Favorite concepts from the cutting-room floor

It's always easier to poke fun at the mishaps of others than it is to notice the faults in your own work. Instead of jumping on the #ugafail bandwagon, I thought I'd take this opportunity to share a few of my own less-than-perfect moments. Thanks to my trusty supervisors, none of these ideas were ever publicly consumed (until now):

Oh, the horror. This online ad was meant to grab the reader's attention and suggest some of the fun places they could study through our summer abroad programs. Unfortunately, the copy reminded my boss of the title of a 1990s-thriller movie:



Bad cluck. I was looking for a new stylized icon that I could use as a background accent in my designs or to close magazine feature articles. After speaking with a designer friend, we decided to make something out of the capitals that top the many columns that form our campus architecture. Not only could this element be found in many of our Mediterranean-style campus buildings, but they are also commonly used in the columns that frame courthouses everywhere. We chose to simplify the capital design to the icon below, which was rejected by our dean due to its bird-like resemblance:

Unsportsmanlike behavior? It has long been the tradition of law schools to announce their new faculty members to other schools each new academic year. It's a great way to show-off introduce new hires to the academy by highlighting their achievements. One of our administrators suggested using a "trading card" motif to help these announcements stand out from the rest. Though I can't take credit for the original idea, it is certainly one of my favorite projects ever. Sadly, it was rejected as too edgy for our target audience.

So now that I've put some of my (few) weaker moments out there, I'd love to hear some of your tales of cutting-room floor concepts in the comments section!

Social media and the hype cycle

I've long been an advocate for thinking practically about social media. While it's always interesting to follow the latest trends and how leading consultants apply them to higher education, the bottom line is that we all have limited resources, and we have to use them judiciously.

Enter the Gartner life cycle, a (pretty accurate) model developed by an IT research firm of the same name:

Social media is still seen by many as a trend, and some skeptics go so far to argue that it's a fad. The hype cycle helps provide some context for how new technologies are often perceived, as well as hints on when organizations should adopt them. Here are my takeaways from this model:

• Don't get caught up in the hype. It's tempting to ride the hype wave, only to suffer some damage to your credibility when disillusionment sets in. Manage your client's expectations (as well as your own) when working in new media environments.
• Be prepared to address the uncertainties. Do your homework before recommending new tools, and think of how you might deal with potential pitfalls. If you don't know what those pitfalls might be, hold back.
• Watch the adoption rates. As technologies become more mainstream, time will tell if they are worth adopting. Not every technology will coast through the enlightenment/productivity curve, but as more people in your audiences adopt them you'll have a better idea of which ones will fit into your media mix.

Tips for managing branded trinkets

Few tasks drive me more crazy than trinket orders. Those doggone, end-of-fiscal-year-and-we-still-have-money-left, let's-fit-30-words-and-a-logo-on-a-pen trinket orders from departments across campus.

Here are some things to consider when managing marketing giveaways:

• First and foremost, remember your big-picture brand. The same rules that apply in any other medium also apply here. Unless you're recruiting for a master's program in adult entertainment, you probably shouldn't be imprinting your logo onto shot glasses or garters. (Yes, I've seen both.) Consider the quality of the products as well: placing your logo onto something that's dollar-store quality might not reflect well on your institution either.
• As always, think about your audience. When possible, ask members of your target audience what they like. Prospective or admitted students will like different tchotchkes than alumni or employers. Make sure the giveaway has some practical value. Save the stuffed animals for alumni-baby gifts. Depending on the audience, there may be special ethical obligations to consider (i.e., reporters or judges).
  
• Decide on your objective. Are you looking to remind the recipient of your institution? To thank them for their service? To grab their attention, or someone else's? Make sure that whatever giveaways you order help accomplish that objective.
• Last but not least, carefully consider the imprint. Only once you've answered the above questions should you start the design work. Your imprinted message should be clear and brief. Never cut corners on your institution's brand standards, and don't try to pack too much information. If the imprint space available is insufficient for advancing your goals, pick something else. Be aware of the limitations of each medium: engraved, embroidered or silkscreened graphics will appear quite differently from how they look on your monitor or printout.
  

Fun with emergency contact info

Looking for a creative way to get more emergency contact info on your students? The Medical College of Georgia has developed a fun video for its ICE (In Case of Emergency) campaign, available at http://www.mcg.edu/ice.

It's a great use of humor to drive home a serious point on a topic many choose not to think about. Kudos to the communications team and administration at MCG!

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.