Trending Upward

I’m not sure how to even start this post. I hate using the term Web 2.0 because it’s come to mean *anything* and therefore not really mean anything. This all isn’t new, but if you think about it, higher education websites are just starting to scratch the surface using blogs, wikis, Twitter, Facebook, Second Life, and others.

How do you know it’s working? How do you know your users/students/etc are finding this stuff useful?

Obviously different types of higher education websites might use Web 2.0 differently. For smaller schools, it might be a little easier (or not!) as there may be one website for all aspects of the higher education experience. For larger schools, however, each department, each school, each athletic team, each *course* may have different websites. (Yikes!) So how can each of those websites use Web 2.0? Let’s look at a couple ways:

1. The helpdesk can use RSS to update students, faculty, and staff of any IT alerts and issues.
2. Admissions can use Twitter to announce upcoming application and registration deadlines, and more.
3. Instructors, advisers, and admissions can create blogs to keep their students and prospects involved.

This list could go on and on. The question becomes, however, how do you know any of it is useful for your users/students/faculty/etc.?

First, of course, create some goals for your user of these technologies and applications. Stop rolling your eyes, just do it! I guarantee you’ll thank me later.

So how do we create goals for something we’ve never used before? Remember, goals aren’t set in stone. Put *something* down. Anything.

Facilitation goals. These might be the most important. If you are going to use Twitter, blogs, Facebook, any type of collaboration tool, then *use* it. Make a goal that states how many times you’ll post or update in a day/week/month and make sure you meet that goal. I’m not suggesting that the posts or updates be forced, however there must be fresh content or it shouldn’t be done!

Analytics goals. Now let’s talk about usage. How do we know if people are actually using this stuff? Let’s put some goals down. How about something like these:

1. Helpdesk and RSS: RSS subscriber count to increase by 2% monthly. Good start! Now, how do you measure that? How about using Feedburner?
2. Admissions and Twitter: Increase our twitter friend count by 2% monthly. Ok, but let’s go further with this one. How about tracking the URLs that you post for your announcements? Usually in Twitter you use the “tiny URLs” to save space. You could also use “vanity URLs” to do the same and keep your branded URL. But, either of these URLs can be tracked so you can see how many of those Twitter *friends* are actually clicking through and taking some action.
3. Instructors/advisors/admissions and Blogs: Increase visit rate by 5% monthly. Increase RSS subscriber count by 1% monthly. That was too easy. If your instructors, advisers, admissions, or anybody else is running a blog, there should be many well-defined goals and strategy around that. Let’s talk about that more in-depth in a later post.

The bottom line is that the goals don’t have to be complex or lofty. Start small … but put something down. Why? Don’t you want to know if your users/students/faculty are actually engaged in what you have to say?

If you’re posting registration deadlines on Twitter and nobody is clicking-through, don’t you want to know so you can change your strategy? Maybe just slightly changing your wording helps. Maybe posting more relevant information with *no* link will help the click-through-rate of the information you *do* post with a link. But, again, you won’t know any of this unless you’re using some kind of analytics.

It all goes back to your users and students. *They* need to find these things useful. How about finding out if they do!

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