Category: marketing

Friday Five: A pioneer blog turns 10

When I first started this blog in the fall of 2005, there was plenty of room to grow.

It was not a crowded space. You could count on one hand the number of blogs focused on communications, marketing and PR issues related to higher ed. A couple of them I didn’t even know about until later.

But I knew about Michael Stoner and his company, and I knew he had a blog. The existence of Michael’s blog, in fact, is what nudged me to begin this one.

On Thursday of this week, the mStoner blog achieved a milestone: its 10th birthday.

In his post commemorating the achievement, Michael asked staff members to cite some of their favorites. I thought I’d share five of my favorite posts from the mStoner blog as well. It’s tough to select just five, and I could go through this exercise again and select five entirely different posts. But for today, here are my top five favorite mStoner posts, in terms of appeal and relevance to me and my work.

1. mStoner’s First Law of Branding. If you learn nothing else about branding, learn this law: Everything is connected to everything else. This concept of a brand ecosystem really resonated with me. It still does. Because it’s true. (Also a favorite of mStoner senior strategist Susan T. Evans, so it must be a damn good blog post.)

2. Strategy at the start? Not always. Speaking of Susan Evans, she really knocked one out of the park with this post. As someone who believes in the ideal of “strategy first” on any project, the pragmatist in me connected with Susan’s point that none of us works in the ideal world, and that “strategy development can and should happen as you go along” on any project. Wise words.

3. Thoughts about MBTeamS and the (First) Great Tweet Race. Remember the Great Tweet Race and how Todd Sanders and John Pederson blew away the competition, proving the power of social media along the way? If you’ve forgotten about the excitement of that 2011 drive from L.A. to Dallas, revisit Michael’s post for a great summary and key takeaways on how that event provides an excellent object lesson on how to run a social media campaign.

4. Brand. It’s not what you say it is. It’s what they say it is. Again, Susan nails it. A must-read post for anyone interested in branding and brand identity.

5. The Shopping Effect — And Your Website. Here’s one from the archives, cited by Michael himself as one of his favorites. Though written in 2004, its lessons are still relevant. In fact, nine years later, we still need to understand how prospective students and their parents shop for schools, and how prospective donors shop for causes.

As I said, there are many more great posts I could have cited. But these are the ones that specifically resonated with me.

Over the past 10 years, you can see posts that were relevant for the time as well as forward-thinking. And that’s the thing I observe, as an outsider, about the mStoner culture. At its core, the organization strives to provide relevant resources while staying on the vanguard. From their role as a pioneer in blogging to more recent pioneering efforts — such as the launch of EDUniverse, the merger and broadening of HigherEdLive and the publication of the collection of case studies titled Social Works — you can count on the mStoner team to be at the forefront.

I can’t wait to see what the next 10 years will bring.

Content strategy is fine, but…

Photo via Bob Warfield's SmoothSpan blog
Photo via Bob Warfield’s SmoothSpan blog

I’m grateful to see the higher ed world talking so much about content strategy these days. This emphasis on thinking about content in a way that connects it with our organizational goals is important.

I’m glad that people are writing books and blogs about content strategy, too. And talking about this subject on Twitter. And planning entire conferences around the theme. These are important efforts, and I learn a lot from the content strategists I follow on Twitter and from their blog posts. I’ve learned valuable lessons that I’ve incorporated into my everyday work, and I’m thinking more about the importance of content in context.

But I sometimes wonder if we’re focusing too much on the content side of things.

I sometimes wonder if we need to pay more attention to the content needs or wants of the people we’re supposed to be creating our content for.

In other words, our audience.

The way content strategy is sometimes talked about, it reminds me of supply-side economics. In a way, I suppose it is. As technology has lowered the barriers to creating and distributing all sorts of content, consumers of that content have more than enough options at a very low price point.

But content strategy without regard to audience is misguided. Simply flooding the marketplace of ideas with more content won’t achieve many business goals for any organization.

Entrepreneur and blogger Bob Warfield touched on this in a post last December. “A lot of entrepreneurs,  when faced with the question, ‘What’s the most important thing to do first?’, would answer, ‘Build a product,” Warfield writes. “Big mistake.”

The most important thing to do first is to find an audience.  It may be that building a product is an integral part of growing your audience, but you’re not ready to build a product or grow your audience until you’ve found the right audience to start with.

Audience strategy, anyone?

I haven’t heard the term “audience strategy” bandied about much in the higher ed or marketing circles. But maybe someone should latch on to that idea and run with it.

Maybe it’s because we take our audiences for granted in higher ed. We’re not the entrepreneurs Bob Warfield is talking to. And while we do roll out new products from time to time (new degrees or certificate programs) or new services (online options, blended learning), we probably don’t look at our roles the same way an entrepreneur would.

Most of us work in established organizations. We probably don’t worry too much about finding the right audiences for our content. We have scores of them, and many of these audiences (alumni, current students, members of the community where our schools reside) already have a connection with our institutions.

But we should be thinking more strategically about who these people are.

I recently read about one approach that connects both audience and content in a pretty nifty way. It’s called audience-centric content strategy. It begins with the audience first.

Whether we call it “audience-centric” or by some other name, the important thing is to keep our audience in mind as we design our content strategy. Then maybe the most relevant aspects of our plentiful storehouses of content (the supply) will better connect with what our audience is looking for (demand).