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I just returned from the beach. I have to admit, it’s not a place I always want to go, but it’s always a place I never want to leave. For me, the beach is nature’s ultimate creative expression. It has only three elements – land, sea and sky – yet it delivers an infinite number of visual configurations that simultaneously feed the soul and quiet the spirit. It has inspired creators since the dawn of time. Greek poets wrote of shores inhabited by deities and modern romantics measured their minds against the vastness of the oceans. Scientists use the beach to record the history of the earth’s great geological change. There are other examples in this vein: just seven notes have given us music from Mozart to Sousa to Joplin to The Beatles. Four chromosome types give us life in all it’s splendor. Three primary colors give birth to a nearly infinite palette. And the core curriculum of the liberal arts … Continue reading
Posted in: Higher Ed Marketing
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A couple of weeks ago, a little-known company called App.net publicly launched a grand experiment. Founder and CEO Dalton Caldwell announced a crowd-funding campaign to raise $500,000 in 30 days, for a new social networking platform that aims to compete with the likes of Twitter – except without the help of advertising. “We will never be ad-supported. Our product is the service that we sell; it is not our users.” -Dalton Caldwell If you think Dalton Caldwell sounds a little kooky, you’re not alone. The announcement alone sparked a firestorm of controversy over on that other popular social networking site, where reactions ranged from ecstatic to skeptical to downright scornful. “No one would pay to use another Twitter,” the objections essentially went. Additionally, a lot of people think App.net is reinventing the wheel – and needlessly so, considering Twitter’s success to date. But in the two weeks since Mr. Caldwell launched his project, it has experienced unanticipated success as +15,000 … Continue reading
A ruling by Judge Rudolph Contreras of the Federal District Court for Washington, D.C. last week set back efforts by the U.S. Department of Education to deny federal financial aid dollars to the lowest performing for-profit schools. For the time being, the marketplace will decide — students and parents matched against hyperbolic for-profit higher ed marketing machines. While the for-profit operators and their Wall Street investors have long understood the power of higher ed marketing, the response by the vast community of endowment-driven colleges and universities remains fragmented. It’s easy for most colleges to disregard the concerns of students and families at the lower rungs of achievement and income — those most vulnerable to the false claims of education value and return on investment. But higher ed marketing is really conversation marketing in the age of social, SEO and PR 2.0 optimization. If the best schools in the country decided to raise the level of conversation as it related to … Continue reading
Posted in: Higher Ed Marketing
I have to imagine that @sweden’s citizen-driven Twitter “experiment” is waking up many a marketing director’s concerns about social media—ergo their brands—in the hands of the masses. As part of its Curators of Sweden campaign, Sweden’s government-sponsored tourism agency turns the reigns of the @sweden Twitter account over to a different citizen each week. This week, Sonja Abrahamsson’s tweets have taken their followers on a magic carpet ride. Everyone from Mashable, The Wall Street Journal, and Forbes weighed in on the controversy. Even Stephen Colbert riffed on it on The Colbert Report, causing over 4.7MM Twitter users to campaign for him taking over the account for a week (#artificialswedener). Because of Abrahamsson and her gaffes (or trolling?), many are calling this “experiment” a colossal failure, while a few say it is absolute brilliance. Having worked as a digital marketing consultant for many tourism directors over the years, I felt an immediate concern for the future of tourism social media efforts. … Continue reading
Luke Wroblewski’s most recent Data Monday post compiled astounding iPad stats. In two years, Apple has sold 67 million iPads, and is by far the leading tablet device. So leading, in fact, that its closest sales competitor is itself—the number 2 tablet is an older iPad, currently on sale at a lower price. With this in mind, I took a quick unscientific survey of a few of our client’s web analytics across higher education, non-profit, manufacturing and banking. This past month, 32% of mobile device visits were from the iPad. With new iPad users coming online every day, and nearly 1/3 of our client’s mobile visits coming from the iPad, it’s a good time to think about how people use these devices, and how they differ from mobile smartphone experiences. Standard websites work fairly well on iPads. On smartphones with touch interfaces, delivering a “desktop” site generally means the user has to pinch and zoom (or squint) to find information. Except … Continue reading
Trickier than it sounds! Some pictures are worth far more than a thousand words.
Posted in: mobile-friendly website
Suddenly it’s very quiet. How would you react if 25% of your active customer base got up and left on the same day? Would you become concerned? Perhaps, if you’re a business owner. But not if you’re a college enrollment manager, right? Because it’s commonplace. It’s commencement, and students are leaving in droves right now across every college campus in America. So what about this newly graduated 25% that everyone has in common? What are they taking with them: Degree? Check. Confidence? Check. Knowledge? Check. New skills? Check. Life-long friendships? Check. A deep affinity with the school? Hope so. Brand message? Huh? Too many institutions treat their brand message simply as a marketing campaign. Without question, it can be a campaign and can contribute to solving many urgent marketing issues like boosting enrollment, attracting new faculty, or funding a capital campaign. Still, that’s selling it a bit short. The best institutions treat their brand as something more – an ethos – … Continue reading
Posted in: Higher Education Branding
I have a friend named Devan. Like a lot of my friends (and a lot of your friends too), Devan has a cell phone. It’s an aging iPhone 3G. You can tell it apart from the iPhone 4 (and 4S) by its rounded edges and plastic case back. Devan’s had this phone for three years – a remarkably long time for a UX nerd to carry a phone, let alone when each successive year brings with it a flood of new features and capabilities, longer battery life, better screens, and updated styling. And the thing is, Devan’s phone looks like hell. He dropped it on the concrete sidewalk over a year ago, fracturing the LCD film beneath the glass in the process. The glass itself remains intact, but a good portion of the display is obscured by bleeding LCD crystals. Because of this, he can only see portions of any given app he’s using. When he gets a new mobile … Continue reading
Posted in: mobile, mobile app, user experience, ux
New content that you add to your website may not adhere to accessibility best practices. Perhaps content authors forget, lack proper training or oversight, or don’t realize its importance. Either way, a segment of your visitors may suffer because of an inconsistent—and a downright frustrating—website experience. Here’s how to fix it.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the need for judicious consideration of whether to embark on an app-building journey or build a mobile-friendly website. A couple of days later, Buzz Andersen at Tumblr said something in an interview that rings true for most of us not profoundly drunk on the Kool Aid of the so-called app economy: Really since the introduction of the iPhone, but particularly after the advent iPad, this concept of “apps as content” has gained a lot of currency, and now every media company in the world feels compelled to be in the business of developing native software as a distribution channel. Despite the press’s tendency to portray this trend as futuristic, I actually think of it as a bit retrograde—particularly since we’ve actually been evolving an incredibly sophisticated medium for content presentation and distribution for over 15 years now: the web. – Buzz Andersen, Director of Mobile Development at Tumblr Good lord, is “retrograde” ever … Continue reading
Posted in: digital communication, mobile, user experience, ux