Managing the Copycat Content Request

You may have gotten the request. It could come via email, in a meeting, or during a chance encounter in the staff kitchen. “Say,” begins Steve the PR guy (or Jen the photographer, or Marie your vice president), “have you seen the social media hub (or the slider widget, or the faculty profile database) on Competitor U’s website? It’s pretty great. Can we do something like that?” And… that’s it. A thing. Maybe they saw it on a blog, or at a … [Read more...]

New Storytelling Platforms: Using Medium at Marquette

Own your story! It’s a common refrain of modern publishing. With so many great content tools at our disposal, we need not outsource the telling of our story to third-party media. One of my all-time favorite quotes, by former King’s College communicator Kyle Christie, sums it up nicely: Universities have an opportunity to leapfrog the mainstream media and explain our research, teaching and wider contributions to society in forms beyond the … [Read more...]

Planning Content Goals With Web Stakeholder Interviews

In an earlier post, we talked about using focus groups to better understand your web users' needs. But external web users are not the only type of users we need to understand in order to create valuable and purposeful content. To create web content that works, we must also understand our internal web content stakeholders. These are all the people planning for, creating, curating, editing, approving, publishing and maintaining content, among … [Read more...]

Best Practices for Email Newsletter Content Planning

Everyone loves to prognosticate about the future of email, including whether or not anyone still reads it or if we’ll soon be able to check it via our refrigerators. For better or for worse, email remains a ubiquitous form of communication today. According to a July 2012 report by the McKinsey Global Institute, we spend 13 hours per week dealing with email. Thirteen hours! That’s a whole season of “House of Cards,” you know. Not surprisingly, … [Read more...]

Department-Level Content Strategy

The following guest post was written by Erin Martin, Web Communication Leader for the departments of Horticulture and Crop and Soil Science at Oregon State University. Last year, I scraped up enough funding to attend Confab Higher Ed, the inaugural higher education content strategy conference held in Atlanta. As I was wandering around, meeting inspiring folks and talking shop with people who get it — who see the value in thoughtful, mindful … [Read more...]