Sofia Tokar, Web Writer at University of Rochester, is one of the 12 presenters of the 3rd Higher Ed Content Conference.
In this 3-question interview, Sofia shares a surprising outcome from content work, the biggest hurdle for content quality and a higher ed content dream.
1) What’s the most surprising outcome – in your work with content – you experienced in the past 12 months?
Surprising (but not really) is how much content templates and standardized navigation help facilitate the redesign process.
The dean of our engineering school asked us to convert all of his school’s pages into the new design that we’d been rolling out to departments over the last year. The catch was that he needed it done in less than eight weeks, in time for review by the ABET accreditation folks. It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you have buy-in from the higher ups and a clear sense of direction and purpose for your content. Plus, nothing focuses the mind like a deadline.
2) What’s the biggest hurdle for content quality at work? How do you deal with it?
I say this with love in my heart (and as an English major myself), but my biggest hurdle is other writers, particularly those from academic disciplines or centers related to writing, communication, or languages. Because of their experience and expertise, these folks seem especially intransigent when it comes to rewriting or editing their website content for users. Unfortunately, the writing tactics that lead to success in academia or research can misfire on the web.
One way to deal with this hurdle is by talking—face-to-face, in person, preferably with coffee in the vicinity. From the talking (eventually) comes the understanding.
The understanding of what, you ask?
That web content is less about what we need to say than about what our users need to hear (hat tip to Professor Michael D.C. Drout for effectively teaching that lesson in his audiobook A Way with Words: Writing, Rhetoric, and the Art of Persuasion).
3) If you were given everything you need, what’s the first piece of content you’ll create for your school?
Snapchat accounts for everybody!
No, I’m just kidding. This one’s a tough question. I’d create a self-evaluation or assessment tool to determine if—and then which—social media platforms are appropriate for a given office or department. There tends to be a knee-jerk reaction to the question in higher education (“Of course we need an Instagram account!”). Instead, I’d like to see some more thoughtful decision-making that accounts for realistic goals as well as available resources.
4) What role does video play in your content strategy?
Video plays an important role in our overall content strategy.
We’re lucky at the University of Rochester, because we’ve got video folks with the skills to do everything from polished productions to livestreaming, from man-on-the-street interviews to Periscopes.
However, I’m not a video person. (Apologies to all my videographer friends!) I’d rather take 30 seconds to scan a webpage than three minutes to watch a video. In fact, if content ONLY exists in video form, then I’m probably not going to consume it at all. The exceptions to that are Vines and GIFs, “video-lite” formats that get to the point in cheeky and creative ways.
