Higher Ed Experts

#ConfabEdu 2015 Takeaways

Sofia Tokar

Higher Ed Experts Faculty Voices

Higher Ed Experts is a professional online school for digital professionals working in universities and colleges.

When you take a professional certificate course with us, you get a chance to upgrade your skills by working on your projects, interacting with classmates just like you and getting detailed personalized feedback from your instructor.

Our faculty members know higher education inside out. Most of them work for institutions just like yours — and they have great expertise to share.

That’s exactly what they’re doing in this new series of posts: Higher Ed Experts’ Faculty Voices.

Sofia’s takeaways from Confab Higher Ed 2015

This year’s Confab Higher Ed may have taken place in the Big Easy, but content strategy for the web is not always easy. It’s fun and challenging and rewarding! But no, not easy.

That’s partly because the web is constantly evolving. Attending conferences (like Confab or Higher Ed Experts’ upcoming 3rd Higher Ed Social Media Conference) can help us get a read on various aspects of our industry.

At Confab, we learned about the latest and greatest web content strategies, tactics, and trends while swapping stories with other higher ed professionals over Gulf oysters and Frozen Bourbon Milk Punch.

Of course, not everyone can attend every conference.
If you missed Confab in New Orleans, here are some of my big takeaways from this year’s conference.

#1: When it comes to web content, less is more

Misty Weaver (@meaningmeasure), content strategy lead at portent.com, hosted a pre-conference workshop titled “Understanding content inventories, audits, and analysis.” She presented lots of useful information, but here’s the biggie: with web content and search engine rankings, it’s about quality, not quantity.

In general, good web content means fewer pages, but with better content on those pages. As detailed in the Content Marketing Institute checklist Misty shared, valuable content is:

Unfortunately, most web pages have what Google considers “thin content,” with “little or no added value.” Often these pages have less than 400 or so words. There will always be a few such pages (e.g., hub pages), but don’t let “thin” or “shallow” characterize your web content overall.

This is where content audits come in! Audits help you identify these problem pages. Content managers can then either improve them or remove them.

#2: Do your (user) research

The dreaded R-word.

I’m a writer, so quantitative measures aren’t really my jam. In fact, I usually leave the number crunching and data analysis to my colleagues.

But I have underestimated the complementary power of qualitative user research. As Misty explained in her workshop, there are limits to analytics: “Analytics only tells me what, not why.” And that’s only information from people who manage to find your page.

“Four good interviews will help you validate your survey research,” Misty continued. She suggested some ideas for getting feedback from users, including:

What luck! I like coffee and pizza, plus I own an iPad. That means I can gather useful and valuable user research. Huzzah! In retrospect, whenever we’ve consulted our undergraduate students on a project, we’ve been conducting this kind of user research—and that’s a good thing.

So do your user research, but don’t go overboard (most of us can’t do the latter because of limited time and budgets.)

Karen Lee (@karenlee) put it best during her Confab presentation on making academic research go viral. Of her team at Stanford Graduate School of Business, she says, “We’re not data-driven—we’re data-informed.”

#3: Fresh COPE-ing strategies

Create once, publish everywhere—that’s how many of us cope with web content on our college and university websites. But how can you republish or repurpose content if you don’t even know it exists?

A couple of speakers from Dartmouth College offered an intriguing solution: “a shared content repository that serves as the bedrock of the college’s 200+ institutional sites.”

At Confab, content strategist Sarah Maxell Crosby (@choiceofpies) and director of web services Susan Lee (@esses) presented Dartmouth’s content repository user experience (CRUX). The repository’s goals are to:

As Sarah and Susan explained, web content “needs to be nurtured, fed, and occasionally pruned … we cannot set it and forget it.” I’m not tech-savvy enough to explain how the Dartmouth team harnessed their CMS (Drupal, I believe) to this end. However, I can see how they harnessed their PEOPLE—staff, administrators, and other content managers.

Instead of focusing solely on technical guidelines (“This is the CMS. This is the content repository. This is how you use them.”), the Dartmouth team added editorial guidelines into the mix.

Here’s the rub: Content managers get technical training after completing editorial training! This solution is elegant in its simplicity: Teach people the foundations and best practices of web communications before you task them with communicating on behalf of your institution.

Which brings me to my final takeaway…

#4: Teaching is one of your best tools

I began this Confab wrap-up with Misty Weaver, and I’m ending it with her as well (she’s awesome). Her conference session, titled “Teaching content strategy at work, in schools, and at large,” was one of the last, but also one that really resonated with me.

Teaching and outreach—these are hallmarks of higher education. Now it’s time to make them integral to our content strategy as well. We must help people see the importance of content strategy by “teach[ing] them the roles they play in successful development and implementation,” according to Misty.

Not everyone is comfortable speaking in front of a lecture hall or classroom. Mercifully, there are many other ways to teach folks about content strategy for the web. As Misty explained, you can:

Find the methods that work best for you and your students. “Teaching is a way to demonstrate the value of what we do,” she said. “It’s also a wonderful way to learn.”

And that’s why I love teaching web writing at Higher Ed Experts. In every single session that I teach, I also learn something new, interesting, and useful from my students. Unlike some industries that closely guard trade secrets and latest developments, one of the best things about higher education is our willingness to share with—and learn from—each other.

Did you attend Confab Higher Ed this year?

Share your takeaways and impressions in the comments, or send me your #ConfabEDU thoughts and insights on Twitter.

Meet the Faculty: Sofia Tokar

Higher Ed Experts is a professional online school for digital professionals working in universities and colleges.

When you take a professional certificate course with us, you get a chance to upgrade your skills by working on your projects, interacting with classmates just like you and getting detailed personalized feedback from your instructor.

Sofia Tokar Sofia is the web writer and communications officer for Arts, Sciences and Engineering at the University of Rochester. As part of the web team, her work includes creating, editing, and curating content for the university’s homepage and top-level pages, departmental web pages, and social media accounts. She regularly co-hosts on-campus presentations and workshops about strategic and tactical web communications.

Sofia earned her master’s degree in English language and literature from Queen’s University in Canada. She is currently pursuing her master’s in online teaching and learning at UR. She is also a graduate of the Higher Ed Experts web writing certificate program.

Sofia teaches Higher Ed Expert’s 4-week online course on Web Writing for Higher Education.