University Business - November/December 2011 - (Page 64)

internet technology For Georgy Cohen, manager of web content and strategy at Tufts University (Mass.) and co-founder of the blog “Meet Content,” content strategy is what gives all of those channels, platforms, and projects a meaningful structure and purpose. “Content strategy is not a ‘thing to do’; it’s the purpose and the process behind the things we do,” she explains. Now that institutions are major web publishers, they have no other choice than to act like professional publishers to break through the ambient noise and reach students, parents, alums, and donors. What makes a good publisher beyond the profound understanding of the audience interests? It has always been the capacity to plan strategically the design, production, delivery, and maintenance of the content for a given publication. Like any good publisher, institutions need strategic planning to mobilize and coordinate resources and sources, manage demands of various initiatives, and provide the right content to the right audience through the right channel—at lightning speed. On The RighT PaTh While there’s a great interest for web content strategy in the higher ed web/social media professional community, examples of comprehensive implementation don’t abound. Content strategy, like any issues related to governance, can be perceived as political, messy, costly, and time-consuming. As a consequence, the majority of the few known higher ed examples have been limited to specific projects, redesigns and/ or CMS implementations—and not incorporated in day-to-day processes. For example, at ithaca College (N.Y.), content strategy helped administrators rethink and revamp the financial aid and billing website. By focusing on how the site could meet student and staff needs, this redesign, facilitated by the firm decimal152, put web content back where it really belonged—at the center of the project. It was an instant success. Once the site was launched, the volume of calls received from frustrated families trying to 64 | November/December 2011 pay their bills was slashed immediately. The University at Buffalo (N.Y.) Web Content Initiative team took advantage of the desire to get a CMS coupled with a redesign to dramatically improve website practices. Piloted at the UB School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, this project included extensive research around “mental models” by Indi Young and comprehensive information and messaging architecture by the agency mStoner. Content strategy can be perceived as political, messy, costly, and time-consuming. In this on-going initiative to dramatically improve the web presence of the institution, content strategy was used as the foundation to inform and guide change on the web. “The key deliverable to our project is creating best-practice prototypes of different kinds of UB sites (academic, administrative, and service-oriented) that will be used to inform web development by all the units at UB,” explains Rebecca Resources Colleen Jones on Higher Ed Content Challenges, http://collegewebeditor .com/blog (9/13/2011 post) decimal152, www.decimal152.com Ithaca College Case Study, presentation by decimal152, www.slideshare.net/stetsonhatter /below-the-fold-architecting-amissioncritical-department-website Indiana University of Pennsylvania blog, http://blog.iup.edu /aroundtheoakgrove Kristina Halvorson on higher ed content challenges, http://collegewebeditor.com/blog (5/3/2011 post) Web Content Initiative at University at Buffalo, www.buffalo.edu /ub2020/transforming_operations /transforming_initiatives/web_ content_initiative.html Bernstein, web strategist from the university communications office. At Victor Valley College (Calif.) and The University of new Brunswick (Canada), some elements of content strategy are also incorporated in the discovery phase of future web projects. At indiana University of Pennsylvania (Pa.), where work on a comprehensive multichannel content strategy is in progress, it’s not the prospect of a web redesign that put things in motion. In this case, the most immediate reason to dive into a content strategy was the challenge that social media presents, and, to some extent, an opportunity created by a change in the organizational chart. “Between print, the web, media relations, video, Facebook, Twitter, we’ve got something like 16 different tools we can use for any particular communication. It’s clear we need to be strategic about which tools we use for which tasks,” says Mike Powers, previously director of web services and currently interim director of communications. Content strategy at IUP is seen as a way to devise manageable solutions to feed all these content-hungry tools. With print, web, video, photography, and media relations under one roof and as a single team, it was possible to hit the ground running and follow best practices taken straight from Halvorson’s book. In just a few months, Powers and his team have already managed to implement a content strategy group, an editorial calendar covering all the university communication channels, from billboard to Twitter and Facebook to TV, as well as a message hierarchy mapping out institutional “pillar messages” into more usable information. Next on their to-do list is a content audit to find out if what’s published on all these tools is aligned with these messages. “From there, we’ll be making decisions about what we need to change to better reach our goals,” says Powers. This will take more time, but there’s no doubt that IUP is moving in the right direction with its multichannel approach to content strategy. universitybusiness.com http://collegewebeditor.com/blog http://collegewebeditor.com/blog http://www.decimal152.com http://www.slideshare.net/stetsonhatter/below-the-fold-architecting-a-missioncritical-department-website http://blog.iup.edu/aroundtheoakgrove http://blog.iup.edu/aroundtheoakgrove http://www.collegewebeditor.com/blog http://www.buffalo.edu/ub2020/transforming_operations/transforming_initiatives/web_content_initiative.html http://www.buffalo.edu/ub2020/transforming_operations/transforming_initiatives/web_content_initiative.html http://www.universitybusiness.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of University Business - November/December 2011

University Business - November/December 2011
Contents
Editor's Note
College Index
Ad Index
Behind the News
Financial Aid
Viewpoint
Education Gateways
Models of Efficiency
Business Intelligence Gets Smarter
Internet Technology
Independent Outlook
End Note

University Business - November/December 2011