Here’s a strategy I’ve used when implementing a new knowledge base in a scenario where users rely on IT support people and helpdesk systems:

1. When a new helpdesk request is submitted, the IT support person uses the knowledge base to determine if an answer has already been documented.
2. If the answer has been documented, the IT support person sends the link to the knowledge base answer along with an explanation of how to find it by searching the knowledge base. (Ex: “Hi Fred, I found these instructions by searching with “iPhone” and “IMAP” in our knowledge base: http://www.knowledgebaseurlhere.edu…”)
3. If the answer there is no documented answer in the knowledge base, the IT support person could either take the time to document it first and then follow the steps for #2, or he or she could reply to the ticket but save a copy of the answer for the knowledge base later.

There are several reasons for using this strategy:

• It develops and maintains and the knowledge base documentation. Each time helpdesk issues arise, documentation is either being created or reviewed.  Your efforts are placed proportionally to the need of your customer base.
• It ensures a consistent party-line answer. Your knowledge base becomes the canon.  All helpdesk people refer to it for answers, so there is less of a chance that users become confused or frustrated by answers that change based on which person they ask.
• It saves support staff the redundant effort of providing an explanation if one is already out there. If one user has an issue, chances are another user may have it later.  Having that information saved for future–even if one or two steps need to be updated–will save you effort later.
• It’s a subtle way to show users how to search for answers within the knowledge base. You are not only encouraging support people to use and maintain a knowledge base, but you are having support people teach the users how to use the knowledge base.  Instead of just feeding them the answers, you are teaching them how to fish for them!

For more information, check out Writing Documentation & Training Materials.

Photo Credit: Fishing Harbour in Setubal by fotografar

Related posts:

1. Kings of All Cosmos: How to Get Internal Knowledge Out There
2. University Intranets: Let’s Secure Our Internal Knowledge Base from Ourselves #Fail
3. Live Blogging: Eye on the Prize-Implementing Technology w/ an Eye on ROI

Speakers:

• Stephanie Geyer, Associate VP of E-Communications and Web Strategy, Noel Levitz
• Darren Wacker, Higher Education Consultant, James Tower
• Lance Merker, CEO, OmniUpdate

General Info

1000 college bound high school seniors, randomly selected

95% confidence interval

+/- 3% margin of error

1) How they find your site

What you go to look for a college website, what page are you most like to land on?

• Home page 72%
• Specific page of interest 19%
• Random page 8%

Google the number 1 resource for searching – 41%

Only 13% are referred from a printed piece

Very few doing research on myspace or facebook

2) How they navigate through it

Navigating links should take me to answers – 85%

Only 15% will use the search function (maybe they’ve learned the search function on college websites is a little ick)

Seth Meranda says the results are flopped for current students – they are much more likely to search

5 Main questions students always ask

• do you have my major?
• can i afford it?
• is it in the right location?
• can i get in/how do i get in?
• will i fit?

3) How much will they read

Student do read online now

Look for admissions deadlines and details, financial info and location

Skimming blogs

They’ll print out details and data about the enrollment process

The balance between “read” and “do”: 42% said they need more than click and read…but 52% said they were just there to read and consume information.

What do they want to do? Apply (80%), request a campus visit (73%), get RSS feeds (59%), calculate the cost to attend (58%)

4) Preferred site design

Should site be edgy or traditional? 50% like bold edgy designs (62% of these said the web was more of a priority), 43% like traditional approach

Content is more important that how it looks 80%

Look and feel is more important 18%

5) Social Networking preferences

An even split between Facebook and MySpace for preference – only 49% on both. Facebook 50% and Myspace 52% Darren would make the arguement that people are more interested in engagement on Facebook – MySpace is for entertainment, whereas Facebook is about their whole lives

22% are not on either

Will they “friend” you? 70% want to engage on there, 28% won’t, 3% don’t have an opinion

On private social networks: 75% would engage with you – they want it. 22% said no, 2% have no opinion.

Do they want us to initate conversation? only 51% want that. 46% said no. they’ll find you if they want to talk to you. There may be more leeway if there is a pre existing relationship.

What content do they want on a social network?

• Discussions about courses and academics – 3.74 out of 5
• Student activities – 3.65
• Insight into school culture – 3.37
• Communication with students/faculty 3.01
• Profiles of current students and faculty 2.88

Not looking for issues about financial aid on these networks – they want it off of your edu website.

6) How do you talk to them?

70% prefer to apply online

Want to communicate w/students and faculty online

Only 32% want to pay their deposit online

Only 15% want to find out their acceptance.

7) Importance of website content

I had to leave before they got to this part….if you took notes on this, or the rest of the presentation, please leave a comment!

Related posts:

1. Live Blogging AMA Higher Ed: The New Power: Social Media Marketing Strategy for Higher Education
2. Highlights from E-expectations: Class of 2009
3. Live Blogging AMA Higher Ed: From Gandhi to Google

If you are reinventing, you need a poster child (one that is not controversial and one that is very easy to see transformation in). At Purdue, it was a broken pay telephone that was the first thing people saw at the visitors center – the first thing they saw on campus was broken technology. That lead to a $100,000 investment to renovate the visitors center.

The Journey

• Central vs. decentralized
• Funding mechanism
• Staff marketing competencies
• Logo proliferation
• Legacy, not strategy
• Measuring success
• Brand?
• Separate plans for news and marketing
• No customer research

These were the obstacles. Which ones do they need to engage?

The strength of the organization was in the news services – they were masterful at pumping out news releases. The MarComm group was functioning more as a print shop. “Creative brief” was non-existent. There were no folks really focused on marketing.

They developed a digital footprint – what’s being said about you, over what channels, and what’s the quality of mention?

They were getting considerably less traffic than their peers – sites were blocked that were crawlable. There were huge opportunities for search engine optimization.

Karlyn’s Note: Presenter said that they compared “Google Analytics” data, and another attendee said “since it was a public school, that’s public knowledge” – while its possible to compare the traffic on your site with others, you can’t get access to Google Analytics data unless someone gives it to you. You can use services like Alexa and Compete, but let’s be careful not to make Google Analytics a general term for ALL web traffic data. (a) It’s much more than just web traffic volume and (b) it’s a specific tool.

Though they were great at producing news, once it made its way to the web, it was taking journalists up to six clicks to find something.

They dumped thousands of articles into Wordle to see what message people would get from them. Huge disconnect between what they thought they stood for, and the news that was being written.

Organization Reorg: They switched over to a centralized marketing group and completely restructured the organization. They are six months in…still honeymoon time.

Overhauled website and navigation. Hates beauty shot of campus. Banner on their website rotates and it all relates to stuff that’s in the news.

When a press release didn’t work, they put a video on YouTube and it took off.

The Identity Initiative

People can identify with identity universally at an institution.

Your brand is the sum total of all associations made with your institution.

Your positioning is your researched, documented, agreed upon desired brand association.

Logos, visual identity, and/or tagline are simply reflections of your brand.

SMART brand strategy:

• Specific
• Meaningful
• Accurate
• Reinforced
• Tangible

Your brand shouldn’t just last for a few years….it should last until you’re dead. The campaign can change…new taglines and such…but the brand strategy should stay the same.

Guiding Questions for Purdue:

• What level of baseline awareness of Purdue exists among key constituents?
• How is Purdue perceived among key constituents?
• What are the perceived competitive strengths and weaknesses of the University?
• What misperceptions, if any, exist?
• What are opinions about Purdue (and other Big 10 and/or lang-grant institutions) shaped and influenced?
• What is Purdue’s  most powerful and compelling differential advantage?
• What motivates key constituents, including alumni and donors, to seek a relationship with Purdue?

Project Scope

• Identity Assessment
• Qualitative Research: 20 Focus groups
• Qualitative Research: 40 In-depth interviews
• Quantitative Research

Karlyn’s Note: One of the best presentations of the conference!

Related posts:

1. Live Blogging: What the Heck Do All These Numbers Mean? Web Analytics for Higher Ed
2. Live Blogging: Press Release 2.0 – News Releases in the Social Media Era
3. Live Blogging AMA Higher Ed: The E-Expectations of College Bound Seniors

Opening Video:

Rebranding Tradition:

• Begin with the end in mind
• Know who you are
• Know whom you serve
• Create a conversation to built ownership.

The Results:

• Record enrollment: up 4%, the largest in 20 years
• Out of state applications up 27% with out of state enrollment up 9%
• Pre college summer program participation up 14% with a 24% matriculation rate
• Corporate recruiter interest up 6%
• Record fundraising with cash gifts up 23%
• Alumni participation rate up 6%

Why change the name?

• Reflect our mission
• Differentiation
• Broaden market share
• Enhance our reputation

The name didn’t say anything about the nature of the university.

Timeline:

• September 2005: New Chancellor arrives
• October 2006: Name change proposed
• April 2007: Name changed approved
• January 2008: Name change enacted

Started with an assessment: Who are we? Who are our competitors? What is our vision? The result was a focused mission statement.

You have to know who you serve: Who’s your target audience? Campus community, alumni, corporate recruiters, prospective students, high school teachers and counselors.

Didn’t mess with the seal or the mascot. He’s not that crazy.

Name change marketing was funded entirely by private gifts.

Communications staff used flip cams to take videos of faculty and staff at the University, which ended with “I am Missouri S&T”. Made internal community buy in more. Same great faculty and staff but with a new name…proudly stating their mission every time they say the name.

National ranking took a hit when they changed the name.

Played off the idea that there was “something new at Missouri S&T”

Capitalized on a deeply held desire to distinguish themselves from the other Missouri campuses. Encouraged involvement of all parties. No opinions were excluded.

“In higher education, there is a bias toward reflection and not a bias towards action” – this is directly contradictory to what you need to do to be a successful marketer.

Related posts:

1. Live Blogging AMA Higher Ed: From Gandhi to Google
2. Live Blogging: Eye on the Prize-Implementing Technology w/ an Eye on ROI
3. Live Blogging: Press Release 2.0 – News Releases in the Social Media Era

(Sorry, I came in late to the session)

Listen to your audience – how many people asked their audience if they WANTED a Facebook page? A network may be better to a Facebook page – your audience might view it as different. Real time response is always important – people expect it. People will take you more seriously if you respond to them in real time than if you have the best Facebook page ever.

Let them make content - Content is the foundation on which all digital marketing should be build. It’s what they do on the web…they create content and share it. More and more people feel like content belongs to everyone…not just you! Real viral marketing is inspiring people to go out and sell for you. People that are extremely happy with you will become evangelists for you. You want content creators in your network – they will generate a tremendous amount of content and energy. They are influencers. We trust people we meet on social networks over slogans and adds. Only 1-3% of people on any given network are responsible for making things happen on that network. It’s as if you’ve suddenly hired a lot of co-authors. You have to get use to the idea of collaboration…which means you lose control.

Establish measurement criteria – Qualitative measurements like number of conversations, if people are there there talking about you, etc…Sometimes we confuse numbers with quality – don’t just look at the number of fans you have on Facebook. YouTube is not a video channel – it’s a social network. Don’t measure by views…measure by how many conversations people are having about your video or by how many subscribers you have on your network. Put growth and activity together.

Favor relationship and message – Social media has not killed marketing. It takes time – you can’t just throw up a Facebook page. Seed content (Stanford did this on their Facebook page). Content has to both convey the brand and offer value. What else can you offer beyond information?

Make your site social – It might be wiser to start there, rather than jumping off to a different platform. How do you offer your users a way to get involved? Look at Ohio State, Colgate University. Social networking and social media have killed the whole idea of the fold – it’s trained people to scroll.

Become professional - For examples, blogs are professionalized and have strong competition. It’s time to take it to the next level. Don’t just get students to blog about their day. And don’t wall the blogs off behind a portal – Google can’t find it. It’s time to start allocating resources to at least managing. The largest growth happens because of internal management.

Explore other networks – Ning, LinkedIn, Digg, built your own – go beyond Facebook.

Be creative – There’s no excuses not to be. Think about ways to make things happen among people. Enabling conversation is your number one job.

Keep it simple – Instead of trying to be all over the web, focus it in a few places. No one has REALLY done YouTube well yet.

(Did you can the first two points of this presentation? Add them in the comments!)

Related posts:

1. The Use of Social Media in Higher Education for Marketing and Communications: A Guide for Professionals in Higher Education
2. Live Blogging: Press Release 2.0 – News Releases in the Social Media Era
3. Help Me Help You: Social Media Education

One of your great goals as a professional should be to be fired – that’s when you know you’re pushing the envelope.

A brief state of the union:

• Economy is somewhere between bad and worse ever – we’re freeing up budgets, but we’re all still scared
• Politics: somewhere between “yes we can” and “over my dead body”
• Strategic gifts: a new definition of “ouch”
• Crop of new students: The best and worst, most focused and distracted ever

State of our Profession:

• Job Security: treat level orange
• Salary: 0% increase is the new black
• Retirement: death seems easier to contemplate
• Pure ethically infallible professors: barely tolerate us (Karlyn’s note: and let’s be honest, we barely tolerate them)
• Machiavellian, ethically challenged administrators: barely tolerate us
• Existential conflict between values/ideals and reality

What if we were the solution to that existential crisis?

• What if we were not victims, but agents of change?
• What if we deeply understood what we were truly good at?
• What if we knew how to recognize an ideal student?
• What if we were the most desirable choice for that student?
• What if we had the resources to truly thrive?

What if we were Expert Marketers? (for God’s sake, don’t be an expert marketer!)

Taking the PSAT is as stupid as advertising on an orange – you get a certain score and you get mail regardless of other factors.

The emperor of marketing has been very naked for a very long time.

• The multi-billion dollar direct mail business is built on a 99% failure rate because you so inadequately understand how you’re communicating with.
• A typical American is exposed to 1000 sales messages in a day…and only 2 has a lasting impact, and one of those has a negative impact.
• Billions of pounds in landfills and millions of CO emissions
• Online video is so “new” that 11.2 billion were streamed in the US (July) – The biggest lie you can tell yourself is that you’ll come up with a viral video to describe your school perfectly.
• Second only to the Chemical Industry in regulations and controls (the advertising and marketing business)

And yet..There are the rarest examples of success that are powerful examples:

• Harley-Davidson – they don’t sell motorcycles, they sell rebellion. They understood there’s a way to transcend demographics and speak to values.
• Apple: You’ll have to pry my Mac from my cold dead hands.
• Nike: The swoosh says it all.
• Saturn (before GM destroyed it)
• Starbucks: They sell the 10 minutes of sanity you afford yourself at the beginning of each day.
• Schools who know who they are: Berea College, Oberlin, Naropa, Ever Green College

What’s different about these brands?

• They understand the difference between marketing and movement building
• The Obama campaign wasn’t about technology – it was about understanding people and allowing them to drive the bus.
• They are built around a very strong value system.
• They have the courage to sacrifice – the essence of positioning is sacrifice…to know who you are not good for. The moment you worry about pleasing everyone, you’re dead.
• They sell their product by marketing a view of the world.
• Others compete around them, rather than against them.
• They’ve evolved beyond a database to a true base of support

Great brands ask themselves a harder set of questions:

• Does our story reflect a deep understanding of a moral? People spend way too much time worrying about the semantics of the story they are telling.
• Does that moral speak to a underval/timeless truth?
• Do we know who can most benefit from what we do?
• Ware we “one of” or are we “the”?

Great brands know something that the rest of us seem to have forgotten: headlines , hardships and stock indexes aren’t suppose to define who we are, they’re suppose to test who we are.

The world isn’t have an economic, environmental or political crisis: We are experiencing an existential crisis of wisdom.

The only question ay of us should be asking is what/who/how will we rise above it?

The only question we should be debating today is what role your university can (must) play in this effort.

Will your engineers affirm human potential or prey on our basest instincts? Will your business majors destroy or build the next economy? How will we consume energy? How will we care for the least, last and lost in our society?  How will we define the difference between smart and wise?

Marriage of marketing and movement building:

• Do we operate like an expert or like a real person?
• Do we rent space in someone else’s world or own content?
• Do we shine a light on ourselves or on the issues dear to us?
• Do we define community geographically or in terms of values?
• Do we treat our members as people or as profiles?

Let’s ask these questions in a very familiar context:

The High School Kid

• Confused but curious
• Afraid but excited
• Defining a short list
• Applying
• Deciding
• Committing

We should say “we know you’re confused but curious…but here’s some of the things you should be thinking about”. Tailor it with your values and beliefs – those who agree will come to you. Those who don’t, won’t.

What is the state of mind at each step? What is the message I can deliver? Don’t spend 99% of your dollar round the decision point – spend it on cultivation.

So what is your role?

Related posts:

1. Live Blogging AMA Higher Ed: The New Power: Social Media Marketing Strategy for Higher Education
2. Live Blogging: What the Heck Do All These Numbers Mean? Web Analytics for Higher Ed
3. Live Blogging AMA: Reinvention

Last week, Kyle, Rachel and I had the pleasure of speaking at Stamat’s annual SIM Tech conference. Stamats always does a great job with that conference, bringing in great speakers and giving out a lot of great information (and no, it’s not a constant sales pitch!). This year was no exception, and it was a great couple of days in Boston.

There were two trends that I noticed:

1) A move towards pragmatic social media

This is a shift I have seen occurring over the last several months, and one that I’m very happy to see happening. Colleges are going from just doing social media because everyone else is, to starting to think about doing it in a practical way. They’re taking time to plan things out and really make sure they have the right mix of media in their marketing efforts. They are starting to realize that social media is no different than any other marketing tool. Several speakers noted that social media should be the last thing you do, after you get the rest of your house in order. What a refreshing change!

2) Mobile, Mobile, MOBILE

This was the first higher ed conference that I’ve been to where mobile was really front and center. One of the keynotes develops apps for the iPhone, and several of the general sessions talked about it. While I’m not convinced (yet) that mobile is anything more than a luxury for higher ed, I did think it was interesting to see how many marketing people were interested in it. I’m anxious to see how this pans out and will be following it closely.

One last thing I wanted to note was something that Fritz said in his opening remarks – that is that employees today are no longer your typical employees. They are little creative consultants and they are out there building their own brands. What does this mean for colleges? You’re going to have to fight to hang onto them. It’s an extremely important point. If you have someone that is out there making a name for themselves on Twitter or the blogs, and you value the contribution they make, really make sure you’re treating them like you want to keep them. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a person trying to advance themselves professionally. It’s not that they necessarily want to leave the school and go somewhere else…but it is always nice to have options.

Did you attend the conference? What were your key takeaways? Leave a comment!

(PS If you’re in Boston tonight, come out for the AMA Tweetup! Looks like all the usual Boston suspects will be there, plus a few new people too.)

Update: Here’s another recap from my buddy Tim Nekritz

Related posts:

1. Win a Stamats SIM Tech registration!
2. eduWEB 2009 Reflections
3. Reflecting on Stamats Conference 2008

So anyway no reason to really to rehash a lot of this, but I do want to share the updated slides here.  Remember it doesn’t matter what you call it, an inquiry is a lead.

Inbound School Marketing V2

Related posts:

1. Inbound School Marketing Slides: Whipple Hill User Conference ‘09
2. Book Review: Inbound Marketing the Book
3. Hello, Is Anyone Out There – HighEdWeb 2008 Presentation

Once it’s all there, that person is your knowledge base, your Karamari forever (excuse the bad joke, folks).  He or she attends all the key meetings.  Every person or process involves at least one part where this person is consulted for how “we” do things.  And new hires must spend a significant portion of their time volleying back and forth between attempting to to something semi-productive and tracking this person down.

What can you do ensure that all that internal knowledge gets transferred out of a person and into something that can be shared?  Here are a few strategies I have used:

Your knowledge base should have a granular permissions structure.

Information may need to be opened or restricted based on group membership. At the topmost level, make it public. It is much easier to take something public and lock it down than vice versa.  (People are very nervous about sharing; don’t create additional barriers to doing so.)

Give the masses of subject matter experts authoring access.

Having content vetted by a small group of people creates bottlenecks.  A knowledge base is different from a formal Web presence.  If you feel tempted to restrict authorship to an elite group, instead consider having this group review and edit the published contributions of everyone else.  You will get much more done, and you can still have quality content.

Delegate the documentation of internal knowledge to new hires.

Every time a new hire tracks this person down for an answer, the new hire should be told to document it.  (Hooray for newbie-hazing!)  But seriously, this tactic does serve several purposes:

• The person who actually possess all the internal knowledge is going to be too busy to actually sit down and do the documentation himself/herself.
• Having to relay that information to each new hire one-on-one costs the billable time of two employees: the new hire and the expert. If the new hire, documents this information, it will become available for all future hires so that the cost of relaying the information is only one new hire each time.
• The expert is able to check how well the new hire understood the information given to him/her by reviewing what was documented and making additional changes or comments.

Lead people to the knowledge base.

When getting people to adopt a new knowledge base, you may have to get them to accept change by leading them there gradually:

• When they ask you a question that is not in there, add it.  If/when it is in there, send them the link.  It is a subtle way of showing them that the answers can be found in the new knowledge base.
• When they get used to going there, you can try answering questions by explaining to them how you looked up the answers in the knowledge based in addition to giving the URLs.  Teach them your search strategies along with giving them the answers.
• Eventually, like training wheels on a bicycle, you can take away the URLs and let them navigate the knowledge base on their own.

Photo Credit: Little Prince and Katamari by bdjsb7

Related posts:

1. University Intranets: Let’s Secure Our Internal Knowledge Base from Ourselves #Fail
2. The Virtues of Delegation
3. Salary versus Autonomy

You can make a well branded and copy written ad and spend hours on your landing page. Making sure to catch every user possible and track all your conversions but it can all be destroyed by the context you ad is placed in. An example of this was brought to my attention last night.

An Example

The twitter account @420revolution posted this status:

Oakland University Supports Marijuana Use http://bit.ly/4joFGJ

Which leads you to a Digg.com article with the same title and description:

Self Explanatory

You finally end up at a YouTube video of a screen cast which shows an Oakland University commercial with the words “The following clip is brought to you by Oakland University”. What follows is a video by HowCast explaining “How to legally obtain medical marijuana.” Here is the video:

The tweet was eventually re-tweeted a few times and dugg a handful of times. Luckily this example was not a PR nightmare for the institution and it was on a site like Hulu which does have a good grasp on the content they push out. But as site start to push out more user generated content be prepared for the sorts of things an ad could endorse.

The Lesson

Obviously Oakland University did not place this ad on this particular video but the more online ads are being dispersed on sites with wide ranges of content it becomes impossible to control what context your message is being displayed in.

I am not sure the advertising policy or options Hulu gives to its advertisers as far as targeting. But this would apply to any site your university advertises on that could have questionable content or user generated content. Where does the line get drawn between promoting yourself and endorsing a product/service/opinion you have no control over?

Your Thoughts

Have you come across other examples of university advertising #contextfail? Or have policies/guidelines at your institution that only allow you to promote in approved spaces?

Related posts:

1. Taking the idea of a cohesive Web template in a slightly different direction
2. Reining in the outliers for a university-wide cohesive social media presence
3. Reining in the outliers for a university-wide cohesive Web presence

The key problem is that the original screen resolution filter described in the first article operates on a now false premise: mobile devices are sub-VGA in resolution.  By now I’m sure you’ve heard of Droid, the new Android 2.0 based smartphone from Motorola.  Now, that is just one example, but it’s hitting a whopping resolution of 854 x 480.  The HTC Touch Pro2 runs 480 x 800, and even it’s older sibling was 480 x 640.  By comparison, the iPhone and iPod Touch’s resolution is 320×480.  Higher res. screens on mobile devices are the new trend, one that I’m not entirely convinced that they won’t possibly rival netbook resolutions soon.  Sure, we could just add some of these resolutions to our initial filter (which I did), but that doesn’t entirely solve the problem.  This is especially true since once you break the barrier of VGA resolutions, you run the risk of sniffing out normal computers.

My solution is now a two pass system in our Google Analytics mobile traffic profile.  I’ve kept the resolution filter in place as the starting include filter since that’s still the best and most reliable place to start, and modified it to account for the higher resolutions.  I took a simple approach and just added in the main increments that we’ve seen on the upper end of the spectrum: 480, 640, 800, and 854.  You could just as easily simplify the entire thing to grab everything 854 and down (you’ll see why this works in step two) as that seems to be the current top mark for phone resolution at the moment.  My resulting regex for the new include filter based on the old one is:

^([1-2]?[0-9]?[0-9]|3[0-6][0-9]|480|640|800|854)x([1-3]?[0-9]?[0-9]|4[0-8][0-9]|800)$

A simpler approach (which matches anything 899×899 or less) could just be:

^([0-8]?[0-9]{1,2})x([0-8]?[0-9]{1,2})$

That’s step one.  The issue is that you are guaranteed to catch normal Windows users with either one of those filters (Apple machines almost always have higher resolution than that, even older machines, but I’ve learned there are no absolutes in analytics).  That’s where the second pass comes in to play.  After the first filter, which tells the profile what to include, set up a custom exclude filter on the field “Visitor Operating System Version.”  For the pattern, have it exclude matches for:

(95|98|ME|XP|Vista|NT|10\.[4-6])

This will get rid of all relevant versions of normal desktop Windows (Windows 7 reports as NT currently, as far as I can tell) and OS X, and leave you with a nice pool of mobile users to paw through.  This should even allow you to scale up the resolution filter as smartphone screens improve and maintain your reporting accuracy, though you might want to add Linux to the exclude filter then too.

If anyone has come up with what they feel is a better solution, I’d love to hear about it in the comments so we can discuss ways to improve upon the method I’ve offered here.  So far, I’m very happy with the results this is producing for us, but we also have a pretty small mobile device user base, so it’s not easy for me to tell how well this might work in a larger environment where more variables might come in to play.

Related posts:

1. Mobile Analytics: The Neglected Mutant Step Child
2. Prediction 2008 The year of the Mobile phone
3. 7 Google Analytics Filters To Help Understand Your Visitors

Software Example

So let me start this review by sharing a little Flash piece that I developed and was able to easily embed in this blog post.  You might know my dog Skip?  Well here’s a chance to get to know him a little better.

Impressions of the Software

Flimp Text Editor (Click for Larger)

It was fairly intuitive and straightforward to put together a template.  Dropping pictures, text, and video onto the template was as simple as drag and drop, and then you are given lots of control into the nit picky details of your work.  There were times that it felt like the interface required extra clicks to accomplish things that could be handled in fewer.  An example of this is when you go back to edit an existing “flimp” you have to do an extra click to edit instead of being able to click on the preview and get right into the application.  Of course being able to constantly develop and update the service is one of the great things about software as a service application!

As I went through the tool to build this demo application I was quite frankly impressed with the feature set.  There wasn’t anything that I wanted to build and design that I didn’t easily have the ability to.  One negative was that for videos you have to upload a file in the .flv format.  Of course with the abundance of converters this isn’t a make or break, but with the rich feature set it was something that stood out as a disappointment.

A Customer Testimonial

Flimp does have quite a few education clients, and after reading through some of their higher education case studies I reached out to a friend who works at Suffolk University, Jessica Krywosa, for a testimonial.  Many of you will recognize Jessica from her Integrated Marketing and Communication blog.  I knew all I was spending was a few hours on the weekend to get in here and toy around with the software without an actual campaign to test the service, so I wanted a more in-depth assessment.  Here is what Jessica had to say about the Flimp service.

What makes Flimp so great is more than the product – its the people. They have been very responsive and collaborative in our work with video email campaigns. If you’re having an issue you can call, email or tweet them and receive a rapid, accurate and friendly response. As they continue to grow, they are very open to product enhancements that we bring up – be it in interface or analytics.

What I’ve worked most with is the analytics. Seeing click throughs by individual emails has been invaluable when determining campaigns – the placement of information, our web traffic and content, even time of day for segmented audiences. All in all, its been a great learning experience as we move forward in creating interactive and dynamic content for all areas of the university.

Flimp wasn’t aware that I reached out to a customer, so feedback like this really says a lot about a company.  I know at HubSpot there is a superior level of service and transparency that we strive hard to establish.  When a friend asks a friend for their honest assessment and they tell about the passion of the people at the company, it says a lot about that company.

Final Impressions

Although I was impressed with the feature set, I didn’t really get to dig into the email marketing and analytics to truly assess those functions.  Being someone who has a lot of experience in both email marketing and web analytics I’m a little upset I can’t truly give my expert’s take on those features.

I do still have to warn that just because Flimp takes the programming out of flash doesn’t mean that someone without design skills is going to be able to create masterpieces!  I think the people who will really find value in this tool are traditional marketers who are experts in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop or Microsoft Publisher and just can’t wrap their head around Flash. With a little education I strongly believe those individuals will feel right at home in this application and be able to create vibrant web applications as they have created for print.  I think that is the true highlight of the software because I know there are a lot of individuals who fit into that mold in colleges and universities around the nation.

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Looking at the example above, (I am not picking on Duke, I just choose them at random) most higher ed sites end up this way. Not accounting for the print style the spacing is all off, unnecessary items get printed and paper is wasted, usually the user get confused. There is a simple way to prevent this, setup a print style sheet.

How to make a separate print style

In HTML:

<link href="print.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print" />

or in CSS:

@media print { ... }

What is important to keep on a printed page

• Wordmark/Name
• Department name
• Page heading
• Central content
• Footer/URL
• Department contact information

What is not as important to keep

• Navigation
• Images (other than content specific)
• Colors
• Keeping the same pixel perfect layout

Some basics about print style

Make the content 100% – Since you don’t know what size paper or how your users will be printing you pages it’s best to change everything to 100% width. This will us the maximum area possible and not leave blank sections on the paper.

Use a print friendly wordmark – Most university Web sites have their wordmark in the top left of every page. Sometimes the web version may not be appropriate for print so using an image replacement technique will yield the best results for the end user.

Get rid of anything unnecessary – display:none is your friend, use it for anything that isn’t directly related to the content of the page. Navigation, background images, promotion images

Include the URL and date – This one is not necessary but could be helpful especially for news items or anything that changes frequently. Although it is enabled by default having the URL, date and any other important information on the page may be helpful.

Compare the above example to the one at the top of this article. UNL has a completely different feel when printing. They take everything in account and tailor everything to the print medium. 100% width, friendly wordmark, removing the menu and focusing on the content.

Additional Resources

Although it is just starting I stumbled across a site dedicated to the print versions of Web pages. http://printfancy.com/ – “showcases and honors websites and companies that take the extra step to maintain their brand across all areas”

• Print Different – Eric Meyer
• CSS Design: Going to Print
• Printing the Web: Solutions and Techniques

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Dr. Nikki & Nurse MK

Nikki Massaro Kauffman might not quite have the split personality of the original Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but on this day you should still watch out.

Ricky Bobby James

Kyle “Ricky Bobby” James might not go as fast as the original… but you can bet if you don’t chew Big Red you will still get the same advice.

KarlynV

We are sorry you were ALL wrong.  Karlyn’s last name is NOT Morissette.  The truth will free you.

Fienster the Clown

Michael Fienen is “scary” on target and never afraid to be a fiend when telling the truth.

The Web Rock Star

Yes Nick DeNardis does tell us all how we can be “web rock stars” on EDU Checkup, but seriously you didn’t know he was a true closet Web God of Rock?!

Other Halloween Costumes

• Our friend Andrew Careaga appears to be having a whale of a time in his failure.
• Maybe you know Joe Gaylor?  Well here is Todd Sanders being Joe!

Got a picture to share?  Leave a comment or send us a list and we’ll add it to the post!

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In my Cross-site scripting presentation at #heweb09, I mentioned that a North Carolina State University report from September 2008 showed that users clicked the “ok” button on message alerts 61% of the time, regardless of whether the message alert was legitimate or not.  From that I concluded that we could be reasonably certain that, as an attacker, we would have a 1 in 2 shot of tricking a victim into clicking an exploited link via email, IM, twitter, etc. A recent study from the Intrepidus Group (the company behind PhishMe.com) now confirms my hypothesis: the report concludes that 60% of people click the link contained in a phishing email within the first hour of receiving it.

In addition, a 2005 study (pdf) at Indian University concluded “…that Internet users may be over four times as likely to become victims if they are solicited by someone appearing to be a known acquaintance.” So what does this mean to us in Higher Education? Given that users are even more likely to be fooled by phishing attempts from “known acquaintances” on social networking sites, it means that we need to be very diligent in protecting our university accounts on those sites.  Don’t allow your admins to use frivolous applications on Facebook (see Hacked Facebook applications below), remove admins who are no longer active, and change your Facebook password frequently.

(via BBC.co.uk)

WordPress inadvertent disclosure bug

Turns out this one is actually a problem with Tiny MCE that Wordpress uses as its WYSIWYG editor.  If you paste content into the Visual editor, Tiny MCE will create a second hidden (style=”overflow: hidden; position: absolute; left: -10000px;”) copy of your pasted contents.  The problem is that in some situations, Tiny MCE does not remove this hidden div when you publish.  This means that the ORIGINAL contents of what you pasted will be published as a hidden div on your published post.  Again, not the worst security issue, but could definitely cause issues if you pasted some content that you really didn’t want published.

(via Something Better to Do)

Hacked Facebook applications in the wild

Many have been saying it was only a matter of time, and it looks like that time is finally here.  Several facebook applications have been hacked and are directing users to download a fake update to an out-of-date version of the Adobe Reader from a Russian site.  Affected facebook applications (so far) include:

• CityFireDepartment
• MyGirlySpace
• Ferrarifone
• Mashpro
• Mynameis
• Pass-it-on
• Fillinthe
• Aquariumlife

Until the developers are able to correct the issues, stay clear of any of the above apps.  Also, it’s a good idea to not use ANY frivolous facebook applications if you are the admin of a university-owned page or group.

(via avg.com)

Google Wave Security Issues

The recent release of Google Wave invites over the last couple of weeks has spurred significant of interest in the Higher Ed community.  Those of us who were lucky to receive an invite have rushed out and started “waves” with others in the community.  As we being to utilize this tool more and more, many of us will begin to research and utilize the various plugins that are available.  In fact, if you were in on the “Google Wave in Higher Education” wave, you saw a gadget in action: the “Are You Coming?” gadget was used to poll who was planning on attending the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference. I bring this up because it appears that Google has been fairly lax, security-wise, in the way it currently allows gadgets to be created and used.

@theharmonyguy has been busy testing Google Wave and Wave Gadgets (WG) and has discovered some interesting (read: scary) things. Gadgets work by loading an iframe inside the Wave.  In their current form, Gadgets are allowed to not only load in an invisible state, but also launch javascript.  Scripts inside the gadget are not allowed to access the DOM of Google Wave, however, as he discovered, all gadget container iframes are loaded from the same domain and therefore, scripts from one gadget are able to access the DOM in another gadget.  Combine this with the fact that gadgets automatically load as soon as you open a wave AND you can be added to a wave as long as someone knows your wave account or gmail address.  What you now have is a perfect platform for phishing.

We all love new technology, especially those that allow us to communicate in new, more efficient ways.  But we need to remember that the attacks we are familiar with in “old” technologies follow along with us.  Hopefully Google will have all of this worked out before the official launch of Wave.  Until then, be leary of opening Waves from people you don’t know.

photo credit: catatronic

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