Nobody likes clutter. It's overwhelming, distracting, and a chore to clean up. No, I'm not talking about your office space — I'm talking about your website. All the clutter people have to sift through to find the information they're looking for. Web professionals often see "clutter" as a design problem, but as usability evangelist Jared Spool notes, "It’s not the visual design the users are reacting to. It’s the actual … [Read more...]
Thinking Strategically About Facebook Content
October 21, 2011 by
Last week, higher ed new media communication specialist Alaina Wiens wrote about how recent changes to the Facebook Newsfeed are affecting user engagement. As Facebook tightens their grip on the algorithm that prioritizes when and where posts are seen, social media content creators are scrambling to figure out the requirements for successful Facebook engagement. Wiens reminds us that it's more important than ever to have a strategy. Facebook is … [Read more...]
Perception Measures and Content ROI
October 17, 2011 by
On the topic of content measurement and ROI, we typically think web analytics and business-driven analysis. But how do we measure the impact of our content on our users? Content strategist Daniel Eizans calls these "perception measures". This type of qualitative analysis is important if we aim to understand how and in what context our content best meets users' needs. In his post, Eizans breaks down the types of perception measures, … [Read more...]
Web Governance and Ownership
October 7, 2011 by
In a post this week, Jonathan Kahn, a strong advocate of content strategy and web governance, reminds us that the culture shift to a web-centric mindset for publishing and communication is still incomplete. As I described in my recent post about selling content strategy, we need to help stakeholders make this shift in thinking. Web governance is a responsibility that needs ownership. We still need to make the case for it — and to be prepared to … [Read more...]
Capture the Moment
October 5, 2011 by
When I spoke about content curation at last year’s HighEdWeb conference, it was a fresh concept. But in the past year, higher ed has picked up the baton and run with it, integrating the thoughtful curation of content created by students, alumni and other audiences into our marketing and communications efforts. .eduGuru’s Mike Petroff recently examined how a handful of universities (including my own!) employed content curation to cover the … [Read more...]