Subscribe to RSS feed

Online Newsrooms in Higher Ed

On Feb. 13, I appeared on Higher Ed Live with Seth Odell to talk about online newsrooms in higher ed. We talked about the project I was recently a part of, Tufts Now, what universities should aim for with their online news and how to achieve that. Watch the archived video:

Thank you, Seth, for having me on the show, and thanks to those who watched and asked awesome questions! I’ve been eager to talk about this topic, as I often feel that higher ed news sites — owing to time, resources or different priorities — often get short shrift but have great potential to become a hub of information for our various audiences. I wanted to follow up on the show by emphasizing a few points.

We are all publishers now – This is one of the fundamental tenets of content marketing. So we better start acting like it. We are in charge of our own stories, so let’s take charge of the ways we tell and present them. We can’t rely just on positive media coverage. Content is our best marketing tool, so own it.

Don’t follow higher ed – Our audiences aren’t reading and sharing news from other higher ed news sites, so why would we use those as our benchmarks for the online news consumption experience? Also, higher ed is not a leader here (yet). Look to mainstream media, prominent blogs and other online publications to see how they do it. Remember — often, they are working with budget constraints similar to ours.

Mix it up - Online news content can (and should) go far beyond news releases and profiles. Video, audio slideshows, infographics, blogs, live chats, live tweeting, curation, live streaming interviews — all of these are in our arsenal and within our budgets, and they can help us cover stories in new and compelling ways.

Affordable tools like SoundSlides or SlideShowPro can help us create compelling audio-visual slideshows in minutes (and SoundSlides, at least, allows you to export your slideshow as a video clip you can then upload to YouTube). CoverItLive enables both live chats (with a professor talking about the revolution in Egypt, for example) and tweet/chat archives. Storify helps us curate content from a range of different outlets.

Pitching – We can have a great story, but how do we get it out there? If we’re pitching it for external coverage, are we looking beyond just the normal papers and considering blogs (both major and niche)? As David Meerman Scott emphasizes in his book “Real Time Marketing and PR,” news happens in real-time, so position what you’re pitching around current events or whatever the media is currently interested in. Know which way the wind blows. Relatedly, check out Conversation Agent’s thoughts on news discovery and the new PR.

And what about the tried and true press release? How does that need to change? The “social media press release,” a new template for media outreach in the real-time, multimedia web world, takes that traditional content platform and gives it legs. PR firm Shift Communications offers a social media news release template [PDF] and you can read more from Copyblogger, Brian Solis, Social Media Today and PBS MediaShift on the topic.

Distribution – For content we produce ourselves, does our content management system publish in real time, like a blog? (Heck, how about just using a blog platform?) Do you get picked up in Google News or Google Blog Alerts? Do you offer RSS feeds? Do you have an e-mail newsletter? Is there a plan for linking out news stories via social media? Where else do your news stories feed on your website — relevant top level pages? Relevant school sites? If there are no feeds, are you manually sharing relevant links with the appropriate web/communications folks elsewhere at your institution? Have we tagged and categorized our stories properly for findability and organization? Can your web stories get republished in the alumni magazine, with links or QR codes driving people to the web for extra multimedia coverage? Does your news coverage feed into your mobile site/digital signage/etc.?

Relationships, collaboration and voices – Your coverage is only going to be as strong as the relationships behind it. Are you connected to the other communications professionals and content creators/influencers at your institutions? Are you sharing information, story lists, news tips? Are you brainstorming about coverage?

Relatedly, when sitting down to figure out the best way to do online news at your institution, broaden the conversation beyond just your news or PR people. Have the social media folks at the table. Bring the designers. Perhaps most importantly, invite the programmers. See what everyone has to say. Want an outside voice? See if you have an alum who works in online journalism, or invite a staffer from the web newsroom at your local paper.

Resources

I wanted to share some of the blogs and online resources that have helped me in my journey through higher ed online news. While some are mainly geared toward professional journalists, there are lots of takeaways for higher ed if we ignore the hand-wringing about paywalls and online advertising :-)

News University – This resource from Poynter, while geared toward professional journalists, is available to anyone doing similar work. News U offers very affordable courses and webinars (priced right for even higher ed!) covering topics that range from video production to photo editing to news writing to introductory jQuery.

Adam Westbrook – This UK-based multimedia journalist is a go-to resource for learning doing video and multimedia work on a budget and a smart thinker on the future of online journalism. He offers a free ebook, “6×6,” that gives advice on the different skillsets that the next generation of multimedia journalist will need.

“New Rules of Marketing and PR” – It’s no secret that I am a David Meerman Scott fangirl, but this book really lays out the fundamental approach to online marketing and communications in a real-time, web-centric environment. Consider it your textbook.

College Web Editor Survey: State of Print and Electronic Publications in Higher Ed – This survey by Karine Joly, released in December 2010, provides some interesting context for online higher ed publications against their print counterparts, with some thoughts on the shift to digital and how to have web and print complement one another.

Leadership Lessons – Amy Mengel of ReadMedia recently launched a monthly series of interviews with higher ed public relations professionals. On the first episode, Jill Jess – associate director of news and media relations at the University of Kansas — discussed her transition to higher ed PR from journalism.

10,000 Words – This blog focuses on the intersection between journalism and technology, always sharing links to cool tools and pointers on emerging trends. The creator, Mark Luckie, now with the Washington Post, also wrote the great book “The Digital Journalist’s Handbook.”

Nieman Lab – This blog, a project of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard, explores journalism in the internet age.

PBS MediaShift – Presenting itself as “your guide to the digital media revolution,” covers everything from social media to online privacy to mobile to ebooks.

“Producing Online News: New Tools, Stronger Stories” – This textbook is authored by Ryan Thornburg, an assistant professor of journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill and a great thinker on the future of news.

What else? I love talking about this stuff, so let’s keep the conversation going!

3 Comments

Georgy, February 14th 2011 | Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Content

Ngrams and the Challenge of Context

On Feb. 9, I attended the first public demonstration of Google’s Ngram viewer, hosted at Google’s Cambridge offices by Hacks/Hackers Boston and delivered by Google Books engineering manager Jon Orwant.

The Ngram viewer taps the Google Books database of approximately 15 million digitized books to graph the occurrence of certain phrases in literature over time. This can yield a rough data visualization of cultural trends as expressed via word choice in literature. Results can be broken out across 11 language corpora and any range of years.

Google is making this data available — whether its to researchers in the digital humanities or yokels like myself — in the hopes of extracting insights from the accumulated corpora. When you break down a work of literature into what Orwant described as its semantic data stack (I’m veering into an alluring yet unfamiliar library science world here!), you have pages, text/pictures and characters at the bottom. As you ascend, you can begin to discern structure, parts of speech, facts and — ultimately — ideas. Google’s goal is to be able to intuit ideas from the amassed data from these books — but they’re not there quite yet.

It’s a fascinating tool (there’s even a Tumblr where you can post your own interesting Ngrams). You can compare similar words or competing phrases. Sample Ngram searches included phrenology vs. neurology, middle west vs. midwest, nursery school vs. child care vs. kindergarten. You can also track to evolution of a term like “hospice” over time, or compare appearances of the terms freedom, security and liberty across American history.

What Ngrams demonstrate is the legacy left by language. Our language is an expression of our history, and by atomizing literature into data, Google hopes to empower an unprecedented quantitative cultural analysis, pulling out compelling trends and patterns and validating hypotheses. As any number-crunching reporter will tell you, data tells stories.

The challenge, though, as Orwant would be the first to admit, is context. A word only means so much on its own as a data point, and words may have multiple meanings that can best be sorted out via context. The lack of context also opens the possibility of gaming the data to spit out desired results. It’s easy to compare two words that will result in an interesting looking graph, but what does it really mean? Some of the Harvard researchers involved in the project (a study they have dubbed “culturomics”) have created a user’s guide to evaluating Ngram data, which is helpful, but the onus is still on the user to practice safe data interpretation.

Lessons from language

To web marketers, some of the tenets of Ngram may sound familiar. After all, don’t we use the Google keyword tool and webmaster tools to optimize copy for SEO, making our content more findable and relevant to the ways our users seek information? Of course, SEO isn’t about conveying a message or idea; it’s about getting a message or idea found.

There is more to consider. In her recap of the event, Katie Cohen notes that the Ngram viewer has value as a data-driven editorial tool that can inform our word choice and steer us away from antiquated verbiage. But she also raises the good point that as a barometer of the evolution of language, Ngram may provide an incomplete picture:

I wondered whether published works really captured the zeitgeist, especially in an era where so much is communicated off the printed page, via blogs, tweets, even video.

(Which, of course, begs the question: WWMMS — What would Marshall McLuhan say?)

I can’t help but think about Mike Teavee from “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” who wanted to be the first person transmitted by Wonkavision. Sure enough, he was transmitted in a million little pieces and came out on the other end — in one piece, but much, much smaller.

What do we lose in the transmission from ideas to data and (as Google hopes) back to ideas? Can a computer, even one like Watson, ever be intelligent enough to interpret data contextually and draw meaningful conclusions?

Words alone can tell stories, but when we can appreciate the words in their full context, that story becomes richer and more accurate. Ngrams from books across centuries can point to a trend or pattern, but if we were able to extract Ngrams from news articles and tweets and YouTube videos, think how much more robust and validated that pattern becomes.

What the Ngram viewer demonstrates is the significant role of language as a cultural watermark, and how breaking a whole down into its components can yield entirely new understandings. But above all else, to me, it is a critical reminder of the value of context in making true sense of the world.

2 Comments

Georgy, February 11th 2011 | Tags: , ,
Posted in Content, Events

Checking In: That’s Entertainment

Second in a series of posts about the rise of check-in services

One of the most interesting phenomena to emerge from the proliferation of location and experience based services has been the concept of checking in to content. Foursquare, at its most basic level, makes sense — I go to the bar, and I click something that confirms and communicates my presence on the web. But TV shows? Websites? Does the concept of checking in really transfer to media and content consumption?

Most definitely.

Watching a TV show or visiting a website is as much of an experience as patronizing a restaurant. It’s driven by the same motivations to seek value. And as a value-rich experience, content demands the following things to thrive. (And these are not new or only true of the web — if you think about it, this is true across history.)

  • Order (schedule, structure, organization, purpose, data)
  • Community (conversation, audience, shared interest)
  • Mobility (sharing, accessibility, malleability)

The check-in framework inherently meets these needs, which makes it a natural fit.

People connect through content, much we do through locations and other shared encounters, and we rely on these digital signposts to enhance our experience.

The Glow of the ‘Second Screen’ Campfire

On Mashable, Caroline Giegerich described content check-ins as a means of self-definition and finding community. She said the following of entertainment-based check-in services:

As DVR and On Demand erased our live viewing habits, television became less viable as a water cooler topic. It’s time to bring it back. Enter GetGlue, Miso, Philo, Tunerfish and others. I may now live across the country from friends in New York City but I can still connect with them via GetGlue’s stream and see who is also addicted to The Walking Dead.

Services like GetGlue, ScreenTribe and Miso convert entertainment transactions into commodities, providing a framework for engagement and discovery. For content creators, a check-in holds significantly more weight than a tweet, as Mashable’s Jennifer Van Grove explains, because of all the data attached to it. Participants derive value from the relationships (shared interest community) and information (recommendations, program details) that they gain by checking in. As Van Grove wrote (and her whole post is worth a solid read):

In practice, this alternative checkin behavior is one that is more cultural and familiar than anything the location checkin offers. In fact, it emulates the way we experience entertainment in our everyday lives. The desire to share is unchanging — it’s how we share that will continue to evolve with the help of social media and entertainment checkin services.

The community aspect of entertainment check-ins is powerful. Van Grove elaborates:

Foreign as it may sound, the act of checking-in to television shows or other entertainment entities creates a culture connection between media consumers with similar interests. Philo, Miso and GetGlue provide services that allow individuals to make social connections to culture, and that’s what sets them apart from the Twitters and Facebooks of the social networking world. It’s this cultural relevance that will create digital bonding experiences and will propel this trend to television watchers outside of the web-tech bubble.

These services capitalize on the “second screen” phenomenon of people complementing and enhancing their TV viewing with iPad, laptop or smartphone usage in order to access, as Giegerich puts it, “information surrounding what’s on screen, including comments from friends and additional information.” (In fact, some say Twitter has helped spur a revival in TV viewing. A recent post on the invaluable Twitter Media blog gives a case study with the show “The Game.”) A July 2010 Nielsen/Yahoo study found that three out of four Americans experience the web and TV simultaneously. (This plays into the idea of dynamic context, which I’ll discuss more in a future post.)

It also touches on something else, the real key to what makes television content a natural for a check-in framework: emotion. Content, in this case TV entertainment, depends on emotion to gain traction: humor, outrage, sadness, joy, you name it. GetGlue founder Alex Iskold spoke to ReadWriteWeb about this

Humans are attached to entertainment and entertainment drives our emotions. Everybody wants to talk about entertainment and essentially it’s a form of self-expression. Which books you like, which movies you like, which shows you watch – it’s self-expression and something that we’d like to discuss and tell each other about.

And where does GetGlue go to capitalize on these emotional transactions? They rely on the second screen, of course. “We’re already where we need to be,” Iskold told RWW. “We’re in the living room.”

Coming next: Mayor of my blog?

Photo by dantaylor/Flickr Creative Commons

3 Comments

Georgy, February 8th 2011 | Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Content

Checking In

Getting ready to go out to dinner? Watch TV? Drink a beer? Even visit this humble blog? Chances are, if have an activity in mind, you can “check in” and share that activity with the world.

When you think “check-in,” you might first think of Foursquare or Gowalla, the standard-bearers of location-based services. But an increasing number of services are expanding the check-in modality beyond your favorite bars and bookstores. The idea of location is morphing such that it really means experience.

But why? Why are we invested in communicating and learning about experiences in this transactional fashion?

  • The power of shared/collective experience – We all like to know that we are going through something together. Look at the Heatpocalypse/Snowpocalypse/etc. “locations” that emerge on Foursquare during significant weather events, the hashtag games that crop up on Twitter now and then (like #improvedbands) or just follow the hashtag for something like the Super Bowl or the Oscars (or, my personal favorite, the comic gold that was the opening ceremony to the 2010 Winter Olympics). I like to think that we exist in a state of latent connectivity — sort of like the standby power a phone charger consumes even if a phone isn’t plugged into it — waiting for something or someone to engage with.
  • The power of game mechanics - SCVNGR is the poster child of exploiting game mechanics for LBS gains, but other services are (smartly) playing that card, as well — there are even potential applications for game mechanics in the delivery and consumption of online news.
  • Inclination to share and communicate – Is it because humans are tribal animals? We are naturally inclined to share and communicate the experiences in our lives. As soon as technological advances have allowed, we’ve seized them to enhance and expand our communications to our own networks and the world at large.
  • Inclination to self-organize – For better or for worse, humans are programmed to self-organize. Like I said above, we are tribal. A hashtag, however ephemeral, is a sort of digital tribe, a campfire around which we gather based around a common interest.
  • Serendipity - In the context of Foursquare, I once termed it “squarendipity” — the belief that by using the web to align our life experiences, we will uncover common ground and thereby enhance those experience. C.C. Chapman recently blogged an example of the serendipitous applications of Foursquare. (Of course, as we already know, serendipity is not the whole of a strategy, but rather a component of one.)

In a recent post, Mashable provided a good roundup of the check-in boom and some of these themes, going more into depth about the deal and branding aspects of location/experience-based services. The author also raises the question of whether or not the LBS explosion is the consequence of some critical mass of oversharing tendencies, or simply the new standard for self-definition.

Whichever way you look at it, online life and offline life are increasingly becoming just one life, and we are building and adopting technologies to reflect this. In the coming weeks, I aim to explore the dimensions of this evolution and its implications. Stay tuned for future posts on this topic.

Coming next: That’s entertainment

Photo by dpstyles (yes, Dennis Crowley)/Flickr Creative Commons

No Comments

Georgy, February 1st 2011 | Tags: , ,
Posted in Content, Social Media

Content Rules!

I was on vacation last week, which gave me some time to plow through C.C. Chapman and Ann Handley’s new book, “Content Rules.” It’s a great read, loaded with information, explanations and practical advice, written in a fun and accessible manner. If you’re wrestling with how to wrap your arms around content creation and strategy, you’ll be energized and refocused by this book.

I attended the book launch party at HubSpot TV a couple weeks ago, where Tamsen McMahon from Sametz Blackstone approached me, armed with a flipcam, and asked how I was using content to build brand. Turns out, she asked a lot of smarties the same question. I find myself in some fine company in the below video, collecting our answers to that important query:

Before thinking too much about how content can promote our brand, maybe we should step back for a moment and ask the question, “What is content?” Luckily, Chapman is way ahead of us and recorded this video asking several attendees at BlogWorld Expo back in October this very question:

Hungry for more about content? Here are a couple cool links I’ve come across lately:

I hope the new year brings you good times and great content! :-)

No Comments

Georgy, December 28th 2010 | Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Content

MITX Panel Discussion: Grow Your Customer Relationships With Branded Content

On Dec. 7, I attended the MITX panel discussion “Grow Your Customer Relationships With Branded Content.” The panel, moderated by Holland-Mark Digital principal Mike Troiano, featured:

Carissa Caramanis O’Brien - President at Red Box Communications
Eric Oliver – Director Digital Brand Communications, Converse
Matt Drinkwater – Senior Director, Yahoo!

As Troiano put it, the old tactic was to cram your view down the customer’s throat with self-serving copy. The new tactic, content marketing, focuses on delivering web content with intrinsic value. It hits the sweet spot of both what customers want and what serves the brand’s interests. Why is this effective? One, because people have become better able to filter unwanted noise. Two, people are becoming savvier at finding the information the way.

What is Branded Content?

As O’Brien put it, while in the past we strived to create a slick, finished package, the challenge now is to offer something incomplete that invites the audience to continue the dialogue. Our responsibility is to start the story and enable the connection with the customer. This participatory experience is becoming a default expectation for the digital natives we market to. In describing the web show “Chronicles of EMS,” which covers the evolving field of paramedicine, she spoke of a program designed by and for paramedics to elevate the profession and create community. Sponsored by a defibrillator manufacturer, the product is embedded in the field with the paramedics featured on the show.

Oliver says that the relevance of the content generated at Converse is driven by their audience’s passions. Converse doesn’t want to talk about itself; they want to know what their customers are doing in their shoes. One of those passions is music — historically, the Ramones, Kurt Cobain and James Dean have all shown off various flavors of Converse. Converse’s Rubber Tracks initiative allows bands to record music in a state-of-the-art Brooklyn studio and keep their recordings in exchange for Converse sharing the content created during the recording process. Converse supports the initiative by creating how-to videos for musicians and engineers. Oliver described it as “putting our money where our mouth is.”

Drinkwater echoed the audience-centric perspective, lending ut a more data-driven approach that Yahoo! has the ability to execute by mining search and click behavior. He shared the example of the branded web show The Thread in its women-centric Shine channel, focusing on celebrity fashion. This joint initiative with Proctor and Gamble adheres to three main pillars:  1) is the content compelling/engaging? 2) can the product integration be done tastefully? 3) discoverability. The Yahoo! editorial team doesn’t fall into the advertorial trap by posting content that doesn’t pass the “smell test” of  what women want to consume organically on the web. The effectiveness of the venture is measured, with Nielsen tracking in-store product sales. According to Drinkwater, Comscore ranks Yahoo as having nine of the top 10 branded content programs on the web. The key, says Drinkwater, is commitment – these efforts take time.

Troiano talked about his firm’s work with Notch, a session ale (high flavor, low alcohol) looking to gain traction in the craft beer community. On NotchSession.com the makers of Notch aim to build rapport among craft beer drinkers and provide “information with objective value” about craft beer, session ale and other related topics. All of their social media efforts drive back to NotchSession.com. On Twitter, they follow targeted bars in a target market (in this case, Boston) as well as the people who patronize those bars. They set up a listening station to pay attention to commentary about session ale and craft beer, and comments left on those blogs have become a major inbound marketing vehicle for them.

Challenges for Content Marketing

Troiano mentioned how it can be a challenge to recruit content contributors from within the organization. It is important, he said, to share the strategic context of this work, so people see its value. Bring the content creators around the table from the beginning. Curation is also a valuable complement to creation, by getting people to react to select third-party content with their own context. In his projects, Troiano institutes content checkpoints at 30, 60 and 90 days, providing opportunities for high-ranking people in the company to weigh in on the value of the content work and help breed an internal culture of others wanting to contribute.

O’Brien seconded this, noting that sometimes, you have to play to the egos a little bit. Sometimes, she added, the problem is beyond simply finding contributors — it’s getting any buy-in at all. Content marketing is still new and tough to understand for some fields, including health care, which has the added complexity of regulatory challenges to contend with.

Budget can also be a factor, but as Oliver detailed, you can get high-yield content with a low budget, while adhering to the principle of creating content that is a draw over advertising that is a push. This video of the hot band Phantogram shows these ideas in action:

Troiano added that budget is not just a question of money — it’s also time, and an organization needs to culturally get what content marketing is about in order to allocate the necessary time to any content marketing initiatives.

The Future of Content Marketing

Drinkwater says there is an increased interest in content marketing (including a push toward microcontent), and thus an increased push to find newer and cheaper earned distribution channels. Relatedly, the barriers for content production have fallen significantly. A challenge he faces is giving his branded content more legs outside of Yahoo!

Oliver foresees that brand-sanctioned, crowdsourced content — through services such as Poptent – could gain in popularity, challenging the brand-agency model with a more community-driven approach.

O’Brien said that as brands grow more comfortable with losing control, they will more readily embrace user-generated content.

Troiano summed it up well, noting that in time, content marketing will become the core of marketing, and less of a side-project. This is because a human approach to business is becoming more and more vital.

“If you’ve ever tried to say something interesting at a party,” said Troiano, “you understand the essence of content marketing.”

More Coverage

2 Comments

Georgy, December 9th 2010 | Tags: , , ,
Posted in Brands, Content, Events, marketing

Can Stories Spare Higher Ed From the Axe?

On Nov. 14, Mark Greenfield — a noted speaker and thinker on higher ed and director of web services at University of Buffalo – appeared on an episode of Higher Ed Live entitled “When the Axe Man Cometh,” talking about the future of higher ed – specifically what it means for those of us working in higher ed marketing. (Don’t have time to watch the show? Here is a great written recap by Deborah Edwards-Onoro.)

One of the topics discussed was which departments might be outsourced as universities look to cut costs, and the  outsourcing of marketing functions came up. The following Twitter conversation ensued in the show’s backchannel:

Patrick Powers: Higher ed is not in the IT business #higheredlive (It’s also not in the web/marketing business)

Me: Is higher ed in the business of telling its own story?

Patrick: sometimes… but not when someone can tell it better (and cheaper).

Me: Part of what helps me do my job well is my deep investment in the univ’s mission. You can’t buy that.

Patrick: You’re right, you cannot buy personal investment. But do you need it? Are U of Phoenix employees invested?

Me: It’s a qualitative argument. I have my ear to the track everyday. Does that help me tell stories better than John Doe?

Me: I think investment and immersion are vital.

Patrick: Are vital for quality or survival?

J.D. Ross: Can’t have survival w/o quality – have to be able to tell the stories & show the value to new students…

Me: I think for both quality and for success/survival. Call me an idealist ;-)

Patrick: it’s ok. i actually agree (i’m an idealist, too, but I play a curmudgeon on the web) ;-)

I recreate the conversation here in full because I think it touched on an important point: stories as a core business function, and who is best equipped to fulfill that function.

Content is Capital

Content marketing, as explored in Joe Pulizzi’s talk at Content Strategy New England a couple weeks ago, focuses on the concept of marketers as publishers, working to attract or retain customers through consistent creation of valuable content designed to maintain or change a behavior. This includes us. We create quality web content that we hope guides prospective students to apply or visit. We write compelling articles that we hope inspire alumni to donate or feel pride. Content is capital with which we grow our business.

One flavor of content marketing is brand storytelling, sometimes called brand journalism. David Meerman Scott defines it well:

the creation of Web content—videos, blog posts, photos, charts, graphs, essays, ebooks, white papers—that deliver value to your marketplace and serve to position your organization as one worthy of doing business with.

Ann Handley of MarketingProfs elaborates on what storytelling for business is all about:

It’s about how your business (or its products or services) exist in the real world: how people use your products—how they add value to people’s lives, ease their troubles, help shoulder their burdens, and meet their needs.

George Snell of Weber Shandwick sums up why it is important for organizations to invest in brand storytelling:

Given the climate – consumers flocking online for information and mass media transforming into multimedia platforms – smart brands are realizing the power of controlling and creating their own online storytelling.

Increasingly, more and more brands — from the U.S. military to Boeing to Moleskine to Imperial Sugar Company — are following suit and building their own, internal storytelling capacities across multiple platforms (also known as transmedia). So why would we in higher ed even consider outsourcing our own storytelling capacity?

When it comes to achieving business goals, a brand needs good stories like a website needs good usability. Both guide our audiences toward desired ends, supporting core objectives. And how do you craft an effective story? By knowing your audience. And in higher ed, we live and breathe with our audience every day. That is not easy to replicate externally. It’s part institutional knowledge, but also part investment in the institution and connection to its mission. Only so much of that can be communicated in a brand identity document. As I tweeted during the show, I feel like what helps me do my job well is that connection I feel to what the university is all about.

So how can we dull the axe blade, or spare it altogether? J.D. brought up a good word in the backchannel: value. Stories demonstrate value. Our future as higher ed marketing and communications professionals depends on how well we tell stories, both externally (to communicate the institution’s value and achieve business goals) and internally (to communicate our own value and make our own case). We need to be viewed as a core business function, a sort of Buildings and Grounds for our organization’s brand and reputation — trimming the hedges, unblocking the toilets and painting the walls.

Investing in content is investing in stories, which are the voice of your institution. And shouldn’t you always speak from the heart?

9 Comments

Georgy, November 18th 2010 | Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Content, marketing

Mandy Brown and Erin Kissane at Content Strategy New England: A Pragmatic Approach to Editorial Style

Last night, Mandy Brown (left) and Erin Kissane spoke at Content Strategy New England on “A Pragmatic Approach to Editorial Style.” Brown is co-founder and editor for A Book Apart, contributing editor for A List Apart, and community and support manager at Typekit. Kissane is an independent content strategist and editor based in NYC and Portland, Oregon, and a former editor at A List Apart magazine.

Kissane started by comparing the process of creating a website to wearing braces — after you get everything straightened out, the braces come out but you’re asked to wear a retainer — which almost nobody wants to do (or actually does). So a style guide could end up being like a retainer — something designed to help keep your content on the straight and narrow, but easy to shove in a desk drawer and forget about. Kissane said a good style guide should really function like a railing on a stairway you can grab when you’re about to fall.

Ultimately, a style guide should help create consistency. Here’s how it can do that:

  • It provides guidance on voice, style and tone. While content strategy has moved beyond this, it’s still essential. An organization needs to define its voice, outline any tonal shifts and elaborate on its style (formal? not formal?).
  • It defines mechanics and length. This includes spelling and capitalization, length of pages and headlines or instances where one should refer to a house manual (e.g. Chicago, AP)
  • It clarifies how we structure our links. Do we links nouns or verbs? What kind of relationships should links show? This is a codification of human judgment in order to help people make calls down the line.
  • In the case of images, a style guide distinguishes communication from decoration. Content should communicate, and images are no exception. Is this achieved through screenshots, diagrams, information visualizations, illustrations?
  • You need to balance consistency with a healthy variance, varying appropriately from channel to channel.

What happens when style guides go wrong?

  • It is simply not in use.
  • The style guide is isolated, either physically (e.g. a print copy shoved in a bookcase somewhere) or  by being created by a separate team, individual or consultant.
  • It’s frozen – it doesn’t grow due to a hyper-level of detail that does not make for  easy editing, or only one person is capable of suggesting and implementing edits.
  • The content of the style guide is arbitrary or mechanical, i.e. reflecting one person’s pet peeves or going to an absurd level of technical details.
  • The guide descends from on high and doesn’t match the realities or meet the needs on the ground.

How can a style guide stay flexible and adapt? How can people feel ownership and investment?

  • Make the style guide appropriate to the needs of the organization. Fit the existing content creation process and workflow.
  • Strive for consistency, not uniformity. Consistency in style will help the reader move through the content. Uniform content is dull to both read and create.
  • Create principles, not rules. Share these principles to help people understand why the style guide says certain things.
  • Provide real-life examples across all applicable channels, showing how the rules play out in a way people can grasp.

How can a style guide help our content remain authentic?

  • Personality matters. Help convey a sense of character — anthropomorphizing the characters may help achieve this (“our organization wears these clothes and says these things”).
  • Be honest, because people will find out if you’re lying and they will call you out. Case in point: the Cooks Source scandal. A style guide should help define who you are and encourage transparency, which will help inform future responses and communications.
  • No bullshit. Eliminate jargon and trendy language. Just do it. Unsuck it. No mercy. Compile lists of words common to both the organization and the industry and banish them.

How do you integrate a style guide into the fabric of an organization?

  • Put the guidelines where people do their work. Post it on the organization’s wiki or intranet. Weave components into page templates or build them directly into the CMS. Don’t be Clippy, but do provide timely and relevant support.
  • Use your own content in the style guidelines.

How do you convert style guide users into style guide evangelists, in order to help it live on?

  • Building off the idea of sharing principles and not rules, be sure to communicate the why along with the how, so people can appreciate the rationale rather than just blindly follow a process.
  • Ease the adoption process. A style guide should not be delivered with a thud, but rather adopted over time. Let people know who to ask when questions come up. Offer a presentation or a Q&A to explain the style guide for people and allow for feedback and questions.
  • Develop a plan for ownership. How can people contribute to help the style guide change over time? There should be an owner/point person for the style guide, but the time and resources to do the job need to be built into their job description.
  • Plan for evolution. Create a procedure to allow the style guide to adapt and change. Host it in a wiki, where discussion modules can help people collectively evolve the document. Establish a decision-making process. Develop a process for communicating changes to the guide.

How do style guides tie into broader content strategy efforts?

  • Strategy and tactics work best hand in hand, and having a strategy behind your style guide will help it live longer and be more useful.
  • A style guide can be a gateway drug into deeper content work. It is a discrete goal that most people can understand. If they buy into the process of developing a style guide, it may be easier to get them behind more nitty-gritty content projects.

Some good points came up in the Q&A:

  • How can you measure the effectiveness of a style guide? Think of it in terms of measuring the effectiveness of the content. If you ask users to complete reading comprehension tests, how do they perform? Can you measure its effectiveness in terms of recovered productivity?
  • One example of a great style guide? The Economist.
  • Design and content styles should work together from a shared set of principles. Much like you may A/B test functionality and images, consider A/B testing words, as well.
  • Kissane and Brown talked about the idea of agile content development (much like agile software development) and the value of an iterative process (though it works better in-house).
  • When it comes to employing a style guide for distributed publishing processes (e.g. multiple contributors to a blog), including some potentially reluctant writers, they pointed out that the process of writing helps you understand what you are making and what you did. It helps to have an opportunity to synthesize an idea to make sure you understand and can communicate it.

Thanks, Mandy and Erin, for an engaging and informative talk!

Stairwell photo by estherase/Flickr Creative Commons

3 Comments

Georgy, November 16th 2010 | Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Content

A Video I Love and Why

My friend Tim Nekritz asked people to blog on the topic of “A Video I Love and Why.” I couldn’t help but oblige.

This video is by Christiaan Van Vuuren, the Fully Sick Rapper. Van Vuuren’s story in a nutshell: he traveled to South America in late 2009, contracted tuberculosis, was hospitalized at home in Sydney briefly, got released, grew sicker, and was re-hospitalized and quarantined for six months before his release in July 2010.

During his first hospitalization, he created this first rap video, but it was the one embedded above that went viral and earned him the title of the Fully Sick Rapper. (This video news report from a New Zealand TV station gives a good overview of Van Vuuren’s story.)

When I first discovered this video earlier this year, I was drawn to it mainly because it was one of the funniest, most entertaining things I’d seen on the internet in a while. But upon (several) repeated watchings and some reflection, I find that there is a lot to appreciate in here, most of all how impressively Van Vuuren coped with (and made the most of) a pretty miserable situation.

Van Vuuren turned his misfortune into an opportunity to create and to learn (in one part of the rap, he riffs on how much better his video editing has gotten), sharing several funny videos over the course of his quarantine — and ultimately earning legions of fans around the world. He threw himself into the videos in part to stave off quarantine-induced insanity, and when he emerged from isolation, he had a fresh set of skills and a fully engaged fan base.

Now that he is free and healthy, he is taking advantage of his fame to not only pursue a new career in entertainment, but to raise money for charities addressing issues such as TB awareness and treatment around the globe. Among other endeavors, he helped start the 30 Days Has September project (trying one new thing each day in September and raising money for charity in the process) and participated in YouTube’s Life in a Day project, where he recorded a thoughtful rap marking his 180th day in isolation (just days before his eventual release).

You have to admire Van Vuuren’s spirit and determination to not let an adverse situation get the best of him (a true testament to the power of humor), and how he has almost seamlessly transitioned from long-term hospital patient to minor celebrity and spokesman/fundraiser for tuberculosis awareness. You even have to give him props for his video editing skills, which improved dramatically over the course of his quarantine.

In life, it is often how we respond to adversity that defines us. In the case of Christiaan van Vuuren, it was becoming sick-sick (as he puts it) that helped him become Fully Sick.

6 Comments

Georgy, November 8th 2010 | Tags: , ,
Posted in Content

Joe Pulizzi at Content Strategy New England

Last night, content marketing expert Joe Pulizzi spoke at Content Strategy New England. Pulizzi is the author of “Get Content, Get Customers” (Amazon affiliate link) and co-founder of Junta42 and the Content Marketing Institute.

One of Pulizzi’s first points was this: Your customers don’t care about you, so stop talking about yourself. The 80 / 20 rule of content says that while 80 percent of our actual content is customer-centric, companies tend to push the 80 percent that talk about themselves. Content, says Pulizzi, is a promise to your customers, and I really like thinking of it that way. What are you promising to your audience with your content? Are you living up to that promise?

Content marketing is centered around the premise of marketers as publishers, owning and not renting the media. (In fact, 90% of brands are already publishers.) This is not a new idea, said Pulizzi, bringing up historical examples such as John Deere’s magazine The Furrow(published since 1895) and the Jell-O cookbooks. The catch is, if you are going to publish, it has to compete, so it has to be great — not good, great. Luckily, brands often have more resources than the mainstream media at their disposal to get their stories published and shared. But creating and sharing valuable content on a consistent basis is at the core of content marketing. The standard should be compelling. Let quality guide publication volume.

Pulizzi touched on the distinction between content strategy and content marketing, and noted that in actuality, they are two sides of the same coin. While content strategy is more focused on internal process, he explained, content marketing is focused more externally on engagement, action and establishing expertise.

The future of content marketing is promising, as the findings from the 2010 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends indicate. Companies that prioritize and fund content marketing see the results and feel good about their efforts. But other companies are not confident in their efforts to date; they need help to develop an executable content marketing plan and create engaging content, and they are willing to spend the money to get it.

That generated an interesting side-conversation about journalism, and how so many ex-journalists are becoming CCOs (chief content officers) at companies or working in various content marketing capacities. When we got our journalism degrees, no one told us we’d end up in marketing. But it’s all storytelling, right? Same craft. You just become a beat reporter for a brand. (More on this from me soon.)

Here are some videos from the event, going into depth on some topics I didn’t cover above. It was a great evening, and Pulizzi was a great speaker and a really nice guy to hang out with. See you at the next CSNE event on Nov. 15, where Erin Kissane and Mandy Brown will discuss “A Pragmatic Approach to Editorial Style.”

VIDEOS:

Pulizzi reviews the findings of the 2010 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends, a joint effort between Junta42 and MarketingProfs:

Pulizzi discusses the quality vs. volume debate:

Pulizzi discusses how to advise small businesses on content marketing:

(Katie Cohen blogged an interesting response to this conversation.)

Pulizzi discusses the differences between inbound marketing and content marketing:

2 Comments

Georgy, November 4th 2010 | Tags: , , ,
Posted in Content, Events
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »