Possibly the most intelligent online university magazine on the planet!

Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) turned to Elliance to fulfill its aspiration to reach new prospects, influencers, foundations and partners far beyond its community of living alumni and friends. We recommended CMU relaunch its university magazine on a smart digital story platform, juice every story with keywords from a strategic Keyword Guide, and back it by an editorial calendar whereby stories are released on a regular schedule to train the Google bot to expect fresh content.

In relaunching CMU’s responsive university magazine, we have created a technologically sophisticated online university magazine which is commensurate with the institutional brand. It has a singular mission: to build brand awareness for Carnegie Mellon with people who are either not aware of its brand (“brand unawares”), or don’t have CMU on top of their minds.

Two forces are powering this new relaunch: big data and branding.

Let me begin with two high-level views:

Allow me to illustrate the smarts behind this:

1. Data powers the entire user experience: The online magazine sections (aka departments in print parlance) are based on a combination of popular SEO keywords and CMU’s strategic priorities and. The story tags too are intentionally hand-picked by use of long-tail SEO keywords. Instead of displaying popular tags alphabetically, they are prioritized in descending order of popularity, with ability for site administrators to designate a couple of tags as sticky tags based on university’s strategic priorities.

2. New interactive design deepens the brand: CMU has always been an integrative brand. It has innovated at the intersection of multiple academic disciplines. Elliance applied cutting-edge interface design techniques to tangibly visualize this Carnegie Mellon brand distinction. As an example, in the screen shot below, note how we textually (with dual color-pixels) and visually (with color gradient) illustrate the fusion of “robotics” and “arts & culture.”

3. Stories are juiced by SEO Keywords: CMU is leveraging the power of fresh digital content infused with SEO/Social to reach strangers the university may never be able to reach with print alone. Writers can create three levels of stories: high fidelity, medium fidelity and low fidelity. Each story can be hand-optimized weekly to maximize the chance of securing Google page 1 rankings and increase social shares.

4. We’ve created an optimal blend of digital and print: Instead of printing a quarterly long-form magazine, CMU has moved to focusing on publishing one in-depth story every week followed by an annual glossy print version which will largely be a collection of the best performing stories (based on views and shares metrics). Result: less cost, more engagement and bigger impact.

5. “Mobile First” simplicity is the new mantra: See the persistent header and navigation on smartphones.

If you want to experience the data-informed and brand inspired magazine – and affect the dynamics of what gets displayed and the SEO rankings during your website visit, visit cmtoday.cmu.edu.

October 2016 Update. The magazine has been massively successful. Traffic has doubled. Over 70% of the website traffic is coming from Google. Over 90% of the users are coming via non-branded keywords like “brain science”, “machine learning”, “LGBTQ demographics”, and more. Brand unawares are becoming aware of the Carnegie Mellon brand name. The CMU team is very pleased with the initial results.