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In February, Notre Dame’s Alumni Association did something remarkable: it launched an interactive television program entirely online.

The program is called Tender, Strong, and True: Living the Gospel Daily. It’s a panel-format show discussing a topic of faith with academics and spiritual leaders. And through UStream, the entire world can join in the discussion.

Now UStream isn’t that new, and many of its uses are pretty old school: one-way streaming video to the rest of the world. But the real power is the ability to interact with the audience and for you viewers to interact with each other.

Duke got a lot of attention last year when a professor started doing online office hours. Karine Joly from CollegeWebEditor.com asks, “Who needs television when you can actually interact with experts at this level?”

While most Americans still watch many hours of television each week, the nature of TV consumption is changing. Millennials are watching less TV and using more Internet. My own experience involves sitting with my laptop while a TV rambles on in the background. I don’t really feel like I watch that much TV, but it’s frequently on. I consider that time as “online,” though it’s often called media multitasking.

UStream melds these by offering an interactive viewing experience. And it succeeds because the experience is not contrived—it’s organic because it’s up to the audience to participate and the presenter to engage with them. Schools have been streaming lectures and conferences live for years, but only recently did that become a two-way street. And services like UStream make it easy and affordable.

Like Duke’s online office hours, this digital form of television is a way to increase the reach of an otherwise limited format. An in-person lecture may reach dozens or hundreds of people. Streaming that lecture may be able to engage thousands. And an archived program can extend to hundreds of thousands or millions. How’s that for reach?

ND is rolling out Blogs at Notre Dame, a blogging platform using WordPress MU. We’re hoping to get some of our brilliant and interesting faculty members blogging. This raises a lot of questions:

There’s been a lot of talk about blogging for admissions and student recruitment, but should faculty members blog? Will that hurt or help their chances of tenure? Can it help a school’s ranking? Is blogging respectable?

After some spirited and lively discussion, debates, and research, I’ve posted an article on our AgencyND blog about faculty blogging.

I don’t mean for these to be the answers, but I am hoping this post will continue the discussion and shift some perceptions.

Read Blogging for Academic Reputation, Rankings, and Scholarship »

The web profession is a client-driven one, even when we don’t technically have clients. We’re always teaching, educating the various stakeholders as to best practices, how to use new technologies, and why they shouldn’t waste their time on the flashy buzzword-du-jour.

If you’ve been doing this long enough, these conversations will all be familiar to you. If you’re new to this business or haven’t been in a client-facing role, you’ll do well to familiarize yourself with them.

1. Strategy Before Tactics

Are you sure you even need a new website? What do you mean you heard you needed a Facebook page? Let’s start from the beginning. Let’s start with your audience. Who are you trying to reach? What do you want them to do? If you can’t answer these basic questions, you might as well just start burning money. We’re not just pixel-pushers and code monkeys – we can help you make smarter decisions about what to do.

2. Measurement and Analytics

What gets measured gets improved. This isn’t 1995 – a hit counter isn’t going to cut it. There’s no excuse not to have at least Google Analytics (or something) tracking and providing information. What to look at? Let’s see – top content, pages with high bounce rates, referring sites, search keywords… the list goes on. Oh, and remember: reporting is not the same as analysis. So let’s figure out what we really need to measure (let’s call them KPIs) and set some goals.

3. Search Engines 101

Search engines are a major source of traffic. You can’t cheat the system. Search engines rank you based on the text on your site, the number of links pointing at your site, and the quality (or trustworthiness) of sites linking to you. It’s a little bit like dieting – there are tons of people selling shortcuts, and none of them are sustainable. You have to earn your ranking honestly, over time. Start by creating quality content that people want to read and the rest will come naturally.

4. Design Isn’t About You

I know you don’t like the [color | typography | photos | white space], but that’s ok – the site isn’t intended for you. You’re not your target audience. The design isn’t just about looking pretty (that’s a given). It’s actually about helping you achieve your goals. You remember your goals, right? We talked about them way back when we agreed on your strategy and decided what you were measuring. This design does that.

5. How to Write for the Web

Hey, great brochure. Really, it’s beautiful. But let’s cut to the chase: it’s not a website. You can’t just copy and paste that text into your website and expect it to work for you. Web visitors expect instant gratification. Don’t bury the lede. Make your copy scannable. And for goodness sakes, don’t ever put “Under Construction” on a page.

6. Web Isn’t the Same as Print

When you print something, you’re creating something permanent. You spend a lot of time editing, tweaking, proofreading, and painstakingly checking before you give the final go to the printer. Once it’s printed, it’s done – there’s no changing it. But the web isn’t a print piece. Every time a visitor hits our website is a new publication – a new chance to make a change, edit our content, and fix a typo. On the web, unlike print, you can’t let perfection get in the way of publication. The difference between 99% and 100% is a lot of investment and not a lot of return.

Like many higher ed web professionals, my team is caught in the middle.

On one hand, we have clients and want to help them get their projects done, make them happy, and accomplish their goals.

On the other, we have the institution. Even if we’re entirely client-driven and can run like a business, we’ve got priority assignments, rush jobs, and pet projects handed down from the top. These can disrupt any other projects we might have in the shop, and sometimes it’s hard to explain to clients with their own deadlines.

What are we to do?

Be a Leader

At AgencyND, we’ve started creating professional development opportunities for others on campus. We get out there and teach, we host speakers, and we organize webinars (like Karine’s Higher Ed Experts). We also work on providing tools and resources for communicators across campus, the people who really drive communications for the different departments and offices.

The goal is to raise the general level of expertise on campus and to position ourselves as experts so that people are comfortable coming to us, trust our advice, and generate new interest in the various topics we hit on – social media, analytics, strategic communications planning, email marketing, and so on.

Provide Service

Working to establish ourselves as leaders has had two effects: clients are smarter and they like us better.

Amazingly, our efforts in leadership seem to be changing the nature of some of our projects. People ask better questions, they pursue new ideas, and best of all, they share what they’re learning. They require less “client education” and fewer arguments over best practices. Generally, they seem more satisfied and certainly more understanding of our department.

The challenge that remains is being able to actually delivering on the service, with all this new interest and increased demand. But it’s a great problem to have.

If you haven’t checked out the Horizon Report in the past, it’s an annual publication that highlights key technologies expected to affect higher education in the next five years. This year’s report was published on January 14 and has some real gems, as usual.

What’s On the Horizon

The near-term technologies include mobile computing and open content.

The mid-term technologies (oddly noted as the “second adoption horizon”) are electronic books and simple augmented reality.

The far-term horizon includes gesture-based computing and visual data analysis.

Go get the full report >

Why Should You Care?

From a marketing communications perspective, these technologies will affect the future of our industry in a number of ways:

1. They will open and close avenues of communication.

Both mobile and augmented reality have been hot topics in the marketing world for several years. Mobile is already a big deal for many of us, working to provide mobile-friendly tools. What we haven’t necessarily done is find ways to communicate through mobile devices. We are hesitant (and rightfully so) to abuse SMS for marketing purposes. But there are opt-in SMS channels that higher ed has been slow to adopt except for use in crisis communications and in certain classroom applications.

Augmented Reality (AR) is another opportunity for blending communications messaging with real-world experiences. Like most tools in this Cluetrain world, AR will need to provide value and not just be an advertisement. Already, there are excellent ideas being pursued – including a an augmented reality campus tour application for the iPhone.

2. They will change the way we are perceived by our audiences.

The latest and greatest technology is a differentiator for a relatively short period of time, as early adopters get credit for being on the leading edge. These schools get more press and are often perceived as thought-leaders.

Next, there are the second-adopters who improve and perfect the technology. This is harder to do, but it’s potentially safer than trying to dive into every new thing. The iPod wasn’t the first MP3 player, and the iPhone wasn’t the first smart phone – but they certainly did them well enough to win some major market share. After all, there’s no medal for being first to market.

Finally, there are those who fail to keep up at all. This is a far more critical differentiator: not staying current. If students start to expect something, it’s folly to ignore those demands and expect to stay competitive. No school wants its students and parents to think it’s behind the times.

3. The model is changing.

As the report notes, “Open content has now come to the point that it is rapidly driving change in both the materials we use and the process of education.” (p. 13) Where students once paid a hefty price for access to information, free, open content is forcing schools to shift their value proposition toward education and experience. The higher ed business model is changing.

Communications will have a tremendous role in keeping schools in business by recruiting top students, faculty, and staff. They will have to take advantage of every tool in the toolbox.

What’s on your horizon?

Your own school and situation will be unique. Your size, budget, and priorities may direct you in one direction or another. That’s ok. But you should also be drawing up your own horizon report, asking yourself what you’ll be working on in one, three, or five years. Are you prepared?

Take this brief quiz and make a mental note of your responses:

1. Have you and your boss (or client) agreed on the important metrics for your website’s success?

That’s it. If the answer is yes, you’re on the road to being an analytics superhero. But if you don’t know the answer to that question, all of your analytics efforts are in vain.

Nikki Massaro Kauffman is a smart web marketer (and a daring thief of table skirts). She recently wrote about problems with data collection for eduGuru:

“Tools help you do the job, but they don’t do it for you. They require expertise. Do you even know what information you want to get from the application in the first place? Do you know enough about the data you are collecting to know how to get what you want from the tools? Do you know how to use the tools?”

“Reporting is not Analysis”

Avinash Kaushik has famously said that reporting is not the same as analysis. I believe this is because people mistake tools for intelligence. Just as a programmer is useless unless he has a project, reports are useless unless they are answering a question.

Too often are we asked to provide answers to unstated questions. The result, as Nikki asks, is whether we can read the minds of our bosses and clients about exactly what they’re trying to accomplish.

Analysis is about business intelligence. Web analytics software is supposed to help you make informed decisions. It starts with deciding what you’re trying to measure and how to measure it.

Fortunately, it can be easy to start (and gets harder the deeper you go). Begin by talking with your boss briefly about what you both consider success to be for your website, and then what you both consider the most important thing someone can do on your website. If you’re lucky, it’s as simple as a conversion goal – a checkout process, a signup, or a form. If not, look for ways to measure whatever task you have. Michael Notte has a great resource for defining your web metrics and KPIs.

This is the first step to moving beyond reporting and into analysis. And just as Mr. Incredible had to work out to regain his crime-fighting figure, you’ll need to practice and develop your skills. You’re on the road to becoming an analytics superhero.

I’ve written and spoken on website usability testing plenty of times. But recently, our team at Notre Dame has begun to seriously investigate other methods, tools, and concepts to improve every part of our projects.

Special thanks to Kate Russell, our information architect and usability coordinator, who has uncovered a wealth of tools and is helping create an entirely new process around one of the biggest weaknesses for so many websites.

Methods and Tools

Let’s start with the specific testing methods you might employ throughout a project.

Gut Reaction/5 second test

Quick–what’s the purpose of this site? Take five seconds to look at a site and list the things you noticed about it. This is something of a free association exercise, but it’s useful for evaluating the overall impact of a site without getting into a ton of detail. You don’t need a fancy tool to do this, but since there is one (and it’s free and easy to use) you might consider it.

Card Sorting

A card sort asks the test subject to help you organize the site in a way that makes sense to him or her. This is a formative or summative type of test, allowing users to help create the solution rather than simply validate the solution you have provided. A card sort can be performed with index cards (print the name of each page on a card) or with specialized software.

Information Architecture (IA) Testing

This type of test uses the same kinds of tasks, but examines it within the context of an information architecture or sitemap. IA testing can be done using an outline, flowchart, index cards, or specialized tools.

Task Testing

Identify common user actions and ask the test subject to do them. These can be phrased as a story:

You are interested in getting updates from this blog when there are new posts. How might you do this?

Task testing can be applied at many different stages in a project, but is most useful when done on a mockup or a working prototype of the website. Too early (wireframes, grayscale mockups) and it’s hard for users to imagine interacting with it, or too late and it’s tough to fix deep-rooted critical mistakes.

Voyeur Analytics

I call these tools “voyeur” tools because they let you watch actual users interacting with your website. These track the mouse movements and clicks of individual users. I’m not sure what the right name is for this one, but it’s a neat idea. It does bring up some privacy questions, but that will play differently depending on your organization and the tools you use.

Analytics, Measurement, and Surveys

Once a site is live, there are any number of analytics and surveys you can use. This goes beyond the scope of “testing,” per se, but it’s a valuable part of evaluating the site’s success. Look beyond traditional stats packages (Google Analytics, WebTrends, etc.) and consider Heatmaps (CrazyEgg or ClickHeat), A/B testing such as Google Website Optimizer and surveys or site feedback tools such as UserVoice.com.

When to Test

When do you test? Test early, test often. Don’t wait until the end, or it’s too late to test.

Download this graphic (PDF)

Before You Begin

What to Test: Current website, competitor websites.
Methods: Task tests, IA testing
Tools: Silverback, TreeJack, Chalkmark

Creating a Site Organization

What to Test: Proposed sitemap or collection of
Methods: Card sort
Tools: websort.net, OptimalSort

Testing the New Site Organization

What to Test: Proposed sitemap
Methods: IA testing
Tools: TreeJack

Initial Layout – Wireframe/Paper Prototype/Mockup

What to Test: Wireframe/Paper Prototype
Methods: Task testing, gut reaction
Tools: Silverback, Chalkmark, fivesecondtest.com

Full-blown Mockups

What to Test: Flattened files
Methods: Task testing, gut reaction
Tools: Silverback, Chalkmark, fivesecondtest.com

A Working Site (templates and content)

What to Test: The development or pre-production website.
Methods: Task testing
Tools: Silverback

The Website is Live!

What to Test: The live website.
Methods: Analytics, surveys, voyeur analytics
Tools: Web analytics software (Google Analytics, StatCounter, WebTrends, etc.), Userfly

Where to Learn More about Usability Testing

• My Usability Bookmarks
• All Usability Bookmarks
• Usability.gov
• Jakob Nielsen
• Steve Krug

Robert Stephens, founder of Geek Squad, famously said that “marketing is a tax you pay for being unremarkable.”

I have this quote taped to the wall of my office. Sometimes I stare at it, wondering what I can do to be more “remarkable” in my work.

As a marketer, I find the biggest challenge is this: how do I overcome the unremarkable? Most clients and projects are simply unremarkable. They’re exactly what you’d expect, and that puts them at a disadvantage.

If only these clients would come to us much earlier, we could help them be more remarkable. We could help design better produces, services, or processes. Marketing doesn’t start once you have something to sell: it starts when you have something to produce.

A New Definition of Marketing

For many people (albeit unconsciously), marketing is defined as helping to sell an unremarkable product. They think that any product will sell if it has enough “mindshare.” I liken this approach to winning an argument by shouting louder; you might win some arguments this way, but you’re not going to convert many people to your side.

I believe that remarkable products (with remarkable brands, service, support, etc.) sell themselves. People don’t want to give you money because of your fancy ads, websites, logos, brochures, etc. But they’ll gladly give you money for your amazing products.

As a marketer, my new product isn’t print design or web development or advertising or – it’s teaching clients how to make their product (be it a graduate program or a departmental service) amazing.