After years of loyal Blackberry usage, I finally bought an iPhone in early September. But it took me a few months to come around to what millions of iPhone users had been obsessing about for months: Instagram, the photo editing and sharing app. Once I decided to go all in, I realized what the buzz was all about—Instagram's real potential for engaging, community-driven content. In talking with Higher Ed Live's Seth Odell at EduComm 2011 last … [Read more...]
Reimagine Content in Higher Education
December 13, 2011 by
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
December 7, 2011 by
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 Entrepreneurship: A Commitment to Change
December 5, 2011 by
It’s a common refrain: we’re so busy. We have so much on our plates. It’s hard, or impossible, to try new things when we can barely keep our heads above water with our existing CMS, channels, deadlines… the list goes on. But it’s time we realized that innovation and experimentation are not nice-to-haves. They are the core functionality that allows our online channels to thrive and evolve over time — not to mention keep us professionally … [Read more...]
SEO Copywriting for Content Contributors
October 27, 2011 by
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...]