Just a little update about this website — georgycohen.com will be transforming at some point in the near future. So, if you want to get your fill of reading material, check the following destinations…
Next Stop: The Crosstown Digital Communications Blog (RSS)
In Transit: The Crosstown Tumblr (RSS)
And, of course…
Meet Content (Subscribe / RSS)
Happy reading!
Tuesday night, the inimitable SchneiderMike, senior VP of the digital incubator at Allen & Gerritsen, held court at Meadhall for a meeting of Content Strategy New England, talking location-based marketing as it relates to content strategy. He literally co-wrote the book on location-based marketing, and his passion for the topic is infectious.
Despite the noise and the distraction of about a thousand beers on draft, Mike dropped a ton of valuable insights, some of which I have captured below:
A lot of food for thought. Thanks, SchneiderMike! Want more? Check out this cheat sheet excerpted from “Location-Based Marketing for Dummies,” including the five rules of location-based marketing.
If you know me, you know that I am a public transit nerd, and a particular fan of buses. In principle, I find bus travel much more fascinating than subway travel. Why?
With these reasons in mind, I have been known to set aside a day to go on a bus adventure, taking a new route to explore a place that is not yet to known to me. Today is one of those days.
I will be leaving Tufts University after more than seven years to start my own business, a consultancy I have named Crosstown Digital Communications. My goal with Crosstown is to help organizations, primarily in higher education, communicate more effectively on the web.
Some of the details and logistics are still being sorted out (such as a new website), but you know how it is — when the bus comes, it’s time to hop on.
This is not a decision I’ve come to easily. Tufts has been an extraordinary place, not only to work, but also simply to be. The community, ethos and spirit at the university are second to none. It has been my pride and honor to help tell Tufts’ story on the web, because it is a story in which I feel deeply invested. But now, I look forward to the chance to do the same for other institutions, learning more and sharing what I can in the process.
Meet Content, which I co-founded with Rick Allen of ePublishMedia earlier this year, will continue to exist — and grow — as a blog and resource about web content in higher education. We are excited to expand the dialogue about content, bringing some of the smart voices in the higher ed community into the conversation and finding new ways to share knowledge.
Crosstown is, of course, on Twitter (@crosstowncomm), and I’ve also set up a Tumblr called “In Transit” to share the articles and links that are informing and inspiring me.
If you’d like to learn a little bit more about Crosstown or you are interested in working together, please visit the Crosstown website to read about my services and drop a note to say hello.
Thanks for reading this. I’m really excited about this new journey, and I hope you’ll come along for the ride.
A big thanks to Jeff Stevens of Union Photo & Design for developing the Crosstown logo.
The other day, I wrote about Why The Fuck Should I Choose Oberlin? (WTFSICO), an irreverent but successful effort by a couple of loyal Obies to showcase why they love their school.
We talk a lot about authenticity in higher ed web marketing, but how much more authentic can you get than a website powered by user submissions, showcasing what people really like about an institution via an internet trope they readily embrace? (It’s important to note that, while I call it a “marketing” site, it is an unofficial site not officially endorsed by the university. More than anything, it’s a fan site that just happens to be run by university staff and alums.)
When I see WTFSICO, I see a reflection of any number of popular single-serving sites that come down the pike, go viral (like, legitimately viral) and spark a huge amount of sharing, conversation and attention. In short, what I see is the real internet. I don’t see a time-delayed facsimile that has been vetted by committees and upheld by established best practices, and in the process had all the life, authenticity and relevance wrung right out of it. I see a real-time cultural echo.
In higher ed, we far too often call that a risk.
At HighEdWeb, I talked about how higher ed needs to begin using mainstream media as an analog for developing our own news sites — learning from the standards they are setting for an online news experience and from the platforms, channels and content types they are embracing to tell stories.
But the validity of that approach goes beyond news. In his HighEdWeb session, University of Florida’s Jeff Stevens brought up everything from Kiva to Kickstarter to Farmville as inspirations for engaging alumni and soliciting donations in ways that are new to higher ed but proven in other contexts. If we’re reaching out to a particular audience via the internet, why not do what works for that audience? Seems simple enough to me. Maybe it’s a magazine. Maybe it’s LOLcats. If it works, it works.
The fact of the matter is, if you are doing what you’ve always done, or sticking only to proven .edu conventions, you will soon find yourself falling behind — or realizing you’ve been behind for a while. That’s not to say we should change on a whim, or just for the sake of changing. Not at all. But we can’t be complacent. That would be the real risk.
At Ithaca College, where campus closes at 3 p.m. in the summer, multimedia content coordinator Rob Engelsman and his colleagues took the opportunity to do a “fun, summery thing… to help celebrate the weekend” and post humorous GIFs to the university Twitter account. Yes, GIFs. In case you didn’t know, this 24-year old file format is having a cultural resurgence via sites like Reddit and a host of Tumblrs. Two of the most popular ones for IC were Rebecca Black visiting the campus fountains, which drew about 518 clicks, and a rendering of what campus looks like at 3:01PM on Fridays, which got about 189 clicks.
“For the last shuttle launch, we photoshopped the space shuttle lifting off from our new Athletics Center which has a large tower on it, and for the fourth of July we had the liberty bell swinging between our two iconic towers on campus with fireworks in the background,” says Engelsman. They got some feedback about a couple of the GIFs being too goofy, but according to Engelsman, “we had fun anyway.”
Recently, I saw Mike Richwalsky of John Carroll University tweet, “So we run digital signage, and I’m so tempted to put “STUDENTS Y U NO GET FLU SHOTS” on there promoting our free flu shots. #jobsecurity.” Pittsburg State’s Michael Fienen responded by creating the slide, which Richwalsky then adapted for use in digital signage. I’m not sure if he actually published it or not, but I thought it was hilarious — and certainly attention-getting, which is what you want for a flu shot campaign.
These examples few and far between. Though Rob Engelsman tipped me off to at least one company in the higher ed space is embracing this — check out Unigo’s Find Me a Fucking College single-serving site, driving users to the Unigo pages for various schools.
There is one giant caveat: It is extraordinarily difficult for us to do this. One of my cardinal rules is “don’t try to be cool,” because if we try to hard to be cool, we will only look foolish. This is tricky stuff to pull off. Photocopying pop culture is not a recipe for success; it’s a shortcut to failure.
We also wrestle with our own gravitas. I think many institutions would want to characterize themselves as forward-thinking and not hidebound, but how much of our marketing is hidebound? When trying to be forward-thinking, how often are we forced to tie one arm behind our back? Why do we have to hashtag neat, valid ideas #jobsecurity? Where does the real risk lie?
Why WTFSICO works for its creators is that they are not too far removed from their target demographic. Also, the site is not official, and it likely didn’t languish for months between conception and launch. WTFSICO is a natural extension of their love and enthusiasm for Oberlin and a natural expression of what, to them, is an effective web presence. In short, they are not trying too hard.
The July 2010 Brigham Young University parody of the Old Spice guy videos worked because it was a real-time, nearly instantaneous reaction to a pop culture phenomenon. (The incredibly popular video response phase of “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign launched July 14, 2010; the BYU video went up the next day. The original commercial had debuted in February 2010.)
Still, we have to be attentive to internet cultural phenomena like LOLcats and GIFs and single-serving websites. They represent a key dialect of the language that the rest of the internet is speaking, and we do not operate on a separate internet. In marketing, achieving a fluency in that language is the biggest challenge. Whether we’re talking Tumblr or flyers, the language may change but the challenge remains the same.
But maybe efforts like WTFSICO are out of our reach. Maybe they only succeed because they are not institutionally grown. Maybe we’re too close to the problem to be part of the solution, and our role is best served encouraging from afar rather than creating on our own. Maybe. Maybe not.
It’s easy for us to segregate ourselves, but our users don’t. We’re judged alongside everything else. We don’t get a break. Believe it or not, we are on the actual, real internet, right alongside everybody else. So need to find ways to start acting like it.
What do you think?
The other day, I came across an unexpected link in my Twitter stream. Ma’ayan Plaut, social media coordinator at Oberlin College and a 2010 Oberlin grad, shared the link to Why The Fuck Should I Choose Oberlin, a website she launched on Oct. 26 with Harris Lapiroff, a UX developer at Oberlin and a 2011 graduate. (Lapiroff also runs a Tumblr called Fuck Yeah Oberlin, playing off a popular Trumblr trope.)
This single-serving website offers a variety of reasons why you should, well, fucking choose Oberlin, and it is powered by user submissions (though is it moderated for repeats, irrelevance, typo correction and to exclude mentions of current students or add relevant URLs). Some of my favorites include:
I was surprised (and impressed) by how smart, bold and different this site was, and I wanted to learn more. So I asked Plaut and Lapiroff to answer some fucking questions. Here are their fucking answers.
GC: How did you get the idea for whythefuckshouldichooseoberlin.com?
MP: The simple answer is that we both really fucking love Oberlin, and we both have since before we got here as students. For me, I’ve spent way too much time clicking through What the Fuck Should I Make for Dinner, and I started following the Fucking Word of the Day on Twitter over a year ago (and my vocabulary has gotten much better, as a result).
I’ve spent much time being official eyes and ears and words of Oberlin, and sharing about Oberlin comes naturally to me. I guess this website was just waiting to happen.
HL: Ma’ayan pretty much covered it, but yeah, I’m pretty much always on the lookout for websites I can make that are simple and fun. We both love Oberlin and we both love the internet, so we spend an unsurprisingly large amount of time brainstorming Oberlin-related things we can do on the internet and sometimes we do them!
GC: How are you guys getting away with this? You’re both Oberlin alums, but you’re also employed by the college. Is this officially sanctioned? If not, do you risk getting in trouble?
MP: After graduating from Oberlin in 2010, I began a one year position as the web fellow in the office of communications at Oberlin College, which transitioned into a full-time position as Social Media Coordinator. I spend much of my time (both at work and not at work) thinking about social media, what works, what doesn’t, observing our audiences and monitoring conversations, good and bad, about Oberlin. The underlying goal of this site was to share our love for Oberlin with other Obies and hopeful Obies, because we were once one group and we are now in the other. Not much has changed, except that we’ve gotten more enthusiastic over time. We’re not alone in our enthusiasm.
This is not an officially sanctioned website, nor are we posting this to any official websites. This site was made entirely on our own time and using skills we also implement while working for the school in our respective positions. We have a tacit and unofficial approval from our boss (VP of Communications and an alum of Oberlin himself).
HL: Like Ma’ayan said, this is definitely not official. I understand that things that people do and say in their free time has been known to get them in workplace trouble. One of the things I really love about working at Oberlin is that it’s a pretty open-minded institution. There’s no constant threat of draconian punishment for stepping out of line that you might find at more uptight organizations. Overall, however, response from individuals within the staff has been (unofficially) positive. People seem to get it.
GC: What are the stats, as of the time of this response, for the site? (Hits, shares, tweets, reblogs, etc.)
MP: As of the first 24 hours, we have had 1423 submissions and 2036 shares on Facebook. Our analytics show that we had 7,889 unique visitors and and 258,356 page views in that span of time, too. From a preliminary glance at Tumblr and Twitter we’ve probably had close to 100 shares to those sites as well.
As of Saturday afternoon (Oct. 29), we’ve have over 2000 submissions and 2684 shares on Facebook. We’ve had 10,214 unique visitors and an accumulated 400,697 page views.
GC: Who is visiting this site? How are people discovering it? Are you linking to it from official web/social channels?
MP: A vast majority of our publicity has occurred as a result of Facebook sharing of the original website link, and to a lesser extent, friends posting screenshots and links on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr (these are harder to track as they leave our site, since we can’t track private Twitter accounts or untagged posts on Tumblr).
GC: What has the reaction been from students (prospective and current), the admissions office and the administration?
MP: Within the first few hours of our first posting, we had class trustees, admissions counselors and interns, and a handful of administrators from around the school liking and sharing the links on Facebook. We spent much of Thursday fielding emails, Facebook tags, text messages, phone calls, and personal interactions that went something like this:
Them: “Great fucking website guys!”
Us: “THANK YOU. Submit things to us!”
Them: “Okay!” (or in many cases, “We already did!”)
We tried extremely hard to push via word of mouth, both in person and online (note: Oberlin is currently in fall recess, which means there are few students).
We’re not sure what the prospective student response is at this point, but we have had a surprising amount of responses from non-Obies who said that they wish they had chosen Oberlin instead of their school.
We’ve had really great responses from alums, though, who’ve said they’ve never been as proud of their alma mater as they are now, or that they never repost things that curse but they make an exception for something like this… and they’re demonstrating it by sharing their reasons that they love Oberlin with us and by sharing the link (or their favorite reasons) with the world.
HL: People who already love Oberlin fucking love this website. I’m curious to see if we’ll get any reaction from prospies, high school college counselors, &c. We haven’t heard much yet.
GC: Single-serving sites are a fairly common phenomenon (for example, barackobamaisyournewbicycle.com, khaaan.com, ytmnd.com, sadtrombone.com), as are user submission-driven Tumblrs, but I can’t say I’ve ever seen them employed this way in a higher ed marketing context. Do you think we in higher ed should take more cues from memes and other niche, viral, pop culture content?
MP: I think, in trying to approach a variety of generations, you really have to move with the times. If you’re trying to reach young folks, you have to know what they’re spending their time reading, watching, talking about, etc. — but almost all these activities are things that happen amongst friends. They’re not talking about college websites, but they are talking about a new video they saw. Connecting to a new audience sometimes means taking a different approach.
The top thing is allowing the audience to have input. Thoughts and opinions happen all the time, but agency is more powerful than any marketing campaign. It’s you deciding what’s important, not you being told what’s important.
Why does viral content work? It humanizes all of us, hitting at the basic themes that we interact with and identify with easily — things that are clever, funny, etc. — not numbers and figures. When it comes to higher ed, viral can take the shape of making administrators accessible, rethinking campus culture to make it more available, or using the things that make the college unique and fun and using that to showcase some form of important information.
HL: Some years back, Ze Frank made a video in which he compared trends in the web to waves in the ocean. I like to think of us as the surfer’s in his analogy. We’re not trying to claim this trend and we don’t expect it to last forever but we saw a wave and we wanted to ride it. We made something that was fun for ourselves and because of that it was fun for others. People respond to that.
I think stuff like this is important, like Ma’ayan said, in humanizing a community. It shows that we have a sense of humor, that we’re not stodgy, that we’ve got personality. Oberlin College is not a corporate-person. We’re just people-people. I think people really like seeing that.
That message is often stronger when it’s institutionally supported (not that I think Oberlin could ever officially support something like WTFSICO—part of its charm is that it’s renegade) so I do think people in higher ed need to take note. That’s why the work that Ma’ayan does at her real job—running official Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, Tumblr blogs, &c.—is so important. It shows that Oberlin College is both hip to trends and has personality.
GC: So, does this mean it’s OK to say “fuck” in higher ed marketing now? Some people get uptight and offended pretty easily, especially at universities. If the content works for our target audience, should we just ignore the naysayers?
MP: I don’t think that cursing is a necessary part of any situation. I didn’t so much as say a single curse word til I was in college. I was just fine without them in my life, and to be honest, I don’t use them that much anyways. Language is richer and more creative if you have to find another word to use.
The only reason why this sort of thing works when trying to speak to large groups is that it puts people at ease (contradictory, I know) because it gives a decided air of informality to the content. It encourages our users to say what they want, in as stripped-down a manner as possible, and share exactly how they feel, and in every manner, they can be uncensored.
To me (foodie at the core), this is taking our normal well-balanced diet that has been told to us will make us healthier and live longer and injecting a touch of spice or heavy cream to your average meal. I see this sort of “rogue” website as a underground supplement to the delicious and nutritious planned marketing. Maybe this little fun taste will encourage a viewer to actually follow up on the statements on the site by clicking through to more official content (if there’s a relevant link to content submitted to us, we’re adding it — who said fun can’t also be educational?).
HL: I think, perhaps obviously, this sort of content needs to be gauged to your audience. If you’re a conservative Catholic college, for instance, your audience might be a little put off. But Obies have always been a little edgy, a little ahead of the trends, and totally irreverent, so I think this sort of site really appeals to most folks who love or will someday love Oberlin. It’s hard to say what the reaction to this website would be if it were published by the college itself instead of two enthusiastic alumni. I think that’s something that could have consequence from a number of groups whose support is critical to the college. But I think it is important that universities are not afraid of content like this when it crops up organically.
Check out my follow-up analysis post: WTF FTW Part 2: The Real Internet
Earlier today, I asked on Twitter: “When it comes to creating content, what does ‘quality’ mean to you?” I got a range of great responses and had some good discussions. I’d love to hear your thoughts, as well, in the comments.
Last night, I saw Jens Lekman perform at the Arts at the Armory complex in Somerville, just a 20 minute walk from my house. The last time I saw Lekman perform was in 2005, at a tiny club across town, PA’s Lounge. (It was also then that I interviewed him for a profile in Splendid E-Zine). In the interim, Lekman has gathered lots of acclaim for his honest, emotional, clever and at times charmingly awkward songwriting.
When I saw him in ’05 at PA’s, he was very fresh and young. He shyly clung to the microphone, eyes shut, crooning away. But at the Armory, I was stunned by how Lekman has matured as a performer in the past nearly seven years. At a sold-out venue packed with nearly 400 fans, Lekman commanded the stage with ease and comfort, dancing around, responding to the crowd and obviously enjoying the night.
It made me think about the act of creation. When you create something — a song, an essay, a painting, a website — you create a world. You can either invite people into it, or not.
Back in 2005, we got to observe the worlds of Lekman’s creation, and the audience derived some enjoyment from that. But we were not a part of them. Those worlds were his own. Last night, however, we were invited into them. We became an integral part of them.
After the show, my friend Chris remarked, “He was just completely engaged.” And that was it. Yes, the concept of engagement is one of the most overused in marketing. But now, after this concert, I feel like I have a better understanding of it than ever before. To engage someone is to invite them into the world of your creation, and to make it a shared experience. They become as much a part of it as you are, sharing in the honesty, the emotion, the cleverness and, yes, even the charming awkwardness.
Sometimes, your world needs to remain your own, and that’s okay. It could be something very personal, or you’re just trying to work something out or conduct an experiment.
But a world gains power when you bring people into it, because they make it better than you could have done on your own. They shape your creation, enhance it, amplify it.
It makes me think of one of the coolest phenomena I’ve learned about from the Occupy Wall Street movement — the people’s mic, where the crowd makes up for the lack of amplification by having an individual’s message shouted in echo by the people standing nearby. This not only enables everyone to hear the message, but actively involves the crowd in its communication.
It may have taken Lekman a few years to figure out how to let people into his world. But last night at the Armory, the power of his engagement was on full display. And his creations, his songs, buzzed with the life we fed into them.
This year, I attended my third Podcamp Boston which is always a great, affordable opportunity to learn and network from some of the smartest web marketing people in the area.
One of the great things about Podcamps is how attendees are empowered to shape the conference in a way that makes it most valuable to them, whether it’s by creating ad hoc sessions or how many presenters actively turn to members of the audience to enhance the discussion with their questions and input. Last year, Katie Cohen and I ran an ad hoc discussion about content strategy, which was a fun and fulfilling exercise. I came away resolved to propose a formal session this year — and I did!
I described my session, “Get Smart About Content,” to some people as “content strategy lite,” covering the high level principles of ensuring your content is sustainable, useful and goal-driven.
It was a great session, made great (in true Podcamp fashion) by the smart questions and helpful insights shared by the (packed!) room. Thanks to everyone who participated. Below, I’ve shared the slides (enhanced with some additional details) as well as a Storify of some of the key points tweeted during the session. Thanks, Podcamp organizers, for the great opportunity!
UPDATE: Thanks to Jess Faulk of Simmons College for recording the session!
