Last week, a bunch of smart higher education content professionals landed in Atlanta for the second annual Confab Higher Ed cake party. Er, rather, the second annual Confab Higher Ed conference. More than just a project show-and-tell, the conference presenters used their accomplishments and experiences to touch on some of the pervasive themes that inform all of our work. These include trust, internal communication and collaboration, and how to … [Read more...]
Power to the Humans: HighEdWeb 2014
October 27, 2014 by
The dream of higher ed is alive in Portland. That’s what we learned at the 2014 HighEdWeb conference, which made its first stop in the Pacific Northwest. As always, the conference was a great opportunity to learn, reflect, connect, and refresh our perspective for the challenges waiting back at home. A theme that pervaded many of the sessions at HighEdWeb was the idea of being human. The work we do as web content professionals is not about … [Read more...]
Best Practices for Email Newsletter Content Planning
March 30, 2014 by
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...]
Reconsidering the Social Media Hub
February 21, 2014 by
One of my favorite projects when working at Tufts University was leading the creation of our social media hub, a custom-built page which hosted feeds from all of our social media accounts and served as an at-a-glance destination for campus social chatter. I was (and still am) extremely proud of what we built. But that was back in 2010. Now, four years later, these types of pages (often called hubs, mashups, or aggregators) are still very … [Read more...]
We Blog About Headlines. What Comes Next Will Amaze You
January 21, 2014 by
My first job out of college was working for the Boston Globe’s website, which afforded me the opportunity to write a lot of headlines. Perhaps the best (or worst) headline I ever wrote, after a Boston Celtics victory, was “Pierce nets 40 as Celtics pierce Nets.” Clever, eh? “Clever” could be an apt description for many headlines you read. The goal of the headline is to tell you what a story is about, establish its tone, and entice you to read … [Read more...]