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Years ago, when I was running my own little web business, one of my clients was a car insurance company. We designed their website, but had inherited an online quoting system written in approximately 100,000 lines of terrible Perl code.

Every few months, my client would send me updates that required me (back in my programmer days) to dive into this horrendous tangle of if-then conditionals and half-assed subroutines. In short, it was a mess. But their business depended on it.

One day, I got a call from the president of the company. He accused me of holding their website hostage because I wouldn’t let their marketing person, Becky, update the quoting system. Becky was very nice and I’m sure she was quite good at her job, but she wasn’t technical and there was no reason she should be plunged into code. I tried to explain why this was a bad idea.

“You don’t think she’s smart enough?”

I pointed out that it was a specialized skill and I’d been programming for many years – and it was hard enough for me to do it.

“You don’t think she can learn?”

I grasped at straws. Knowing that he was a car collector and had a full-time mechanic on his staff (to work on their beautiful showroom of classic vehicles), I asked him,

“Would you ask her to work on the engine of your car?”

He immediately responded with an emphatic “hell, no.” From there it was easy to connect the dots and convince him it was in his interest to keep Becky out of the code and leave it to the professionals.

The right job, the right tools, and the right person.

Since then, I’ve learned a valuable metaphor. If you need to hammer a nail, chances are you can learn how to hammer a nail. If you need to cut down a tree, you might learn how to use a chainsaw. But it’s a lot more dangerous. You can hurt yourself. It only takes a small slip-up to do a lot of damage. And it certainly takes more training. At some point, it’s better to pay someone else to do it for you.

Every year universities and colleges embark on a quest for an elusive beast: the content management system. Many of these organizations have a dream: a single system for the entire university to store, manage, and distribute content. They call it enterprise content management (also known as eCM).

Enterprise means “does everything”

Enterprise content management represents a $3 billion market, with major software players including IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, and EMC. These companies offer robust systems that do many things, from web to search to email to document management. They are intended to own the breadth of services around content.

So how do these companies offer everything? They buy companies and glue them together. Or they build lackluster solutions and tack them on. The result is a mess of software that acts inconsistently, creates data islands, and often fails to keep up with more specialized competition.

Look at the separation of Google Analytics and Feedburner as a simple example: Google bought Feedburner and spent the next few years trying to integrate the authentication, migrate data, etc. So why can’t I link my Feedburner data with the rest of my Google services? Imagine tracking feed subscriber counts along with your Google Analytics data. This is a phenomenal opportunity for integration, but sadly these great services are on separate tracks.

Features means broad, not deep

Large institutions have a lot of differing needs. Because one tool does everything, it’s easy for customers to be fooled into believing that they can have one solution to many problems. This forces nearly every single user to compromise something for the sake of having a single tool. It might save money or time and it might be easier to support, but it doesn’t necessarily do the best job. It’s practically an institutional admission that we should sacrifice quality, innovation, or results for the sake of easier management.

An alternative is to use many different tools to accomplish many different jobs. There are two problems with this. First is the time spent searching for, evaluating, and selecting the right tool for the job (often by people unqualified or ill-informed to make these decisions) – and with no guarantee that they’ll end up getting the best option. This can be handled by selecting a small set of specialized tools that may serve a wider range of needs. The second problem is that of integration: enterprise content management is about eliminating redundancies, improving efficiency, and repurposing content. The answer? Interoperability.

Interoperability means duct tape

How easily can you push data in and out of a system without a manual (upload a CSV) process?

Software should not hold you hostage. In fact, software should be built with the realization that new services may pop up that the vendor didn’t anticipate. So rather than play catch-up all the time, software should have an API. In other words, it should allow for integration with outside software packages. Yes, this may be a custom job for many of the independent pieces of the software puzzle. But it’s what will allow your Development Department and the Admissions Office to have their own tools without forcing one or both to compromise on what’s critical to them.

Let’s imagine that Development (read: fundraising) needs a CRM tool to manage all the people in their system. Every phone call to a donor, letter to a prospect, etc. will need to be recorded and tracked. They’ll run reports by donor frequency, readiness to give, capacity, etc. It will probably include some donation processing mechanism. Meanwhile, Admissions wants to use a CRM to track every interaction with a prospective student, use workflow to manage an application, track yield rates, etc. While the overarching concept (CRM) is the same, the solution is not. Admissions has very different needs than Development, and any tool that claims to be perfect for one will likely be terribly frustrating for the other.

However, you may wish to store all of the actual people records – the names, contact info, etc. in a central database. Or you may wish to push all of the dollars into a single place for accounting purposes. Maybe you have a great email marketing tool that both offices could use. This is what we call integration (or interoperability, if you want to use a fancier-sounding term). A few well-placed software tools to glue these together could create a more functional and effective system than a single, all-things-to-all-people package from a major eCM vendor.

So what should you do?

Just because large enterprise products are expensive and aren’t necessarily the best at every little thing doesn’t mean they’re worthless. The reality is that you don’t need the best in every category, and the professional level of support is a very useful and attractive feature. But with a bit of vision, the right attitude towards software, and some creative engineering, you can cobble together your own vastly superior system.

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?

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.

A recent question on our internal campus communicators network prompted a question about Google’s social networking entrant, Buzz. There’s been plenty of chatter about it, so I don’t feel the need to summarize what Buzz is.

As @donschindler pointed out, Jeremiah Owyang has a great comparison of some top social networks including Buzz. He urges marketers to

Google has had several forays into social networking, including a very popular network called Orkut (basically Facebook, but most popular in Brazil and India). They’ve also built Google Profiles, which are required to use the new Google Buzz. There are other social tools as well, but Google hasn’t caught the wave as an industry leader yet.

What’s most promising is the social integration with tools we already use and value. Facebook is a standalone application, but Google can add a layer of social networking on top of your email, documents, and other productivity tools. That social layer is great for collaboration, discovery, and productive networking (as opposed to seeing what your long-lost high school classmates are up to).

A great example is the recent social search that Google launched late last year. Once you’re hooked into it, you’ll see results from your social network. For instance, when I search for higher ed marketing at the bottom of the page I see “Results from people in your social circle for higher ed marketing” including blogs, links, and other content that people in my social circle found valuable.

We’ll see if Google supplants any of the networks (I doubt it) but I believe they’ll do a wonderful job of integrating them and augmenting our online experience to add value – something many other networks fail to do.

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?

In software, an API is a way to get data into or out of a system. It stands for “Applicant Programming Interface” and basically allows outsiders to access or manipulate the information in the software.

The Twitter API lets you access tweets, search users, post tweets, and so on. The API enables apps like TweetDeck, Twitterrific, and all those Twitter-related web apps to exist. The Google Maps API is the engine behind thousands of maps mashups.

APIs Everywhere

One of the most frustrating things to a software developer is reinventing the wheel. They even have an acronym – DRY: don’t repeat yourself. So when you’re building software that needs to pull in campus events, you should hit the API for the campus calendar and grab what you need. Want to show YouTube videos in the search results? Use the API.

Just as frustrating is finding the substandard add-ons that often come with large software packages. Just because a web content management system has a CRM (constituent relationship management) doesn’t mean it’s a good CRM. So it sends HTML emails? Is it as good as the standalone systems? You pour all of your wisdom into selecting a great software package and you often end up with poor add-ons that don’t meet your needs.

This is where APIs can come in handy. If you can get the systems to integrate via their respective APIs, you can get the best of both worlds. And if they’re popular systems, they may even build such integrations right in (like LinkedIn showing your latest Slideshare presentations).

Human APIs

Higher education institutions are notorious for being collections of silos. But some brilliant folks recognize the value in networking across their institutions, serving as connectors, and sharing information. These are Human APIs. Sometimes they’re called Connectors or Trust Agents Zero. They build make themselves available, build relationships, and share information freely. In exchange, they are able to create more value through collaborations.

Meetups and User Groups

One way to start is to form a user group of professionals around a particular topic. Our team has spawned several groups, including the South Bend Ruby Group. This group led to new relationships and I eventually hired one of the members to our team.

We’ve also formed a number of internal groups on LinkedIn around various industries and topics. The outreach doesn’t take much, but it’s absolutely worth it for the chance to interface with other teams and departments, share knowledge, and build on each others’ efforts.

This week I presented to our team at AgencyND about Mobile – what’s the deal and what’s coming. I call this the Mobile Horizon, as a nod to the Horizon Report which aims to inform higher education about the future technologies and their implications. Mobile is all the rage, and for good reason. View the presentation to learn why.