[pre]design

Education

Influential web content in higher ed: An interview with Colleen Jones, author of “Clout”

In our last post, we introduced the concept of “clout”, which we boiled down to “getting people to believe your brand”. This is easier said than done, particularly in higher ed where messaging is highly decentralized. Universities struggle with finding ways to present an authentic, honest view of the institution while influencing prospective students and the general public to believe they are what they say they are. I recently talked with Colleen Jones to discuss how her book, Clout: The Art and Science of Influential Web Content, can help colleges and universities who are struggling with these very issues.

Todd and Colleen at the Clout release party

Todd and Colleen at the Clout book release party

Todd: Hi, Colleen. Thanks for taking the time to chat with us about your book. I had the pleasure of reading it over the holidays and it was fantastic!

Colleen: Thanks! I’m glad to be here.

Todd: Tell me a little bit about the book and how you came up with the name: Clout: The Art and Science of Influential Web Content.

Colleen: Well, I wanted the book to stand out from smarmy books about persuasion and influence. Many of them focus only on manipulative tricks and not on the big picture or long term consequences. I felt “clout” best suggested my approach.

I also am convinced that influencing through content requires combining art and science. The art comprises rhetorical principles and qualitative research. The science encompasses psychological principles and quantitative research. My goal with this focus was to move the conversation about content strategy forward from process to principles and evaluation.

Todd: Clout is full of detailed how-to tips, case studies and examples. What types of organizations are represented in the book?

Colleen: Every organization who is trying to achieve a result online needs influential web content. It’s a myth that organizations who aren’t big companies don’t need or can’t achieve clout. The book has a chapter talking about the elements of context to help readers quickly understand the situation they need to influence. And, to drive the point home, I featured examples from higher ed, startups such as Grasshopper.com, government institutions such as CDC.gov and WhiteHouse.gov, Fortune 500 companies such as InterContinental Hotels Group and more.

Higher education institutions will benefit from thinking about the decisions they need students, parents, and faculty to make. For example, as more and more of the application and admission process happens online, how can your web content best encourage ideal prospective students to enroll? And, how can your web content guide prospective students through the enrollment process?

Todd: Your book is about practice, but I really liked that it is rooted in theory, making it ideal for the academic enterprise. Would you say the book has application in the classroom as well as the boardroom?

Colleen: Yes, absolutely. Many of the academic books about rhetoric have little practical application beyond analyzing political speeches. Rhetoric has become such a lost art, especially in the U.S., but it’s SO practical. I see this book being an excellent bridge from academia into practice for communication, media, information technology and similar programs. But, don’t take my word for it. A sample chapter that explains rhetorical principles is available on my website.

Todd: Many people in higher education, particularly faculty, tend to shy away from any talk of marketing or branding (but they are coming around to it). I attribute this in part to some of the negative practices, the “snake oil” as you call it in the book, employed by a few slimy sales people or dishonest PR folks. Likewise, there may be people who feel uncomfortable with the idea of “influential web content”, thinking it is code for some sort of manipulation. What would you say to them?

Colleen: I certainly understand that concern. But, influence is at the heart of most academic learning. Professors and students have to write papers that not only report facts but also persuasively argue how to interpret them. Class discussions are not just about answering trivia but about presenting different viewpoints convincingly. Even in the sciences, as Thomas Kuhn pointed out in his work about paradigm shifts, if you do not present knowledge in an influential way to a community, the community will not accept it, and the knowledge will be lost. (Malcom Gladwell revisits this idea more recently in Outliers.) Because influencing is at the heart of learning and knowledge, it’s perfectly appropriate for a higher education institution to be influential. And, in our digital age, they have to be influential through web content.

Ethics help ensure influence does not cross the line into manipulation. The most important way to stay ethical is to stay truthful. If your case is grounded in facts, long term results, and respect for the people you are influencing, then you will stay on the right side of the line.

Todd: You wrote a great chapter on planning. In our practice we see a lot of institutions jumping into the web and social media without first thinking about their business objectives. How do you address that?

Colleen: One element of context is the result (or objective) you want. The first step in planning is to ask why your web or social media effort will move you closer to that result. That question will help you sort out promising ideas from distracting ones. Now, if you don’t have a clear vision of the result you want, you’ll have a tougher time with planning.

Todd: In the book, we learn that a big part of achieving clout as an organization is gaining people’s trust, which is done in part by presenting evidence to support what you’re saying. The more clout you have, the less evidence is required to prove yourself. In many ways, these concepts are applicable not just to web content, but your overall branding efforts. Would you agree?

Colleen: Yes, that concept of clout applies to all your branding efforts, from your brochures to your emails to your website. What’s really challenging is, online, there are many channels where a higher education organization could have a presence, from Facebook to mobile. Meaningful content across those channels will make your brand consistent and, therefore, easier to remember. When I worked on customer experience for Cingular Wireless for several years, I touched every channel– the IVR (phone system), the website, the point of sale system, and the store. I can assure you people notice when you say one thing in one channel and something different, or even conflicting, in another. I worked hard to bring consistency to the content and, as a result, the Cingular Wireless brand.

Todd: Two of my favorite chapters in the book focus on evaluation. There’s an overwhelming amount of data available to evaluate the web quantitatively and many great qualitative techniques as well. While you detail the “how and when” for using these methods, one tip really hit home with me personally—“don’t get lost in the weeds.” What did you mean by that?

Colleen: I meant that the point of evaluation is to figure out whether you are achieving the results you want. The point is not to use every capability of every evaluation tool or research method out there or to analyze every tiny bit of evaluation data you have—to get lost in those types of weeds. Focus on questions about whether you’re achieving results. Then, use the right methods to answer those questions.

Now, sometimes some deeper, more exploratory evaluation is in order. The key is to assess when the time and effort is likely worth the insights you might gain from that evaluation. For example, if one of your content efforts was a huge success or a huge failure, it would be worth doing some deeper evaluation to figure out why.

Todd: As you know, most colleges and universities follow highly decentralized web publishing models. It’s not uncommon to find subject matter experts (SMEs)—faculty, administrators, staff—having sole responsibility for entire websites in their subject or office area. You address this in your final chapter. Can you briefly discuss what you call the “SME Syndrome”? How do you balance the tension between the “accurate” language your faculty are demanding and the “influential” language your marketers prefer?

Colleen: SME Syndrome is the overly detailed, often arrogant language that some SMEs try to insist upon in the name of accuracy. Style guides and governance policies that require the right balance between clarity and accuracy help tremendously. These guides also can specify any laws or regulatory guidelines that temper claims about the benefits of a product or service. For particularly stubborn cases of SME Syndrome, testing the content with real users will prove whether the affected content will work for users.

Now, it’s possible to go too far in the other extreme. If you talk about a subject in terms that are too terse or simple, people—especially people with some knowledge of the subject—might think you are being condescending or that your understanding is very basic. We know from research by psychologist B.J. Fogg that the more people know about a subject, the more critical they are of website content on that subject. If that is a risk for your situation, then consider whether you need some separate content targeted at different audience levels. For example, CDC offers basic content for anyone and more technical content for doctors and researchers.

Todd: This has been terrific insight, Colleen. I hope our readers will take as much away from your book as I did. Thank you!

Colleen: Thank YOU! I look forward to seeing you at the next Atlanta Content Strategy event!

Colleen Jones has led interactive strategy for Fortune 1000 companies such as InterContinental Hotels Group and Cingular Wireless (now AT&T) as well as for Centers for Disease Control, the most trusted government agency in the Unites States. As the principal of Content Science, Colleen consults with executives and practitioners about making their web content more influential. Colleen is a veteran of the interactive industry, a participant in the first ever Content Strategy Consortium and the founder of Atlanta Content Strategy. She has spoken about the value of influential web content at conferences everywhere from Phoenix, Arizona to Paris, France. Learn more about Colleen and her book at leenjones.com.

J. Todd Bennett, co-founder and managing partner of decimal152, helps colleges and universities understand the needs of their constituents and partners to develop strategies that meet those needs.

Education / Politics / Strategy — 10 Comments
23
Feb 10

The Incidental Publisher

A web CMS: a system that manages web content. It sounded like a dream come true. But what they failed to mention is that the system simply facilitates the management of the content, not its creation. You solved a technical problem and created a human one– real people with little or no experience are now creating official institutional content on your behalf. Yikes!

Maybe that wasn’t such a great decision after all. You could, as Jeff Cram of the CMS Myth suggests, stop letting people use your CMS .

In his article, Jeff wrote:

“You have dozens of users in CMS tool 101 training sessions with no idea why they are there, no familiarity with the publishing model and no incentive to learn how to keep their piece of content up to date which rarely needs to be updated anyway. This never ends well.”

He also references another great article by Seth Gottlieb that makes a case for scaling back on distributed web authorship. Does this make any sense? The reason you bought a content management system (CMS) in the first place was to distribute the management of content to lots of people!

Jeff and Seth say that the promises of a website made better with a CMS are never quite realized because of “occasional users” — people who have little incentive or ownership of the site. I believe there is a great deal of truth to this, but feel the problems run even deeper. I see a lot of highly motivated CMS users churning out huge volumes of web garbage.

You have now created an organization full of incidental publishers.

Merriam Webster defines incidental as:

1 : being likely to ensue as a chance or minor consequence
2 : occurring merely by chance or without intention or calculation

How did you become a publisher?

Without intention? You didn’t intend to become a publisher, did you?

Perhaps it happened by chance (low woman/man on the totem pole, newest employee in the department, you have an iPhone).

And of course it’s a minor consequence (the last item on your job description calls this “other duties as assigned”).

It used to be so much easier. There was a webmaster. That person was, well, the master of the whole website—a jack-of-all-trades. Websites were smaller and the chief function was to create a place online to put all of the great stuff you created for some other purpose offline. It’s a bit larger and more complicated now, isn’t it?

Your Organization Needs Content Creators

Most of the organizations I’ve worked with consider themselves fortunate if they have 1 or 2 full-time employees devoted to web content.

Imagine a large research university with an operating budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars, thousands of employees and students on campus facilities that rival many medium-sized towns, trying to sell a $160,000 intangible product to a middle-income family– and just one full-time web content person. Phew!

Without completely restructuring the operation, the widely distributed management of a website is the only way they can manage it. Unfortunately, the way many of them distribute responsibility is incidental and haphazard. Change a few job descriptions to include “doing the web”, train people on how to use the tool and *voilà* the website runs like a charm. HARDLY.

For the purposes of this conversation, let’s assume that most organizations have some sort of back-end technical support function for their sites (an IT department, a vendor, a web host, etc). There’s typically a budget for that. Leadership understands the need for it (and doesn’t understand how to do it so they’d gladly pay someone else).

That said, I want to focus on the other side—creating and maintaining useful content.

Who Creates Content?

Who does this stuff? While many people think it’s the role of a single webmaster (or a distributed group of departmental webmasters), the reality is that there are many roles that contribute to making content for the web.

Kristina Halvorson, in her book Content Strategy for the Web (p.73), identifies six types of people involved in content creation (with my take in parentheses):

Requesters submit requests for web content to be created, updated, or removed (These are the bosses who tell you to “get this up on the web”.)

Providers are subject matter experts who own and manage source content—or have the necessary information in their heads—that will be used by creators to develop web content (These are people closest to your product, service or audience who will likely run for the hills when you ask them to contribute website content!)

Creators are responsible for actually developing the content (This is anybody and everybody and rarely includes someone with professional communications training.)

Reviewers/ approvers must be consulted about some or all of the content prior to its publication online (These are usually the bosses who probably requested it in the first place. More likely than not, there is no reviewer at all. The untrained creator has total authority to do whatever she wants. It would be nice, however, if this function was served by a real editor with the authority to edit.)

Publishers get the content online, via coding, a content management system, a wiki, a blog, or other technical wizardry (These are the people with access to the CMS who are probably the creators, too. This is the one function that the organization usually provides some training and support for.)

Community Managers may be responsible for participating in online conversations via social media (You likely have far more of these than you know.)

And you thought all you needed to do was train your webmasters on the CMS!

Making Change

To really affect change in your organization and on your website, you have to involve a lot of people at all levels.

It may sound cliché—but it all starts with leadership. The leaders, whether they’re vice presidents or department directors, are also the requesters and the approvers. They don’t need to understand how you do what you do, but they do need to get why you do it so they will stop asking you to do stupid things! The incidental publisher is rarely in a position to defy the boss when told to get something up on the web.

So how can you really help those who create content for your website?

First of all, stop throwing out vague instructions like “keep your content fresh” and “promote interactivity”. People don’t know what that means and they’ll just waste time trying to do that.

And do not start and end your education with a “writing for the web” presentation or workshop. There’s nothing wrong with these (I have done many myself), but if it’s all you plan to do you might as well just call it “reformatting your garbage so it’s easier to scan”.

Here are a few things you should do:

Begin by aligning and educating people at all levels of the organization. If you want people to change their behavior, you have to teach them. Don’t assume they all read the same blogs and books that you do. Introduce the basics. Make the knowledge real and applicable to their specific sites.
Don’t stop with one presentation, but provide ongoing professional development. Many of you share your knowledge and experience with others at conferences, but rarely share that knowledge internally. Your incidental publishers may not have the opportunity to attend professional conferences and when they do, it’s likely in their functional area, not web-related.
Be sure to cover the basics and details of your overall brand and messaging strategy, content strategy and editorial strategy
Help them develop their own content and editorial strategies that align with the larger institutional strategies. If you don’t yet have an institutional strategy, do that first. You have to know where you’re going before you can direct others on how to get there.
Make sure people know your organization’s business objectives and audiences and help them determine how their department’s objectives and audiences fit in the big picture.
Teach them how to conduct simple audience research (i.e. talking to people) to find out what they need and want from your websites.
Help jump start efforts one site at a time. Provide assistance with a content inventory (including the weeding and pruning of content), improve the architecture and rewrite some of their content. Basically, show them how it’s done.
Help them understand the role of measurement and build-in simple, understandable ways to measure the effectiveness of their sites. Small, targeted measurements are much better than vague hit and page visit counts. Tie these measurements to their strategies.

None of this has to be done overnight. Baby steps in the right direction is progress. It will take a long time to change the culture—years perhaps. If people within the organization say this is too much work, is too hard or they don’t have enough time then perhaps they shouldn’t have their own websites at all.

I’m not saying this is easy. In fact, it may be very, very hard. Your website IS your organization. In many cases a page deep within your site is the first and only contact people have with you.

You put your best foot forward in the products you develop, the courses you teach, the research you conduct and the services you provide, don’t you? Your expectations are high for your students, your employees, your faculty and your grantees, right? Why would your website, a reflection of all of that, be any different?

Your website is not an incidental responsibility—it is what you do and who you are. Its priority must reflect that.

Architecture / Education / Politics / Research / Strategy / Technology — 8 Comments
12
Feb 10

Your website needs a [pre]design

Have you ever visited a redesigned website that looks nice, but is no more usable than before (or worse)? Did your organization implement a new content management system only to find your content never got any better? Were you disappointed when the new portal failed to revolutionize the way you work?

What are the first things many people think to do when their website has problems?

“Hire someone to redesign it! Get some new technology!”

Why? Because that’s what they always do. That’s what their competitors do. And quite frankly, they just don’t have the time or expertise to think about it. It’s a vicious cycle– a website gets redesigned, a tool gets implemented and people are happy with it for a little while. But old problems resurface, frustration mounts and it’s time to redesign again.
You blame the tool, blame the vendor, blame the people who work for you, but never blame the process.

Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

By this definition, the organizations we work with are ALL insane. So are we, and we admit it.

It’s so easy to fall into old patterns and behaviors. Trying to keep up with competitors, trends and the mounting pile of work in front of you leaves little time to think. You just do what you know. We have spent time on both sides of the table– the client side and the vendor side. In former roles, we redesigned hundreds of enterprise and small scale sites in response to a pre-determined scope of work spelled out in a complicated RFP. The projects usually addressed surface-level issues that resulted in nominal improvements in the look and usability of the site.

We have made our fair share of mistakes, but now we are learning from them. We had the tremendous benefit of a fresh start and new perspective that comes from creating a new company. We now find ourselves questioning everything we do and constantly asking “why?”

Here’s a sample from a Skype chat we had a shortly after starting decimal152 at the end of 2008:

Todd: [they] redesigned their website and it still sucks
Adam: that’s blunt
Adam: why does it still suck?
Todd: maybe the design or the cms was never the problem to begin with
Adam: or maybe it was, but it wasn’t done right
Todd: or maybe it was only part of the problem
Adam: or they got railroaded by a committee or a vendor
Todd: ahh, yes. like us.
Todd: in a past life
Adam: people define scope for a redesign RFP without doing the predesign work to determine scope in the first place
Todd: we need to start with good research that leads to good strategy before tackling solutions
Adam: and educate the entire organization along the way

Let’s stop the redesign insanity! Ask questions. Think before copying what another organization is doing. What works for them may not work for you. Besides, how do you know if it even works for THEM? (Chances are they don’t know if it’s working either). Redesigning a website to fix a problem you haven’t fully diagnosed is like putting a band-aid on a tumor.

It’s time to focus on pre-design– the research, strategy and planning that takes place BEFORE you decide to redesign your website.

We’re looking forward to an honest conversation… and lots of questions. We hope you’ll join us.

Side note: This is our very first blog post! We’re so glad you found it. If you care about your organization’s communications and the people responsible for getting them done, we hope you will subscribe to our blog. You can get updates on future posts by subscribing to our RSS feed, email updates, Facebook fan page, LinkedIn or Twitter. One last favor– help us get the word out and share this with a friend! Thanks– Todd.

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