Your Users Don't Care About the Status Quo

I was recently discussing a portal implementation with a small college. The portal "solution" was purchased so that current students could conform to institution business functions (pay tuition, graduation check-lists, grade summaries, etc...). The institution was excited about this new tool, however they had one problem: current students weren't using it. When the institution was asked why not, their response was: "The current students don't know that this is where they are supposed to be. We need to spend more time, money and energy on converting the students." (not verbatim, but the gist).

Wrong, they need to return the portal and reinvest time, money and energy into understanding what their students want.

Portals Aren't Solutions
Those of you that know me well, know that I hate portals. Portals are a poor excuse of bolting on a silo of political process to a university's website. 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.

Though I am very condescending of portals, I understand how they have become a major part of academia. Institutions have primarily been siloed beasts. Divisions, political turfs, and process-centered areas are the norm. The organizational chart of colleges and universities are long, vertical lines. This has benefits when it comes to student segmenting, decision making, accountability, and development. However, this organizational system will struggle to maintain stability and timeliness as our students become more complex, more entrenched in interactive channels and more demanding of service.

Portals are designed to accommodate processes, but our future interactive communication (primarily the web) needs to be designed to accommodate the user (student) experience. Students do not see our institutions as a collection of silos, rather they see us one brand. User experiences dominate silos. Why? Because a user experience involves many areas that from a user's point of view should be one seamless entity. Students want to be able to join a club, register for classes, buy books, read profiles on professors and sign up for yoga without having to relearn navigation structures, processes, or workflows. Students don't care that the IT department runs the e-commerce section and the registrar handles the schedule of classes. To them, it is all one entity. Our job is not to educate the student on our silos, rather to design based on their expectations.

Experience Architects Needed
We need to start navigating towards 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 marketing team is no more in charge than the IT team, nor does registrar's office have more clout than the housing department. The "Experience Architects" will hold the conversations with students, and both will work collaboratively.

In the end, our sites are for the students - they are the user's who have a need to accomplish a task (the degree). By taking their perspective, we can eliminate the friction that so often accompanies academic processes.

Web Design Rap

Loopholes in the .edu Domain Exploited

The Conversation Marketing blog has discovered that Pickering Institute is allowing anonymous users to register for-profit blogs on their .edu domain. This would allow any potential blogger to take advantage of the trust and goodwill created by real institutions.

The article does a great job of outlining the reasons why this is a bad idea, and how it could affect the SEO, value, and success of our legitimate operations.

As a higher ed professional, I agree with the author (Ian Lurie). There is a higher purpose attributed to .edu domain name. By allowing non-institutions to take advantage of the domain, it reduces taints the water. I would support a solution to fix these loopholes.

Pickering Institute doesn't visually appear to be a reputable institution, but it did grab hold of a .edu domain and is now exploiting the loopholes.

HigherEd Twitter Crowds

As of recently, we have experienced an explosion of higher ed Twitter users. At the same time, twitter has become a crucial social media tool. Therefore, many of our twitter streams have become overwhelmed with multiple discussions. At times, I have wished for a way to only "listen" to select groups of individuals

Enter CrowdStatus.com. This tool allows you to create groups of Twitter users. The nice feature is that I can create a group, and then share the URL so everyone can take advantage of the same group.

On one page, you can see the latest updates from everyone in your group. It's a great way to get a snapshot of what is going on. It would be nice if the service refreshed each user as new tweets happened; however functionality is limited for the alpha release.

My first group: Higher Ed. I captured all the users from the UWEBD discussion, and added a few Twitterers I have been following to the list. You can check it out at: http://crowdstatus.com/HigherEdcrowd.aspx. Use the comments of this post to let me know if I missed you; I'll put you on there right away. Hopefully this will be useful.

(BTW, anyone with protected updates [Brad, FJ] can't be added to the stream)

Canadian Conversation Conversions

Last week I was up in Canada beginning a consultation on the school's web strategy for recruitment and retention. It was a couple of days filled with great discussions, ideas and experiences. Part of the consultation involved focus groups with students and faculty. The students were very refreshing - the passion and zeal they had for their school and education were outstanding.

As we worked through the focus groups, a few terms, words and phrases caused me to pause and explore their meaning. Though subtle, if ever working with Canadian schools/students it is best to understand the lingo:

1. Mark = grade
2. GPA is calculated on a percentage scale 85% ~ 3.5
3. College is a community college. Any institution above this is only a university (college and university are not interchangeable).
4. Enroll is spelled enrol

I'll add more as I come across them.

It's Good People Day - Continue the Celebration

For those of us entrenched in social media and follow "internet celebrities," we know Gary Vaynerchuck and his explosive personality. Each day, whether it is a WineLibraryTV or on his blog, we watch his video blogs explaining his powerful thoughts on social media, personal branding, wine tasting and marketing strategies.

Today, Gary is dedicating the day to praising the people that are awesome and good (see video below). The people that provide value through blogs, twitter, and other social media outlets. The people that have helped you become who you are, or the people that have shaped your approach.

In higher ed, we have many individuals that value altruism over capitalism and continue to provide awesome thoughts and strategies toward the greater good. People like Matt Herzberger or Brad Ward of BlogHighEd. Or great photography like Joe Gaylor, or design inspiration like Stewart Foss. Idea generators and inspirers like Andy Shaindlin, Karine Joly, Drew Stephens, Jeff Kallay, Mike Richwalsky, Dennis Miller, Andrew Careaga, Brian Niles, Mark Greenfield, Heidi Cool and Tony Dunn. UNL believers and achievers like Brett Beiber, Aaron Coleman, Alvin Woon, Aaron Grauer, Bob Crisler, Mark Hiatt, Ryan Lim. These folks are awesome and good. Check them out, follow them on twitter, subscribe to their RSS feeds, friend them up on Facebook - they are innovators and have advanced our industry and taken it to a new level. They are all good people.

Gary's Video on "Good People Day:"

The Virtual Generation is Coming

As the millennials continue to move through the undergrad and graduate recruitment ranks, it is time to begin focusing on the next generational shift. Not because the millennial generation is ending, but because a new generation is forming.

Since the post World War II era, generations have been defined by an age-related model (Baby Boomers - 1946-1960, Generation X - 1961-1981 and Generation Y [millennials] - 1978-2000). However, as the consumerization of IT continues to dominate the landscape, a new categorization of generational labeling must begin. This new generation—"Generation V",as labeled by Adam Sarner, senior analyst at Gartner, Inc—defies the age, gender, social demographical or geographical model which breaks down as more consumers are using technology to level the playing field and shift importance to motivation, effort, and competence.

Generation V (where V stands for Virtual) is based on online merit and an increasing preference to use digital channels to discover information, share ideas, build knowledge and expand trends. Members of Generation V strongly believe in the benefits of collaboration—that "we" is more powerful than "me." They believe in a conversation rather than a communication.

Social networks, blogs and user-generated content are the beginning of Generation V. The conversation dominates the activity—not the communication directed toward them. As the conversation grows, so does the balance of power.

As marketers, this has major implications. Typical data collections that we have used to segment our target audience will be only used for procedural requirements. Instead, online personas and trends based around web activity and conversations will dominate our marketing approach.

In higher ed, applications and enrollments will have a minor direct impact compared to the commercial industries where identity is less of a requirement for purchasing (anyone can purchase from Amazon; one must give a large amount of personal data to apply for admission to a college or university). However, this generation will be influential in the conversations with our institutions. Building processes around the online personas rather than the demographical identity will provide larger benefits in the long-term.