Museyroom

[michael-powers-blog]

Letting Go of the Words Again

Most books about web design and development don’t last. The field moves so quickly that many books are out of date by the time they hit the shelves.

Ginny Redish’s Letting Go of the Words is not one of those books. In a field with few classic texts, this, along with Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think, is surely one of them. So when I heard that a second edition of Redish’s book was coming, I immediately preordered in Amazon.

I wasn’t disappointed.

Longer and Shorter

In the technology world, most second editions are really just an attempt to keep up with changing technology: “Now includes HTML5!”

That’s not what Redish has done here. This is a true revision, not just a quick update. In short:

There are two new chapters: one on headlines and one on usability testing.

There are two new “interludes”: one on content strategy and one on “Finding Marketing Moments.”

The book is now 32 pages shorter.

More content, fewer words. That Redish clearly lives the title of her book really tells be all you need to know about it.

But if you aren’t yet convinced…

How to Do It

The second edition keeps in place what I’ve always liked about this book: she shows you how to do it.

This is key for improving your writing. It’s one thing to tell your readers to omit needless words. It’s another to do it. As the linguist Geoffrey Pullum wrote about this famous bit of advice: “The students who know which words are needless don’t need the instruction.”

Getting from the general rule (“Cut! Cut! Cut!”) to the specific example (“We can cut this down by 40%) is the tricky part. It’s the kind of thing writing instructors spend their time helping students learn.

But in the absence of a teacher—or even with a teacher—Redish’s book is a great resource. She doesn’t just tell you the kinds of things you should do to improve your web writing, she shows you how, with before and after examples. And she includes process help, too: where to start, how to draft, how to get and use feedback on your writing. If you need to know how to write for the web, this is the place to start.

What about Mobile? Social?

If there’s something to that’s missing here, it might be the lack of more specific information on topics of the moment: things like mobile, social media, andSEO.

In fact, all of these topics are mentioned on the back cover. And a number of of the new examples are mobile and social examples. For instance, the revised “interlude” on “The New Life of Press Releases” includes an example of planning news posts for social media use. There’s an example of how Lufthansa’s site gets stripped down to its essentials on a mobile device.

But you won’t find a chapter on writing for mobile or writing for social media. Redish explains in her introduction:

Letting Go of the Words is about strategy and tactics, not about tools. Technology changes too fast to be a major part of the book—and the principles of good writing transcend the technology you use.

Now while I think there is a lot to be said about writing for and within the limitations of new technologies, I can sympathize with Redish’s point here. Good writing is good writing. And that’s the idea that made this book a classic in the first place.

It’s also why I’ve chosen it as the text book for my upcoming course on Social Media & Web Writing for Higher Ed. We’ll go beyond what’s in the book, and we’ll get specific about writing for social media and higher. But I wouldn’t want any web writer to miss Letting Go of the Words: it’s a foundation you’ll find yourself building on for years to come.

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The Students You Didn’t Know You Had

How good are our websites’ readers at, well—reading?

In The Audience You Didn’t Know You Had (from Issue No. 2 of Contents), Angela Colter makes a point that may surprise a lot of web writers:

…if your target audience includes the general public, you may want to consider that nearly half of them may have low literacy skills.

And she backs it up with the research to prove it, both in the United States and abroad.

If you write for higher ed websites, you might think “Low literacy? At least that’s one problem we don’t have to worry about.” That is, unless you’ve read writing by college freshmen.1

In fact, according to the National Endowment for the Arts report To Read or Not to Read, in 2005 only 35% of American twelfth graders read “at or above the proficient level.” Further research finds that the books most frequently read by high-school students are written at a 5th to 6th grade level.

Now consider this: while only 35% of U.S. twelfth graders read at or above the proficient level, 68.3% of U.S. high school students enroll in college.

That means that in a best-case scenario (in which all of the proficient readers enroll in college), about 49% of college freshmen read below the proficient level.

Of course, the percentage of low-proficiency readers will vary from college to college. Some colleges enroll a higher percentage of non-proficient readers, others a lower one. But, as I’ll argue in a few moments, it’s an problem all of us need to reckon with.

Not that those of us who market universities and colleges online are going to solve it! But the numbers above make it clear that if we are to make our admissions numbers, all but the most elite colleges are going to have have to attract and enroll a good percentage of non-proficient readers.

Which means that our admissions websites are going to have to be written at a readability level below twelfth grade. How low? Tenth grade? Ninth grade? Your school’s English department probably has a good handle on the reading level of your entering freshmen. Give them a call.

“But we want the smart students”

I know what you’re going to hear from at least some of the folks you work with: “Tenth grade? Ninth grade?! Those aren’t the students we want. We want the smart ones!”

It is an understandable reaction. But keep in mind that reading proficiency and intelligence are not the same thing. If you’ve ever spent time in a country where you didn’t know the language, you experienced this first hand. You did not become less intelligent the moment you stepped off the plane. But you did effectively become a much less proficient reader, and your performance at all sorts of tasks—from obtaining coffee to riding the bus—probably suffered.

Now those less-than-proficient students are certainly going to have a harder time of it in college. But it’s a fact: there just aren’t enough proficient students to go around. Unless you work at a very elite institution, you simply have to attract lower proficiency readers and help them to gain the skills they need after they arrive.

And even if you do work at one of those elite institutions, here are four groups of people who might convince you to write your admissions content at a level somewhere south of twelfth grade:

Parents: At what level do your prospective students’ parents read? They may in some cases have lower literacy than their children. The most recent Noel-Levitz E-Expectations study found that 48% of students involve their parents when deciding which college to attend. If those parents have trouble understanding your website, your institution may be less likely to make the short list.

Stressed Out Students: As Angela Colter points out, we are all low-literacy at times:

When people are tired, under stress, or just plain busy, they may have fewer cognitive resources to bring to the task at hand. And that affects word recognition, inference, problem solving—all the skills you use for reading and understanding.

Tired, under stress, busy: this could easily be a student or parent researching colleges—or searching for financial aid. Under these conditions, even proficient readers will be grateful for an easier-to-understand website.

Foreign students: If part of your job is attracting foreign students, keeping the reading level of your admissions materials lower will pay off. Just as when you tried to order coffee in Prague, these are smart people who may not be as proficient at reading as others. That doesn’t mean they won’t be a good fit at your institution.

Everyone: Lining up readability levels with grade levels is a handy shorthand, but leads to the common misconception that more readable writing (that is, writing with a lower grade level) is somehow “stupider” than less readable writing. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are few people who won’t appreciate writing that is clear, concise, and brief. Save the complex writing for complex matters—and maybe not even then. (The post you are reading right now has an average grade level of about 7.)

Actually simplifying your writing—now that’s the hard part. The Readability Test Tool is a good place to get started. And this is also a topic I’ll discuss in more detail in Social Media & Web Writing for Higher Ed, a four-week online course that starts on October 15, 2012.

A big shout out to anyone else who’s been a reader for UC’s Subject A exam and its successors or any other form of mass writing-testing. You rock. ↩

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What Pterosaurs Can Teach Us about SEO in Academia

All writing is rapidly becoming web writing, making search engine optimization (SEO) a core web-writing skill—and not just for marketers.

Academic SEO

One of the things many of us who write for higher ed websites have to unlearn is the academic style of writing. If you went to college, I’m sure you are familiar with paragraphs like this one:

A new way to advance public relations research in Web–based communication is to conceptualize research using a technology acceptance model (TAM) to investigate online audiences’ push–pull media behaviors. Analyzing how users accept and use online communication technologies is important to best understand how to reach online audiences. This is especially true for targeting the ever–changing landscape of Web–based communication where demographics such as age have been shown to exhibit different communication behaviors and consumption patterns online.

—Heather Martyn and Linda M. Gallant, “Over 50 and Wired: Web-based Stakeholder Communication,” First Monday, Vol. 17, No. 6

Interesting content for many of us higher-ed web types, but not so easy to understand. There are many even harder to understand examples out there, of course. But you get the idea.1

But it isn’t the style that interests me here. Instead, I’m interested to know how a reader would find this article in the first place when the First Monday website doesn’t use even basic search engine optimization (SEO).

A few of the issues:

The HTML <title> of the article above is—“Martyn.” And that’s what shows up in search results.

The actual title of the article is burned into a graphic, so a Google search for “over 50 and wired” doesn’t bring up the actual article, only a different page with an abstract of the article (and that comes up in seventh place). (A listing on adademia.edu does show up in fourth place.)

The URL for the article doesn’t include the title or any keywords. It doesn’t even include the name of the journal: http: //www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/ index.php/fm/article/view/3449/3262

Because of a robots.txt problem, the <meta> description doesn’t show up in search results.

Which turns out not to matter so much, since the <meta> description is actually blank.

This isn’t an SEO issue, but it’s worth mentioning: because First Monday uses frames, if you bring this article into Instapaper, it doesn’t work at all.

So unless you already know about First Monday, you aren’t likely to find this article—which is a shame. Research on how to manage online PR for older users could be interesting to a lot of people, including those in the higher ed web community.

It should be surprising that one of the oldest peer-reviewed journals on the internet, a journal that is about the internet, and one that is dedicated to the idea of open access, should have such terrible SEO issues. I don’t mean to imply that First Monday is completely inaccessible. Once you are there, you can search the site by author, title, issue, etc. The journal is indexed in all sorts of academic indexes. However, without good SEO, First Monday’s authors are not accessible to the search techniques used by most people on the internet (also known as most people). Which means these authors are not a part of the conversation that I assume they want to be a part of.

It should be surprising. But it’s not unusual for academic journals. First Monday is far from alone among online academic journals in having poor SEO. If “one of the first openly accessible, peer–reviewed journals on the Internet,” online since 1996, can’t get this right, we shouldn’t be surprised that many others are doing even worse.2

Are many editors of academic journals worried about SEO? I don’t know. But they should be. Academic journals obviously appeal to a specialist audience, but they shouldn’t be completely divorced from the rest of the world. What happens when those who have been thinking most systematically and deeply about a subject never get to participate in the larger online conversation about their subject because of poor SEO?

Pterosaur Heresies

For an answer, take a look at ReptileEvolution.com. Or, better yet, read Darren Naish’s post on the Scientific American blog site, Why the world has to ignore ReptileEvolution.com. As Naish sums up at the top of his post:

ReptileEvolution.com does not represent a trustworthy source that people should consult or rely on. Students, amateur researchers and the lay public should be strongly advised to avoid or ignore it.

Why is Scientific American posting this advice? Because David Peters, the proprietor of ReptileEvolution.com knows his SEO. Naish points out:

If you google the name of just about any fossil reptile, synapsid or amphibian…you get numerous hits for ReptileEvolution.com, typically high up or even top in the search results. This goes for image searches as well as for normal ones.

As it turns out, aside from being an amateur paleontologist and a gifted illustrator3, Peters is also a marketer and web designer. Which is great for ReptileEvolution.com but not so good for science, because the information provided at ReptileEvolution.com turns out to be, according to scientists who work in the field of reptile evolution, “unreliable and inaccurate.” But the average student, searching for information on pterosaurs, will find Reptile Evolution.com first. She’ll have no idea that this site is unreliable, in part because

those who publish the sort of big-scale, taxon-heavy analyses that contradict [the view of of evolution at ReptileEvolution.com]—either have no internet presence at all, or are not interested in putting images, diagrams and other representations of specimens online.

It’s not just that our academic writers don’t know how to write for the web, it seems that neither they (or their editors) know how to get what they publish found and make it appealing. As a result, their voices are missing from the online conversation—which, for better or worse, is becoming the only conversation that matters.

At a time when the entire academic enterprise is being seriously questioned—when a lack of respect for the work done by academics might be cutting your funding right now—this is a big problem.

Web Geeks to the Rescue

And this is where we, the higher-ed web pros, come in.

While we’ve been busy applying our SEO skills to market our schools, it turns out those skills are needed on the other side of the quad, too. Optimizing for search engines isn’t just a skill needed for marketing. Increasingly it’s a skill needed just to get heard on the web, which is why I say it’s becoming a core web writing skill.4

And who probably has the maddest SEO skills on your campus? You do, because you do it every day.

Time to take a walk across the quad.

But what to do when you get there? Relations between us marketing folks and the academic world aren’t always smooth. And you’re not going to get very far if you just walk over to let them know they’re doing it wrong. Here’s what might work:

Offer yourself as a classroom speaker on web-related topics. It’s fun, you’ll get to demonstrate your expertise in front of a faculty member, and it’s a great way to recruit talented work-study students. (Just listen to the questions they ask afterward. You’ll know which ones you want to hire.)

Get on some campus-wide committees. I know you’ve still got a lot of work to do on the website, but you do know it will never be done, right? Aside from a chance to get out of the office, campus-wide committees give you a chance to build up relationships with faculty and staff that might not happen otherwise. Plus, you increase your chances of being there when important web-related decisions are being made.

Keep working to educate your campus about web issues. This is difficult. It’s my experience that those of us working on a university website spent a lot of time training support staff, and we don’t always get to talk to faculty or other decision makers. But keep reaching out. We’ve had success with sending out updates about the web issues to everyone who is a registered editor in our CMS. On our campus, that includes a good number of faculty.

Since the early 90s, we have all been living through a revolution in how we communicate, a revolution as big as the transition to movable type. Those of us who spend our days working at the forefront of that revolution need to help our campuses learn to thrive in this brave new world.

In the interest of full disclosure: once upon a time I wrote a dissertation that included academic prose that was much more impenetrable than this example. I had my reasons. Sometimes academic prose provides a useful shorthand for communicating with other specialists. Sometimes it provides a level of precision that plain language does not. (And, yes, all too often, it can hide sloppy thought or just prove that the writer belongs to the academic community.)↩

Like all of us, First Monday is a prisoner of its content management system, a 2006 version of Open Journal Systems. Obviously, SEO was never built into that system, despite “open access” being one of OJS’s goals. Not every system for scholarly publication has this issue—I’ve seen hits from JSTOR appearing with increasing frequency in search results, and JSTOR materials are behind a paywall.↩

If you’ve got kids, I highly recommend David Peters' Giants of Land, Sea & Air, Past & Present. My kids' copy eventually fell apart they read it so much.↩

As a former teacher of freshman writing, I can’t help pointing out that this pterosaur controversy would make great material for a research writing class.↩

[michael-powers-blog]

A Sample Editorial Calendar

Karine Joly’s recent column on content strategy for higher ed included some comments from me about our our content strategy efforts at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

The article put a few e-mails into my inbox, including a request to share a month or two of our editorial calendar.

While I’m not comfortable sharing our working, internal calendar with the whole world, I’m happy to share the basic format we use and some of the thinking behind it.

We keep our editorial calendar in a Google Spreadsheet, and I’ve recreated the basic format we use in this spreadsheet. Why Google Docs?

Shared authorship: We can add in as many authors as we need, so different people can enter information about upcoming events, our social media plans, scheduled press releases, etc.

Shared readership: We can grant read access to anyone who needs it to make our plans actually happen, or to those across campus who need to coordinate their plans with us.

Everyone has the latest information: Some days, events move quickly and plans change accordingly. With Google Docs, everyone is looking at the latest version.

Our format is designed to make setup fairly easy. To add additional months:

Duplicate the “Model” sheet

Update the tab name

Update the title in cell B2

Update cell B6 to the first day of the month

Delete the fifth week of the month if necessary

Once you have a new month, you’ll want to make sure you get major events into it: holidays, your academic calendar, athletics events, etc.

Another option we considered was using Google Calendar. This would avoid having to take time to set up the spreadsheet for each month, allow for import of the data into third-party programs like iCal, and let us set up repeating and multi-day events. A different, color-coded calendar could be set up for each venue. But in the end, we found the spreadsheet to be easier to read and update.

All in all, it has worked pretty well. But there are all sorts of changes and adjustments that could be made! So go ahead, make a copy, and modify as you need. If you come up with a useful modification, please share it in the comments!

[michael-powers-blog]

This, and the followup, summarize so much of what we need to work on in higher ed.  Required reading.

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Interview at collegewebeditor.com with yours truly about working toward implementing content strategy beyond the web team.

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Promoting the Arts with Social Media

Thanks to everyone who came to this morning's presentation.

The slides are available below (and on SlideShare), including the information about Twitter that we didn't have time to cover.

If you have questions that you didn't get to ask during the session or over lunch, post a comment below!

View more presentations from Michael Powers

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Three Reasons You Should Come to Web Writing Boot Camp

I’m once again excited to be offering a webinar for Higher Ed Experts. Web Writing Boot Camp: Strategies, Techniques, and Tools to Write Web Content That Will Be Read is a three-webinar series (May 10, 11, and 12) that aims to help you and your team create better web content.

Unlike many webinars, you’ll have the opportunity to do some practical exercises, as well as the opportunity to send in an example of poor web writing that we’ll use during the webinar. There’s just no substitute for examples, and between the ones I’ve collected and one participants submit, we’ll have a lot to work with.

(All submitted examples will be rendered anonymous, by the way. So feel to submit your own writing, your office mate’s writing, writing from another website, etc.)

It’s 2011. Why Should I Take a Webinar about Writing for the Web?

The web is dead. People don’t read anymore. All the cool kids are doing social media now. Or talking about content strategy. Why take a webinar on writing?

Reason #1: Users Are Readers

Reading is still central to the web/app/mobile/email/etc. experience. All those students out on the quad, looking at their phones? They’re reading right now.

(OK, not that guy wearing sandals. He’s looking at LOLcats—wait, he’s reading too.)

Because reading is still so central to the online experience (and that won’t change anytime soon) web writing is a central skill for anyone working on the web. We’ll be covering how web writing differs from other types of writing and the top techniques for improving your writing for the web.

Reason #2: Social Media Is Text-Based

Sure, there’s YouTube. And Facebook and Twitter are full of photos and videos. But the core activities for users of social media are reading and writing.

That’s why we’ll be looking in detail at writing for Twitter and Facebook on day two of the boot camp. Getting your message through in 140 characters or less is a real writing challenge—but a challenge for which good web writers are ready.

Reason #3: Writers Need to Understand Content Strategy

Interest in content strategy has exploded over the last year, and rightly so. Content strategy is rapidly becoming the necessary partner of user experience, showing us how a whole bunch of practices around content planning, creation, and governance need to work together.

Although there are plenty of definitions of content strategy out there, I’ve come to define it (semi-circularly) as what you need to do to create great content. And it’s something every web writer needs to know about.

That’s why the third webinar session takes a look at content strategy for writers. In particular, I’ll talk about ways to help large groups of decentralized writers work together to create effective content.

More Information

The full, blow-by-blow webinar description is available over at Higher Ed Experts. Registration closes April 29.

Got questions? I’m happy to address them below!

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Follow the link for the slides from my presentation on Thursday at the CUPRAP Spring Conference. If you are interested in the “Director’s Cut,” that’s also available on my SlideShare account.

Thanks to everyone who came, and thanks for the great questions. If you apply any of this to your site, let me know!

[michael-powers-blog]

Some might think: “Hey, that’s just a minor inconvenience for you the potential customer.” Those who do think that way should not be involved in running a website.

—Gerry McGovern, The Price of Doing Business on the Web. Gerry McGovern’s weekly posts almost always contain at least one quotation I’d like to make into a poster.

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This Thursday (St. Patrick’s Day!) at 10:30 in Hershey, Pa. I’ll be presenting a reprise of my eduWeb presentation from last summer, Fast, Cheap, and Actionable: Creating an Affordable User Research Program. For any Lanyrd users attending, I've added the CUPRAP conference as an event.

[michael-powers-blog]

The Tweet Race: Epic Fail for Mercedes, or Failing Like a Fox?

If you’re part of the higher ed web community and don’t by this point know about the Mercedes-Benz tweet race, @tsand, @ijohnpederson, and #MBteamS, well…

Never mind, I’m pretty sure you’ve heard of it. If not, take a moment and get yourself up to speed.

It was a fantastic demonstration of the power of social media, and a great win not just for @tsand, @ijohnpedersen, and St. Jude, but for the higher ed community.

One thing’s been bothering me, though, and it’s well summed up by @dylanw:

It’s a great point. We’re not exactly Mercedes target audience, are we? Aside from Mrs. @tsand*, how many of us expect to ever own a Mercedes? How many of us even aspire to own one? As Lori Packer wrote:

[Mercedes] ran a great event that I hugely enjoyed participating in and raised money for a good cause, and for that I thank them. But the race coulda been sponsored by Audi or Schwinn for all I cared.

Nonetheless—

And I have to agree. That C-Class coupe? It looks pretty sweet. And did you know that Mercedes made a hybrid? I did not.

But what’s the point of making a whole bunch of people who, as a group, are unlikely ever to own a Mercedes, like your cars a bit more?

Was the whole tweet race in fact, a miscalculation—even an epic fail—on Mercedes part?

For that matter, why wasn’t the tweet race even mentioned in Mercedes’s Super Bowl commercial?

Passion, Community—and Skills

For an answer, take another look at why it was the higher ed web community who was able to push their team to victory.

I absolutely agree with @LoriPA and @Robin2Go that a huge force behind the #MBteamS victory was our passion and our community. As @Robin2Go put it:

This community was engaged and invested in the outcome of this race and that investment was, quite literally, how the higher ed community blew the competition out of the water. … Without continuous encouragement from the celebrity coach, however, [the other teams] simply couldn’t sustain a last ditch effort.

There’s another element those teams seemed to lack, too: the web skills to pull this kind of victory off. Just looking through my browser’s history, I can see that #MBteamS supporters used, aside from Twitter itself: Facebook, yfrog, YouTube, Google Docs, Trendistic, Vimeo, Instagram, TweetGrid, UStream, Klout, WordPress, and Twibbon.

I’m sure I’ve missed a few tools. My question: how many communities, no matter how passionate, could simply follow a race that was happening across 12+ websites and platforms? How many could use them effectively? Not many.

Passion, community, and high-level web geekery. (Brilliantly marshaled by @tsand.) When it comes down to it, who else, besides us higher ed web geeks, could possibly have won?

And Mercedes-Benz Is Hanging out with Us Because…?

Of course, if it hadn’t been the higher ed web community, it was going to be some other tech-savvy group. Perhaps Mercedes miscalculated as to which community (followers of Serena Williams or followers of @tsand) was the most engaged. But clearly they know—or Razorfish should have told them—that this was a race that would be won by the web geeks, right? And that this community probably wouldn’t have a big overlap with people who can actually afford a Mercedes?

Epic fail—or at least miscalculation—is real possibility here.

But put this in the context of Mercedes current rebranding effort:

We’ve got competitors out there that are trying to slap a label of old, stodgy luxury on our brand,” says Steve Cannon, VP of marketing at Mercedes-Benz USA.

It wasn’t always so. Want to see the Mercedes brand as it used to be? Watch the 1958 French film noir Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (a.k.a Frantic, a.k.a. Elevator to the Gallows). Aside from being great film, it has a fantastic soundtrack by Miles Davis and features a 300SL Mercedes-Banz Gullwing which is stolen by a young couple—after they kill its owners.

French cinema, film noir, Miles Davis, and car young people would kill for. That may or may not be your cup of tea, in 1958 this was some seriously hip stuff—and some seriously good product placement.

How far they’ve fallen. To me, stodgy is exactly the word that describes how I personally have viewed the Mercedes brand. If forced to buy a car with a price tag like a Mercedes—I would need to be forced—I’d probably buy something else.

But our job isn’t to buy the cars. It’s our job to make them cool again.

Higher Ed Web Geeks, Cool?

Well, we know it’s true, but how often do others recognize it?

Another way to look at it: we are the recommenders. If you have anything to do with technology, you are constantly being asked to recommend software, computers, phones, websites, and more. Our opinion on these things is taken seriously, even by people who aren’t really sure what it is we do all day. Even by people who might actually be in the market for a Mercedes.

While Mercedes didn’t know exactly who would win the tweet race, they had to know that we are exactly the kind of people who would turn out to participate.

And while we’re not car experts, having a couple thousand web-geeky people out there who suddenly know your products and think positively of them is a win for Mercedes. And if I’m right, it’s a pretty brilliant social marketing move by Mercedes. Run one campaign (the Super Bowl ad) for potential buyers. Run another (the tweet race) for the people whose opinions the potential buyers respect (or, at the very least, who they want to impress).

Here in higher ed, where we need to market our institutions to so many audiences (potential students, students, parents, and alumni just for starters), there are no doubt lessons for us to draw from all this. But I’ll leave them for another time.

In the meantime we can just bask in the afterglow. We are #MBteamS. We make Mercedes cool again.

*Originally written before watching Higher Ed Live, updated to reflect @tsand’s revelations about his plans for the car. Return

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Newsletters in Less Than an Hour

I’m excited to announce that I’ll be offering a webinar for Higher Ed Experts on November 16. “How to Produce an Effective E-mail Newsletter in Less Than an Hour” is the first of two webinars that make up E-mail Newsletters 360: How to Publish E-Mail Newsletters That Get Read.

Here’s the description for my session:

How to Produce an Effective E-mail Newsletter in Less Than an Hour

Don’t have days to produce each issue of your e-mail newsletter? If you’re looking for ways to streamline your newsletter production process, this is a webinar you don’t want to miss. Michael Powers, Director of Web Services at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, will explain how his daily e-mail newsletter for faculty and staff was designed to be timely, effective and put together in less than an hour. Michael will also share lessons learned, tricks and tips to produce e-mail newsletters for internal audiences.

Yes, you read that right: daily. e-mail. newsletter. In less than an hour.

I’ve been a little concerned that description is mostly going to convince you that I’m simply insane. But I can tell you: it works. It happens daily. And I’ve got over 2,000 witnesses to prove it.

Register for the webinar and I’ll do my best to convince you that:

Doing a daily newsletter can be a great idea (I’ll talk about when it is and isn’t).

It doesn’t have to take all day (I’ll talk about how to make sure it doesn’t).

Having a daily newsletter has other benefits, too (I’ll show you what they are).

One other note: even though Karine was kind enough to call this my newsletter, it’s about as far from a one-man production as you can get. (And, yes, I’ll have more to say about that in the webinar, too.)

The second part of the webinar takes place the following day. Tonya Oaks Smith, Director of Communications at UALR Bowen School of Law, will be focusing on newsletters for external audiences in “Recipe for an Engaging and Results-Driven E-mail Newsletter.”

I’m psyched to be part of the Higher Ed Experts faculty, and looking forward to November 16. Head over to Higher Ed Experts to find out more—registration is open.

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Fast, Cheap, and Actionable: Creating an Affordable User Research Program (The Director’s Cut)

My presentation from the eduWeb Conference is now available on SlideShare—and it’s embedded right below.

It’s a seven-step (+1) process for moving from doing isolated research studies to managing an ongoing user research program that doesn’t take all your time, is affordable, and leads to actionable insights.

Fast, Cheap, and Actionable: Creating an Affordable User Research Program (The Director's Cut)

Thanks to everyone who showed up for the presentation on Tuesday. Doing the presentation was a blast, and led to lots of good conversations afterward.

As promised, this is the director’s cut, which includes previously unreleased material. Please keep in mind that this version is unrated, and may have errors, omissions, missing music cues, etc.

As usual, I learned a lot at eduWeb. If you weren’t there (and even if you were), here are some places to soak it all in:

SlideShare Event: eduWeb Conference 2010: All the eduWeb presentations I could find on SlideShare

GoodReads: eduWeb Conference 2010: A collection of books recommended during talks at eduWeb 2010

Flickr: eduWEB2010: Photo pool (not a single photo from my presentation, though—are any out there?)

eduWeb on Prezi: Prezi doesn’t seem to have groups, events, or pools, but a search for eduweb turns up at least a few of the many Prezis from the conference.

Anything I missed? Just let me know in the comments.

[michael-powers-blog]

The KPI Spreadsheet: An Analytics and Research Dashboard

Over in the Projects section of this site, you can download my KPI Spreadsheet.

I created this spreadsheet to help keep track of analytics data from our website, but it turned out to be useful for tracking all kinds of monthly data. I use it to keep track of mentions of our university in social media, YouTube views, the number of support requests we receive each month, and satisfaction and task completion ratings from our 4Q survey.

This is a multi-sheet spreadsheet. Use the “Raw Data” tab to collect your analytics numbers each month. Then make copies of the monthly report tab (in this case “May 2010”) to create month-on-month and year-on-year comparisons automatically.

To create a new monthly report, make a copy of the sheet, rename it, and change the number for “Month of Analytics.” (This is the number of months for which you been tracking analytics data. Your first month of tracking is 1, the second is 2, etc.) Once you change the month number, the rest of the numbers on the report update to the new month.

The germ of this idea came from the first edition of Brian Clifton’s Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics. Having all your important stats (your KPIs, or key performance indicators), turns out to be much more useful than having to go and run new analytics reports every time you want to consult your analytics. Plus, many of your stakeholders may be used to reading Excel spreadsheets, so providing data in this format is comfortable for them.

What I’ve added to Clifton’s original idea is the ability to generate monthly reports from the data on the raw data tab. Most of the magic happens in the hidden rows on the monthly report, so look there if you are interested in know how it works.

I’m releasing this under a Creative Commons license, and improvements are welcome! Go ahead and download the KPI Spreadsheet.

[michael-powers-blog]

Welcome to the New Museyroom

After a four-year hiatus, Museyroom is back!

I’ve moved the blog over to Tumblr, and finally abandoned the old version of Movable type (2.63!) that had powered this site. While I'm still a little unsure about this whole Tumblr thing, I took a good look at Drupal, Wordpress, and Expression Engine before making the leap. And ultimately I decided that for this site:

I didn’t want to spend my time keeping up with security patches (I'm looking at you Drupal and Wordpress).

I didn’t really need the flexibility offered by a full scale blogging system/CMS.

The Tumblr theming system is really quite flexible and avoids the limitations of many other blogging systems. (You can figure the whole thing out in a short evening, unlike, for instance, Drupal theming.) 

Tumblr's dashboard, easy posting of different sorts of media, and iPhone app made it really appealing from a writing perspective.

For now the old content is going away. I may bring over some of it someday, if I can find some way to automate that process.

About the theme: the new site is an excursion in HTML5, CSS3, and web fonts, which I can only make limited use of at my day job. As of yet, I’ve done absolutely no testing in any version of Internet Explorer. But if you’re reading this, you’re probably the sort of person who has a couple of browsers installed. So if things look strange, fire up the latest version of Firefox, Safari, or Chrome.

So—here we are. Expect a few posts soon about my upcoming presentation at eduWeb 2010, and then we’ll see where things go from there.

(Want more background on the site? Just want to know what the heck a museyroom is? Check the about page.)