Creating a Social Media Style Guide

Style guides are essential partners in the creation of effective content. They help ensure consistency of tone, voice, brand, spelling and grammar, giving our content credibility and value. Rick provided a great breakdown of the elements of editorial style for the web last August. But what about social media? Since we can’t erect an editorial process around every individual tweet, status, comment or response, it is critical to have a style … [Read more...]

Evaluating the Mantra “Think Like a Publisher”

Over the last few years, a popular phrase has gained popularity in higher education as well as the broader community of web professionals: Think like a publisher and less like a marketer. This thinking is a backlash against outdated "push marketing" and communications that interrupt and distract users rather than inform and attract them. Hearing this message continually reinforced gets me pumped because it’s a mindset I strongly … [Read more...]

Back to Basics

Picture this: fresh haircut, new outfit, big date... and you’ve got spinach caught between your teeth. Kind of ruins the mood, doesn’t it? That’s what it’s like when a typo or other grammatical miscue ruins otherwise well-planned and well-executed content. Davina Y. Gould, director of publications and online communications at Stetson University College of Law, reminds us of some common errors—and the value of a sharp editor. What other … [Read more...]

Liberate Your PDF Newsletter Content

We’ve all received them—heck, perhaps we’ve even had to (shudder) distribute them. You know what I’m talking about: PDF newsletters, sent as an email attachment to a distribution list or linked on a webpage. In some corners, they still lurk. I’m just going to say it: People use PDFs for a hundred different reasons, and about 97 of them are wrong. (Rick blogged about some of these content problems in April.) The wrongest of the wrong, however, … [Read more...]

Planning for Content Delivery, Consumption and Context

In Monday's post, Georgy talked about transmedia storytelling in higher ed—using multiple content delivery methods to support your institution's story. This topic opens the door to a discussion on how you plan for content delivery and consumption that are contextually relevant for your audiences. With all the content delivery methods at our disposal, how do we know what content is most effective for the message, content type and target … [Read more...]