Todd Woodlan
Todd is the coolest geek you'll ever meet. He earned his English and visual arts degree from Emory, and at Mindpower serves as our conduit into the mind of the Millennials. (He is one – but you'd never know it from looking at him.) He also programs our websites, writes copy, and provides the fabled "missing link" between the right- and left-brain. When he's not staring at lines of code or getting his chops busted, Todd prowls the city in search of good music and weird places.
There’s a lot of information floating around on the Internet right now. The rather obvious reason for this is that we’re not limited by the constraints of having to physically fit information on paper. Space is cheap online and we’re in a big rush to fill up that space with all the information we couldn’t afford to put anywhere before. The down side to all this is that there’s a lot of stuff to sift through. Clay Shirky notes that this isn’t an information overload, just a failure of filtering systems.
Almost any website is going to be a big repository of all the information that anyone might need, and rightly so. But proper organization of that information is of key importance. Not only do you want a good, robust search feature that will direct people to what they’re searching for, you also want to make sure that the information is easy to navigate.
Ease of navigation first and foremost means a solid hierarchical structure that’s easy and intuitive to get through. It means getting a sitemap nailed down that doesn’t have too many levels and has pages sorted logically. More important than a good hierarchy, however, is finding areas of your site to place information that are intuitive, yet not necessarily immediately apparent during the site mapping and design phase of creating your site.
One of the best examples is moving the content from a general “About” page to an interactive element on the homepage. This not only eliminates an entire page, but creates a filter that blends the “about” information into the rest of the site so that the information is integrated into the experience of the site. The text is still present, but by combining it with other parts of the site the information is less oppressive and doesn’t overload the visitor.
Replicating this process as often as possible on your site is an important point to keep in mind as early as possible in the design and planning stages. This keeps your site from being a mass of information that is exhausting to sift through and instead properly filters the information so your visitors can easily get what they need without resorting to the search function.
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Posted by Todd Woodlan on August 10, 2009 at 5:02 pm
Filed under: Ramblings
Coinciding with the rise of social media is the reorientation of marketing towards tribes. Unlike push marketing, tribe-based marketing strives to gather people around a particular idea or concept, fostering a sense of community. As Seth Godin points out, this approach is not so much about imposing an idea upon a group as forming connections among people who already have an interest in something. Using the tribe metaphor, Godin focuses on the ability of a single person (or business) to organize that tribe, creating a movement and changing the status quo. In essence, a good tribal leader identifies a point of connection among a group of people and then controls the distribution of that connection.
However, a lot of social media has created the opportunity for groups to coelesce without a figurehead in the form of a single leader. There may be an instigator (such as the person who initially creates a Facebook page), but as a group grows it’s tough for the initial creator to control the direction the tribe takes because when it comes down to it, tribes aren’t former around people, they’re formed around ideas. We can see this when spontaneous networks show up without a figurehead. Recent examples have included “citizen journalist” reporting of disasters such as September 11, the 2004 tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, the Mumabi terror attacks, and the spread of swine flu. No single entity organized individuals to start sharing their experiences, but the availability of the technology and the immediate, apparent need for expression caused the emergence of the networks.
What’s even more interesting about these networks is that they arose in spite of a figurehead-driven outlet delivering information on the same topic. News organizations were forced to put away their authoritative, “push” means of working and adopt the grassroots, tribal way of working. On the one hand, this would bolster the idea of the symbiotic relationship of tribe and leader. By encouraging the growth of the tribe reporting on the tsunami, for example, MSNBC was being a good tribal leader by not forcing a product (in this case its own reporting of the news) on its constituency and instead facilitating connections between people in the midst of the chaos and people wanting to gather information on the tragedy. On the other hand, however,this situation shows how little the importance of the leader is as a result of social media.
In this particular case – news media coverage – Twitter, Facebook, and other social media applications provide the actual distribution method for the product (news coverage). The actual news outlets only provide a venue that is, traditionally, the go-to point for news coverage. By repurposing the citizen journalist-created content, the news outlets may appear to be tribal leaders that can direct a movement, changing the status quo of how news is reported, but in actuality they are becoming another conduit in the stream that has no director. In fact, the worst thing that these outlets could do to the stream would be to try to be such a figurehead, damming up the stream of information and the resulting tribal connections.
While in the news world, it would seem that social distribution networks like Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc. are quickly overtaking the traditional types of news story distribution and making tribal organization difficult, there are other possibilities for being a successful, sustainable tribal organizer. Most of these opportunities involve finding a tribe that cannot create an effective network with the general tools at their disposal. Obama’s presidential campaign is one of the most often-cited examples of this, and with good reason. In past elections, information has been push-based. A candidate would tell his position and feed information outward rather than try to bring people into an idea and engage them. Any sort of tribal organization would be done outside of the official campaign with no central leadership. The Obama campaign, however, provided that figurehead and moved the marginal tribal organization to the main stage. It created a social network that could not have emerged without a figurehead coordinating all of the different parts. The Obama-specific social network could not have been replicated through a Ning network and keeping official updates on the campaign circulating would have been difficult if not impossible without a central Twitter and Facebook account. Now that he’s been elected, change.gov is also an effective venue for organizing feedback and official updates that could not be duplicated through non-directed, general use of other mediums (general discussion boards and mass emails, for example).
What Obama did right and the news organizations did wrong is identifying an area that actually needed a tribal leader. Not every industry and not every product will lend itself to existing as a directed tribe. While it may be inspiring to believe that true change and movements occur by one person coming forward an organizing, social media has begun to change that dynamic. Some industries may be temporarily able to support a figurehead at the top of the tribe, but unless that figurehead is providing a medium of organization that is unavailable elsewhere, the tribal figurehead structure is not sustainable.
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Posted by Todd Woodlan on June 10, 2009 at 9:22 pm
Filed under: Ramblings
Tags: marketing, new media, Seth Godin, social networking
Recently, the New Media Consortium and EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative released the Horizon Report. The purpose of the report was to identify six technologies that will become important in teaching and learning in the coming years. Two of the technologies are expected to be adopted within on year or less, two of them within two to three years, and two of them within four to five years.
The choices of the technologies – cloud computing, mobile, geo everything, personal web, semantic aware applications, and smart objects – are not that remarkable. Going over the threshold into academic and popular use for any of these isn’t too surprising. Each one has been around for a while and are used relatively frequently. What is surprising, however, is that not very many of these technologies show up in marketing plans, especially for colleges and universities.
Many institutions are struggling with re-working their website or debating whether or not to start a Facebook page. While these projects are important, the broader picture is that creating an online presence involves much more than just having something online. It’s a matter of having the right form for your content and speaking to your target audience through the channels they are expected to be able to navigate once they arrive on campus. If a technology is widespread enough in its use to warrant use in the classroom, why can’t it be used as a viable marketing tool as well?
In addition to the college version, the Horizon Report comes in a K-12 version. The technologies listed here are very similar: collaborative environments and online communication tools in under a year, mobiles and cloud computer in two to three years, and smart objects and the personal web in four to five years. This report is probably even more important than the collegiate version for marketers since it outlines the technologies through which prospects will expect to receive your message. That means in two years, the issue won’t be whether or not to open comments on a Facebook page, it’ll be how to improve the iPhone app. Likewise, in five years the issue won’t be whether or not the website has all the right information on it, it’ll be whether or not the information shifts enough with each user.
Again, that’s not to say that getting a good website or email campaign isn’t important, but that’s not all you should be planning. Looking several years out and building the infrastructure for some of the Horizon Report’s technologies would be a smart move now so that when the technologies are commonplace, you’re already prepared.
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Posted by Todd Woodlan on May 19, 2009 at 9:13 am
Filed under: Ramblings
One of the great things about new technologies is that an answer to a question can be read by a lot of people. You don’t have to repeat the same answer more than once and distance isn’t really an issue for anyone wanting to get information about your institution. As always, however, there’s a danger in putting too much stock into answering questions en mass.
Answering a question in front of a group rather than in a one-on-one situation gets the information across just fine, but it doesn’t make the personal connection that is going to make a prospect connect with your institution. Showing that extra bit of attention is important to convey the idea that you’re working with your students and not treating them just as numbers.
The less apparent side-effect of mass answering is the problem of answering a question that is similar to what someone wants to ask, but not quite the same question. Sure, there are the general questions that are the same for everyone like “What’s your average SAT score?” or “How many students do you have on campus?” but there are also a lot of questions that appear to be the same but really aren’t. Financial aid is a good example. An institution may have a general package for financial aid opportunities, but individual departments and programs may also have funding opportunities that aren’t part of the stock financial aid answer. Without a customized, personal answer a prospect might not find out about these opportunities and end up looking elsewhere.
Granted, customized answers are becoming easier to generate with newer technologies. However, overlooking the importance of an actual human delivering that answer could be the difference between a real connection and a passing interest.
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Posted by Todd Woodlan on May 18, 2009 at 9:15 am
Filed under: Ramblings
Ohio State University recently stopped censoring comments on its Facebook page. This is a big step to take for any institution (higher ed or not) and social media commentators would generally agree that this is a pretty good thing, but it’s a step that isn’t taken often enough and in enough different places.
One of the problems that Ohio State and other institutions run into when they’re removing dissenting opinions from something like Facebook is that it’s really obvious that they’re doing it. Facebook relies on user-generated content to function as a “social network” and, really the whole point of having a Facebook page is to get into a dialogue with fans. If there’s no ability to have a dialogue, then the page just doesn’t function well and users know something’s up. At the moment, a lot of people will tolerate blocked comments because everyone’s just feeling out how to use these technologies, but as technology progresses these sorts of actions won’t be so acceptable to users.
It may be obvious that some part of an institution’s story is getting shut down when comments aren’t allowed on a Facebook page, there are other subtler areas where the same process is going on. Any area of a website that tells only the best, more impressive parts of an institution’s story is creating an absence that may not be noticeable immediately, but target audiences know that something else isn’t quite there.
This doesn’t mean go out and tell everyone about your university president’s position on an energy board, but it does mean to not be afraid of the unique aspects of your story. It also means to try and open up as much of your marketing to outside opinion and commentary as possible, creating an organic campaign that is a reflection of how your institution truly is.
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Posted by Todd Woodlan on May 15, 2009 at 9:15 am
Filed under: Ramblings
While a lot of companies have been making mobile-specific websites for years, many institutions are just now starting to plan out a miniature version of their site. Simmons College, for example, is getting ready to work on a mobile version for their site and Bob Johnson is encouraging other institutions to follow Simmons’ lead. However, before you start putting a lot of effort into re-creating your site it’s worthwhile to look at what exactly “mobile marketing” means.
I’ve written about possibilities for emerging technologies in higher ed and agree that mobile marketing is one of the top technologies to target, but it will probably look a lot different in a few years. Mobile-specific sites are a temporary solution to the issue that cellphones were initially developed off of the telephone model, computers were developed off of a book/typewriter model, and technology designers are trying to reconcile the two in a haphazard manner. With touchscreens (iPhone, Blackberry Storm) and movement sensors (like the iPod shuffle, the Wii controllers, etc.) that old model is breaking away and “websites” are going to be much more immersive and fluid. It’s good to have a mobile version of a site, but (a) this shouldn’t be that different than the main site (mobile devices are running scaled down browsers rather than mobile browsers) and (b) it will be almost completely obsolete in 2-3 years.
The terminology shouldn’t be “mobile website” so much as “mobile marketing,” an indication of the importance of apps and more purpose-driven ways of accessing information. When mapping out your new mobile website development plan, take a look at the shifts in technology and make the information able to be repurposed in any number of forms, from HTML pages to apps. Also, don’t look at any mobile endeavors in terms of the technologies that preceded them. Instead try to make them as device-specific as possible.
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Posted by Todd Woodlan on May 14, 2009 at 9:15 am
Filed under: Ramblings
One of the questions that pops up a good bit is whether or not Facebook ads are a good idea for institutions. Mike McCready recounts a recent experience where Facebook ads drove up traffic, but didn’t result in any new applications. Attempting to explain this problem, a couple colleagues comment that:
When people come to Facebook they are there to share and communicate with family and friends, they are not there to buy a product or look for a school to apply to. This discussion was furthered after talking with one of our web producers later today who made a good observation. When you go into your Facebook account, you are often there for a purpose – read status updates, play your favorite game, look at photos, etc. You likely block out the ads and superfluous content on the page – like a horse with blinders.
By all accounts I’d have to agree with McCready’s colleagues. One of the main issues with using Facebook – and social media in general – for marketing purposes is that you’re invading a private space that users expect to keep private. Any sort of non-user-generated content is foreign to the whole concept of social media and meets with user resistance.
Beyond ads, however, this resistance also occurs against any sort of institutional presence on social media sites. That can include Facebook pages, groups, or events with aggressive marketing tactics. Users go to Facebook and social media sites to make connections with things that they already identify with, not to be convinced to be a part of something. Social media marketing should not be centered around a campaign to create new converts, but to foster people’s identification with your brand. Instead of pushing your institution or product on social media users, you should be targeting and encouraging your existing fans to develop a stronger bond with your product.
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Posted by Todd Woodlan on May 13, 2009 at 10:15 am
Filed under: Ramblings
It seems like all of a sudden a lot of colleges and universities are thinking about starting up a Twitter feed as part of their admissions marketing plan. On the surface that seems like a pretty good idea. Twitter is a new technology and has a face-paced, abbreviated way of working. A perfect medium for teenage prospective students, right? Apparently, that’s not really the case.
There’s a Reuters article that’s just been published about a comscore study that says most Twitter users aren’t in the 18-24 year old range that usually picks up on new technology. Even the 12-17 year olds aren’t at the top of the list. Instead, it’s the 45-54 year olds that are most likely to tweet. This has two main effects on any good Twitter marketing plan.
The first effect is that you need to be sure that you’re targeting the right audience. If you’re going after prospective students, be sure to tap into the large (but not dominant) under 18 segment of Twitter users. Don’t just assume that all of your followers are going to be the right age.
The second effect is more broad than just Twitter and carries over to almost any new technology that pops up: don’t assume that only younger generations are early adapters. As the study points out, the Internet has been around for a while and a lot of people in their 20’s and 30’s have grown up with digital technology. Picking up something like Twitter or Facebook is almost second nature. This means that you shouldn’t use technology with the assumption that it will automatically reach people under 18. Likewise, you shouldn’t not use technology because you’re worried that it will be too complicated for your target audience. Instead, do your research. Make sure that you are using the right technology for what you need.
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Posted by Todd Woodlan on May 12, 2009 at 8:42 am
Filed under: Ramblings
As an internet developer (that’s the English translation of the Mindpowerese term “Oxymoron”), a large part of my job entails looking at how information’s organized. Now, this “hobby” entails a lot more than what you’d assume at first. It’s not just sitting around staring at graphs, charts, and outlines all day. It’s looking at how people set up their websites as a whole. Most of the time, the client (and even sometimes the people creating the website) spend most of their time on the design and just assume the old standards of organizing the actual content, which usually entails a very categorical outline of all the pages in the site. But, there’s a lot more to it than that.
As Clay Shirky pointed out a while ago, there’s no need to carry on the idea that information can only live in one place. In the physical world, a library for example, pieces of information can only be in one place at a time, so it’s necessary to fit them into pre-defined categories made by someone who knows how all this stuff fits together. But, on the internet, information can be called up and recategorized at any point, with any degree of specificity.
As search engines (as opposed to directories) have shown, hierarchy can be created ad hoc. The scary thing about this? When we’re building sites, we all-too-often advocate a strict, unchangeable categorical structure without realizing that websites can function in a completely different manner than books in the library.
To keep with the book metaphor, a book has all the information it’s ever going to have, nothing more and nothing less. But, it’s far from being a “complete” work (I think the fancy term for this is the oeuvre). Really, there’s no such thing as a complete work; all the information on a topic is endless and changes constantly. What’s more, when most people turn to a reference book, they’re usually searching for a specific little bit of information or a single chapter to combine with other chapters. That’s a lot of extraneous info and words surrounding what they’re really getting at.
Now, there’s the misconception that a website has to be organized like a book, giving the appearance of an oeuvre or complete work. But, frankly, we’re just stuck with this frame of mind because we’re used to reading, writing, designing, and printing books, which can’t change once they’re sent to press. What someone reads is what was originally set down on paper. In recent years, we’re beginning to understand that websites can change and can be modified on a person basis. This is evident everywhere from the most basic login and account systems to the Google Adwords advertisements that are automatically generated based on the content of the page. So, what’s the next evolution of all this? I’d say that it’s something along the lines of instantly mutable websites that change content based on what the user’s viewing.
Every time a person visits a site, his moves are tracked (not as a “person” per-se, but more of as a number). From these moves, it would be possible to calculate what that person’s interested in.
For example, I’m a prospective student going to a university’s website. I keep looking around at the Admissions page, the English department, maybe Comparative Literature, and maybe, say the cycling club. That’s all valuable information that’s not getting used. Since I’m interested in Comp Lit, there’s a reasonable change that I’d also be interested in Philosophy and probably stay as far away from something like Pre-Med or Business school as I could. At the very least, all the callouts and side areas could change, advertising some of the related programs, amazing faculty, or recent student accomplishments. Even better, the content of the whole site could change.
From those four pages, we know that I’m a prospective students interested in liberal arts and maybe pursuing a sport. All of the extraneous lower-level information geared towards current students could magically disappear. The site could become entirely customized to the visitor. I’d no longer have to visually skip over links for Alumni, Giving, or the latest form I have to fill out for advising. I’d only be directed towards an in-depth exploration of what I was originally on the site to find out. If we want to get even creepier, we can take a look at the browser history (I think this is an option that would require permission on the part of the visitor) to see where else the visitor has been and delimit the results even further.
With this changeability and mutability, websites can truly be dynamic. The challenge, though, is to make the mutability completely invisible. The goal of any website is to direct its users to the information that they need without having to think about navigating around. There should be no breakdown of the interplay between design and organization that makes someone step back and say to themselves, “Hey, I’m looking at a website. How do they organize these things?” If the website can shift beneath the surface and reorganize itself as necessary to accommodate the particular user, all the better. We may end up finding out that our ways of organizing information aren’t what we thought they were which, consequently, can have a great effect on more traditional forms of media.
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Posted by Todd Woodlan on April 7, 2009 at 9:00 am
Filed under: Brain Candy for Wisdom, Ramblings
Tags: admissions, Clay Shirky, information architecture, marketing, university, website
A long, long, long time ago there was a project called the “Book of the World” that sought to collect all the knowledge about everything and put it into one nice and neat collection. It was, more or less, the precursor to the modern day encyclopedia. The problem, however, was that there was just too much information to include and everyone eventually resigned to having an incomplete, impossible project. Then came the Internet. The ability to collect and manipulate vast quantities of data spawned a resurgence in the idea that we can collect all the knowledge in the world – hence Wikipedia.
There’s a striking similarity between how something like Wikipedia is set up and how normal college admissions sites are organized. The former supposes to be a complete list of facts about everything, give or take a couple entries. The latter is carefully organized to contain all the information that a prospective student would ever need to know about applying to your institution. Now, of course, collecting all the information you’d ever need on a site is impossible; the best you can get is pretty close. But, more important, it would be pretty boring if you knew everything about everything. Once you read all the information, you’d be set. Wikipedia can get away with this since it’s impossible to read all the content, but what about an admissions website? Sure, there are a lot of pages, but it’s pretty easy to comb through most admissions sites in an hour or so. The question here is: how does that affect prospective student engagement with your institution?
If prospective students have all the info they need about the feel of your institution from the website – or even think they have all the info they need – then they’re probably not going to reach out and contact your admissions office, they’re just going to send an application. Normally, this is seen as a good thing. That would mean that the branding succeeded, that the experience of the institution carried over through the design and copy on the website so that it connected with the student enough to send in an application. But, this also means that the “success” of a website is based on how completely it can stand in place of your institution – in other words, the more “successful” and complete your website, the less the prospective student actually interacts with the real, physical, living institution. A better approach would be to create strategic holes in the information provided online that would encourage prospects to either visit the campus for themselves or, better yet, contact admissions offices and counselors directly.
Now, this doesn’t mean that admissions websites should start taking the application off of their websites or taking out every third word in the marketing copy. It means that they should admit that certain aspects that are important to their brand cannot be transferred electronically and one of the most important of those is a human articulation of the institution.
You want to give enough information on your admissions site so that prospective students are intrigued and want to ask more. This action gets a dialogue going and creates a mental investment in your institution on the part of the prospective student that gives your brand life. Place contact information around the site as often as possible and encourage visitors to ask more about particular aspects of your school. Give as many different ways to get in touch with counselors and admissions officers as possible: IM, email, phone numbers. Even better, point out the holes in the information on your site and suggest questions for students to ask. The key to all of this, as Toby Keeping mentions, is to actually get back to the prospects with relevant, personalized information in a timely manner so as to actually build a rapport. This rapport is the key not just to getting more applications, but make sure that you’re at the top of the list when it comes time to decide on which school to enroll in.
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Posted by Todd Woodlan on February 24, 2009 at 8:35 am
Filed under: Brain Candy for Wisdom, Branding
Tags: admissions, branding, descartes
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