The most important communications plans at our universities are the ones we hope we never have to use. These are our plans for crisis communications, to be activated when a threat is posed to the health and safety of our campus community. Nowadays, these plans revolve heavily around electronic communications. Many universities shifted their crisis communications planning into high gear following the fatal shootings at Virginia Tech in 2007. … [Read more...]
Assessing the Value of HTML Meta Tags
August 18, 2011 by
Get excited! We’re talking HTML meta tags. Yes, today these annoying details we love to ignore are front and center. Metadata is not a sexy topic for most people, and HTML meta tags even less so. But they’re on our web content checklist — or they should be — so let’s have a plan. HTML meta tags are used to inform search engines about your webpage content. What is this page about (meta description element), and what are the subjects … [Read more...]
Building a Campus Content Group—In the Wild West
July 27, 2011 by
Many of us work at institutions without top-down content strategy and may be “lone rangers” when it comes to content at our respective schools or departments. It can even be lonely at the top (a.k.a. central administration) if we’re not in the loop with others around campus. But if we look beyond our own dusty saloons, we’ll see many folks just like us, trying to bring the rule of law to the wild west of content. The challenge—and … [Read more...]
Aligning Content Online and Offline
July 6, 2011 by
Traditionally, we have viewed offline and online experiences as two separate things — complementary, perhaps, but separate. Today, the distinctions between physical and digital are dissolving — campus events are experienced both from the audience and via the hashtag — revealing themselves to be two sides of the same experience. This begs the tough question: Are we aligned? On June 12 and 13, I delivered a presentation at Penn State Web … [Read more...]
Higher Ed Live Recap: “A ‘Content-First’ Approach to Higher Ed Web”
June 23, 2011 by
On June 19, we appeared on Higher Ed Live with Seth Odell to talk about a "content-first" approach to higher ed web. It was a great discussion about why content matters and how we can make it the center of our conversations about the web in higher ed. We'd like to share the episode with you and flesh out some of the ideas we discussed with Seth. Why "Content First"? Content should always come first because we need it to support all … [Read more...]