January 2013 – Andrew Careaga

How journalist-friendly is your #highered website?

news Media relations and PR in higher education continues to evolve. The old days of pitching story ideas or blindly sending out news releases is giving way to a different model — one that relies more on the Internet to connect us to our audiences.

We’re trying to optimize our websites to make them easier for journalists to find and easier for Google to index. We’re sharing more news with our audiences via social media. We’re putting our content in more media vessels than ever before, re-purposing print stories for the web and web for print, posting video and audio online, encouraging interaction through blogs and social. More and more, we are relying on the Internet to help get our news and our stories to our audiences.

That audience includes journalists, and many of them rely on the Internet to conduct research about the stories they’re working on. If we’re doing a good job getting of making our institutions visible in the online world of search and social, then chances are a journalist will end up on our .edu site in search for background information, or perhaps a source for an interview.

So, how well do our websites communicate the type of information journalists are looking for?

To my knowledge, no comprehensive study of .edu pages has tried to answer that question. But PR on Websites, a recent study by Nielsen Norman Group, does look at corporate, government and non-profit sites, and much of the information from that study translates well to the higher ed sector.

The free, 287-page report 287-page report offers more than 100 design recommendations for improving the design of PR areas of corporate websites, as well as helpful screenshots, discussions and quotes from journalists who took part in this comprehensive usability study. This is the third edition of this report, but it’s the first one I’ve read, and its expanded list of tips — 103 this time, as opposed to 32 from the first edition — provides a wealth of takeaways that should benefit anyone interested in making their websites friendlier to journalists.

Despite the report’s length, it’s an easy read — as you would expect of any report created by usability guru Jakob Nielsen and his company — so if you do no more than skim the executive summary (pages 3 through 7), you’ll glean some useful information.

“Ultimately,” write report authors Kara Pernice, Hoa Loranger and Nielsen, “PR-related usability comes down to a simple question: Why spend a fortune on outbound PR (trying to pitch journalists) when you neglect simple steps to increase the effectiveness of inbound PR (satisfying journalists who visit your website)?”

Some takeaways for higher ed PR folks and web designers:

Ditch the marketing talk

This should be a no-brainer for anyone with a PR background, but it’s worth emphasizing up front. “Journalists are not gullible,” the report notes, “and they don’t take a company’s own word as truth. Indeed, almost all journalists said that press releases were useful only to find out how a company is trying to position itself.” I would like to think that those of us in higher education are less buzzwordy than PR folks in, say, the tech sector. But I’ve seen my share of marketing dreck in higher ed PR pieces. (Heck, I’ve had to put my fair share of said dreck in press releases.)

The Nielsen folks further advise: “[B]asic information must be easy to find and should be cleansed of the marketese and excessive verbiage that smother the facts on many sites. Journalists don’t have time to … sift factual wheat from marketing chaff.”

How much of your PR content is actual wheat and how much is chaff? Better to do the sifting before you put your content on the web.

Facts, not fluff

Related to the point above, journalists want access to facts about our organizations.

In general, the more interesting facts you present about your company, products,and executives, the better for PR. Journalists look for facts they can use in their stories. Our study participants were much more excited about genuine information than about marketing claims, which they immediately discarded.

How easy is it for journalists to access interesting facts about your school?

Making contact

Make it easy for journalists to contact the people they need to contact for their stories. Doing so “can set you apart” from the competition.

Specifically, the study says journalists want to be able to easily find this information from our websites:

Press: Name, telephone number, and e-mail address
Company overview: What the company does, its purpose
Products and services: Information at the right level of detail
Financials: Trends (e.g., current and yearly earnings)
Management: Names, images, and bios of high-level executives
Philanthropic involvement: Information on social and environmental responsibility or other goodwill.
Spin: How the company wants to be perceived, its angle on a story
Images: Downloadable, high-resolution images of important people, products, services, and events
General facts: The basics of the company (e.g., CEO, headquarters, number of employees, year established)
People: Names and contact information for people who can be interviewed

We should assume they’re looking for the same from us.

Get discovered

Above all, make sure that your institution can easily be found via a Google search. “When looking for information and getting to the company’s website, the majority of the participants used Google and typed the company name in the search bar.” Journalists also relied on Google to get contact information. As one is quoted as saying in the study, “I use Google a lot to get people’s e-mail and phone number. Google is a time-saver.”

* * *

Higher ed websites try to serve a multitude of audiences, which makes focusing on a single one (like journalists) tough. But many of the same features journalists are looking for are useful to other audiences, too. The point this underscores for me is an idea that I’ve made before in this space: the colleges and universities need to start thinking like a media organization.

Photo: © TMarchev | Stock Free Images & Dreamstime Stock Photos

On digital hoarding

When I read this morning’s ReadWriteWeb post about digital hoarding by Taylor Hatmaker, I discovered a kindred spirit amid the sea of inbox zero fanatics and Evernote acolytes.

For I, like Hatmaker, collect digital scraps of information for later reading and action, but it piles up in the cloud, unread and unacted upon. My collection of favorited items from the Amazon River that is my Twitter stream long ago surpassed 1,000, and my Google Reader has too many unread items to even fathom. (I do occasionally read some of the stories that flow through that stream. That’s how I discovered Hatmaker’s essay this morning.) Email, too, is out of control — both the work account and the personal one — and is compounded by my habit of blind copying myself on certain emails that will require me to follow up when the recipients of those messages inevitably ignore their responsibility for whatever deal we’ve struck. (Credit due to Getting Things Done guru David Allen for this idea, which has helped me keep better tabs on projects but has done nothing to help alleviate my digital hoarding tendencies.)

The Internet, the cloud, cheap server space and social media tools have all made it easier to collect digital stuff and save it for — For what, exactly? For later? For ever?

So, yeah. Digital hoarder, c’est moi.

That used to bother me. But I’ve learned to come to terms to this aspect of my personality. As much as I love the idea of productivity and clearing clutter from my digital and physical life, I realize that it will never happen.

Hatmaker also knows this.

“I’m never even going to organize my hoard,” she writes. “I’m never going to straighten out my Evernote tags or my Gmail labels or all of those saved stories on Read It Later, Pocket or Instapaper. I am an absolutely abysmal digital gardener, just like I am a terrible real gardener. I can hardly remember to keep my cat alive in real life – and she has a robust built-in reminder system.”

This makes me smile.

Digital hoarders love digital company, I guess.

So if you’re one of us, know that you are not alone.

Photo: “Homeless hoarder,” by Richard Masoner/Cyclelicious on Flickr.

#highered and Obama: the first four years

266449_web_5-22-12-obama-joplin_will As President Obama prepares for today’s public swearing in of his second term of office, it’s as good a time as any to look back at how higher education has fared under this president’s first term, and to look forward at what might be in store for higher ed over the next four years.

The first four years of the Obama presidency have been marked by difficulty and turbulence. The economic mess he inherited hit many sectors hard, and higher education was no exception.

Many colleges and universities, perhaps for the first time in their histories, resorted to layoffs, furloughs and program cuts to deal with their financial struggles. The rise of MOOCs threatens to turn the traditional model of higher education on its ear, even as campuses try to survive by raising tuition while more college graduates struggle under the strain of enormous debt loads. The latest punch to higher ed’s gut came last week, when Moody’s Investors Service gave all of higher ed a failing grade. Moody’s pessimistic outlook (which I briefly discussed here last Thursday) could do some major harm to colleges and universities that seek to borrow money for badly needed facilities upgrades or other projects.

No president can wave a magic wand and make these troubles disappear. But a president can set an agenda and cast a vision for a nation’s future — at least for four years at a time.

So, how well did Obama do at setting a higher ed agenda and casting a vision for our sector during his first term? And what does he envision for higher ed in his second term?

First-term promises (mostly) kept

Obama’s first-term vision for higher education seems to connect to the ideals of keeping college affordable and accessible to people of all income levels. He also wants to increase the college graduation rate and get more students to major in STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and math) in order to improve our nation’s global competitiveness.

Peter Wood, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, sees Obama’s vision as encompassing eight major themes, all of which touch on the issues I mention above. Lumped together, these themes constitute “a large and energetic attempt to recast the role of American colleges and universities.” (For an in-depth treatment of Obama’s higher ed agenda, read Wood’s introductory piece on the topic in the Chronicle of Higher Education. And to get even more in-depth, read each of Wood’s blog posts on the subject.)

Since it’s difficult to view success or failure of broad categories like affordability and accessibility, we’ll need to get more granular and take a look at how well Obama’s main initiatives fared, or didn’t fare, during his first term.

For that, we turn to a recent analysis by Politifact.com. The website says Obama has largely kept or made progress on nearly three-quarters of 508 campaign promises from 2008. He’s made the greatest progress in the areas of health care and education.

On the post-secondary education side of things, Obama has kept most of his promises in terms of trying to keep college affordable and accessible, and in trying to increase the number of college graduates. Those include promises to recruit math and science degree graduates into teaching careers, reduce subsidies to private student lenders, expand Pell grants for low-income students, increase research opportunities for college students and increase funding for land-grant institutions.

But Obama fell short in a few areas, such as his efforts to create a college tax credit program (a compromise that watered down the initiative), simplify the financial aid application process (another compromise), to support college credit initiatives and to create scholarships to recruit new teachers.

The next four years

So, what is in store for higher education during the second term of the Obama presidency? I discussed this in my post-election post, The higher ed agenda and Obama’s second term. But in case you missed it, here’s a recap:

Slowing tuition growth. In the Obama campaign’s fall 2012 Blueprint for America’s Future (PDF) is a section titled “Improve Education for Middle-Class Jobs.” It specifically calls for cutting tuition growth in half over the next decade. It also calls for doubling campus-based student aid and incentives for schools that limit tuition growth. So the take-away here is that Obama wants colleges and universities to work on affordability, and maybe somewhere down the line there will be some carrots for those that adhere to the as-yet-unspecified goals.
Hope for STEM education. Contained in that same document is Obama’s call for 100,000 more math and science teachers so we can “out-compete China and Germany” (among other nations, presumably) “by out-educating them.” The STEM Master Teacher Corps and investments in research and innovation into the best ways to teach math and science will help improve math and science education nationwide.” That STEM Master Teacher Corps, by the way, has a goal of 10,000, not 100,000. So to reach the blueprint’s 100,000 goal will require more math and science teaching degrees.
Job training programs. The blueprint calls for community colleges to train 2 million new workers for “good jobs that actually exist.”
Research opportunities to support the blueprint’s goals of expanding jobs in manufacturing and energy. To bolster manufacturing, Obama says he wants to build “a new network of 15 to 20 manufacturing innovation institutes to bring together business and research universities to ensure that the next generation of products are invented and manufactured here.” Meeting his “all of the above” energy goals will also require investment in research universities.

The president’s vision for higher education is hopeful and progressive as well as pragmatic. But he’ll continue to call on colleges and universities to become more accountable and to keep costs down. He will likely continue a theme from his 2012 State of the Union Address, when he told higher ed leaders everywhere: “If you can’t stop tuition from going up, the funding you get from taxpayers will go down. Higher education can’t be a luxury, it is an economic imperative that every family should be able to afford.”

Given the tenor of that statement, you might think Obama is not much of a fan of higher education. But you would be wrong. As Wood notes in his Chronicle piece from last February, shortly after the president’s SotU address:

Despite President Obama’s recent feistiness on student debt and spiraling college costs, he is a man who has generally identified himself with the ethos of contemporary American higher education and has, in turn, been embraced by the faculty, students, and the broader institution. He bridges with ease the differences between the fiscally challenged state university and the financially thriving summit of elite education, and a whole set of related tensions: between going to college to get a job and going to college to get a liberal education; aspiring to financial security and aspiring to be part of the ruling class; and aspiring to be part of America and aspiring to be a “citizen of the world.”

Meanwhile, America’s colleges and universities will continue to struggle to bridge their missions with their economic problems accelerated by the impact of technological advances.

Maybe more important than asking what is the president of the United States’ vision for higher education is the question: What is your vision, Mr. or Ms. President, of your college’s or university’s future?