Writing for the Web

What I'm doing now

I quit my job with CEHD back in January. If you want to read about that you can find a few notes at http://honey.delobi.us/2009/01/my-wanton-act-of-optimism/.

My mother became very ill and was hospitalized three times and so it was a good thing I no longer had a job. I've been able to visit her in the hospital or nursing home and get her into assisted living.

I'm now looking for freelance work in search engine optimization (SEO). My current gig is with Super Cubes LLC. It's a good gig. I love doing this type of work.

TinyURL or other service?

I've used tinyurl.com and snurl.com for many years and have been happy with their service. But having just read Analysis: Which URL Shortening Service Should You Use?, I think I might rethink this.

First of all, if I still had responsibility for a site or responsibility for a brand, I'd register vanity URLs right away. Yes, some of these services will allow you to choose your own custom path. So if you're using Twitter and frequently using a service to shorten umn.edu/college/departmentname/programname, you could try to obtain UofM-program and always use that.

You can also track traffic from those shortened URLs. TinyURL does not offer this service, but others do. So even though tinyURL has been around since way back when, I think I'll be trying bit.ly now. It's still a memorable name and it offers additional services.

Social networking/social giving

Now to get people to create these for our funds! How, how, how?

Playing with widgets

I've been playing with Ning, Gather, and other social media sites. You can come join me if you like.

I've added a couple of widgets to my sidebar. Scroll down and you'll see them on the left. They are simply RSS feeds, but made a little more attractive, perhaps.

You can subscribe to a feed for this blog, too. (Not that I ever have time to update it, of course.) If it seems to work, we'll consider adding a similar option to our College's news blog.

social media resources for IHE

MySpace's portal for colleges and universities

(How) Should higher ed institutions use MySpace? Get answers from the higher ed MySpace advocate: Heather Mansfield, Web editor at Drury University

MySpace Best & Worst Practices

Usability and writing merge? Yes!

Go read Turn Usable Content into Winning Content.

Here is someone talking about both brand and language, about both brand and usability, and about emotion.

SEO tools

Spying On Your Paid Search Competitors refers to several tools that allow for competitive analysis even if you don't pay for search terms. They are

• Compete


• Alexa


• SpyFu.com

I ran a Spyfu search to see how we show up for a search on "kinesiology Phd" and found that there's not much competition for that set of terms. However, once I dug a little deeper I found searches for "PhD programs in education." And that's not a phrase I've tried to optimize for. I assumed that students ready for a doctorate would have a more specific program or field in mind. And right in front of me is evidence that the search economy finds that phrase profitable. So I immediately changed the page we have listing our doctorates in education and human development. Gone is the word "doctorate."

The Compete tool will allow you to compare traffic from three top level domains. So I can compare how the University (umn.edu) stacks up to Columbia (columbia.edu), but not how my college (cehd.umn.edu) stacks up against Teacher's College (tc.columbia.edu/) at Columbia. it's too bad because this site gives information on how engaged the visitors are and it gives the top three keyword phrases which drive visitors to the site. Paying for the service might make this site more helpful.

Alexa hasn't changed much over the years. And while it also limits data to the top level domain, it provided this little tidbit:

Where people go on Umn.edu:

• umn.edu - 13%


• gophermail.umn.edu - 12%


• lib.umn.edu - 6%


• d.umn.edu - 6%


• onestop2.umn.edu - 4%


• onestop.umn.edu - 4%


• mail.umn.edu - 3%


• gis.umn.edu - 2%


• cfans.umn.edu - 2%


• extension.umn.edu - 2%


• cehd.umn.edu - 2%


• webvista.umn.edu - 2%


• movielens.umn.edu - 1%


• umcrookston.edu - 1%


• cla.umn.edu - 1%


• myu.umn.edu - 1%

Social Media Optimization

When many of us think social media we think Facebook and MySpace and YouTube. It also includes other tools and platforms that allow for interaction. It doesn't only have to be "social" conversation. It includes bookmarking adn content sharing tools such as Delicious and Digg.

Higher education hasn't made the most of this media yet. But here are a few good tips on how to optimize current Web pages for the social media.

• 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO)
• Rules 6 and 7
• Rules 8, 9, 10, and 11
• Rules 12 and 13
• Rules 14, 15 and 16

I encourage you to read the entries, but here's the synopsis (really not that different from general optimization rules):
1) Increase your linkability
2) Make tagging and bookmarking easy
3) Reward inbound links
4) Help your content travel
5) Encourage the mashup
6) Be a user resource, even if it doesn’t help you
7) Reward helpful and valuable users
8) Participate
9) Know how to target your audience
10) Create content
11) Be real
12) Don’t forget your roots, be humble
13) Don’t be afraid to try new things, stay fresh
14) Develop a SMO strategy
15) Choose your SMO tactics wisely.
16) Make SMO part of your process and best practices

I have to confess that while I've used many social networking sites and visited many others, I rely only on a few. I subscribe to newsfeeds of a few blogs for work and pleasure and I've watched what others in higher education have been doing.

Right now I'm interested in making it easier to share and bookmark our college's research. But I have yet to add the widgets to make that possible from our Web site. Our blog site has the RSS feed and a simple script I found for adding the feed directly into iGoogle. Our internal audience isn't filled with early adopters and many have no idea what an RSS feed even is.

Marketing programs III

While most prospect students will find out the most about your programs through your Web site, you hope they'll hear good things through the "word on the street" and their interactions with program representatives.

Here are a few ideas for making programs a little easier to hear about and to locate.

Your URL goes everywhere

• Include your Web site URL on
• e-mail signature lines (faculty and staff)
• stationery
• business cards
• presentation materials (For instance, PowerPoint slides and handouts should use College or University templates and include a program-specific URL.


• At workshops, conferences, community meetings, etc., have something available that you can give out. It could be a business card or a bookmark.


• If you're speaking somewhere, be sure you’re identified in the schedule or program as being from the College and University.


• Post to newsgroups and listservs in your field and put a URL in your signature line.


• Don’t be afraid to brag about your program, your faculty, your staff, your students, your college. Prepare a few points that everyone in your program can talk about so you’re all giving a consistent message.

Keep your friends informed and make new friends

• On campus


• Inform University advisers about your program’s strongest selling points. (Remember CCE, CLA, the Graduate School, and other college advising offices, ETC Services, St. Paul Career Center, and perhaps the Study Abroad Office.)


• Have materials available for visitors to research and service centers in your field.


• Make the most of your relationships with other departments and submit related news and course offerings to their departmental or student newsletters.


• Be sure your faculty are listed as experts in the U’s experts guide, the Children, Youth, and Families Consortium’s experts site and others as appropriate.


• Routinely ask faculty and staff for new bragging points. Make sure your college's communications office knows about what your program is most proud of. Don’t neglect students and alumni accomplishments. If the communications office doesn’t know about something, they can’t provide that information to University Relations or other units on campus that can provide you with publicity and recognition.


• Offer a freshman seminar.


• Offer an information session and use all your contacts to invite prospective students.


• Nominate your faculty, staff, students, and alumni for University awards.


• Teach a session at Saturday Scholars or similar programs




• Off campus


• Host a regional event.


• Sponsor a conferences or seminar.


• Seek out the most popular blogs and listservs in your field. Post related comments. Link to your program site or faculty page.


• Find out if any listservs in your field allow promotional postings or sponsorship and post accordingly.


• When providing an URL in an e-mail or listserve, or even your signature line, place it within a context. For example, “Visit www.education.umn.edu/CI/Faculty/research/ to discover research in curriculum and instruction.â€?


• Write a letter to the editor. Not just to the local newspapers, but to any newsletter or journal in your field. These can be reprinted on the College’s Web site.


• Offer an online survey course.


• Consider authoring a Wikipedia entry for your research area. Be sure it links to the College or your program area but don’t limit it to such links or it will be removed. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_education. Harvard has a link carefully included there. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_learning. The Johnson brothers are mentioned in the references and could be made into a link.)


• Consider authoring a Wikipedia entry for your most prominent faculty and alumni. (See the entry for Robert H. Bruininks. See also, List of University of Minnesota people.


• Create a blog site. But only if you have the time to keep it updated. (See http://intranet.education.umn.edu/Communications/web/blogging.htm for advice.)


• Consider asking faculty to create pages on Facebook.com or other social networks.


• If you have technology, sport, or science news, consider submitting it to Digg.com. (Currently this site gets a lot of traffic and bloggers find stories to write about. It might die out in a few years.)

• Keep your feeder schools, associations, professional groups, advisers, etc. informed. Feed them news, editorials, or programs details as appropriate. Be sure to ask them how they want to receive this information and respect that preference.


• Ask for links to your Web site from professional associations. Be sure to consider state, national, Canadian, and international associations if appropriate.


• Consider having a display at conferences, lectures, etc. sponsored by related organizations. Sponsor the refreshments or provide the pens.


• Check in with your alumni. Keep them part of the community.


• If you’re giving a guest speaker something related to the College as a thank-you gift, consider mailing it to his or her office address. Don’t let it get left behind at the hotel.


• Does any industry related to your programs need more graduates in your field? If so, ask them if there any way they could assist in promoting your program(s).


• Keep bio pages and contact information on your Web site accurate and up-to-date.


• Consider posting an IM (instant messaging) address and staffing it.

Consider the best experiences you’ve had at your favorite restaurant, hotel, garage, or clothing store. What did they do to make you feel great about your experience with them? Can you do something similar?

Even if a student decides to go elsewhere, can we make them feel like they’re missing out on something here? How do we show we understand their needs and are on their side? How can we be gracious?

How can we keep our graduates feeling like a part of our communities? Who else has more credibility in their assesment of the program than a graduate?

It's the faculty, their repution, and reputation of the school that really influences prospective graduate students. But even if faculty are not available to respond to prospective student inquiries, someone in the program area can keep in contact with your prospective students and build a relationship with them. They can be encouraged to think favorably and speak favorably about your program to their friends and colleagues. They can be encouraged to apply. People respond to those who show an interest in them.

“Naturally, students want to receive information about your campus when they are beginning their searches. But they also want to continue communicating throughout the recruitment process.�1

Relying on the Graduate School, the Admissions Office, the alumni society, or students services is not enough.

• Review your admissions process to insure that every student who applies is greeted, welcomed, and encouraged to enroll. This does not necessarily have to be in person.
• Greeting and encouraging those who haven't completed the admission process is also critical. Check the Apply Yourself system to identify those who have yet to complete their applications and send them a note with additional information about your program, your faculty, or your graduates.
• If you identified influencers on prospective student’s decision to apply, consider how can you best keep those influencers informed. Does this audience need to be added to a College mailing list for research publications? Would an e-mail twice a year from the department chair be welcomed?
• Promptly answer e-mail and phone calls from prospective students ASAP. Be available. Faculty and staff are the best examples of the quality of our programs.
• Consider dropping any forms or procedures that create additional steps for students applying or that increase confusion about the application process.
• Extend the relationship. Get prospetive students to campus if at all possible and let them meet you, the faculty, and current students. Host a recruiting weekend.

1 Engaging the “Social Networking� Generation

Suggested reading

I found McGovern's "Words that work: search words versus website words" article interesting.

Choosing the words we use to describe our content can be tricky. We need to use common terms in order to be found by search engines users and to be recognized by people browsing listings of our programs or articles. But there's the tension with also wanting to use the most academically correct terminology. And some terms have conotations we might want to employ or avoid. For instance, vo-tech or vocational-technical education are commonly used terms. But that's not the term used in the field. The Journal of Vocational and Technical Education is now being published as The Journal of Career and Technical Education. Which term do we use? It's important to know the purpose of the page and who the intended audience is. And how strongly the faculty feel about the term.

Writing Link and Heading Text is another good article that came across my Outlook recently.