Central College Web marketing

We are getting ready to release a video about the new education and psychology building on their mini-site this week. The project certainly has been a good test of the resources that we have on-campus to develop video content for the Web site. Because of our physical location, we have relatively limited network resources which presents a significant challenge when trying to publish video to the site. I quickly realized that this would be a perfect application for the computing cloud.

Confronted with this new challenge, I remembered Mike Richwalsky presented on moving data to the cloud using Amazon’s S3 service at eduWeb. I jumped over to his information repository on highedwebtech.com and got everything together that we needed to get started. I transferred some of our files to over to S3 (which, by the way, was super easy) and tested things out from off-campus. Magically everything works like a charm, and our video download was lightning quick thanks to Amazon.

After we send out the email campaign associated with this video, we’ll see what the final costs of moving this project to the cloud are. Based on some rough numbers though, I would expect our cost to be less than $25. I would imagine that is pretty reasonable price for having a good video experience on our Web site. We’ll have to give it some time but perhaps now that we have the ball rolling, we can continue to use the cloud for some of our other projects.

It has been quiet here on the blog for a few months while we finished up the redesign of the Central College Abroad Web site. The project was a huge undertaking, with new content, site architecture and design being completed this go around. Hopefully this is a step forward for the Web site.

Here is a quick rundown of some the new things on the site:

• Added AJAX and jquery support site-wide
• Switched from static html to dynamic coldfusion pages
• Re-organized the application start page to make more sense
• There are student quotes on all of the pages
• Added a section for alumni that will be growing soon
• Added a section for cooperating institutions
• Added a section for parents to learn more about sending their student abroad

There is so much more information on the new Web site than the old site and hopefully this will help the recruiting process and keep parents and alumni informed with what is happening.

As with any Web site, it is still a work in progress but this is probably the best start that we have had on a new Web site. I can’t wait to see how great this Web site will be after a couple months.

You can see the new Web site here: www.central.edu/abroad

I recently presented about using social tools professionally for the annual professional development series on our campus. I was asked to give this same presentation to the enrollment and financial support council which contains some of the senior leadership at our institution.

While originally the presentation focused on the tools, I tweaked the presentation slightly, to focus on the benefits of using social media to augment our marketing efforts. I also asked the twitterverse to pass along ideas for what they would tell senior leadership.

There were some great ideas and some themes in the responses. Including:

• Don’t focus on the tools, focus on the conversation.
• Social media is about the relationships and relating to the audience.
• Social media is an extension of customer service.
• Facebook status and twitter are the new small town front porch.

I feel that the presentation went well and opened some eyes as to the kinds of things that our prospective students are doing online. As always there are challenges in using social media effectively and we will certainly see some growing pains. At the least, some of the senior leadership is aware of what is happening with the Web and how it is affecting our recruitment efforts.

You can check out all of the information from the original presentation when you get a chance. The original post is different from what was presented today, but the ideas and concepts are the same.

Today kicks off the Stamats integrated marketing conference in Tampa, Florida. The backchannel has already been full of information including an interesting video stream of a higher ed round table from the hotel last night. You can see some of the clips here: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/stamats08 Some of the notable higher ed folks that are going to be there include: @kylejames, @bradjward, @karlynm, @mherzber and @JeremyWilburn just to name a few.

Unfortunately it is only possible to get to a couple of professional development conferences every year. But, with all of the social tools that are now available, you can follow along pretty well virtually. If you need some help following along, swing by my office and I’ll give you a crash course.

For the month of October, we saw a decline in the number of visitors to our Web site compared with last month. We continue to see more traffic than we had last year at this time.

The admission site has seen roughly 500 visitors more than last year at this time. Unfortunately the Athletics, CCA and Alumni sites saw significantly less traffic. It is especially noticeable on the athletics site because it is the most popular content areas of our Web site.

Once again the department and pages Web sites see continued growth as more faculty, staff and students take advantage of their personal Web spaces. We also are seing moderate successes with our e-mail campaigns.

See the full report here.

I recently delivered a presentation titled “Explaining the groundswell: harnessing social technologies for productivity” for a campus-wide professional development opportunity. While it was advertised as a social networking how-to, I shifted the presentation to showcase how we got to the point where social networking is relevant.

I have two versions of the presentation that are available for download. The first is just a PDF of the slides, the second is a Flash movie with a voice over which is recommended for on-campus viewing only. If you were unable to attend the presentation the second version will help understand the slides.

As promised, here are a list of links to the social networks that I talked about. Again, the best way to learn how to use them is to dive in head first and start playing around.

Browsers

• Firefox
• Google Chrome (not supported for campus Web applications)
• Flock

RSS

• Using Microsoft Outlook as RSS feed reader
• iGoogle
• NetVibes

Social Networking Applications

• Blogging platforms:
  • wordpress
  • blogger
• Facebook
• Digg
• Flickr
• uStream
• Ning
  • <cuwebd />
  • HighEdWeb
• Twitter (you can follow my updates here)
• Twitter Apps
  • twhirl
  • TweetDeck
• Google Docs

A few months ago, our admissions office came up with this great idea of having an admitted student portal. Codenamed “top secret,” the project is designed to help students move through the admission process at Central College with ease. The project was just recently rolled out, and students should start getting emails shortly. Students can login and see their admission checklist, contact their counselor and even get their housing information.

During the development process we went back and forth between using an existing platform like Ning, or building something in house. While Ning certainly offers a lot of features, there are certainly some drawbacks. The biggest problem we had was with our checklist. While we could use openSocial to “plugin” our checklist application into Ning, it would have been difficult to associate a checklist with a student. Instead we built everything in-house using a variety of tools. To add to the complexity we are pulling student data straight out of our student information system.

A huge thanks goes out to Matt in IT Services for putting a lot of the pieces together. Using AJAX, we are pulling in modules to a centralized page that shows a student what they need to do to complete the admission process. We have also added links to all of the important information including a Facebook group for the current incoming  class, youTube videos and information about the majors a student has told us they have an interest in.

There is certainly a lot of room to grow this application, but we’ll start with collecting some data to see how much it is used. Since the application is pulling in information through modules, it will be simple to add features as they are developed.

I’m probably the last one to post my wrap-up comments about this year’s HighEdWeb conference. Then again I wanted to take the time to reflect upon the information I soaked up at the conference.

Since this was the first time I had ever been to the HighEdWeb conference I really didn’t know what to expect. I must say that I was pleasantly surprised. There was a ton of knowledge being tossed around and you could always find someone to talk to about whatever you wanted to know.

The two keynote presentations were fantastic. Jeffrey Veen’s ideas about using design to communicate ideas and present data on the Web was particularly interesting.  Kyle Ford’s presentation on Ning also spawned some new ideas in my mind.

Social media was all around as well. The #heweb08 backchannel contained almost as much information as the conference did. It was also nice to see some of the faces that I have been communicating with on twitter, as well as make some new twitter friends.

Key takeaways from the conference:

• We should be more aware of XSS attacks.
• There was a lot of buzz about accessibility. We do an OK job at it, but we can do better.
• Using the idea of distributed thinking can help people understand your data.
• Cloud computing is ready for prime-time.
• Selecting Web software can be easy, if you focus on using the correct tools to do so.

eduWeb vs. HighEdWeb
I am starting to see that there is actually quite a bit of difference between these two conferences. eduWeb is really geared toward marketing professionals that are dealing with the Web. There are lots of new ideas presented, but that is all they are, ideas. HighEdWeb dives into a topic and gives you solutions on how to implement these great ideas. Both conferences are outstanding so I think I am going to have a hard time choosing between the two next year.

Now to get started on all of those great things that I learned…

The last day of HighEdWeb was a nice way to ease out of the information intensity of the conference. There was so much good information at each of the sessions, but you could only see 1/5th of everything. To remedy that problem, the conference organizers decided to do a repeat of the best in track sessions.

I started out with a session on accessible video interfaces with Flash. It drove home the point that video is great, but what do you do for people that don’t’ have the ability to see the video and the people that have different bandwidth availability. Once again closed captioning was brought to the forefront and the problems with generating closed caption was addressed. There certainly was a lot of good information that we can use.

I rounded out the best of track sessions with @tonydunn’s presentation of selecting a CMS. While we really aren’t looking for a CMS, it is something to be aware of. I always find it interesting to hear about other people’s horror stories while going through the process. It didn’t hurt that Tony also had lolcatz all through his presentation. The biggest takeaway from the session was to make sure you get some time hands-on with any product you are purchasing.

After lunch and a few awards, I said goodbye to all my fellow #heweb08 companions and hit the road. The conference was really good, and I learned a lot of tidbits that can be brought back and implemented today. Stay tunned for one final conference wrap-up that has the key takeaways. I might even post a picture or two…

Day two of the highedweb conference is in the books. There were lots of great conversations with many different people from various backgrounds and the presentations happened to be pretty good as well.

I started off with a presentation from @jjsteffe on using the cloud to help you get things done. The usual suspects where there: Flickr, Google App Engine, Amazon S3 and EC2. He did call to our attention a program called panda streaming which allows you to do your own video streaming while storing on S3 and EC2. This might be a pretty good option.

Next was the press release 2.0 given by @mherzber. The presentation that Matt gave has been around for a while and there wasn’t anything earth shattering. However, he did give me some ideas for how to work with our writers to use social media in their releases to get it in play. He also mentioned socialmediarelease.org which I have known about for a while, but haven’t had the chance to go through with our writer.

We checked out the search engine optimization seminar as well. There were some interesting tidbits of information in it and called to our attention that SWO is a best practice and not a quick fix. He also called to our attention that we need to sift through the analytics data to see what search terms people are using to get to our site so you can get better rankings.

After lunch Kyle Ford from Ning presented on the general topic of social networking. After a little bit of history he really plugged the Ning social network which has a lot of great features while maintaining some data portability. It was cool to see the way different people were using Ning and the players involved. It was also nice to get some more ammo to move the dinosaurs out of the old media mentality.

For the last session I checked out @tsand’s presentation on using video for student life. He brought up some interesting points and provided some comic relief which was welcomed after taking in all of this information.

HighEdWeb continues the science fair style poster sessions which lets you collect information at your own pace depending on what you are interested in. There were some people that were displaying some really interesting things. There was a digital signage group, and the guys from Xaiver were there showing off the awesomeness that is their admitted student portal.

After the poster sessions we went into the “lightning round” which provided some interesting thoughts on a variety of topics. We started off talking about distributed content management and came full circle on how to keep employees.

After taking in all of that information we headed out for some dinner at the Discovery station. Taking a bunch of geeks to a science museum is never a good idea…but we endured getting our geek on and had a little fun.