Reimagine Content in Higher Education

Last week, the Content Marketing Institute blog asked contributors, "What is the most useful thing you learned about content marketing in 2011?" I chimed in and gave the badge to Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman for their lesson "reimagine; don't recycle," found in their book Content Rules. This is a valuable content marketing lesson, but it's also an important content strategy lesson. The idea is to not simply repurpose content … [Read more...]

Communicate Clearly With Less Content

I love content, but nothing gets me pumped more than cutting it. Crop. Delete. Remove. Archive. Why? Because the road to clear communication often leads to less content, not more. The purpose of content is to communicate. For higher ed web professionals, it's easy to lose sight of this. Many people are responsible for constantly creating content — new blog posts, twitter updates, event descriptions, landing pages, "related links." But … [Read more...]

Content and Community at Boston University

Last week, we talked about content and community in higher education. What is the role of content in online community management? What are the challenges and opportunities? Some smart higher ed community managers chimed in to share their thoughts on these questions and others. Today, I'd like to dig a little deeper. I reached out to Jenny Mackintosh from Boston University to learn how she and other BU Marketing & Communications staff … [Read more...]

Content and Community in Higher Education

Some things were just meant to go together — mac and cheese, Wallace and Gromit, Georgy Cohen and a karaoke bar. Also, content strategy and community management. When it comes to social media, these disciplines are completely dependent upon each other. Every tweet, Facebook comment, Flickr photo, YouTube video and blog post is content — and content should give people a reason to stay engaged in your community, conveying meaningful ideas worth … [Read more...]

SEO Copywriting for Content Contributors

Search engines such as Google are one of the primary ways people find our websites and the content they seek. As such, it's very important to be mindful of search engine optimization (SEO) best practices so that we enable search engines — and the people using them — to find and discover our web content. People often consider SEO to be a content editing task — something you hand-off to a specialist. The reality is that SEO is an important part of … [Read more...]