels like word processing. Content providers are happy. Don’t have the other skills

What do they need:

• Adequate technical experience.
• Learn web best practices.
• Easy to use img editting tools.
• Ability to adapt print to web.

What we should do:

• Select staff w the right skills.
• Develop training program.
• Require attending training.
• Provide positive reinforcement.
• Periodically check on their web and offer positive as well as support.

Training Regimen:

• Basic computer skills
• How the web works
• Web best practices
• Multimedia formatting and best practices
• Simple tips for writing for web
• Site specific hands on training w tools
• Basic html

How to teach Content Providers:

• Show them confidence
• Avoid tech speak
• Explain why skills are necessary
• Analogies that they can relate to
• Entertain and engage during and after
• Follow up w reminders, cool tricks and compliments
• If you can compare it to ms word, they will get it.
• Stress the increase in their marketability.

Content Providers Love:

• Copy paste from word
• Activate previous version of updated page
• Restore accidental deletions
• Wysiwyg
• Seeing their content live right away

Summary:

• Clemson has 460 content providers. Manual monitoring process. Run report to see what’s been touched. Go out and look at their sites – this is what my job should be.
• Clemson redesign had 4 templates – full, left, left + spotlight, right, in multiple looks.
• Decision makers don’t understand web any better than admin
• Training infinitely better when one on one
• With workflows, someone needs to be in charge.

Presenter: Brad J Ward, CEO – Blue Fuego

Abstract: I will walk through many of Google’s services and products and show attendees how they can use them to increase productivity within their workplace as well as provide a better experience for their website visitors.Sites featured include, but are not limited to, Google Docs, Maps, Alerts, Webmaster Tools, YouTube, Analytics, Forms, GTalk/GChat, Blogger and more.

Notes during presentation …

Recommended Reading: Free, Chris Anderson

First step: get a Google account that you will use for all of this …

Thought: stop and think whether other staff will ever need access – should you create a corporate Google account instead of using your personal one?

Next: set up Google Alerts – great way to get buzz about your institution.

Thought: I am almost anti-google-alerts … relying too heavily on it can cause you to miss a lot of important web content/buzz.  Remember to regularly search your brand (you’ll be shocked by how much didn’t show up in your alerts).

Brad’s Experience: Brad found out that Butler’s $13K mascot costumes had been stolen via a Google Alert.  Caught it early enough to hitch a ride with the buzz and blow tweets and youtube out of the water, even get mass media attention.

Thought: Best practice is to track down specific mentions of your brand, individual applicants commenting about their school decision.  Don’t try to do this for every social mention. Just don’t. Catch what you reasonably can, but unless you have a social army, it’s not realistic to respond to every tweet, blog post, facebook note, discussion thread. If you end up getting them all – great, but don’t hate on yourself for getting 90%.

Next: Google Search Commands

Google search command “Site:uwo.ca” will only search uwo.ca.

Example of use: School decides to change application deadline to December 1 from December 15. Use site: command to find instances of both options to track down any instances of the “old” date.  Now you know everything that needs to be updated (give or take – Google isn’t perfect).

Boolean operators (AND, OR) work on Google and Twitter and most search boxes.  Use them to create a more inclusive search query (results that include multiple versions of your school name all in one result listing, versus 5 separate result outputs).

Next: Create a Google Map

Steps:

1. maps.google.com
2. create new map
3. name & description
4. save
5. tag things – you can drop html right in there – images!.

Check out Sweet Briar College and what they’ve done.

Butler uses embedded, tagged Google Maps to show places to eat.

Next: Google Docs

Example: Uncovering Class of 2013 Facebook groups in December ‘08.  Within 2 hours, edu webbers had pulled together over 200 links to these groups – would have taken Brad forever to do alone.

Forms: You can use Google Docs to create little online surveys?

Next: google.com/webmasters/tools/

Have to embed a little bit of code onto your site to prove you own the domain.  Provides a lot of quality information on your site – top searches, crawl errors (404’s), who’s linking to your site.

Submit a sitemap – directly influence the key links listed with your school on google search results.  “This is what we want you to feature.”

Next: Google.com/talk

“Live answer solution for free on your website.” This is a way your institution could have that for free! Our MBA site wants this – note to self! Your users won’t need a google account, won’t need to sign in.

Next: Google Reader

FYI, you can run your Google Alerts through here.  Also, search.google.com results can be rss’d into here.  Chris Brogan quote: “Make Google Reader your listening station.” You could check every blog every day to see if they have new content, or you can let an RSS reader check for you, and also deliver the content to ya.

Next: Google Voice

Transcribes audio but not very well. Use it to transcribe your voicemail.

Settings > Call widgets > embed “Call me” widget. They enter their phone number, Google calls them and says “Welcome, now connecting you,” then calls you and offers accept, voicemail, listen to voicemail, transcribe. Fantastic! A nice way to set up your mobile number without giving out your actual mobile number.

Next: Google apps for education

take the cost of running your school email off your hands.

http://google.com/apps/edu

Next/First: Google Analytics

free, all sorts of data about the people coming to your site, allow you to track your campaigns, use google url building to track what kind of traffic you’re getting.

Next: YouTube – owned by Google

New YouTube channel design … 77% of ppl that come to YouTube intending to watch one video, watch several.   Every minute, 20 hours of video is uploaded.  Third most visited site in the US, behind google, facebook, etc.

.EDU channels – additional branding options.  Custom header option (see Abilene), branding on every video. Longer videos can be uploaded.

Next: Full list of all the Google offerings: http://www.google.com/options/

Also, Google Labs (check out email goggles! answer math questions before you can check your email in off hours)

How can you Google your workweek?

Googlers get 20% of work week to focus on labs-type ideas, that end up being their best products!

Google Wave – coming soon.  “Going to shake up a lot of how we communicate – as if enough of that hasn’t already happened. Definitely one to keep an eye on.”

Do you have a Max strategy?

CEO of Google – take whatever you are doing and do it at the max in terms of distribution.  Marginal cost of distribution is free, you might as well put things everywhere.  “Max strategy = Max attention.”  But it’s not always good to have 800 videos on YouTube if they aren’t good.

Think And, not Or -  Seth Godin

If you have time to put pictures on flickr and picasa, do both.  Do you really want to alienate the percentage that are on the second most popular service?

“Not everyone is going to want to interactive with you online. Some just want to pull info and send in their application.” @bradjward – good to remember this, amongst all these ideas.

We don’t know what the next big thing is.  Facebook is 5 years old, Youtube is 4, Twitter is three.  The Internet is 4 years old, it is still a virgin.  @bradjward quoting Gary Vaynerchuk.

Neat thought – only ppl looking for a car will go to vw.com.  People open to great content will go to facebook.com/vw.

Sidenote: Always annoying that major brands get magical different rules on Facebook.  We tried to register Facebook.com/Ivey and were turned down because it was too short – and yet Volkswagon has www.facebook.com/vw – harumph.

Notes from presentation …

What is the purpose of your homepage?

Help users find information that they are seeking.

Most of the room is the “jack of all trades web person at our university”

And does it look good while its doing that?

We all have websites and they all have problems. Demolition is the go to solution – rebuild.  In many cases, the best thing to do is tear it down but in the majority the best thing is to fix what’s wrong: incremental redesign. Research, tweak, repeat.

It’s easier to ask forgiveness than to get permission. (But you shouldn’t need forgiveness)

Step One: Research

Something to go back to to explain decisions

• articles, books & conferences
• web statistic data
• surveys
• user testing

Introduce your institution and its strengths

University of Mary Hardin-Baylor

• girls
• football
• purple

What is this university really about?

Biola – tagline that identifies a unique aspect of the school.

Also, a nice simple succinct paragraph that introduces your school – UTennessee Noxville. http://www.utk.edu/

The Banner

Flash or Ajax, typically. This is prime real estate.

Notre Dame – carousel.  Using the space for useful things – interesting stuff that is taking place at Notre Dame.  Changes on a regular basis.  Could you use your banner better? Could we send some messaging out?

Washtenaw Community College – promoting valuable things at the school

uTexas Office of Communications page.

Banners: you need to fill them with stuff.

Ideally you have a photographer on staff, but not many people in the room do.  Cheaper than hiring: you can get a good camera for about $400.   (USD) The beauty of digital photography is that it doesn’t cost you anything to try it again and again and again.

Try crowdsourcing to students who are passionate about taking photography. UWO uses a flickr box on the homepage to bring in crowdsourced content.

Tip: Taking your own pictures? Avoid situations that will need a falsh.

Navigation

Lenoir Community College.  Every day we fight battles about what goes on the homepage.  Our job is to be the gatekeeper – and turn 90% of people away.

Over 50 links on Lenoir’s page.  5 navigation systems, in groupings that don’t exactly make sense.  “I don’t see why these links are different from those links.” Remember, goal of the homepage is to get people to the information they want to get to.

Logical groupings, with headings.

University of Oxford – you will probably lose a lot of the homepage battles.  uOxford makes the page simpler by grouping the homepage links.

Boston University – another example of a page with many links, but grouped in logical groupings.

Ideally you don’t have more than 10 links on your homepage, but in higher ed, this isn’t the reality.

Search Placement – navigation is not going to work for everybody.

Search box is expected in the top-right corner.

a:link

Web is made up primarily with links – their design is a critical part of web design.

They don’t always need to be blue with underline, but be cautious each time you break this guideline.  Persistent navigation is an area where it is often ok to break the mould.  Also, feature areas.  In-text links should at least be underlined.

Critical to use the a:hover state. Reaction when touched.

Colour: use with caution

Very dangerous unless you have a background in colour theory or design.  And most of us don’t have that.  When it’s great on a jersey, or on a fan’s chest – it won’t necessarily look great on the web.  Your school colours were chosen before the web came along.

Indian Hills Community College – eek.

USC Rossier – stronger use of the same colours. It’s not always the colours, it’s how you use them.

Sometimes, adjust colours slowly – go into photoshop and move them down and to the right – just don’t tell the brand owner.

Rossier used a gradient (red to red) to create warmth and depth in the top of the homepage.  Monochromatic gradients help you have a nice site in spite of your school’s colours. Use them as an accent, not a background.

Step back and look at your colours – what emotion to they evoke without text or design or layout.  Pick colours that go with the message you are trying to put out there.  See if you can use complimentary colours to balance difficult official colours – i.e. a brown to a yellow.

Use Color to Separate Content

Champlain College- nav, banner, content

Oklahoma Wesleyan – top, bottom

Spacing & Fonts

Higher ed websites tend to be text heavy, and your spacing/fonts play an impact on readability of your site.

Line height: Increase line height slightly – makes it easier to see individual lines of text.  Too tight blurs the lines together.

Headings, Lists, Bold, Italics, etc: Web content 101 … Use colour in headings, create your own default bullet with some colour.

Wesleyan (About Us page): Has some of the spacing issues.  Tight spacing creates a feel of business.  Add height to top nav and increase font size.

These are little things you can do without the hassel of a redesign.

Recommendation: Consider every element.  Don’t do anything because everyone else is doing it.  Look to people for inspiration but don’t follow them off the cliff.

Consider whether you have the content/staff time to maintain a new element.  i.e. newsfeeds aren’t so great when you have no news.

Don’t look to just one source for inspiration.

Recomended sources: Edystyle.net, BlogHighEd.org

Dezinspiration, Most Inspired, Smashing Magazine

How to spot a good web designer:

Look beyond “looks” – usability considerations are good cues that the designer was thinking about every element of the site, and how they are used.  Look at their sites, ask them questions about usability.

Height of a homepage banner: screens are getting bigger, mobile browsing is very small (and getting more popular).  If the space is used effectively (communicates, drives into content) then it isn’t too big.  “Above the fold urgency is fading, people are more willing to scroll.  Most important stuff should be above the fold – so if banner takes it all up, it better be important.

Fixed layout vs elastic layout: Steward leans more towards a fixed layout, primarily because of line length. Maximizing can create a verrry long line length, which kills the purpose of the page which is to be read/consumed.  Also much easier to design for fixed (no background images that tile, or boxes out of place).

Designing for mobile environments: Research is important here – use your stats. Check your analytics.

Adding social media right up front on the homepage: Oklahoma Wesleyan – live twitter stream on their homepage.  Skittles disaster … Bare minimum is to have the social links.  Penetration is mostly facebook.  Twitter is getting more mainstream, still a niche thing.  Flickr is very niche.

Yesterday, Matthew Melnyk (@matthewmelnyk) spotted a Facebook Group linking to 16 other Facebook Groups targetting applicants to Canadian universities.  There are many reasons why it is suspected that these groups are not only run by marketers who are pretending to be students, but also have malicious intent in mind.  Bottom line, now is a critical time to search for your school name on Facebook and see who is using it to target your audiences.

What are 2013 groups?

In 2007 it was pretty obvious that higher ed applicants wanted to connect with others that were considering the same schools.  Some student figured Facebook was a neat place to do this and created a group called <School Name> Class of 2011.  By the end of the recruitment cycle there were hundreds of Class of 2011 groups, one for almost every college in North America and each with hundreds of members.  In 2008 we had Class of 2012 groups, and now we have Class of 2013 groups.

FacebookGate 2008

In December, I went away on vacation (woah!) and came back to tens if not hundreds of Class of 2013 Facebook Groups created by fake accounts posing as soon-to-be freshmen.  1,000s of students were joining these groups. Now, really this is brilliant, because now party behind this (collegeprowler.com) happens to be in the education business and now has sleuth access to the Facebook inboxes of all the students that have joined these groups – again this is thousands of high school seniors and other incoming college students.

@bradjward, education blogger extra-ordinaire, and one of the forces behind BlueFuego.com, picked up on the fact that groups were being administrated by fake students.  With some amazing use of twitter, google docs and other collaboration tools, within about 24 hours he and other higher education colleagues were able to make the connection to collegeprowler.com, and Facebook deleted all of the groups created by these fake accounts literally overnight.

FacebookGate Canada

Yesterday, I get out of back to back meetings and find this on Twitter:

Twitter Post from @MatthewMelnyk, June 2 2009

Matt is throwing an FYI to me (@mmbc) here because we had chatted about his school’s 2013 groups a few months ago, I think. (And I appreciate the heads up!)

Here is the link he is referring to:

Screencapture of "Grads of 2009 (Canada)" Facebook Group

This group lists Class of 2013 groups, each affiliated with a major Canadian university.

Let’s talk about Brock

Earlier this year, there were two Facebook Groups tagged Brock 2013. Both of them had less than 5 members. My advice to the school was to contact both group administrators and ask if a school rep could be appointed as a group administrator – to provide official content when valuable. One group appointed a school rep as admin and the group grew from 2 members (the creator and school rep) to now 744 members.

Screencapture of Brock Class of '13 Facebook Group, affiliated with Brock University staff (June 2 2009)

The Second Group

The second group was not interested in participation from a school rep, which is fine. It had 2 members and the other Brock group was growing healthily.  It was interesting to note though, that both the creator and administrator of this other group were Brock alumni – not Brock applicants. One of them was in fact a local landlord who worked mostly with student rentals. There was no obvious spam from this person that I could see on the page, but still his interests are questionable. Especially when a month or so later I started receiving group updates from a St. Catherine’s student rentals Facebook Group that I had never heard of, let alone joined.

The same individual was an administrator of a Class of 2012 group that collected almost 2,000 members.

Screencapture of Brock 2012 group administrated by Brock alumnus and local realtor, June 2 2009

FacebookGate vs Brock

The first link on the Grads of 2009 Facebook Group is to Brock University – but not to the happy community of 700+ prospects.  Instead it links to a group with only one member, claiming to be “real” and that Brock is interfering with student groups and having them deleted:

“Brock staff (namely Matthew Melnyk) have been trying to get control over brock facebook groups. And when the student creators dont make them admins they file copyright claims to facebook and get the groups DELETED.”

Screencapture of new Brock 2013 group attacking university staff, June 2 2009

According to Matthew, the staff member being attacked, there have been individuals spamming the 700+ member 2013 group aggressively:

“I have been in a battle with some of these accounts for over a month now (as is evidenced by their annoyance at me evident in the fake Brock 2013 group).

I dealt with spam on our group posted nearly every ½ hour by dummy accounts hoping to mislead Brock students to join their group. I reported them, and their group to facebook who eventually acted. Unfortunately, it’s a bit like wack-a-mole. One dummy account goes down, another pops up.”

Why is Grads of 2009 FacebookGate Round 2?

Let’s start with the group Grads of 2009.  The administrator, “Joe Ally,” has no network, no friends and no Send Message or Add As Friend functions on his profile.  Every profile has these unless they are important enough of a person for Facebook to build them their very own profile different from what the rest of us get.

Screencapture of Joe Ally Facebook Profile, June 2 2009

Now let’s look at the groups that Grads of 2009 is linking to.

Screencapture of McMaster 2013 group linked from Grads of 2009, June 3 2009

This group seems to use language in tune with an actual Mac applicant.  It has links to macinsiders.com, which I believe is a student run site (but not university run).  But I do notice that the admin is from New York. Totally possible. If you look back to the Brock 2013 group attacking Matthew, you’ll notice that its admin is also from New York.

Comments on the group date back to the beginning of March, and the “first” comment has to do with needing admins for the group. I see this again on other groups.

Screencapture of SFU 2013 group linked from Grads of 2009, June 3 2009

When I click the SFU 2009 link provided by Grads of 2009, I get the above screen. I’ve got a flag here because I’m getting an error, and I’m also getting a flag because it says “Event” unavailable – when i was trying to load a group.

Screencapture of TWU 2013 group linked from Grads of 2009, June 3 2009

Above we have the Trinity Western University group that Grads of 2009 links to.  We have an admin from Ottawa, which feels good to me.  We also have only 21 members and a Group name that has just about every keyword in the book – which says marketer to me.  I’m also noticing that their oldest comment is May 8th – not that long ago. This is a new group.

Screencapture of UBC 2013 group linked from Grads of 2009, June 3 2009

Here on the UBC group, we have an admin who has disabled communication features (totally logical, lots of normal people do this – so not a bad sign).

The WLU group link gives a similar error message to SFU.

Screencapture of Queens' 2013 group linked from Grads of 2009, June 3 2009

With the Queen’s group, I’m seeing a title stuffed with key words (two spellings of Queens, two ways of saying 2009/2013).  I’m seeing a tacky display image that looks A LOT like the one on the angry Brock group.  And I’m noticing the admin’s name. I’m also noticing the language “Post a photo and introduce yourself” – which is also on the Brock group.

Screencapture of Ryerson 2013 group linked from Grads of 2009, June 3 2009

The Ryerson group has the same admin from Ottawa that is running the TWU group, and the second admin is Joe Ally (Mr. Fake Profile /w no add as friend or send message features, remember?).  Also, if you read the group description the first paragraph is the same as on the UBC group above. Read further and see how aggressively the group is pushing members to 1) virally spread the group to friends, and 2) post a picture (same as Queens and Brock).  The final paragraph even says that anyone who spams the group on other Ryerson/2013 groups will get promoted to administrator status.

Screencapture of the McGill 2013 group linked from Grads of 2009, June 3 2009

The McGill group shouts out that the other groups are spam (even though they were deleted 4 months ago) and details the first FacebookGate and even links to @bradjward’s blog.  Check out who the admin is though: same girl that runs Queens.  I want to believe she is legit, because unlike Joe Ally her profile does have the usual Add/Message features.  But remember that Queens used the same language as other groups?

All in all, I think the McMaster group is legit.  The Ryerson, Brock and UBC groups are definitely not.  And the others, might just be entangled/tricked by whatever the fake account holders have been saying behind closed inboxes.  I find this incredibly disheartening. Students used technology to satisfy a social goal (meet other soon-to-be-classmates). In December, collegeprowler.com took advantage of the trend and now it is happening again.  I have no idea what Facebook is supposed to do – as Matthew said, people who are deleted just sign back up again under new names.  It’s just so frustrating to see such a great user innovation get infected by sneak marketers, to the point where eventually the trend will die because the groups are unreliable.  Maybe this will lead to a rise in private applicant communities run by each institution? Brock already has one, and the 2009 E-Expectations report found that 75% of respondents believed schools should offer invite only communities for applicants.

If you are reading this, and are an admin on any of these groups, or have any insight, please post a comment or email me – I would love to have a clearer picture of what is actually happening hear.