admissions and student recruitment – Page 11

Friday Five: what we blog about when we blog about blogs

Today’s Friday Five indulges in a bit of navel-gazing, tossing out five links about blogs and bloggers, by bloggers, on their blogs.

Data-mine your blogs for reusable content. A recent post by Kyle James (aka dot-edu guru) of Wofford College (which has a slew of blogs) suggests that colleges and universities dig into their institutional blogs to find content that could be used elsewhere on the institution’s website. Good idea, Kyle. Maybe we should call it content mining.
Why no Apple blog? Unlike Dell, Google or Microsoft, Apple has never felt the need to have a corporate blog. I’ve always thought this weird. So does Business Blogwire‘s Easton Ellsworth, who speculates that an official Apple blog might make the company more accessible to “the masses who find Apple snobby and elitist.”
Speaking of official corporate blogs … The best of them — like Google’s — offer valuable services and tips, and in so doing they add value and build their reputations. Case in point: Google’s announcement on Thursday of an upcoming free cross-product webinar for webmasters.

Three of our most useful products for website owners are Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, and Google Website Optimizer. On July 8, we’re joining forces to bring you a free webinar about all of them so you can learn more about how they can boost your website when used together.

Nice touch, Google. Nothing snobby or elitist there.
An admissions dean who gets it. A few weeks ago, I found out about “Dean J,” an admissions administrator who blogs, by reading this article about her (article via Academic Impressions’ e-newsletter). Dean J is the nom de blog of Jeannine Lalonde, the assistant dean of admissions at the University of Virginia. As the C-Ville article points out, Dean J has an “easygoing Web personality.” It’s refreshing to find such a voice in a world of recruitment spin. No wonder readers of her blog “quickly latched on to a source of much-needed information about the admissions process at UVA.” Nice going, Dean J.
The most powerful persuasive element of blogging. It doesn’t take a psych degree to figure it our, according to Copyblogger. Blogging allows people to like you, and people like to do business with people they like.

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Problems with portals

Seth Meranda hates portals. That much is clear from this lovely rant against the portalization of higher ed websites.

To Seth’s way of thinking, portals are a manifestation of all that is wrong in academic administration. They are “a poor excuse of bolting on a silo of political process to a university’s website.”

Not only that, but:

Portals are not designed for the correct target audience (students), rather they are designed to enforce out-dated, non-user-centric workflows that appease [non]decision makers. Furthermore, portals fail to aggregate the student life experience. They do not combine all aspects of student interests (academic, residence life, involvement, advising, athletics), instead they primarily focus on only the academic side.

In addition, portals do not provide branding. Slapping your logo on the top and scheming the colors isn’t branding. Branding is entrenched into user experience. Branding revolves around your students’ experiences and expectations related to your institution. Portals cheapen brands by lowering user experiences and hindering expectations.

Seth goes on to advocate “a more holistic, user-experience-centric approach. ‘Experience Architects’ need to work with students (current and prospective) to determine online content and design. Student input needs to become the dominating impact on our future realignment strategies. … The ‘Experience Architects’ will hold the conversations with students, and both will work collaboratively.”

Ron Bronson tends to agree. Riffing off Seth’s post in an entry of his own titled Portals Aren’t Solutions, he writes: “If more innovation, collaboration and assessment of what students need was being done, we’d be able to go a lot further along in creating useful applications and leverage the talents within our own walls a lot better than we do.”

I can’t say I disagree with either Seth or Ron. But it would be nice, for the sake of debate, to hear a different perspective.

I wonder what Paul Redfern‘s take might be on the topic. Paul presented a good session about merging portals with university websites at the CASE Communications, Marketing and Technology Conference earlier this month. Paul is the director of web communications and electronic media at Gettysburg College, he seems to have found a happy medium. Maybe he’ll join the discussion. Paul?

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