Mark Greenfield

I rarely allow guest posts on this blog but today I am making an exception. Pat Lynch is someone who I have followed for many years and someone I deeply respect.  His book “Web Style Guide”, co-authored with Sarah Horton, was one of the first web books I ever purchased and I still refer to it on a regular basis.

Pat has shared with me his thoughts on the recent conversations on the future of higher education web development (see “When the Axe Man Cometh” on uwebd). His historical perspective on the future of university web services departments provides sage advice for us all. Thank you Pat for sharing your thoughts and I look forward to continuing this important conversation.

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THE FATE OF COMMUNICATIONS SERVICES IN UNIVERSITIES

I spent most of my 39-year career (so far) at Yale as a manager and director of various kinds of internal communications services, including science graphics, medical illustration, video production, biomedical and general photography, computer graphics and slides film-recording (back in the 1980s), desktop publishing, web design, print and reprographics services, and web design.

In reading the recent discussion about the hardships and possibly dim future of university web services departments I saw many parallels with the fates of past communications services that came, flourished over several decades, and eventually faded away as technologies changed and the “digital revolution” absorbed virtually all forms of media.

Today a faculty member with a $500 camera and Final Cut Express can do more than we could with $150,000 of video equipment just 10 years ago. Owning FCE doesn’t make you Steven Spielberg, but the artificial barrier of access to exotic equipment is gone. Do we still need video professionals? More than ever, as audiovisuals begin to dominate web communications. You can’t do a faculty interview satellite feed to The News Hour with a FlipCam. But video (and web) professionals need to get used to having lots of company in the lower-skilled areas, and many “commodity” video shoot-and-edit jobs are being done by clients themselves now.

I’d love to think that my university employs me and my service department colleagues for the intrinsic value of our vast and varied media skills, developed over decades of experience, but the truth is much closer to this: The underlying rationale for a university service department is based on skills that are hard to find at that time, or involve equipment that the average faculty or staff member couldn’t afford, or wouldn’t know how to use. So, in the 1970s and 1980s fee-for-service university media departments made most of their money providing services people could not easily make on their own: (silver) photographic prints and slides, hand-drawn graphics, early forms of pen-plotter and film-recorded computer graphics, and various video and audio productions. All required expensive equipment, and knowledge about how to use that equipment.

We also did more exotic forms of communications like biomedical and surgical photography, medical and biological illustration, and higher-end graphic design, but the truth was that the commodity graphics and photo services subsidized the more complex offerings. As laser printers replaced most reproduction of graphics, charting software democratized the ability to create graphs and charts, and PowerPoint replaced 35mm slides, both the specialized and the commodity services shrank.

In my former field of biomedical communications, funded mainly by commodity photo services, most university departments are now a small fraction of the size they were  in the 1980s. They aren’t needed anymore, and they faded away over the last 15 years. Unfortunately some valuable services that were once more available to faculty were accidental victims of this shift. Photomicroscopy, biomedical photography, biomedical illustration, and high-end graphic design also shrank in many universities, more as a financial byproduct of the fading of commodity service departments, not because the high-skill services weren’t needed.

This cycle of waxing and waning of service departments is perfectly normal, and is (mostly) healthy for the university. It happened to photography and graphics, it will also happen to web units that flourished when the skills needed to create a state-of-the-art site were not widespread. The web was not invented yesterday—we’re now almost 20 years into the web era, and it’s long since time that we moved beyond the cottage-industry stage of web design as practiced by specialists, and entered an age when the average university staffer can expect to use the web for routine communications without needing specialized professionals to make that work.

At Yale that shift in web services means that we do dramatically less “static” web design, and now mostly use open-source tools like Drupal and WordPress, working in more standardized interface and identity templates (albeit with plenty of look-and-feel customization as required). This makes sense for our users, and for the University. For the next 3-5 years or so this sea-change in web support is keeping everyone very busy, but inevitably web jobs will change and some will fade away as we succeed  in democratizing access to the web.

So does this history mean that current web designers simply must accept the inevitable shrinkage of their web service units? Yes, but new opportunities in communications are constantly emerging. If today’s web designers think flexibly about their positions and skills, and pay close attention to the changing needs of their home universities, the future can be very bright.

Consider: The media departments I used to work in have mostly faded away, but today MORE people are employed at Yale doing various forms of communications support than in the past “glory days” of centralized graphics, audiovisual, and photography service units. The dramatically lower costs of digital communications (web, social media, digital audiovisuals of all kinds, graphic design across many media) have created far more opportunities than they ended. The people involved are decentralized throughout the university (another key effect of the change to digital media), instead of being concentrated in large service units centered around unusual or expensive equipment. Today it’s actually easier to find a university job in communications than it was 20 years ago. You just won’t be working in a big service unit.

So, the fate of web units isn’t necessarily another sad story of a once-thriving service fading away. In historical perspective this is really a more typical story about job change and evolution. It’s the way it is, and it’s the way it’s always been.

Twitter: @patrlynch

I will be teaching a three hour workshop next month on “Creating a Comprehensive Social Media Framework”  at the 2010 eduWEB conference which is being held July 26-28, 2010 in Chicago.  I have worked with dozens of colleges and universities across the globe on their social media efforts. I plan on sharing these experiences and the process I follow to help higher ed institutions fully leverage the power and potential of these new communication channels and support models.

The topics I’ll be covering include:

• Understanding institutional culture as it relates to social media. We will explore techniques to gauge the openness of senior leadership and campus culture in the areas of authenticity, transparency and control.
• How to identify goals and objectives, and tie them back to overall institutional goals and objectives.
• How to measure success and ROI, including a review of free tools and commercial solutions.
• The importance of creating both policies and guidelines (they are different). As higher education begins to formally embrace social media, it is important for social media practitioners to fully understand the legal ramifications for both themselves and their institutions.
• Implementing management, governance and participation models.  Colleges and universities vary greatly in size, scope, mission and culture. We will explore the pro’s and con’s of various options to help you identifying the approach that will work at your institution.
• How to assess and mitigate risk, including crisis planning and triage planning
• How to properly staff your social media efforts. We will explore the difference between A Social Strategist and Community Manager, and what staffing resources are appropriate for your school.

If you are interested in learning more about these topics, please come join me in Chicago.  The 2010eduWEB conference has a great lineup, and Chicago is a great place to be in the summer. (If you are not already attending, please note that the early bird deadline has been extended to June 28.)

The Cluetrain Stops at Higher Ed, Will Anyone Take Delivery?

Presentation Materials

• PowerPoint Presentation (16 MB)
• delicious.com/markgr/cluetrain
• twitter.com/markgr

Contact Information

Mark Greenfield

Director of Web Services
Mail Drop: 109 Norton Hall
Office Location: 454 Porter Hall
State University of New York at Buffalo
Buffalo, N.Y. 14260
Phone: (716)645-2811
Fax: (716)645-7761
Email: markgr@buffalo.edu

Abstract

The Cluetrain Manifesto” is best described as a cross between “In Search of Excellence” and “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”. Provocative, pretentious and brilliant, this seminal book describes how the Internet will mean the end of business as usual. And yes, it is directly applicable to the work we do. Part rant, part history lesson, part hope for the future, brace yourself for a wild ride as we explore the end of higher ed as usual, how the themes from Cluetrain provide a framework for our profession, and what this all means for us both individually and organizationally.

Cluetrain Website: http://cluetrain.com

Tuesday, June 8
1:15 pm – 3:15 pm (eastern)
Originating from the 2010 Penn State Web Conference

HashTag  #hesmlaw

Come join me at this virtual summit as we explore the legal ramifications of the use of social media in higher education. It is important for social media practitioners to fully understand the legal ramifications for both themselves and their institutions. Social media is a whole new paradigm and current federal law, state law and university policy is painfully outdated. This workshop will explore these issues and help participants develop social media policies that protect both employees and the institution without undue restrictions.

The format will be much different than a typical workshop. Following the principles of an unconference, we will leverage the wisdom of the crowd in an open environment where everyone’s participation is encouraged.

In addition to those attending in person  we will be using ustream to stream the event live and allow our virtual attendees to participate in the proceedings.  The URL for the summit is http://www.ustream.tv/user/PSUWebConf. For those of you who want to participate on Twitter, delicious, Flickr, etc., the hashtag for the event is #hesmlaw

Discussion topics will be chosen by participants.  To facilitate conversation both before and after the summit, I have added an instance for the Social Media Summit at the Harvard’s Live Question Tool:

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/questions/hesmlaw

Please submit your questions and vote and reply to existing questions. I plan on using the information gathered to drive our live discussion on June 8.

I would like to extend a special thanks to Patti Fantaske and the other conference organizers at Penn State for allowing me to continue to push the envelope.  Last year we had almost 350 virtual participants in the first social media summit and I am hoping for the same this year.

I look forward to an interesting afternoon.  Hope to see you there.

Last week I attended my first J. Boye Conference in Philadelphia and it was a great experience. The conference tag line “A knowledge sharing summit for online professionals” was a perfect description.  It combined the best of large conferences (top-notch speakers and experts) with the best of small conferences (networking and personal interaction).  While not specifically a higher education conference, everything that I saw was directly applicable to my job.  The sessions covered a wide range of topics I’m interested in including web governance and management, the user experience and usability, social media, and brand management. (Here is a Google Doc of the j boye 2010 twitter stream.)

The higher ed track featured many people I know including Bob Johnson, Jay Collier, and Mike Richwalsky. I gave a condensed version of my talk on Higher Education: The Toughest Gig in all the Web. All the presentations were well received and generated good discussion throughout the conference.

I was honored to be a part of the Expert Panel Discussion with Tony Byrne, the president of Real Story Group and Barbara Schelkle, the Manager for Knowledge Sharing Systems at the United Nations Development Program. Tony stole the show with his great take on the Ten reasons why web governance is like sex.

Other highlights included:

• A 3 hour workshop with Peter Kim on Making Sense of Social Business. Peter is an expert in all things social first with his work with Forrester, and now with the Dachis Group. His approach is to think about social business strategy rather than social media strategy, an important paradigm shift applicable to higher ed. Most of the workshop explored his process for designing a social business strategy which will be very helpful in my consulting work. He also provided great analysis on when to build and when to join. Peter is an excellent speaker and this was the best social media workshop I’ve attended.
• A 3 hour workshop with Christine Pierpointon on Managing the Web: The Fundamentals of Web Operations Management. Christine has a wealth of experience and shared her approach to web operations management which includes strategy, governance, execution, and measurement.   Web management and web governance is a hot topic in higher ed and was a major theme of the conference. On a related note, I’m particularly interested in the work being done by Stephen Emmott, the Head of Web Services at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His presentation Hand in Gov is excellent and I recommend you follow his blog if you are interested in this topic.
• Thursday’s opening keynote by Eric Karjaluoto called Do You Speak Human? Eric is a great storyteller and his book Speak Human is next up on my reading list. The themes of his speech were reminiscent of “The Cluetrain Manifesto”, my all time favorite book on the web. (The idea behind the Cluetrain is that business is fundamentally human, and markets are conversations.)
• Great back to back sessions from Valeria Maltoni and Mari Luangrath. Valeria is well known in social media circles through her blog Conversation Agent. She gave a great presentation on How to connect with your customers that provided one of my favorite quotes of the conference – “content is your digital body language”. Mari is a dynamic presenter who told the story behind her business Foiled Cupcakes, where 93% of her leads have come from social media. Here is a great list of articles about how she has used social media to build her business. (I’ve got to figure out a way to get Mari to present at the higher ed conferences I’ll be attending in Chicago this year.)
• Two sessions on social media management and policy with Ethan McCarty and Deni Kasrel. Ethan is editor-in-chief of IBM’s global intranet which serves over 400,000 employees across the globe.  I’m hoping Ethan can join us at the Penn State virtual summit on June 8 that will discuss Higher Education, Social Media, and the Law.

I’d like to thank Janus Boye for including me in this great conference. I highly recommend all higher education web professionals consider attending next year.

I will be giving the opening keynote in the higher education track at next week’s J. Boye Conference in Philadelphia. Here is the abstract:

Higher education web development presents many unique challenges that make it the toughest gig in all the web.   Multiple missions, silos, consensus decision making, multiple audiences with disparate needs, corporate expectations on a not-for-profit budget, the growing expectations of the technology adept millennial students, campus politics, and an organizational structure resembling federalism all combine to create a very demanding environment.  But when approached with the right mindset, higher education is also the most rewarding gig in all the web.

This presentation will explore the culture of higher education and how it impacts web development, provide a framework for building and sustaining an effective college web presence, and offer advice and guidance for the web professional looking to make the most of a career in higher education.

When I asked Why is Higher Ed the Toughest Gig in All the Web back in January, it started a lively conversation in the blogosphere and on Twitter.  So I’d like to tap the wisdom of the crowds once again.  What advice would you give someone just starting in higher education web development?  I’ll be sharing my thoughts based on a combined 50 years expereince of college administration in my household, along with sage advice from Dan Pink, Stephen Covey, Seth Godin, Tom Friedman, Tom Peters, not to mention Henry Kissinger, Clint Eastwood, Hunter S. Thompson, and Neil Young.

I look forward to your ideas, and I hope to see many of you in person and on the backchannel at #jboye10