Web Strategy for Higher Education

The other day I was listening to some marketing expert who said and I quote, “There is nothing like online marketing strategy, now-a-days marketing strategy has to have an online aspect, it is the new era marketing”. The advent of web 2.0 has made organizations rethink their marketing strategy…or…if we may call it…their web strategy.

Higher Ed institutions ought to have a very well defined web strategy as they are dealing with the first internet generation, the generation of Facebooks, Twitters, and Googles. It’s the time Higher Ed institutions realize the untapped potential of the web or be ready to miss the boat. In here, I try to identify few key factors that can help a Higher Ed institution to decide upon its web strategy;

1. Use the power of Social Media:- It is established through various online surveys that a large number of new and transfer student prospects use web as their primary resource for researching an institution of their requirements. The students are smarter than what we think. They probably will take opinions from their pals over social networks like Facebook or MySpace or read through some Higher Ed Blogs.

Higher Ed marketing & communications departments can consider making their institution’s official page over social networks like Facebook to penetrate into these student groups with targeted information. Doing something like Wofford College will make you realize the opportunity you had been missing.

With micro blogging tools like Twitter, students are already doing things like setting up reminders for their homework, schedules, trips and getting updates right into their mobile phones. Institutions can make their admission counselors initiate discussions over twitter, create targeted twibes keeping students and their objectives in mind while their search for the right institution.

2. Get the right CMS for your website:- For Higher Ed institutions it is very important that investment is made in the right website content management system. Good CMS systems would allow you to create content which is ADA compliant. Through workflows, it will allow different departments from within your institution to represent their department on the web and yet allow marketing and communications to control the publishing & make sure that market-able material goes out.

With a good CMS, Academics as a department can have its own News, Announcements and Events published at the Academics page on the website. Some good CMS tools even allow you to optimize your website for search engines, checking for meta-tags, ALT tags, Headings etc. Any good CMS system facilitates you with multi lingual & multi channel (mobile, web, desktop) capabilities which further allow any Higher Ed institution to broaden its’ reach.

3. Have useful tools on your website:- When new students or prospects come to your website they are particularly looking for self service web apps which can give them quality information without really delving deep into it. Some of these web apps can include;

• Calculators/Web Apps for Scholarships & Financial Aid
• Effective Search Utility
• Orientation & Testing Apps
• Transfer Students Apps
• Student Portals
• User Friendly App for Program & Majors

4. Have content & messaging strategy in place: - The web world is all about the right content. Whatever I mentioned above would be useless if the content is not targeted, if the messaging is not sticky. It’s just few seconds in which your messaging has to make an impact on the audience; another click and you might lose the lead altogether. The best approach is to engage a content strategist who will study your audience together with you, make use cases around that and help you develop an approach for generating content. Remember, for a prospect coming to your website, it's just the quality and value of the content that matters.

5. Tracking User Behavior: – The web today has become quite mature as a business platform. Web provides you mechanisms which further allow you to monitor and track the user behavior and interest on your website. Tools like Google Analytics & Optimizer not only allow you to evaluate the keyword based traffic coming to your website but also establish which content blocks are converting more leads to students.

Many standard CMS products also provide integrated components for user behavior tracking and relative content based user targeting.

Overall, the essence is that your website should engage its’ visitors, it should talk to the students, and your web strategy should involve students, their perspective. In this dipping economy, even more than getting new students, it is important to retain the existing students. The new web gives you the ways to know the direction and thought flow of your students and prospects.

Make your website a living piece; keep generating more relevant content on different online channels for your college; Give up that conventional college brochure website mindset…make it interactive..Develop a user experience……and see the difference.

by Muktesh Kandpal (muktesh.kandpal@edynamic.net)

WCM/CMS - Shortlisting Blues

It is 7:30 in the evening, a Friday, and apparently David is busy working on something critical, it must be some marketing campaign, I believe. …ohh...no.…I realize he has been asked to do a thorough analysis on finding the right-fit WCM solution for our new website project.

Well, picking out the right CMS for your website is not just about doing some research over the internet. The process is threefold, knowing what you need, identifying what different vendors have to offer and then mapping the vendor capabilities to your requirements.

Step1 - Knowing what you need – This is one of the most significant but perhaps one of the least weighed upon criteria in identifying the solution of your needs. Do you really know what you need? Perhaps you do or maybe you don’t.

This question might be a little tricky as it may have different meanings and value depending upon who this question is directed to. To me, it’s actually a further set of questions which need to be answered at different levels before somebody answers the bigger question on the needs. Some of the common questions can be:

• Are you just looking for a CMS that helps you straighten the possibly out-of-order content publishing process within your organization?
• Is there a need for a system that helps your website integrate well with other existing systems, maybe a CRM, a DAM or an ECM?
• Is there a particular budget bracket, which you’re considering for this initiative? If yes, are you ready to compromise on some functionality and user experience for price points matching your plan?
• Do you have a need of managing multiple sites and catering to multiple channels?
• Are you looking for content management solution for a portal and not a website?
• Is there any inclination towards a particular technology or framework within your organization?
• Do you want to reuse your existing web based content with the new implementation?
• Do you need a CMS/WCM which has capabilities of tracking user behavior, audience targeting and web analytics?

Yet another important aspect to need assessment is about knowing the business drivers for the CMS/WCM initiative within your organization. Forrester research in its web content management online survey identified different likely business drivers for any new CMS/WCM deployment. They included:

• Improved Web site customer experiences
• Increased sales conversion rates
• Brand consistency
• New eBusiness initiatives
• IT consolidation or cost reduction
• Web operations cost reduction
• Improved employee communication

Your business drivers for this initiative should highly influence your decision for the choosing the CMS/WCM product for your organization.

That’s about need assessment. Over here we do not take those requirements into account which would be catered by almost all the standard web content management systems.

Once the needs have been clearly identified, the next thing is about establishing what different solution vendors have got to offer.

Step2 – Identify the offerings – One may get a fair idea about different CMS/WCM vendor offerings at a high level from browsing through the different product websites over the internet. Forrester research in its CMS/WCM Wave ‘09 weighs different solution vendors based on diverse criteria, and one of those important criterions is any products’current offering/solution.

Forrester evaluates the product offerings from a content management, product architecture, and additional capabilities viewpoint.

It is very important to evaluate how a particular product handles the content life cycle? How versioning, audit trail and workflows play out? How do administrators manage and configure the system?

Also, knowing the product architecture is very vital. There may be scenarios where the package is very appealing but the architecture doesn’t stand valid with the changing face of technology. A vigilant review of products’ architecture gives good insight into its scalability and extensibility potential.

Additional capabilities like multi site/channel implementations, multivariate & A/B testing for testing content changes on audience segments should again be carefully weighed upon.

Here is a checklist of some of the common features which are available with a typical WCM/CMS product.

Checkpoint	Details	Supporting Products (few)
Content Repository
	Library services, check-in/check-out and versioning	IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SDL Tridion, Sitecore, Ektron, Fatwire, Interwoven, Clickability, RedDot
Authentication
	Advanced access control, permissions, role delegation	IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SDL Tridion, Sitecore, Ektron, Fatwire, Interwoven, Clickability, RedDot
Content Authoring
	Authoring through browser based templates, or from MS Word	IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SDL Tridion, Sitecore, Ektron, Fatwire, Interwoven, Clickability, RedDot
Workflow
	Workflow should support a proper approval/rejection cycle.	IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SDL Tridion, Sitecore, Ektron, Fatwire, Interwoven, Clickability, RedDot
Content conversion to XHTML or XML.		IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SDL Tridion, Sitecore, Ektron, Fatwire, Interwoven, Clickability, RedDot
Content Delivery through web servers		IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SDL Tridion, Sitecore, Ektron, Fatwire, Interwoven, Clickability, RedDot
Rich Metadata capabilities		IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SDL Tridion, Sitecore, Ektron, Fatwire, Interwoven, Clickability, RedDot
Web Analytics & Reporting
	Either integration to extrinsic analytics tools or in built functionality.	IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SDL Tridion, Sitecore, Ektron, Fatwire, Interwoven, Clickability, RedDot
Page Layout Design Capabilities for end users		IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SDL Tridion, Sitecore, Ektron, Fatwire, Interwoven, Clickability, RedDot
Professional Services Support		IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SDL Tridion, Sitecore, Ektron, Fatwire, Interwoven, RedDot

Other than knowing the feature set, knowing the strategic path a particular product takes is very critical before finalizing on any vendor.

The question is that, how does a customer analyze this factor? From a customer viewpoint, it can be figured out by looking at;

1. The product updates/add-ons any particular vendor has planned or achieved in a given period.
2. The partnerships and associations which the vendor has made in last couple of years.
3. What existing customers have got to say about the product and its capabilities?
4. How many new customers has a vendor acquired in last two quarters?
5. The technology route which the product has taken or is going to take from an architectural viewpoint.
6. If the vendor has grown in terms of its geographical and market presence.

Step3 – Mapping product capabilities to needs – Now this might seem very straight, right? But actually it isn’t. Think about the fact that do you really need everything a good product has to offer, probably not.

To exemplify, there are products which are WCM/CMS leaders but recognized for their integration with their existing portal products. Now the question that you should ask yourself is that other than the portal integration, which perhaps is not something you need, has the product got a better value proposition than a mid-range product with much modest price points?

The point here is that perhaps you don’t need everything that’s offered by different product suites. Mapping your requirements to offerings should result in creating a traceability matrix, which should give you a clear picture of what product(s) you should vouch for.

As a concluding remark, I would say, as identifying the right WCM/CMS product is not your competency, and thus in all probability there can be mistakes, which might be disastrous from a long term web strategy standpoint. To my mind, the best approach would to engage some WCM/CMS consultant even before going ahead with the project in the discovery phase.

by Muktesh Kandpal (muktesh.kandpal@edynamic.net

Key criteria for selecting a Web Content Management system

This blog provides insight into selecting a Content Management System. This is focused towards marketers in the mid-market space. I’ve tried to keep the content as non-technical as possible.

Content Management products (CMS/WCM) have started to become commoditized. All of them seem to offer similar features, which makes the selection process increasingly difficult and frustrating.

So what do you need to think about when you are selecting a WCM system?

1. Product Strategy and Roadmap

Look at the strategy and roadmap of a product to understand the short-term and medium-term goals of the product. Understand how often the product has been updated in the past few years – history is the best indicator of the future.

Understand what medium- to long-term technology decisions have been made. For example, one of our partners, Sitecore’s, strategy has been to stay close to .NET technologies, so this makes Sitecore an ideal product for mid-market organizations focused on .NET. Similarly, Open Text Web Solutions (formerly RedDot) seems to be going through a re-architecture exercise moving them towards the .NET framework as well.

2. Technology

Your choices typically include .NET, Java or Open Source. Given .NET’s popularity with the mid-market segment, a lot of the popular products are aligned with .NET. Some products that have their own underlying languages. Getting your users ramped up and keeping them updated on these these technologies can be a challenge. Integration and development is key with products. The more ‘open’ the products are (ie. how extensively they expose their APIs), the more flexibility you have. Products that expose their API completely will allow you to integrate easily.

A question that comes up quite often with clients is whether to consider Open Source products in the enterprise. Quite often, the main consideration is cost, but you have to remember that Open Source does not mean “free”! In making cost decisions, consider the Total Cost of Ownership instead of just the license costs. Development and maintenance costs can be higher with Open Source platforms, and support has also been an issue in organizations.

The key issue with Open Source product is that you need to know the underlying technologies very well, since support is not always easily accessible. Some very mature Open Source platforms do exist though, so stick to technologies that have a strong development community behind them. Drupal is one product with a very strong community and support model. In the last few years, we’ve seen Drupal make an impact in the Enterprise. This trend will continue.

3. Content Production

When we talk about ‘content’ on a WCM, it doesn’t just mean ‘text’; it also means audio, video, and images. One of the core elements of a web content management system is producing that content. Content production consists of content creation and development, management, and publication.The blog that you are reading right now went through a simple content production process: it involved me typing in the content, my colleague reviewing and providing feedback, and then me publishing the final content out to the site.

When assessing how content is created and developed in the WCM, check that the sytem supports the type of content you need, and provides an easy-to-use editor to create it. Most content editors these days are similar in what they offer. Also, check to see if authoring and transformation features are available.

Worklow is a critical capability of a CMS. Some organizations have complex workflows, in which case a flexible worklfow is needed. For example, certain features – like the ability to enter workflow tasks into email applications or integration into existing intranets – will get people using the WCM quickly.

Once you’ve created the content, you’ll have to utilize the product’s deployment capabilities to put the content on the website. Make sure the the product can provide support and central management for multistage deployment and publishing.

4. Marketing Automation

What if you could get the right content in front of the right person at the right time – how would it impact your customer acquisition process? This is what’s making this space exciting. The ability to serve up dynamic content based on user paths and profiles allows marketers to truly control the web environment.

Marketing automation in a CMS includes web analytics, personalization, lead management, and automation capabilities. Some of mid-market products have started rolling out marketing automation and analytics capabilities – these have been available in Enterprise CMSs like Interwoven.

5. Migrating Content

Most CMS implementations are typically migrations, since you are usually moving content over from existing sites or resources. This can be both tricky and annoying.

There are two ways to migrate content: manual or automated. You probably want to avoid having to do this manually if you can, and just go with automated migration techniques and tools. However the structue of your content does not allow for automated migration, you may have to go with the old-fashioned manual copy-and-paste approach. It’s about as much fun as cleaning a house after a frat party, but sometimes you may not have an option.

6. Costs

Your budget for the CMS implementation should factor in several things, including:

• Licensing costs for the WCM system
• Development
• Training
• Content Migration
• Content Creation
• Hosting
• Other related software

Quite often, decision-makers only see licensing costs, which can be deceiving. Development costs, for example, may vary depending on the CMS. If a product is less common, or more complex, finding resources to support training and development for your project can become expensive.

7. Get an expert opinion

There is a lot of material out there on selecting content management sytems. Listening to what experts say will help you get down to a shortlist quickly. Forrester, Gartner, CMS Wire, CMS Matrix and Aberdeen are some sources you can rely on.

eDynamic has a process in place to select a WCM product that we can share with you. We work with several CMSs like Sitecore, Ekton, Drupal, MOSS and Kentico, among others, and this insight is based on our knowledge derived since 2001. Email me and I’ll send the process document across to you.

Also, we recently released a short video to guide marketers on how to WCM solution. You can find it on our website www.edynamic.net

Feel free to reach out to me with any questions you may have, I’d love to help

by Rahul Khosla (rahul.khosla@edynamic.net)