January // 2012 // matt klawitter digital communications marketing consultant // mattklawitter.com

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Higher Ed, Prepare for HD Web

January 31st, 2012 | Posted in Predictions

These days, marketers are doing a tremendous amount of strategy and work to optimize mobile web experiences. This is especially true in the realm of higher education digital marketing as institutions strive to provide users with content and interfaces that are specifically designed for small devices.

After all, as a recent Pew Report shows, well over half of undergrads, graduate students, and community college attendees access the Internet or email via their cell phones. Hundreds of universities have mobile-enabled websites and those that do not are planning to launch them very soon.

But this article is not about mobile web development. This is not about being mobile. This is about a complementary trend that I believe we will watch develop in 2012 and 2013: the emergence of High Definition (HD) Web Development.

HD Web Development

I have heard HD Web Development, especially video, also referred to as the “lean back” (as in “recline in your La-Z-boy”) Web experience. The ubiquity of high-definition displays, such as televisions, that behave as high-powered computers, and the proliferation of broadband access to Web content, means that we now have the size and speed to enjoy the Web in a massive and brilliant form. And, as devices share and mirror content with one another, the restrictions that current mobile and PC web development impose will be removed.

You could argue that anticipating HD is simply another facet of responsive web design. I somewhat agree. Yet there are a few key differences. And, this goes way beyond just video.

Mobile: For the distracted, goal-oriented user

The reality of content on mobile devices is that the experience is momentary and environmentally competitive. Content for mobile phones must be minimally designed to focus on content, and while that is imperative, the consumer gets only a small taste of the organization’s visual brand. So, in higher education environments, content best suited for mobile is often the simplest and most transactional.

That is, most university mobile sites provide dining menus, phone directories, bus maps, weather, and other nugget-sized pieces of information. And that is ok. It suits the environment. The strategy behind a university mobile site is to serve a user who is highly distracted and on the go. Short and simple is ideal. Keep them connected and be quick about it.

So, the question today is always asked “is this content mobile-friendly?” and “will it look good on small devices?” Even though mobile devices can automatically squeeze your content into a small screen, there are proven techniques to improve how content is presented. This trend will continue and mobile web development will always be a part of our industry.

But what about the audience members who are not distracted? Not mobile. Not desk-bound but relaxing on a couch or near an entertainment center?

HD: For the comfortable user who wants an immersive experience

To meet this user’s needs, I believe we will begin having conversations that emerge from questions like “what does site look like on a TV monitor?” and “what content can we show off in high definition?”

Imagine for a minute a website intended for display on an 80-inch television in the living room or general-purpose room for a family. Imagine the opportunities for friends and family to share in an marketing experience that is a collage of interactive design, multimedia content, and video. Imagine that experience includes the opportunity to video conference or directly message with an admissions representative, student advisor, or professor.

Almost every manufacturer of television, computer technology, and Web-enabled devices is working on new ways for users to display, share, and interact with content on high definition television monitors in homes and offices. This means that websites that look good on tablet devices, PCs, and mobile phones also must be intentionally designed for high-definition display.

Like most trends, this one is simply a fresh iteration of a previous phenomenon. Ten to fifteen years ago, many institutions of higher education considered direct mail CDs/DVDs that created a kiosk (like at your local shopping mall) experience for users as key component of their marketing campaigns. These direct-mail pieces gave people the ability to interact with an institution’s content. Because connection speeds were so slow, these CD/DVDs made it possible to enjoy high-quality experiences during the time when the Internet was not ready to deliver them.

Getting ready for HD

So how do I think you should prepare for the Web in HD? The best and easiest way is to get a 32-inch HD TV and plug your laptop into it. Make sure that you have the proper HDMI connector so that you’re getting the full resolution of the television. Read a more detailed how-to article from CNet.com.

Once you do this you’re able to see how your website looks on a large screen display. Now stand about 10 feet back from that and assess how your site looks.

As you read it ask yourself:

Can you interact with the site?
Can you see the information as clearly as you can see the guide and menus on you television’s DVR?
How well are you able to see your institutions identity/logo?
How well are you able to read headline text?
How much information are you truly able to see from that distance?

The methodology for designing for HD display is similar to those used for responsive Web design. At the same time, the content requirements for such experiences might be more similar to what we saw in the late 1990s when kiosk development and CD/DVD direct mailers were prevalent. So, if we take the best practices of both these marketing trends, I believe we can closely approximate what we’ll need to take advantage of the HD Web. Also, it is likely that HD web development will also be subject to the same nuance, such as with mobile, of native apps versus responsive web design.

One final thought

It is not out of the realm of possibility that users who are consuming Web content from home may soon not even own a traditional PC. It is becoming more likely that your users will expect you to deliver an intentional mixture of mobile phone, tablet, and television web experiences.

Manufacturers and media companies are working on ways to seamlessly integrate a new ecosystem so that content can be shared from one device the next. This means that there will be a giant new challenge that higher education digital communications should be preparing to meet.

Let’s be ready to respond. Get ready for HD web.

How are you preparing for HD Web, and what are your thoughts?
Please share your comments on Google+

Posted in Predictions | Permalink

Hulu – The Simpsons: The D’Oh-cial Network

January 30th, 2012 | Posted in Marketing

On the lighter side, this episode of The Simpsons will definitely make anyone in social media and/or digital communications marketing laugh. I thought it was pretty funny. Here’s an embed from Hulu.com in case you have not already seen it.

Posted in Marketing | Permalink

fear.change.edu

January 13th, 2012 | Posted in Analysis

As I enjoy this time of professional and personal transition, I have spent much time reflecting on my 15 years of experience with digital communications and marketing. I have grown up with the industry: from taking every HTML class offered at Indiana University during my senior year of college, to developing basic websites for agency clients, to leading top-notch teams and creating long-term digital strategies for world-recognized brands in higher ed. For the most part, my professional experience has been creative and fulfilling. Yet, it has for me, and perhaps for many of you, also been filled with a high degree of stress and frustration.

In this post, I want to talk about why. This is not a post about the specific institutions for which I have worked. Instead, this is an article about change.

First, a caveat.

I write this post with some trepidation, perhaps because telling the truth about the more challenging aspects of one’s professional experience entails some degree of risk, especially when those details have more to do with trust and interpersonal relationships than with the issues of, say, writing semantic code. This post is intended to open up conversation about some of the most damaging and least talked about conditions of developing digital communications in higher education.

That is, whether you are a knowledgeable designer, developer, content strategist, or manager, doing the work of digital communications comes easily. It’s GETTING to do the work that is hard. I have found that inexperience, fear, and distrust have at times caused colleagues to engage in behavior that prevents experts, and me, specifically, from doing work that will strengthen and enhance the brand. From an organizational perspective, such behavior weakens an institution because it often allows bad work to persist while preventing good work from getting done. From a personal standpoint, such behavior causes high levels of stress, frustration, and at times, burnout.

In the following, I provide a few examples of how colleagues, consciously and intentionally or not, have obstructed my work, outline the damage such obstruction can do, and talk about how I tried to cope with these situations.

Inexperience

One of the primary causes of obstructive behavior is inexperience. Despite the fact that “Web 2.0” has been around for a decade and social media platforms have gained increasing prominence, many leaders and even communications professionals in higher education still do not understand the basic tenets of solid Web strategy, technology, or design. Although leaders are now beginning to recognize the importance of digital communications to marketing, few truly “know” the culture, and worse, many do not know that they do not know it. Thus, they regard digital marketing as a list of tactics (e.g. make a Facebook fan page, design a prettier institutional site, sign up for a Twitter account) to check off a list, without recognizing the major cultural shifts that must occur to support digital marketing strategies. Only then will day-to-day tactics be meaningful.

For example, many leaders pass over in-house digital marketing experts in favor of high-cost vendors, whose work is often subpar and out of touch with the people who do the work at the heart of an institution’s mission: its faculty. Rather than investing in the staff who have the potential to dynamically interact with and respond to innovators in research and teaching, institutions buy a one-off website “project” or a social media PR strategy that is outdated at the moment of purchase.

I have seen (and still see) this type of inexperience lead to wasteful spending of hundreds of thousands of dollars–money that could have been better spent investing in in-house talent who will support digital marketing efforts for years, rather than for the duration of a solitary project. As someone who cared deeply for the universities who have employed me, such decisions have left me feeling disheartened and dejected.

These circumstances can be impossible to change, given that digital communications experts are often of lower status than the leaders and committees making the decision whether to stay in-house or go outside. The best way I have found to cope is to find those leaders who are aware of their inexperience and thus are willing to learn or delegate, and to invest my time and energy in them.

One of the best professional compliments I received was from one such dean who told me, “Your team’s greatest success has not been in the great websites you’ve built but in the way you’ve changed our culture and how we think about communications.”

Fear

Another cause of obstructive behavior is fear. Unfortunately, in my experience, IT departments are usually the site of this sentiment and resulting poor behavior. This makes intuitive sense, given that in general, one of the IT department’s responsibilities is to mitigate technological risk. They have the important job of protecting constituents’ privacy and identities and must advocate for technological solutions that do no harm. That is respectable.

However, problems arise when IT colleagues presuppose that changing technology or adopting new methods for marketing communications purposes will hurt the institution. In my experience, this assumption results in behaviors that stop, slow down, or marginalize digital communications experts so that their ideas have minimal impact. It is easier to do things the way they’ve always been done than to engage those who have new ideas and more experience in creating adaptable communications.

Since IT departments often have a great deal of power over digital marketing communications efforts, their unwillingness or inability to be agile can hamstring communicators. I have seen IT departments prevent developers from being hired, refuse to consent to open-source projects, and even make it impossible to edit simple websites. Rather than using their time and energy to create novel strategies and deploy fine-tuned tactics, digital teams find themselves jumping through unnecessary hoops to justify their approaches. Projects that will enhance the institution’s brand get sidetracked or halted. And, technology for delivering high-quality web and digital experiences are often then served outside of the university’s infrastructure — at a cost to the organization’s mission — because of an unreasonable unwillingness to experiment or collaborate.

Like behavior grounded in inexperience, fearful behavior causes waste and inefficiency to departments, frustrates employees, and stifles the evolution of the brand. It is also difficult for digital teams to mitigate in day-to-day work. Even if one is a good sport, jumps through hoops, and meets requirements, I have found that some colleagues just do not want to change. In this case, departmental or divisional leadership must attempt to remove roadblocks, and this can be difficult given their lack of technological expertise.

So how have I coped with fear-filled obstruction? I made inroads where I could. And, I had to personally take care of my own stress management. It takes a toll, but it can be assuaged by strengthening your team with confidence and support, sharing your experiences with mentors outside of your industry, and sometimes simply taking a walk around campus to remind yourself why you are there. If that doesn’t work, try counting change or cleaning. Those work for me sometimes.

Distrust

Finally, distrust characterizes many interactions digital communicators have with their leadership, IT personnel, and print-oriented colleagues. I believe this distrust is rooted in the nature of digital communications–their novelty and dynamism–as well as in the demographics of digital communicators. Let’s be honest, for the most part, digital communications experts in higher ed are a younger demographic. We often started off low in the institutional hierarchy. Youthful expertise can often come off as arrogant or off-putting to those older and more powerful than us. It’s almost as if our colleagues look at us and think, “They’re young. What do they know?”

And so we are forced to prove ourselves constantly. This is not a bad thing–if the criteria others use to judge is based on the merits of our work (whether it is sound, attractive, and meaningful) and on its attainment of measurable analytic goals. However, ignorance and fear often mean that colleagues base judgments of a digital teams’ significance on the “value” or “worth” of an arbitrary metric.

The most insidious example of this type of obstruction is the chargeback system, in which digital communicators must account for their time and bill campus “customers” for their work. This system distracts digital employees and managers from their mission, which is to create and deploy high-quality communications strategies and tactics on behalf of the institution. Rather than trusting in-house digital communicators to be experts who must keep up with trends, focus on analytics, and adjust strategies and tactics accordingly, the chargeback system reduces in-house personnel to for-hire workers motivated solely by profit (of which they do not get a share!). It just doesn’t make sense.

I once fell prey to the mandate that if I instituted a system that would allow my team to track its “billable” hours that I would be able to demonstrate the value of my group to the institution. It was wrong. I learned that at a certain point in our growth, the act of accounting and charging for our team’s creativity diminished rather than enhanced our significance. Eventually, leadership required us to focus more on the mechanics of proving ourselves through the arbitrary metrics of time and campus “fun bucks” than on our actual communications products. Chargeback was a system that prevented us from getting to do our work.

If you currently work within a chargeback system, advocate for using other metrics–preferably ones that are analytic and audience-based to demonstrate the importance of your work. And, if you don’t have a chargeback system, be grateful, and be vigilant.

Closing Thoughts

Organizations, especially institutions of higher education, must realize at a leadership level that digital communications marketing teams must be agile and unobstructed. This means investing in staff and dedicated professionals who are committed to the mission of the university, seek to improve their methods on a regular basis, and are open to discussion and change. If organizations are unable to properly equip digital communications teams with dedicated staff, resources and technology, and executive decision-making authority, then its image and brand will suffer unnecessarily. Standards will weaken, great talent will leave, and the institution’s dependency on costly vendors will increase. I worry that some organizations would rather be good at writing checks than thinking and doing great work themselves.

I wrote this post because I believe that we who are currently working as digital communicators in higher education have an obligation to overcome behaviors and cultural practices that are rooted in fear, inexperience, and distrust. We must support each other and the next generation of leaders. While digital communications in general is exciting, and employing digital communications in service of the mission of higher education is fulfilling, I suspect that many of us who work in this industry have experienced stress and frustration caused by the sorts of situations I describe here.

We constantly seek validation and ways to cope with what I call obstructive behavior. We are innovators attempting to be agile, creative, and mobile in a culture that is traditional, stratified, and siloed. We also often feel very alone. This post is to tell you that if you feel alone, you’re not.

What are your experiences? Do you agree or disagree? Email me your thoughts, and I will share them anonymously in a follow-up, or feel free to post comments to Google+

Matt Klawitter .com