Lydia Anthony, Web Content Manager at Converse College, is one of the 12 presenters of the 2017 Higher Ed Content Conference (the 4th edition!).
In this 4-question interview, Lydia tells us about an exciting content project, a favorite tool, the place of SEO and shares a cool video with us.
1) What is the most exciting content project you’ve worked on over the past year?
We tried a new spin on an annual faculty profile story this year and created a video hybrid story that integrates short Facebook videos with text. One of the things we love most about this story is that it was about 90% created by our student intern, Emily. It was really validating to use my storytelling know-how to empower a talented young person, and then see her really run with it and take it to a whole new dimension I’d never even been to before. It’s definitely the most innovative video project we’ve done but honestly as a small college with a small communications team, I don’t think we would have had the time and energy for it if it weren’t for Emily. Find capable people, aim them in the right direction and then allow them to blow your mind (while saving you many hours of labor). It’s a beautiful thing…
2) What is your favorite tool to use when working on content projects?
In 2017 so far I’d actually have to say Google Calendars. I know that sounds silly but really literally creating a Web Content Calendar and throwing all of those cyclical updates on it you know are going to come back around every year, it’s something we’ve been wanting to do for years and we’re finally doing it and it’s great. I think when you’re working with very busy colleagues across campus who are the subject matter experts – which I think EVERYONE in higher ed does – it’s just a relief for everyone when you become the proactive one and say “Hey I know summer registration is coming up for your camp… let’s go ahead and throw that on the website” instead of waiting for them to rush in at the last minute and say “OMG I forgot to tell you but I’m about to miss this advertising deadline can you please update this yesterday?” For some reason our office kept thinking it had to be initiated the other way around… But when you finally accept what your colleagues can and can’t do well, it frees up so much time to be strategic rather than reactive.
3) What is the place of search engine optimization in your content creation and distribution process?
I can’t say we are placing a lot of emphasis on SEO right now. We’ve got a new SEO analysis plugin, Yoast SEO for WordPress, so we’ve incorporated some baseline data into our annual site reviews this year and that requires us to throw in some basic focus keywords so it can assess every page. We haven’t done much with that data but next year we’ll probably choose a subset of those pages to really optimize. We had an SEO expert work on our top ten landing pages at site launch this time last year. My priority is to tend to the SEO on our academic program pages – the majors and career track pages. That’s the area where we really thought carefully about SEO during content creation and some of that work got lost in migration. I want to make sure they have those catchy meta descriptions for Google and social sharing as well as the right photo coming through…We know we’re not going to win at the numbers game, but I think it’s really important to pay attention to those link teasers because they could be the difference between a user clicking your content or just scrolling on by.
4) Video has become a key format. Can you share the most successful video produced at your school?
I’ve already mentioned our video hybrid story which has definitely been the most successful if you add all the views of the different clips. In sheer terms of number of views, it’s been a Move In Day clips reel from the beginning of the school year. It’s a two-minute long video and the average view length is 15 seconds… So, to me that says we nailed the topic but could have saved all the time we spent on the last one minute and 45 seconds, ha. (Not literally…we all know Truncation Is Not A Content Strategy) We’re planning a spring video series and those will average about 30 seconds, very front-loaded. It’s pretty much the video version of the lesson I’m unpacking in my upcoming talk, “The Art of the Short-Form Story: How to Spend Less Time and Get More Readers Per Word.”
A conference focusing on content strategy & practices in higher ed?
The HECO conference has become a must-attend event for marketing and communication professionals in higher education looking for new ideas and best practices for content creation, management and distribution..
Read below what a few of your higher ed colleagues who attended the past editions of the Higher Ed Content Conference say about the event.
Tags: HECO17, Higher Ed News