Creative gone wrong

My crazy-busy streak has continued, and I've decided that a silly post is now in order. Here are some recent discoveries for creative amusement:

• Photoshop Disasters: The blog all about awful, commercial photo editing.
• The Bad Pitch Blog: Not just bad news media pitches, but good PR advice as well.
• Tales from Redesignland: I first discovered this higher ed blog during our own redesign in 2008. This week's post: really bad quotations from real Web redesign consulting proposals.

And if you're considering the lighter side of font selection, check out this handy "How to pick a typeface" flowchart or the CollegeHumor video, "Font Conference."

Note: If you haven't noticed, I'm cutting back my blog frequency to every other week for the summer. I'll return to weekly posts once school is back in session!

I want a new website for my department. Now what?

It's an increasingly rare request: to start a new website from scratch for a department. Redesigns, yes. Website expansions, all the time. New landing pages for marketing, of course. But creating a new site for a department or program that has lived without one for the past 15 years since the World Wide Web went mainstream? Not so much.

Yet as I've recently began the thought process for educating a program director on how to build a good website, it has become a good refresher on the foundational concepts that we all should be considering when working on any Web project:

1. What do you want your website to do, and who do you want it to serve? Go no further until you can answer these questions. Every other decision streams from knowing what goals you want your site to accomplish and for whom.
   
2. What content should the site include? Since most websites serve first as informational resources to outside audiences, it's good to assess what you're already publishing for these groups. Do you have print brochures, news releases, advertisements or information on other websites about your program? For example, an academic program might not already have its own stand-alone site, but the program's faculty may already have their own biographical sites. If there are frequently asked questions that your program receives via phone, that information may also help guide the content of the site. Do remember to include a description of what the department/program does, the main contact information, and the physical location.
   
3. What information or functions are most important? Use the answers to #1 and #2 to develop the information architecture of the page. A good website sets priorities and communicates them to the user. Trying to clutter too many links on a program's home page confuses users and ultimately will make your entire site less effective.
   
4. Once you build it, who will maintain it? Building a website creates the responsibility for keeping its information current and accurate. Who will handle that responsibility? Will they be trained in maintaining the information themselves, or will they need to work with someone who already has that knowledge? How often should the site's information be reviewed and updated? A department that has survived this long without a website may not appreciate the long-term commitment they represent. Websites are not one-time projects that season as they age; their owners must preserve their content lest they rot.
   

Has Facebook jumped the shark?

It's sad when something great, popular and wildly successful hits its moment of downturn—when it tries a little too hard, goes a little to far, or forgets the roots of what made it successful in the first place. It's hard to watch something after it has jumped the shark.

By now, most have heard about the dramatic changes that Facebook has made to its privacy settings and automated community pages. For a good overview, check out Andrew Careaga's blog post for summary with links to some scathing reviews of these changes.

Facebook became a mainstream social networking platform by providing a private portal for connecting friends and family. Its users became comfortable sharing the details of their lives on the internet by trusting a certain degree of privacy. It expanded its reach to organizations through fan pages, paving the way for affordable, targeted advertising opportunities for institutions of all sizes.

The changes Facebook has made in the past few weeks has frustrated users, developers and marketers alike. Protests advocating Facebook deactivation or abdication have proliferated in the blogosphere and in Facebook itself. So how are we to move forward from here?

• When it comes to privacy: Remember the basics. For any personal profile connected to your name, remember that anything you post online has the potential to become public. Test your Facebook profile at ReclaimPrivacy.org or better yet, don't post anything that you don't want your employer, grandmother or a stalker to find out.
• When it comes to "community" pages: Follow them and don't panic (at least not yet). I "liked" my institution's community page just to monitor its activity, and they're nowhere near as powerful as real organizational fan pages at this point. The updates don't post to my news feed, and the content is obviously automatically generated. I tried to submit the link to our official site a few weeks ago, but nothing has happened yet. These pages don't remotely resemble a community, they're clearly not authentic, and they work more as a search function for public Facebook updates. They have wreaked havoc for finding organization pages, but beyond that, I don't think they'll compete with real fan pages in the near future. 
• When it comes to Facebook in general: Watch out for other options. These recent actions strongly indicate that Facebook has indeed jumped the shark. According to Information Week, Google searches on "how to quit Facebook" have spiked and many high-profile users have deleted their accounts. The Diaspora project promises to deliver a "privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network" by September 2010. The Noel-Levitz 2009 E-Expectation survey found that college-bound seniors have strong interest in private social communities for universities.

Survivor's guide for the short-staffed

It's a good thing that my institution's mascot is the Hatter, as I'm wearing many, many hats this week. The boss is out on a family emergency, our Web editor is on a much-deserved vacation, and our office manager is out with a sick child. All this, and we have one of our biggest annual events this weekend, plus a board meeting, plus graduation in two weeks, plus the thousand other tasks that make up our regular job descriptions.

Here's how I'm keeping sane*:

• Prioritizing early and often. On days like this, a to-do list with true deadlines is essential.
  
• Cut off the distractions. No Twitter. No e-mail notification sounds. Check e-mail a few times daily so that the limited hours you have are more productive.
• Delegate what you can. Spread the urgent priorities among the remaining staff, and request help from other departments if necessary.
• Postpone the less important tasks. When you're short-staffed for reasons beyond your control, the relationships you've built with other department heads and campus colleagues will pay off by way of understanding.
• Make sure the missing staff turned on the out-of-office messages. There's no bending on this rule in my office. Regardless of the reason for being out, this is the one thing that will guarantee a call on personal time.
• Call in your clone, if you have one. Unfortunately, my Web developer is way behind deadline on building our cloning machine. If those of you at research institutions have access to one, let me know!
  

* For the moment.

Law school video shoot trivia

I'm pretty spent from two full days of a campus video shoot, so I'll return to my campus photography series next week. But I did learn a few interesting things I thought I'd share...

• Law students like to participate in video shoots more than still photo shoots. When I typically ask students to feature them in our marketing efforts through interviews and still portraits, I'll get a 50-60% positive response rate. With that in mind, I asked about twice as many students to participate in our video interviews. Response rate: 95%. Enough said.
  
  
• The traditional movie clapboard (pictured above) is called a slate. We didn't actually use the one that our cinematographer had with him, but he explained that the slate helps for synchronizing video and audio, as the sound of the clap can be matched to the visual of the slate hitting.
  
  
• Not counting broadcast talent, law students and lawyers are the second-most natural group of professionals on camera. The most natural group according to our seasoned cinematographer: funeral home directors.
  

Maximizing Your Photo Budget, Part 2: Avoiding the Cover Photo Curse

You have found the perfect cover picture. It has interesting composition, beautiful lighting, and blends nicely with your approved design. The publication is on its way to the printer, and then it happens.

The student quits school, and your dean wants the photo replaced.

You've just been struck by the cover photo curse. It happens to the best of publications (see also Sports Illustrated), and can wreak havoc on the nerves of editors and designers alike. There are often reasonable arguments for keeping the cursed photos, as most external audiences would never know the stories of the photo subjects in our stock images. Depending on the stage of production, changing the photo can be costly as well. However if it's not too late to replace such photos, we'll usually be expected to do so.

So how can higher ed communicators avoid the photo jinx?

• For featured students, get high-level approvals before getting their portrait. I love to get recommendations for "poster students" from faculty and administrators, as many of the professors who are hesitant about responding to other marketing/media inquiries will go out of their way to promote their favorite students. But before I move forward, I always run the names past our dean, student life director, registrar and honor court adviser. The e-mail typically goes like this: "If there is any reason—and I don't need to know why—this student shouldn't be prominently featured in our marketing, let me know."
  
  
• For favorite candid shots, share them early with your dean. If you're using a photojournalistic style of photography, by definition you're not staging the shots in advance. Instead, share your favorite new shots with the leadership before you get too attached.
  
  
• Plan your shots with high-achieving students, if you can. Certain groups of students, such as competitive teams, honors classes or admissions/alumni ambassadors, go through a screening process to become a part of the group. While this approach is far from foolproof, your chances of photographing someone who might get into trouble are decreased.
  
  
• Aim for more seasoned students. Students in their first semester or first year of classes (depending on the duration of the degree program) may still be learning the ropes of graduate school and may choose another path. I once featured a first-year law student who was at the top of his class on a full-tuition scholarship, but left to pursue a career in film production.
  

In the end, there is sometimes nothing you can do to avoid the photo curse. Superstitions aside, life happens to all of us, and the graduate school years are often a time of transition. But with a little planning, we can mitigate our risks.

Maximizing Your Photo Budget, Part 1: Selecting Your Photographer

The old adage is true: in higher ed marketing, a picture is worth a thousand words. There are few things that can impact your design and brand messaging more than the photography you use, and without a good selection of photography, your ability to communicate is severely limited.

But in an age of shrinking budgets, how can you get the most bang for your photography buck? By being resourceful and planning well, there are many things university communicators can do to maximize their dollars in this important area.

• Consider your style. When I started working for my law school eight years ago, a corporate photographer was hired annually to do a two-day shoot with staged, perfectly lit shots. He and his assistant would spend an hour lighting a small area, then we would fill in a few students and a professor to interact. The result? About 15-20 of the most beautiful, phony marketing images that made our prospective student focus groups cringe.
  Ever since that discovery, we have used a more journalistic style of photography to show a truer, more authentic view of our campus life. But the rewards of this change extend far beyond messaging and impact; we also get a much higher yield of shots. Instead of getting 8-10 different images in a day, we can get dozens (if not hundreds), so the cost per shot is drastically reduced.
  
  
• Finding the photographer (assuming you don't have a professional on staff). Professional photographer rates can vary widely, ranging from less than $100 an hour to $4,800 for a day. The key is to know what you're looking for and do your homework. Local newspaper editors can refer freelance photographers in your area, or you can also check with marketing peers at other institutions or agencies. The CASE College/University Editors Photographers List is also a good resource for photographer recommendations from around the United States. Once you have a few names, be sure to look at their portfolios and check references with their other clients. Rates do not necessarily correlate with ability, and you don't want to waste time, effort and budget on work that doesn't fit your needs. Ask the photographer about your project, including their expectations for setup needs, whether they use an assistant, their approach to photo editing, and other issues.
  Also, don't automatically dismiss photographers who are outside your area. Some who specialize in higher education may coordinate shoots with several universities in a geographic area for reduced rates, and others may charge an affordable rate with limited travel costs. If you can offer on-campus accommodations and cafeteria vouchers, you may even be able to negotiate on the travel fees.
  

Check back next week for part two of this series: Avoiding the Curse of the Cover Photo.