Higher Editing: Eliminate these common errors

Have you hugged your editor today? If not, you can at least make sure you're avoiding the following common errors in your higher education prose:

• Incorrect use of "alumni." If you don't want to accidentally change the gender of an honored graduate, please commit the following list to memory:

• More than one graduate, including at least one male: ALUMNI
• More than one graduate, all female: ALUMNAE
• One male graduate: ALUMNUS
• One female graduate: ALUMNA
• There's no such thing as an "ALUM" unless you're talking about chemistry (the subject itself, not your academic department)

• Hosting a "first annual" event. There's no such thing. There are "first" or "inaugural" events, both of which imply that there will be subsequent events. However, you can't have an "annual" event until it is held two consecutive years.

• "Univeristy." This is one that spell-check should catch every time, but it still gets by on occasion.
  

• "Graduating a school." This isn't my personal pet peeve, but it is one brought up by legal writing guru Bryan Garner during his commencement speech last year. Correct usage: graduating from a school.
  

Preventing rogue tweets on your institutional account

Admit it: If you manage both institutional and personal Twitter accounts, you've probably posted at least one rogue tweet.

You may have caught it and deleted it right away, but someone probably saw it. You just hope that someone wasn't your boss or a troll.

So what steps can you take to avoid causing a rogue tweet?

• Tweet from separate programs or devices. Many dual-Twitterers create boundaries by tweeting institutionally from their work computer and by tweeting personally from their mobile devices. This approach makes it easy to shift persona with less risk.
• Set your tweeting program's default account to your personal one. If you're going to accidentally tweet from the wrong account, it's much less risky to post a straight-laced institutional news item from your personal account than to post a snarky comment for your college or school. This trick is great if you don't have a smartphone.
• Don't tweet angry (or when otherwise mentally compromised). You shouldn't do this anyway, but tweeting angry (or when #gettngslizzerd) from an institutional account will most certainly grab the attention of your followers. Tweet from both personal and institutional accounts as though your boss, HR office or university president is watching at all times (because they just might be), and even if you mix up accounts, there's not much harm. Heck, one time I accidentally posted a higher ed marketing link from the law school account and the university retweeted it.
• Share these tips with other institutional tweeting colleagues so they don't rogue tweet, either.

Do you have other tips on preventing rogue tweets?

Top three myths that you don't know will kill your blog

I love to read blogs that offer practical tips, scan-able lists, and quick advice, and I enjoy writing in a similar style. But there can be too much of a good thing. Inspired by a brief Twitter exchange with @mStonerBlog and @andrewcareaga, I thought I'd share my own top-three list of tired blog memes:

• Things you don't know, have missed, and aren't going to find anywhere else. In this world of information overload, no one wants to miss out on a big story amidst all of the noise.
  
• Things you think you know, but what you know is wrong. Have you been misled by myths? Thankfully, there are blog posts that will clear up the confusion!
  
• Concepts that will kill other concepts, kick other concept's tail, or are dead. Email, Facebook and Google social media projects may seem like living organisms. They might seem threatening at times, or even look like they're being threatened. But they don't have a pulse. They do not have weapons or a physical presence. They cannot fight, receive medical treatment, or be thrown in jail for their transgressions.

P.S. Some might add that top-three (or top five, 10, etc.) lists have also passed their prime. Considering that David Letterman's top-10 list has endured for more than 25 years, I think the theme is immortal.

Graduation collaboration: Sharing the workload on commencement programs

There are few higher education publication projects that are more collaboratively time-intensive than the commencement program. It's a document that will be treasured for decades by graduates and parents alike, and whether your institution is graduating 50 students or 5,000—it had better be accurate.

Of course, reaching perfection can be an elusive goal for any publication, let alone a commencement program. It's a herculean task requiring extensive collaboration from the registrar's office, student affairs, academic deans, faculty award committees, etc. Academic recognitions may not be finalized until weeks before the event, and it's tempting to delay production for the inevitable last-minute changes.

Since our communications office began producing our graduation-related programs two years ago, we've found Adobe InCopy to be an invaluable tool for managing the process. It's a basic word processor that can link directly into an Adobe InDesign document, where the graphic designer can alter the appearance and organization of the layout. Think of it as a content management system for a printed document, instead of a website.

By saving the files to a shared campus file space and separating sections of the program into different linked files, several users in different departments can update the document at once. Once the information has been finalized by the various offices, the communications office finishes the publication and sends it to the printer.

To train other departments on how to use InCopy to update the program, I used TechSmith's free version of its Jing screen-capture video software to narrate the steps for finding the files and editing them in the program. Watch the training video.

Another technical trick for checking accuracy is to save every official name to your InDesign user dictionary. It won't catch every mistake, but running a spell-check to the entire document after this step can catch some elusive name errors.

Photo courtesy of Flickr.com/omgdek under Creative Commons license.

Favorite tactic: The annual 1L student focus group

It's no secret that good marketing requires knowing your audience, and you can't really know your audience without researching it.

For many higher ed communicators, research can feel like a complicated, time-consuming task. However I've found that scheduling at least one focus group with our first-year students every spring can yield rich feedback that inspires my planning for the rest of the year. Here is how I make the most of it:

• Strategically select your sample. Our primary marketing audience is prospective law students, but gathering these students—let alone getting candid answers from them—isn't always practical. The next best thing is to gather 8-10 highly qualified first-year students who can still remember the process and are already on your campus. We want the opinions of those who "shopped around" and were accepted to multiple schools, so I invite students from a geographically diverse sample with high admissions statistics.
  
• Ensure good attendance. Plan the focus group at a time when many are available, along with a small incentive for attending (we find that providing a decent lunch works well). Draft an attention-grabbing email message that lets the sample know that your institution values their opinions and will use their feedback when making future decisions.
• Find a fair moderator. The moderator should have some distance from the topics being discussed while still understanding the goals of the research. The person should be friendly and warm, able to spark conversation and get the participants comfortable with sharing their opinions.
  
• Ask about media consumption. What resources did they refer to when selecting what schools to apply to? What media outlets do they find most credible? What helped them make their final decision? How did they first become interested in your institution?
  
• Let them review your current tactics. Show the group ads and publications that are being targeted to prospective students. What messages resonate? What doesn't work? How do your tactics compare with those of the other schools they applied to? Don't forget to include your website in the discussion.
• Test out new ideas. Bring samples of new concepts to get their first impressions. Probe into why certain ideas have more impact than others.

While this research approach won't yield scientific or generalizable results, it can go a long way to giving you deeper insights into what those close to your target audience wants for the cost of lunch catering and a few hours of staff time.

How to find great vendors

From local printers to national agencies, every higher ed marketer needs to find new vendors every once in a while. So what are the best ways to find one?

• References, references, references. There's no better way to choose vendors than by good referrals. Ask your network who they recommend. If you don't know anyone who could make a recommendation, this is a great question to break the ice. Listservs or professional LinkedIn groups can also be helpful places to request suggestions. (Conversely, if you find a vendor you like who wasn't referred, make sure to call a few of their clients before you hire the company.)
• Your professional organizations. If you're a member of a communications organization, check out their website for recommendations or sponsors who cater to your market. The CASE Yellow Pages is one resource that covers a variety of education-related companies, and the College and University Editors' Photographers List includes freelancers from around the nation referred by fellow communicators.
  
• Industry networks and organizations. Check out the portfolios of creative freelancers on Behance.net, where you can search by various fields (including academia). The Graphic Artists Guild also makes member portfolios available on its website, and the Professional Photographers of America offers a Find-a-Photographer site.

What are your favorite resources for finding vendors?

QR codes: the good, the bad and the ugly

Looking for an easy, trackable way to drive people to your website? Never fear, QR codes are here!

You don't have to be a smartphone user to notice these trendy little marks popping up on everything from magazine ads to outdoor signage. For the uninitiated, these little QR (quick response) codes are just text that can be scanned into a smartphone using one of the many available QR reader apps. The text may be a sentence, an e-mail address, or (most often) a Web page, and readers will often open the links into a Web browser.

While I'm still using a dumbphone, I'm jumping into this trend head-on for our print advertising and direct mail pieces. As much as we want people to visit our website, it makes sense to make this process easier. We have yet to know whether this is a temporary fad or the start of a lasting bridge between the print and online world, but the cost is minimal enough to make this worth a try.

Smartphones aren't necessary to generate these codes, and you don't need to pay a dime to generate codes with analytics. They are ugly, but as long as you keep some of the contrast, you can spruce up the look slightly in Photoshop. So how do you get started?

• Set up a free account with a URL shortening service that offers QR codes and analytics. Right now, bit.ly and goo.gl both include QR code generation for all shortened links, and they also track clicks. Accounts for both of these services are free, and I wouldn't be surprised if market pressure leads similar services to follow suit in the near future.
• Make sure your site is (at least moderately) friendly for mobile devices. If a huge portion of your website is Flash-driven, you'll want to phase that out before driving mobile users to it. Smartphone users will expect that the sites they're going to have been created just for them, so don't violate this expectation by making it incompatible with their phones.
• Focus on function, then form. Designing around these codes can be tough. They're not inherently attractive, and they need to be at least .75" square in size to work. Test them out *every* time you use them, just like you should for a regular Web address. The more phones you can test on your first few designs, the better. Once you know the original code works, then you can experiment with color variations (then test them again).

Happy coding!