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Notes from HighEdWeb 2011

I am finally, after 2+ weeks, forcing myself to sit down and reflect on what I learned at my first HighEdWeb conference. The bloggers from Link did a much better job than I could ever hope to do of summing up each of the presentations I attended (the title of each talk below is linked to a summary), so I’ll simply provide my primary takeaway from each session.

Carrying the Banner: Reinventing News on Your University Web Site by Georgy Cohen (slides) – We need to look for ways to be more immediate in our news coverage; for example, quick video responses to items happening today.

What Colleges Can Learn From The Insane Clown Posse by Karlyn Borysenko (neé Morissette) (podcast | slides) – Colleges and universities need to know who they are and who their people are, and not apologize for it.

The Politics of Doing IA for HighEd by Aaron Baker (podcast | slides) – Information architecture is like planning a kitchen, where everyone has to be able to find the tools they need.

What Content Strategy Really Means for Higher Ed  by Kate Johnson – Determine a process for producing and maintaining content, *especially* after its launched.

I’d Buy That For a Dollar: What Robocop Can Teach us about Alumni Engagement by Jeff Stevens – Three prime directives for alumni engagement: make it compelling; make it collaborative; make it competitive.

Engaging Your Global Audience with Real-Time Campus Event Coverage by Seth Odell – One camera, one laptop, one person is all it takes to do the most basic of live streaming.

Politics or treason: Toeing the line or begging forgiveness in site adaptation by Anne Petersen (slides | podcast) – Always be testing, even if it’s just bringing an iPad into the student lounge.

Multimedia and Social Storytelling: Capitalize on Content by Donna Talarico (slides) – There are many ways to tell a story on the web: POV, narratives, photos, videos, infographics, audio

Making a CSS Framework that Works for You by Dan Sagisser (slides) – Doesn’t really apply to UChicagoLaw at the moment, but I can see how a CSS framework might be useful to us for, say, a series of minisites.

Swingin’ with Sinatra: Small Apps Fast by Sven Aas (slides) – Not being a programmer, I didn’t understand most of this, but did learn a very important lesson about being prepared for hardware failures while in the midst of a presentation.

Shawn Henry Keynote: Accessibility – Links to some great pages on the W3C site for thinking about and working with accessibility issues.

For me, though, much of the value of any of conferences like this (and of this one especially) comes less from the presentations and more from the experience of the conference itself — of meeting amazing people in person whom I had previously known only via Facebook and Twitter, of networking, commiserating, and bonding with my peers, of spending half a week helping to build a real, live community of web professionals.

And lest I forget, there was also my own contribution to the conference: a series of Johnny Cash tunes rewritten for and performed by higher ed web geeks. You’ve been warned.

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Web Design Project: Niehaus LLP

Earlier this year I launched a redesigned website for Niehaus LLP. The brief from the client, a boutique law firm in Manhattan, was to create a more elegant site that exuded both the legal sophistication expected from a larger firm as well as the personal touch that clients can expect from a small firm. To that end, I designed a logo, reworked the site’s information architecture, and hand-built a new, standards-compliant site.

Before:

After:
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Redesign: TweetChicago

I’ve blogged before about a project at the University of Chicago Law School that we call TweetChicago; it’s a page that aggregates a number of student and faculty tweeters in a single place, to provide the viewer with a snapshot of life at Chicago Law.

After nearly three years of service, it was time for the page to get a facelift. We ditched the HTML/Javascript widget that we had been using to import our Tweeters’ feeds and went with Twitter’s new standard widget, which, unlike the previous version, will actually display retweets, and updated the look a bit.

Before

After
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Law School Project: Mobile Site

(A version of this post is cross-posted at the University of Chicago Law School’s Electronic Projects Blog.)

Today I officially unveiled the Law School’s new mobile-optimized website. Users accessing the Law School’s website from a mobile device (with the exception of iPads) will now be automatically redirected to a version of our website that is specifically designed with mobile users in mind.

It features:

  • A re-imagined information architecture, making it easy to find the information that, according to our research, is what our mobile users are usually looking for.
  • Fewer images and other bells-and-whistles, so pages load more quickly (and with less drain on your data plan).
  • Quick and easy means to find your way to and from the Law School, or to get contact information for faculty and staff.

When developing an institution’s mobile presence, there are many options. You can, for example, build native apps for iPhone, Android, etc., as the University has done; and certainly, there are advantages to that approach. However, given the limited staff for this project and the increasing proliferation of new mobile devices, we wanted to create a mobile presence that would be platform-independent (i.e., viewable on all devices, from iPhones to Droids to Blackberries, etc.). Luckily, the content management system we use for the Law School’s website, Drupal, is flexible, robust, and supported by an incredible community of contributors. By plugging in the Mobile Tools module and a modified version of the Mobile Garland theme, I was able to easily create a mobile site that serves up the same data as our standard site, repackaged in a mobile-friendly fashion.

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Protecting Your Online Reputation

Each year I give a presentation to incoming students at the Law School that introduces them to some of the School’s online resources, and also aims to aid them in their future careers by helping them take control of their online reputations. I thought the latter part of this presentation might be of interest to others as well, so I’ve produced a slightly modified version of the presentation below.

It is almost impossible in today’s knowledge economy to avoid having an online presence. Many times that presence is helpful — we can reconnect with old friends, discover books and music that we never would have otherwise known existed, and impress potential employers with our resumes and portfolios. But if not properly curated, that online presence can also damage our chances of, say, being able to actually land that new job that we’re applying for. And unfortunately, most damage done to  online reputations is self-inflicted, whether through ignorance or carelessness.

Here are four things to consider when posting anything online to avoid shooting yourself in the digital foot:

  • Your employer WILL Google you.  According to a study done in 2009 (and discussed in this Concurring Opinions blog post), 89% of human resources professionals thought it was appropriate to take an applicant’s online life into account in hiring decisions, and 70% had rejected an applicant because of something they had found online.
  • Nothing you put on the internet is ever truly anonymous. “Well,” you might think, “if my employer is going to Google me, I’ll just make sure that anything questionable I post won’t be associated with my name.” Good luck with that. Many websites log the IP address of all computers that access them, and even if you’re accessing a site from a public computer or have IP masking software, chances are there are other ways to discover who left that “anonymous” comment on the company blog. According to a study by Know Privacy, 88.4% of websites have SOME sort of “web bug” that collects data about users usually without their awareness.
  • Once you put it online, it could very well be there forever. My favorite example of this is the young woman in Britain who was fired from her job after calling her boss a “pervy wanker” on Facebook… having forgotten, it seems, that her boss was her Facebook friend. Aside from the cautionary tale of remembering who you’ve friended, what’s amazing to me about this is the idea that this screenshot — obviously taken by one of the poster’s friends — will now live on indeterminately on the internet. The young woman should be grateful that whoever did so had the courtesy to scrub out her name, otherwise she might very well have been haunted by this boneheaded move for the rest of her professional career.
  • Email counts too. I would be willing to bet that people do more damage to their professional prospects through email than through any other electronic means. It’s far too easy to accidentally hit “reply all” for your scathing comebacks intended only for one of many people on a mailing list, or for a disgruntled coworker to forward a “private” email to your entire company. If you are in school, remember that email interactions with administrators are professional communications and should be treated as such. While you don’t have to be quite so formal with your classmates, remember that these are people that you may very well be working with — or for — one day. In the hiring process, you don’t want to be the person who gets remembered for drunkenly spamming the class mailing list every weekend. And of course, there’s the worst-case scenario in which a questionable email is forwarded far and wide with your name prominently attached to it.

How to protect yourself:

  • A rule of thumb. At the Law School, we encourage our student tweeters to consider one rule of thumb before every tweet: “Do I care whether my grandmother, my dean, or my future employer will ever see this post?” The potential readers in your rule of thumb may be different depending on your situation and online comfort level, but if the answer to your question is “yes,” back slowly away from the keyboard and go get a sandwich.
  • Check your privacy settings. Do you know who can see what on your Facebook page? If you’re not sure, spend some time learning how Facebook (or whatever social networks you happen to be on) deals with privacy issues (Facebook’s FAQ’s are here). Personally, I make sure that only my friends can see anything I post; it doesn’t eliminate the risk that something might escape my newsfeed and get into the wild, but it does reduce the risk.
  • Control your brand: post more. It might be tempting, given the dangers I outline above, to throw up your hands, delete your Facebook account, and take a vow of digital silence. After all, what you don’t type can’t hurt you, right. Wrong. If you have no online presence that you control, then you are leaving a vacuum that can be easily filled with the negative comments of others (or of others pretending to be you). Instead, take control of your personal brand by producing high-quality content — whether on a blog, your LinkedIn page or something else — that will be associated with your name and will highlight your skills and abilities.
  • Monitor your data shadow. If anyone is writing nasty things (or, for that matter, good things) about you online, you want to know as soon as possible so that you can take steps to nip disaster in the bud. Google Alerts is a great tool for this; it will send you an email every time Google’s search engine encounters the phrase of your choosing.

So that’s a brief primer in protecting your professional reputation online. If you have any additional tips, I’d love to hear them.

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How to Do Social Media Right (and Wrong)

(You might notice that this post looks a bit a different than usual — it was prepared with a new online tool called Storify, that makes it easy to stitch together narratives using the atomic elements of social media: tweets, Facebook status updates, and so on. They’re still in beta, but you can learn more or sign up for an invite here; it only took a couple of weeks for me to receive mine.)

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Law School Project: Faculty Reading 2010

Each year since 2008, the Law School has compiled a list of reading recommendations from its faculty members as a sort of holiday gift for alumni. And each year, I design a new one-page site to house those recommendations. I think this year’s incarnation came out pretty well, as it’s a rather unusual way of navigating what is essentially just a *very* long list. Even better, we were able to tie this year’s edition into our recently launched Goodreads presence by making it easy for users to quickly friend us and become fans of our faculty members; accordingly our friend numbers on Goodreads increased by 50% within just a couple of days, and many of our new friends seem to have joined specifically for the chance to connect with us, an indicator of significant engagement.

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Tracking the Law School’s Social Media

(cross-posted at The University of Chicago Law School’s Electronic Projects Blog)

I recently spent some time immersed in Google Analytics, trying to track the effectiveness of some of the Law School’s social media efforts. As these results may be of interest to colleagues at the University of Chicago and elsewhere, I thought I’d share the results here.

Goals
The goals of the Law School’s social media presence are:

  1. to increase engagement between the Law School with both current students and alumni, thereby strengthening their bond with the school;
  2. to increase engagement with prospective students, thereby increasing the chances that those students will choose to attend Chicago over one of our peer schools;
  3. and to increase awareness in the general public about the achievements of the Law School’s faculty, students, and alumni.

The primary method for achieving these goals is to distribute content from the Law School’s website through a highly dispersed network of “followers” and “fans,” and to allow those followers to not only consume our content but to spread it to their own friends/followers.

Tracking Method
My measurement for tracking the effectiveness of this method is to trace the amount of traffic driven to our website by these social media channels, as a means of indicating consumption of the content contained therein. I did this by creating segments based on referring URLs and examining the content consumed by the different segments. Of course, visits and pageviews are not perfect indicators of content consumption, but they are the best option that I could figure out how to measure using Google Analytics. It should be noted that the numbers below are based on sampled data rather than absolute numbers.

Facebook

  • The Law School currently has just over 2,000 fans on its Facebook page, an average of 450 of which are active on the page in a given month.
  • Between 10/1/09 and 10/01/10, Facebook sent nearly 8500 visitors to the Law School website (this does not include the number that it sent to the Faculty Blog [just over 350] or the Becker-Posner Blog [just over 4,000]).
  • Other than search engines and the University’s site, only Wikipedia and Leiter’s Law School Reports sent more visitors during that period.
  • 27% of visitors from Facebook had never before visited the Law School’s site. This means two things:
    • 1) over 2200 people who had never visited the Law School’s site before were brought there by Facebook, and
    • 2) the remaining 6300 visits were from people who engage with the Law School repeatedly.
  • 18,728 pageviews resulted from Facebook
    • 17% were views of the home page
    • 16% were views of “student” pages
    • 7% were views of “news” pages
    • 7% were views of “prospective” pages
    • 3% were views of “alumni” pages  
    • 2% were views of audio/video pages

Twitter

  • During the same 10/1/09-10/01/10 period, Twitter.com sent nearly 5,000 visitors to the Law School’s website; however, because of the many different ways people can access Twitter (third-party applications, etc.), it is likely that the actual minimum number sent from the Twitter platform is closer to 6,000, and the total could be as high as 10,000.
  • The Law School currently has over 3,500 followers on its primary account.
  • 19,013 pageviews resulted from Twitter.com
    • 22% were views of the homepage
    • 8% were views of “student” pages
    • 4% were views of “news” pages
    • 33% were views of “prospective” pages
    • 2% were views of “alumni” pages
    • 1% were views of audio/video pages

LinkedIn

  • During that same 10/1/09-10/01/10 period, while only 492 visitors came from our LinkedIn group, 40% of those were new visitors. This is important because we know that the vast majority of our interactions with LinkedIn users tend to be with alumni, so this stat potentially indicates that alumni who are not otherwise visiting the Law School’s site are engaging with the Law School there.
  • There are currently just over 1,300 members of our LinkedIn group.
  • 1,552 pageviews resulted from LinkedIn
    • 18% were views of the homepage
    • 6% were views of “student” pages
    • 18% were views of “news” pages
    • 4% were views of “prospective” pages
    • 4% were views of “alumni” pages
    • 4% were views of audio/video pages

The biggest surprise for me out of all of these results was the large percentage of “prospective” pageviews generated by Twitter; I really had no idea whether our Twitter feed was reaching prospective students or not, but it appears that they are indeed our largest and/or most engaged audience on Twitter.

So, what do you make of these numbers, and how do they compare to your own? Suggestions for ways to improve both the accuracy of these results and the effectiveness of our social media efforts are, of course, more than welcome. 

Update: One stat that I forgot to mention: all of those pageviews generated by our social media were equal to just 1% of our total pageviews for that time period, which seemed surprisingly low to me. However, visitors referred by social media spent approximately 33% more time per page than the average time per page, which indicates that while social media may not be driving massive amounts of traffic, it is driving people who are more likely to actually engage with our content.

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Can a Hashtag Get You Sued?

Alternative title to this post: “How Not to Use Twitter as a Business Tool, Vol. 842”

A colleague of mine recently expressed, via his personal Twitter feed, dissatisfaction with a product that he is required to work with as part of his job. The tweet included a hashtag inferring that the product in question was, in effect, utter garbage. Since my colleague has expressed a desire not to bring further attention to the situation, I won’t mention the name of the product or the company that produces it, but suffice it to say that this is a company that goes out of its way to cultivate customers in the higher ed world, sponsoring networking and social events — and, indeed, social networks — specifically for the higher ed web community.

Now, everyone knows that good social media tactics include monitoring the Twitterverse for mentions of your brand or product, and responding to those mentions. The companies that do it best take criticism on Twitter (Twittercism?) as an opportunity to apologize to a frustrated user and get feedback about how their product or service might be improved.

So how did this company respond?

With an email and multiple phone calls at his work number, threatening legal action if the offending tweet was not removed or retracted.

This “strategy,” if you can call it that, is really nothing short of insane. The backlash that could result from such bully tactics could very quickly destroy the goodwill that this company has spent a lot of time and money trying to build in the higher ed web community. Let’s hope they come to their senses.