Mark Greenfield

I’ve been reading numerous articles lately on how to leverage the power of social computing to bring marketing and public relations into the 21st century. I recently came across The Future of Communications - A Manifesto for Integrating Social Media into Marketing. Reminiscent of Cluetrain, my favorites excerpts include:

• Engage or Die
• Monologue has given way to dialogue
• It is about putting the “public” back in public relations
• Listening is marketing
• Social media is about speaking with, not “to” or “at” people

I would also recommend reading The Seven Principles of Community Building. It’s an excellent overview on how and why to build community. The author’s new book Now is Gone is due to be released in a couple of weeks

A common refrain at HighEdWebDev2007 and other conferences I’ve attended recently has been the frustration many of us feel when trying to convince management that “radical transparency” is a good idea, that allowing students to blog without editorial oversight about what it’s really like to attend our institutions won’t be the end of civilization as we know it.

In Rochester, my colleague Jim Leous from Penn State provided more ammunition for making our point. The cover story in the April 2007 edition of Wired magazine was called The See-Through CEO and provided great examples of how the business world is coming to understand the power of the read/write web. As the inside cover says - “smart companies are sharing secrets with rivals, blogging about products in their pipeline, and even admitting their failures.” Here are some more outtakes from the article:

• Not long ago, the only public statements a company ever made were professionally written press releases and the rare, stage-managed speech by the CEO. Now firms spill information in torrents, posting internal memos and strategy goals, letting everyone from the top dog to shop-floor workers blog publicly about what their firm is doing right - and wrong.
• Power comes not from your Rolodex but from how many bloggers link to you.
• Transparency is a judo move. Your customers are going to poke around in your business anyway, and your workers are going to blab about internal info - so why not make it work for you by turning everyone into a partner in the process and inviting them to do so?
• A generation has grown up blogging, posting a daily phonecam picture on Flickr and listing its geographic position in real time on Dodgeball and Google Maps. For them, authenticity comes from online exposure. It’s hard to trust anyone who doesn’t list their dreams and fears on Facebook.
• Google is not a search engine. Google is a reputation-management system.
• A single Google search determines more about how (companies) are perceived than a multimillion-dollar ad campaign.

It’s time higher education embraced radical transparency. Our communications goal should be dialogue, not monologue. Research has shown that the more you let your constituents talk amongst themselves, the more likely they are to listen to you. They will feel their voices are being heard which builds trust which in turn builds relationships.

I’ve had many people looking for more information on Pecha Kucha after using it for my presentation at HighEdWebDev 2007. A Pecha Kucha slide show consists of 20 slides for exactly 20 seconds each for a total time of 6:40. For more information see:

• Pecha Kucha: Get to the PowerPoint in 20 Slides Then Sit the Hell Down
• Pecha Kucha blog post from Seth Godin
• pecha-kucha.org

I recommend everyone experiment with this presentation style. The restrictions actually force you to be very creative in structuring your presentation. (Good exercise for the right brain!) More importantly, it makes you focus on the most important points. There simply isn’t time to stray off topic. And for those of you involved with writing for the web, I can think of no better exercise for writing concisely.

I’d like to see expanded use of Pecha Kucha at the next HighEdWebDev conference. Maybe a Pecha Kucha Night, or an hour set aside simultaneously in each track. Imagine the value in seeing 6-8 rapid fire presentations in an hour.

I would like to thank everyone for their participation and feedback at HighEdWebDev 2007. I had many requests for both the PowerPoint slides and the script for the presentation which are listed below. Time permitting, I will add audio to the PowerPoint and make that available as well.

• PowerPoint Presentation (PPT 4 MB)
• Presentation Script (PDF 35 KB)

I’ll be making the short drive down the Thruway to Rochester today for HighEdWebDev 2007

I would recommend that anyone attending my presentation on Tuesday look at my posts for the conference which can be found at markagreenfield.com/category/highedwebflat. I have also created a page for the site which can be found at markagreenfield.com/presentations/highedwebdev2007

After 6:40 seconds for my formal presentation, the rest of the session will be spent in discussion and dialog. Possible discussion topics include:

• What will our jobs look like 5 years from now? 10 years from now?
• How do you disaggregate the functions of the web team?
• What functions are most likely to be outsourced?
• Have you ever outsourced work? to a free agent? overseas?
• How do you measure the ROI of the web?
• Do you have a business plan?

If you have any other topics feel free to post a comment to this blog. See you in Rochester.

Stephen Covey is best known for his bestselling book The 7 habits of Highly Effective People. Over the years I have given numerous presentations on how to incorporate the 7 habits into customer service. For those of you not familiar with the book, here are the 7 habits:

1. Be Proactive
2. Begin with the end in mind
3. Put first things first
4. Think Win-Win
5. Seek first to understand, then to be understood
6. Synergize
7. Sharpen the saw

I have numerous ideas about how these habits can create the framework for highly effective web teams. Stay tuned, I can see a presentation at a future HighEdWebDev conference. For now, I’d like to focus on just a couple of ideas.

Habit One is “Be Proactive”. Our basic nature is to act, not to be acted upon. Effective web teams are proactive. They take the initiative. They are Web Evangelists. The are constant and relentless in advocating for the web.

Habit Three is “Put First Things First”. The idea is that you shouldn’t prioritize your schedule, you should schedule your priorities. As I mentioned in a previous post, effective web teams will focus their energy on projects that provide true value to their institutions. As the Pareto Principle states, 80% of the results flow from 20% of the activities. And for those of you familiar with Covey’s work, the most effective web teams spend as much time as possible in Quadrant II.

In 2004, Covey published The 8th Habit - from Effectiveness to Greatness. In the beginning of the book Covey chronicles the move from the Agriculture Age to the Industrial Age to the current Information Age to the coming Age of Wisdom. The transition to each new age brought about a dramatic downsizing of the existing workforce. He asks the question “Do you believe the Knowledge Worker Age will eventually bring about the downsizing of up to 90% of the Industrial Age workforce?

Covey believes it will. How about you?

For anyone thinking about the career skills that will be required to thrive in this era of globalisation I highly recommend reading “A Whole New Mind” by Dan Pink. Here is a description of the book taken from Dan’s web site:

Lawyers. Accountants. Radiologists. Software engineers. That’s what our parents encouraged us to become when we grew up. But Mom and Dad were wrong. The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind. The era of “left brain” dominance, and the Information Age that it engendered, are giving way to a new world in which “right brain” qualities-inventiveness, empathy, meaning-predominate. That’s the argument at the center of this provocative and original book, which uses the two sides of our brains as a metaphor for understanding the contours of our times.

More from the book’s introduction:

“The book describes a seismic - though as yet undetected - shift now underway in much of the advanced world. We are moving from an economy and a society built on the logical, linear, computerlike capabilities of the Information Age to an economy and society built on the inventive, empathic, bog-picture capabilities of what’s rising in its place, the Conceptual Age.”

Pink describes two ways of thinking. The first is L-Directed thinking, exemplified by computer programmers, who are comfortable with logical, sequential, computer like reasoning. R-Directed thinking is characteristic of the right side of the brain - simultaneous, metaphorical, aesthetic, contextual and synthetic. Pink argues that while the Information Age clearly valued L-Directed thinking, the Conceptual Age will be driven by R-Directed thinking. Dependency and the left side of the brain will no longer be sufficient - we need a Whole New Mind.

Another quote from the book:

“The outsourcing of routine software work is putting a new premium on software engineers with high-concept abilities.”

Certainly food for thought for web professionals.

“There is no right way to do the wrong thing”

- Stephen Covey

All web sites must deliver value. This includes higher ed web sites. As higher education gets flattened, a valuable strategy will be to focus on the return on investment (ROI) that the web provides our institutions.

Measuring value can be a challenge and takes time and effort. Unfortunately you can’t measure ROI with a simple equation. It requires a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis and is often more art than science. I know many web professionals who say they don’t have the time for evaluation because they are just too busy, but regardless of how busy you are, this is time well spent. All of us should be able to quickly articulate the value our sites provide.

Focusing on ROI has many benefits. First, it can be used as the basis for a formal evaluation process for prioritizing projects. Too often, ad hoc decisions are made without a formal structure and process, resulting in an inefficient use of resources. Determining ROI prior to working on a project also sets expectations and helps determine if a project was successful. ROI also brings accountability into the equation by holding people responsible for the success or failure of a given project. Finally, web teams that use ROI are more valued and taken more seriously by management.

Recently we have been using our project management/work order request system to track the exact time we spend on both new projects and the maintenance of existing sites and applications. This allows us to better understand the ROI of each site and application we create. I was always able to provide fairly accurate guesstimates, but because we are now providing real numbers on the resources allocated to each project, our efforts are taken more seriously by management.

One of the first things that someone does when thinking about starting a new business is create a business plan. When I started with the Provost’s Office back in 2001 (as Director of Web Services for Enrollment and Planning), I was asked to do just that. This was a newly created position so I was an office of one, with no staff and no budget. In the business plan I outlined the need for a professional web presence, how this goal would be reached, budget and staffing needs, a web management structure and a formal process for requesting web projects.

The business plan has proven to be valuable over the years. A key point was a goal to keep staffing levels where all legitimate requests can be handled in a reasonable amount of time. Despite many organizational changes over the past 6 years, I have grown to the point where I am now an official campus department with my own budget line. We have four full time staff members along with grad assistants and student assistants and a decent-sized operating budget.

A key to this growth is a focus on ROI. While we still don’t have the resources to do everything that everyone wants, we have been able to focus on the projects and initiatives that provide the most value (most of the time ) The success of our projects has helped senior leadership see the value of the web in reaching organizational goals and justified additional investment.

So, do you have a business plan? If not, I would recommend creating one. You will find it a valuable exercise.

I came across this timely post on the Chronicle’s Wired Campus Blog:

More Colleges Outsource Information-Technology Services