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Blog Archives

Blogs - September 2011

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Below are the blog entries for September 2011

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Why Obsess Over Social Media Analytics?

By Kat Liendgens
Thursday, September 29th, 2011 at 1:15pm

If you ask communication specialists and marketers about their main challenges with regard to their inbound marketing strategy in general and their social media strategy in particular, most of them would put ROI measurement at the top of their list. There are multiple reasons why social analytics are so important. First, social media campaigns require a significant amount of resources, so as a marketing manager or communications director, you want to make sure that they’re a worthwhile investment. Second, you need to ensure that your team has enough data points available to be able to optimize their campaigns and be even more efficient and effective. Third, you would like to be able to determine the impact that your social media strategy has on your reputation and on how your organization is perceived, and you might also want to analyze how you measure up against other organizations.

It’s clear why you should obtain and, more importantly, interpret social media analytics, but why is the process not that easy?

  • The data is all over the place. Due to the large spectrum of social media channels and applications, it can be a daunting task to track analytics data for each one. In addition, looking at one social media channel in isolation doesn’t give you the holistic picture that you need for your ROI calculations. That’s where a web marketing tool can come in handy if it has the ability to pull in analytics data from your social channels and at the same time help you understand the correlation between your social media campaigns, your web traffic, and your conversion rates.
  • Attribution is tricky. Without a web marketing tool, it is virtually impossible to follow all of the clicks made by a visitor turned lead (a lead being defined as someone who identified themselves on your site by filling out a form) that eventually lead to a sale (which could be a donation pledge, a new student enrollment, etc). Let’s think of the following scenario: You decide to host an open house event, so you create a nice landing page with a sign-up form. Next, you promote your event on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. A prospective student clicks on one of the links on your social posts and visits the landing page, but doesn’t sign up immediately. Next, you write a blog post about your event, containing some additional information, such as the announcement of an interesting guest speaker. You promote your post via social media. Now, your prospective student goes to your post, reads it, and then clicks on the link to the landing page where he signs up for the Open House. As you can see, without proper tools, you would probably not be able to track down the trail of clicks that led to the sign-up.
  • It’s still a relatively new “thing”. Since social media, as much as it has taken the marketing world by storm, is still an evolving phenomenon, new technologies and applications continue to emerge, both in terms of social media applications and analytics tools to compile and interpret the data.
  • Some things are difficult to measure. This may be an obvious statement, but social media is good for more than just sales. For instance, communicating with your students and prospective students via social media can result in improvements to your processes, your offerings, and your student (and staff) satisfaction. Empowering your communications team to engage with students, faculty, staff, parents, and even media outlets via social media can also boost employee morale, since we are all social beings who enjoy interaction. So even if you have all of your social analytics data at your fingertips, you still need to factor the above components into the equation in order to get a comprehensive understanding of your overall social media ROI.

But just because it’s challenging doesn’t mean that you should give up on social analytics. In fact, since the insights gained from your metrics can have a significant impact on all aspects of your organization, I would recommend investing in ROI calculations and analytics interpretation.

We understand the challenges associated with social analytics, which is why we built a tool to help our customers solve some of those issues. Don’t worry, we’re not trying to up-sell our product. It’s a solution that is available free of charge to Cascade customers, and it's called Spectate. Contact us if you would like to see a demo. We’re here to help.


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2011 Cassies Awards Winners

By Holly Wright
Wednesday, September 28th, 2011 at 2:30pm

We broke the news of the Cassies winners live on twitter during our inaugural awards ceremony at the User Conference, but for those of you who don't follow our twitter stream (why not, by the way?), here's a recap of what went down last Tuesday.

Client Relations Manager, Chris Armistead, kicked off the ceremony during our Tuesday lunch by explaining that the Cassies are no laughing matter, a fact that we've come to really appreciate since the ceremony. Then members of the Hannon Hill team took turns introducing each category, reviewing the nominees, and announcing the winners. Our winners—gracious yet mostly sitting as far away from the podium as possible—walked up to claim their trophies and make acceptance speeches, which ranged from long and emotional to short and humorous. It was the perfect combination of glittering trophies, red carpet business casual style and awkward hilarity.

Below are the winners of the Cassies awards. If you would like to review the individuals and organizations that were nominated, please read our Vote for the Cassies post from August.

  1. Early Adopter - University of New Brunswick for its use of the WordPress connector and for using database publishing so extensively.
  2. Lightening Bolt Award - Texas A&M Texarkana for implementing their new site within just a week and having gone through a re-design already.
  3. Customer MVP - Lee Roberson of Northwestern University
  4. Hannon Hill MVP - Tim Reilly, Support Manager
  5. Biggest Fan of Cascade Server - Nate Tanner of University of Utah Health Care
  6. Twitterbird Award - Adelle Frank of Emory University
  7. Most Creative Use of Cascade Server - Union College for its integration with social media. Check out their social media mashup webinar.
  8. Best New Site - Langara College for its use of webservices to synchronize course information with its public website. Langara has around 1500 pages managed by Cascade. 

Thank you to everyone who nominated someone, voted, tweeted, attended the ceremony or in some other way contributed to our first Cassies awards. We are grateful to have such amazing clients and we look forward to a strong encore of nominees and winners next year. Please use the comments section below if you have ideas for new categories or other thoughts on the Cassies this year. Once more, CONGRATULATIONS to our winners!

Winners of the 2011 Cassies Awards at the Cascade Server User Conference


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User Conference Takeaways

By Kat Liendgens
Thursday, September 22nd, 2011 at 10:00am

I would like to thank all of our customers who were able to attend this year’s Cascade Server User Conference. We hope that you learned a lot, had fun, and are excited about what’s on the horizon for Cascade Server. We can certainly answer “yes” to all the above. The Hannon Hill team enjoyed talking to you, listening to your feedback, and watching such a great variety of presentations. For those of you who couldn’t make it, you missed out, but we will make the videos available in a little bit, and we hope that you’ll be able to be part of next year’s event.
 
Here are some takeaways:
  • Cascade 7 excitement is growing. As soon as Bradley Wagner started presenting the product road map, we got solid validation that we are on the right track with Cascade Server. Thank you for all the positive--and entertaining--tweets, and for your feedback after our road map presentation.
  • Spectate can alleviate pain points. As we discussed, social analytics and ROI calculations are a challenge for most organizations who are incorporating social media into their marketing campaigns. Our new web marketing tool, Spectate, was very well received, and the demo sessions were “sold out”.  More information on this topic coming soon.
  • Twitter is an awesome communication tool. Getting feedback in real time is priceless. #csuc11 was used generously, and it was great to see that our customers used it to share ideas, to give kudos, and to coordinate social events. Take a look at the hashtag archive if you missed any of the action.
  • The Cascade community is stronger than ever. We’re a social bunch at Hannon Hill, and we love spending time with our customers, which is why the User Conference is a big highlight for us. We also realized that our user community is getting stronger than ever. Our customers all over North America know and help each other, and conference veterans made some of the newbies feel welcome--thank you for that! We also had an informal meetup between our attending Canadian clients as well as a whole lot of mingling at our Welcome Reception and Networking Social. Here are some photos from the conference. Please share any others that you took this week.
  • The Georgia Tech Global Learning Center is a great venue for technology conferences. From a location and technology perspective, we couldn’t have chosen a better venue than the Georgia Tech Conference Center. The staff were extremely helpful, the wireless connection was flawless, the setting was both high tech and comfortable. Thanks to its convenient location in Midtown Atlanta, there was no shortage of things to do outside of the conference. Thank you to the staff at the conference center and at the Georgia Tech Hotel and Renaissance Hotel.
  • “The Cassies are no laughing matter.” (Chris Armistead) This year, we held our first annual Cassies Awards. The competition was fierce, and some of our customers really pulled out all the stops in order to get a competitive advantage to win one of those highly desirable trophies. I’d like to thank everybody who voted and congratulate the winners once more.
  • The third conference track was a hit. In addition to the standard two tracks that we have always offered at our conference, we decided to also provide consulting, training, a user experience focus group, product demos, and breakout sessions. Thank you to everybody who participated.
  • Our customers love to give us their feedback. The crowded consulting tables, the UX focus group, and the twitter stream proved that you trust us to take your feedback seriously. In order to help us make sure the 2012 User Conference tops the 2011 one, please take our short post-conference survey.
 
We would love to hear from our participants. What were your takeaways? What was your favorite part of the conference?


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User Conference Welcome Event

By Blaine Herman
Monday, September 12th, 2011 at 3:30pm

With the Sixth Annual Cascade Server User Conference quickly approaching, we wanted to remind everyone that we’ll be hosting an informal networking event on the Sunday night before the conference begins.  The event will be from 6:00 to 8:00 pm on September 18th, and has been generously sponsored by BarkleyREI, a partner of Hannon Hill.  It will be located inside the Georgia Tech Hotel and Conference Center in the Club Room. Refreshments will be provided, and you’ll be able to register for the conference early to save precious sleep time on Monday morning. Registration will also be open on Monday if you aren’t able to make it.   Regardless, we’re excited to have everyone back in Atlanta!

In case you’re someone who prefers bullet points, here are the benefits of coming to the Sunday evening Welcome Event:
  • Register a day early to save time on Monday morning
  • Network with the other 120 people that are attending
  • Enjoy some drinks, sponsored by BarkleyREI

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Did You Know About Cascade Server Hosted Licenses?

By Rahul Bhagnari
Friday, September 9th, 2011 at 1:30pm

Did you know that Cascade Server also features hosting? I totally understand if you want to take a minute to compose yourself – this is big. Currently, many of our clients host their own instances of Cascade Server and are very comfortable with their setup, so many of you may not realize that we also offer comprehensive packages that include hosting services in addition to our standard licenses. With this option, you can avoid having to handle installations and backups, and you can focus on what matters most: fresh quality content.

What else does our hosted license include? Our world-renowned customer service and maintenance, of course!  That’s right, our support and engineering teams (who bend over backwards to give you an incredible product) will be dedicated to handling your entire environment. Hosted clients don’t even have to worry about upgrades – tell us when you want it done, and it’s done. Check out our resources on hosted licenses.

What are some of the benefits of using our hosting services? You mean, besides interacting with the amazingly talented support team leader, Tim Reilly? Well –

  • You can save costs! That’s money! You can avoid buying expensive equipment because you won’t really need it.
  • You won’t need additional staff members to handle the back-end of your instance, so they can focus on developing fresh content on the front-end. And don’t worry about a thing; our maintenance and support teams have got this locked down!
  • You won’t have to worry about all those common, pesky issues like backups, bandwidth allocation, or hardware fiascoes – we’re here to keep everything running in tip-top condition.
  • You can free yourself to focus on developing the sleekest web site you can possibly create!

Purchasing a hosted license and software license of Cascade Server allows for an all-in-one toolkit. We’ll handle the back-end of your web site and you can handle everything else. Here at Hannon Hill, we want to empower you. We want you to grow with us. We want you to join our team! Contact a sales representative to ask about our hosted license agreements.

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Cascade Implementation of Athletics Sites

By Kat Liendgens
Thursday, September 8th, 2011 at 10:45am

Most of our clients have implemented a significant number of sites in our Cascade Server CMS in order to streamline their content management processes. One of the most feature-heavy sites for higher education organizations tends to be the Athletics site, simply because there are so many components to it, such as a variety of sports and teams, frequently updated scores and articles, rosters, events and multimedia content. I thought I’d take a few minutes to highlight some of the features that you could implement.

Information Architecture

I recommend creating one overall Athletics site, containing dedicated sub-directories (folders) for each team, prefixed, where applicable, with the letter m or w to distinguish between men’s and women’s teams. Each team folder should have its own index page, as well as sub-folders for items such as roster, stats, images, etc. This structure ensures low maintenance and ease of use for the end user.

Home Page

Most Athletics home pages contain top stories across teams, which can be accomplished in several ways. For instance, you can automatically pull the most recent stories into an index block and display them in whatever layout you would like, such as a simple list or a photo-slider. If you would like to give the user the ability to flag whether a story was "home page material" rather than displaying current stories automatically, you can add radio buttons to the Metadata Sets, which the user would then check if they want the story to be displayed on the home page or team page as it becomes acute. Another common feature on athletics home pages is the display of upcoming schedules and recent results. If you already have RSS feeds in place that contain schedule and results information, you can simply parse the feed using a format and display the data on your page. Or, if you’re using Cascade Server to maintain your schedule and results, you can pull the information into the Index Block.

News/Stories

When designing your structured data for your news stories, one thing to keep in mind is that you would want to be able to associate each news article with one or more teams, so that stories can be shared across teams. For instance, if an article discusses the male and female Athlete of the Week, it can be associated with the two teams to which the athletes belong.

Schedule and Scores

You don't necessarily need home-grown or third party applications to maintain your schedule and capture results. You can provide your end users with "game" or "event" Asset Factories, so that they can quickly create a game or competition in the system, and enter all of the pertinent data, such as location, home game vs. away game, day/time, etc. In addition, you can add a "result" field, so that once the game is over, users can simply enter the score, and it will then automatically be moved to the results section of the page. This way, one event asset can be re-used and displayed in an "Upcoming Schedule" section or in a "Results" section, based on the presence of a final score. You may also want to give your users the ability to associate a news story with the event, as well as photos, so that when they click on a score, it would link them to the associated news article or related photos.

Roster

Cascade Server allows you to get as granular as you need to with regard to your roster pages. For instance, you can have a separate page for each athlete, on which you can use structured data to enter pertinent player information, and create a roster page on which you use an index block to display the list of athletes, with links to the individual pages.

Photos

Athletics sites tend to be fairly image-heavy, so it's a good idea to allow your users to upload photos within Cascade Server and tag them for specific teams and events. In addition, if you would like to encourage visitors to your website to upload their own photos and tag them in a similar way, you can do so with server-side scripts and bring the data into Cascade Server via web services. I would recommend implementing an approval workflow to make sure that all images submitted are vetted prior to being published to your site.

Wesleyan University, a Cascade client, does a fantastic job with their athletics site, which incorporates photos, schedule and results, sub-directories for teams and departments, and a top stories feed. Their design is also refreshingly clean with a simple navigation. Take a look at Wesleyan's Athletics site.

These are just a few of the features built into athletics sites using Cascade Server WCMS. What are some of the cool things that you have implemented on your Athletics site?


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Spotlight on Cascade Entity Relationship Diagrams

By Charlie Holder
Friday, September 2nd, 2011 at 2:30pm

As with any new enterprise software, it can be a challenge at first to understand how all of the different components fit together, and Cascade Server is no different. I know first hand how confusing it can be at times. Even with almost 20 trainings under my belt, I still remember my first month here at Hannon Hill. I had no idea how Cascade worked, no idea what the terms were and no idea how it all fit together.

As Hannon Hill's lead trainer, I work with a lot of people with very different technical abilities. I get to see how people initially interpret all the moving parts that go into building out and publishing a Site. I have experienced 15-year IT veterans immediately pick up the subtle differences between Configuration-level and Template-level Block assignments, and I have encountered student assistants studying Computer Science who struggle with why we write Formats.

During each and every training, I do the best I can to help equip everyone there with the basic knowledge and skills to start using Cascade. It is important to me that everyone leaves with an understanding of what each part is and how they fit together. This desire has led me to put together a few tools to aid me in that quest. From a comprehensive binder of step-by-step instructions in the event that another trainer needs to take over, to a reference guide of basic Velocity syntax and tools that includes example documentation and explanation, I have a few tools at my fingertips to help others.

So here is another one of those tools that aims to help make the transition to using Cascade a little bit easier. We have put together a diagram to help you visualize how assets in Cascade CMS relate to one another. We know that there are more than a few other diagrams out there--shout out to Syracuse University, UC Davis School of Law, James Madison University and Northwestern University--and we are not in any way trying to overshadow what others have done. (In fact, we used Jason Aller's diagram from UC Davis School of Law as a starting point for ours.) We simply think this is another great resource to provide as supplemental material. A screenshot is below and you can download the full resolution pdf.

As time goes on, we are preparing more resources and discovering new ways to enable Cascade users to quickly and efficiently create and manage their content. I would love to hear about any other visual tools that would benefit your organization and invite you to share any that we do not know about yet.

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