HighEdWeb 2011: Why (Quality) Content is King & Accessibility is Key
Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011 at 10:30am -- Joel Dixon, Penny Harding
Last week, we were a sponsor for the HighEdWeb 2011 conference in Austin, TX. It was an opportunity to visit a great city and interact with some of the best, brightest and most interesting web professionals on the frontlines of higher education organizations worldwide. It’s always nice to talk to customers such as Scott Crevier at St. Norbert College who has several pictures with our entire team (as luck would have it, he also was the winner of a new Texas-sized cowboy hat).
We would like to thank all the new folks who spoke with us as well. It would be nice to attribute the traffic to our splashy new booth and cool products, but the real star was our MindFlex game which enticed visitors to test their concentration powers in a “battle of the mind” with members of our team. The headgear was a bit geeky, but the experience never ceased to be fun! Congratulations to Laura Cleland from University of Toronto (shout-out to #allcanadian crew), who was the grand prize winner of the game itself.
“Keep Austin Weird” is an often heard and seen phrase around Austin. Tim Nekritz’s recap blog talks more about the particulars. But for me it’s the simplicity and effectiveness of the content that made the difference. This phrase wasn’t more impressive when I saw it on a huge billboard as opposed to a T-shirt. Or on a digital display as opposed to a poster. I thought the content was awesome and it stuck--simple.
In many ways I think the entire HighEdWeb 2011 conference reinforced this point again and again. It’s the CONTENT that matters! With that in mind, here’s a few takeaways...
(Quality) Content is King. An emphasis on content was everywhere and the nifty twitter data reporting by Mike Petroff showed that it was the 3rd most tweeted keyword during the conference (behind “web” and “austin”). There were far too many wonderful presentations to highlight but I have to tip my hat to Rick Allen (one-half of the dynamic meetcontent duo) for showing how to make quality content work with web analytics. Producing great content is always the goal but analytics can help with content audits (yes, less is more!), content effectiveness (valuable content should create some action by your site visitor) and content strategy (Bueller...Bueller...Bueller?).
Content Strategy still has a long way to go in Higher Education. Content is king but content strategy is the means for organizing and maximizing it. During our own corporate track session on Agile Marketing: Content Strategy & Effective Tools, less than 10% of attendees acknowledged having a content strategy at their organizations. Just recently, .eduGuru tweeted some teaser data from the currently open Higher Ed CMS Usage survey stating only 18% of respondents had a content reuse strategy in place. Content strategy provides context for your marketing goals, objectives & outcomes. Kate Johnson (University of Denver) did a wonderful job of addressing this topic during her presentation What Content Strategy Really Means for Higher Ed. The key is that content strategy informs your entire marketing strategy (not just web either): content creation, content publishing, your social media channels and your mobile initiative.
Mobile is all the rage but... At least nine workshops had a focus on the impact and importance of a mobile presence for higher education web content. However, a mobile site is really just another channel for guess what? Quality Content. This intersection between content and mobile was well-covered during the presentation Roger Wolf & Doug Beck (both of University of Central Florida) led on mobilized content. They implored us that people really want good content--the mechanism is just the tool. And a statement that needs no explanation: “Content that is crap on a desktop will be crap on mobile.” Put your focus on creating quality content first. Then think about the technology.
Higher Ed needs to take Accessibility seriously or else! I know it is terrible to start this one with such an ominous tone, we all know that a lot of organizations are doing their best with ever tightening budgets and limited staff resources. But this was a really big takeaway. If you have a web presence, you need to take all members of your audience’s needs seriously. Without paying real attention to accessibility guidelines you may not only be unintentionally eliminating some of your prospective audience, but you may be opening your organization’s door to a lawsuit. It is great for people to be motivated to create their content and manage their own sites but as leaders in a constantly evolving field, we need to make sure that content is accessible to everyone.
We look forward to covering some of these topics in more detail with later blog posts but would love to hear your thoughts on these or other takeaways from #heweb11. What did you think were the most important topics covered?
Scott winning the Cowboy Hat at HighEdWeb11
MindFlex Game
MindFlex Game at HighEdWeb11 #2
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