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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.

I recently looked at using Ning to power a private social network, but one little red flag was a deal-breaker. From the Terms of Service:

You hereby grant Ning, during the course of your usage of the Ning Platform, a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, sublicenseable and transferable right and license to (i) use, reproduce, create derivative works of, distribute, publicly perform and publicly display Your Content (a) for the sole purpose of operating and making Your Content available on the Ning Platform and in all current and future media in which the Ning Platform may now or hereafter be distributed or transmitted or (b) for our internal business purposes; and (ii) disclose metrics regarding Your Content on an aggregated basis for advertising, marketing and business development purposes.

Whoa! So anything you post to Ning is theirs to use as they wish, for as long as they wish? Oddly, Ning opens this section with the line: “Ning does not claim any ownership rights in Your Content.” And then it proceeds to trample that a bunch of ridiculous policies that amount to practically owning your content.

So What?

If you’re just talking about users and their message posts, that’s something you might get over. But what about using this as your own branded network? What about placing your logo or copyrighted imagery in there? In short, Ning would be able to use your logo without your permission. I don’t know about your school, but my employer has a department dedicated to licensing – we don’t let just anyone throw our mark around.

It looks like we’re not the only ones who noticed this, either. Duke University’s Duke Digital Initiative website is built in Ning, and it doesn’t have any official Duke mark or photography.

So what should you do?

If you really want to use Ning, you can either give in and just not worry about the implications of giving up some of your rights. Maybe it doesn’t matter – but if you care about your mark, photography, or other content you might need to design around it. You could build a theme that doesn’t incorporate any of these elements. This is exactly what Duke did, but I find it’s still a little unusual, and unnecessarily limiting.

You could also use any number of other white label social networking platforms to accomplish the same kind of thing. Is this the right thing to do? It depends on your needs.

Maybe white label isn’t that important: one could also point out that the 300+ million users on Facebook don’t already have accounts to your private social network.

If software requires a manual, it’s too difficult.

We’ve been looking for some decent agency-minded project management software and frankly, it’s been frustrating. What we need most is solid resource management; we need something to help us forecast our workload out for the coming weeks and months. We don’t want to take on a project if we’re too busy to actually deliver.

If I can’t easily move my information in and out in a reasonably portable format, then it’s too walled off.

Unfortunately, we haven’t had much luck. It seems there are thousands of different “project management” packages. I’ve used many different kinds and have never been satisfied. When we finally found a system that seemed like it could work, it turned out they estimate six to twelve weeks for implementation time!

If it doesn’t deliver on its promises, I won’t use or recommend it.

PM software is just like content management systems, email clients, and calendaring tools: nobody has it quite right, so new ones continue to pop up all the time. That isn’t to say there aren’t great options out there, but obviously someone’s needs weren’t met and they decided to build their own.

Designing great software isn’t easy to do. And even when people do it well, it may not be the right fit for everyone. So we’re still looking. In the meantime, we’re using the wrong software to try and get us by. When we find the right software, it will be all the sweeter.

If it makes my life better, I’ll use it.

The How of Mobile

Mobile development in 30 seconds:

Schools create separate websites for mobile access. Some schools use special stylesheets on the same content. MIT establishes a platform-specific approach to serving content to mobile devices. Stanford students create an iPhone app suite for Stanford and then launch a company to do it for other schools. Duke becomes one of their customers.

Following the lead of MIT’s Mobile Web architecture, we can lump nearly all mobile devices into three categories: iPhone, Smartphone, Feature (i.e., legacy phones that have a web feature). The logic goes that these devices have different capabilities and interfaces, so they should get a different presentation. And according to MIT’s stats, the iPhone is taking over in a big way.

Fortunately, MIT is planning to open source their code very soon. The challenges of detection, routing, and delivery will be even easier to overcome and we can focus on what to mobilize.

The What of Mobile

Just because you can speak the mobile language doesn’t mean you’re saying anything intelligent. For many organizations, mobile is just another delivery mechanism for the same old content. Unfortunately, the content we do produce isn’t always that great.

It’s not enough to simply make websites mobile-friendly. Not every single thing you would do on your full-featured web browser is worth doing on your phone. Is your phone ideal for research? Writing lengthy blog posts? Registering for courses?

Think mobile – what do you want to do on your mobile device? If you’re walking across campus, sitting in a meeting, or wherever you might use your cell phone, what do you need to do?

Some common tools:

• Directory lookup – phone numbers, addresses
• Campus Map
• Emergency info
• Events
• News (especially athletics scores)

But what about student-specific info like class schedules or computer lab availability? Visitors to campus might want to know the best route from one building to another. Or campus transportation schedules?

To answer the what, we need to think about the why of mobile.

The Why of Mobile

As with any project, it helps to consider your audiences, their goals, and the reasons behind them. Prospective students have mobile devices, but is that how they research schools to apply to? Fortunately, it’s not too hard to use the typical tools to measure these things and gauge why your mobile users are coming to your site. (Aside: Not all mobile devices have Javascript support, so you should be careful about limiting your measurement to a JS-only tool.)

From a communications perspective, it also helps to consider your goals. Reduce calls to your call center or help desk. Deliver messages to users who need them the most (desperately searching for something). Increase awareness of events or news. And so on.

The Future of Mobile

For the time being, mobile is still just a limited replacement for a laptop or desktop computer. As that changes (with the technology, access areas, and speed), so will the use cases for mobile. Pew Internet predicts that the “mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020.” We’re already seeing this in Japan and China, where mobile connectivity is more affordable and more ubiquitous than traditional broadband connections.

Imagine students who don’t carry their IDs because the dining hall or library can scan a barcode off their phone? Or taking a photo of a QR code to get bibliographic data? These aren’t exactly the future – they’re already being done.

Mobile is more than just throwing together a mobile stylesheet or an iPhone app. It’s a culture of users who want certain content on-demand, on-the-go, and in a format that suits them. With MIT and iStanford, the answer was to bundle commonly used tools into a mobile-friendly suite. But the edges of theses suites often leave something to be desired as well—browse outside of the usual sites and the mobile experience falls apart.