Monthly Archive for July, 2007

eduWeb Conference 2007
Baltimore, Maryland
July 22-24 

Michael Dame, Director of Web Communications
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

… an insider’s viewpoint of his institution’€s online communications effort after the tragic events of April 16 … Mike will provide an overview of Virginia Tech’s response …

April 16, 2007 Thirty-two students and faculty lost. Campus closed 2 days. Classes cancelled for a week. 715 media members checked in, representing 280 news organizations including international. 140 sattellite trucks in Blacksburg.

9:26 a.m: Email blast: Shooting on campus.

9:31:  Posted same message on site.

9:44:  Overhead police scanner chatter about gunshots in Norris Hall. Went into crisis mode. Prepared for increase in web traffic. Team had developed web plan for crisis in August of previous year when an escaped convict had been in the area and shot a prison official.

9:58:  Alert on home page that gunman was loose on campus.

Goals for day

• Communicate essential information. Brevity on home page. Click deeper for more information. Reduced left navigation to pertinent sections: About, Administration, maps, buildings. Information only pertinent to students, faculty, parents, media.

• Expanded server load balancing. Normally 1 server. Expanded to a second server online to support site. Second server was online in one hour.

• University created Joint Information Center (JIC): university, gov’t agencies, police, FBI, mental health agencies, etc. All could make sure accurate, correct information was getting out.

9:59: Began preparing "lite" version of home page to move to production. Design for lite home page had been prepared ahead of time, ready to go in case of crisis.

10:03: Pulled down heavy elements, flash

11:17: Launched home page lite

12:40: Posted home page statement from president. Webcast, podcast.

Communications workflow

• Campus public informaton officers (PIOs) assigned beats in JIC.  Provided information about victims, statements from university and law enforcement, updates about counseling resources.

• PIOs emailed and called in reports.

• Broadcast team recorded all conferences, edited, put MP3s online quickly.

• News updates posted as bloglike entries on front page. Details on interior pages.

• Dealing with distractions: emails, phone calls from family & friends; inundated with calls from vendors; requests for "local angle" from former media colleagues.

Late 4/16 and early on 4/17: Strategized on design and content ideas for website going forward: decided to create Memorial site.  Over next two days, mapped out new site architecture, discussed hardware/ software/server needs. Deadline to launch In Memoriam design for home page by convocation planned for 2 p.m. the next day. Direction: clear, concise, austere.  Multimedia/ web 2.0

10:33: Shut down VT news database to reduce server load.

Other things we thought about

• Use as much multimedia as possible. Web 2.0

• Students and their families first

• Choose words carefully to promote healing

• Engage the community

• Condolences blog
• Post messages received from other universities
• Live streaming Convocation

• Suspended daily VT News email

4/17 noon: New home page launched. Included information for media
2 p.m.: Launched the In Memoriam design

Virtual participation in grieving

• 35,000 messages of condolence in 72 hours. Shut this down by end of the week because of bandwidth usage.

In Memoriam website
4/19: Launched third version of website when able to release names of victims.

• Photo team was collecting many poignant photos. Put on site to randomly display.  Many photos sent from all over the world were included in photo galleries.

• Spoke not only to the grieving but also used to communicate information.  Students coming back to campus on the 23rd needed to know procedures.

• Message to the media: Please respect our students and faculty as they return to campus.

Traffic spike

• April 16: Between noon and 1 p.m., more than 160,000 visits and 35,000 page views.

• 15GB of data transferred on a normal day vs. 432GB in one day. A tremendous load on the servers, but the site never went down.

Transition back to "normal"

• University needed to provide strength and leadership in returning to normal. Determined not to let the tragedy define VT.

• Questions thought about:
  • Is the timing right to return to "normal"?
  • How do we continue to honor the victims and their families? How can the website be a catalyst for this?
  • What do the families think?
  • What do we do about the "normal" everyday news that needs to be communicated?

• How can a website help the transition?
  • Help begin the healing
  • Offer remembrance
  • Suggest rebirth — springtime photos of the campus
  • Continue putting out our tagline: "Inventing the future"
  • This meant yet another page design

Next iteration of home  page

• Incorporated quote from Nikki Giovanni: "We are the Hokies. We will prevail."

• Combined memorial and crisis communications content

• Restarted regular news and events reporting

• Springtime photos

• Resumed daily email

• Response: New site resonated well with the community. Comments let them know they were on the right path.

• Deemed a "reliable, untainted source of accurate information"

Lessons learned

• Surround yourself with (staff) who care.

• Students and families always come first 

• Offer multiple options for people to access news

• Keep it simple. Let facts and the audience tell the story (NO branding messages!)

Get started

• Be joined at the hip with IT

• Define possible scenarios and match them with the tools you have available

• Develop a lite version of your home page and test it

• Define roles and responsibilities in advance and practice them

• Have ability to leave politics at the door. No time for silos in a crisis

• Plan for your own family/situation. What if you can’t leave work for 24 hours or more?

• Surround yourself with cool, calm, collected do-ers. Proactive people.

• Expect to get very little sleep

• Don’t forget about you. Take a break when you need it.

PR rules broken

• Did not speak with "one voice" starting on the second day. Made many experts available for commentary. This aided in transparency (led to comment above that site was "reliable, untainted source for accurate information.")

• We were 100% transparent. Released information as soon as we heard it. Very open about everything.

***********************

This has been the best presentation so far. In fact, it was scheduled as the only one in its time slot so that everyone could attend. When he finished, we got to our feet, applauding; Michael Dame had tears in his eyes.

Lunch followed and when I finished I saw him sitting on the patio outside the convention area talking with a couple of the event organizers. I talked to him for just a minute. "I’m from Michigan," I  told him, and I related the story of the coverup of a student rape and murder at EMU (which news is all over the country), the subsequent firings and what a stark contrast it’s been to how (a much larger) crisis was handled at VT. He was realistic in his assessment: These are two ends of the spectrum, he said. Hopefully most colleges will fall in the middle in their preparedness and willingness to respond.

I think you’d have to be really put to the test to know.

eduWeb Conference 2007
Baltimore, Maryland
July 22-24 

Ross Kramer
Listrak

With RSS — Really Simple Sydication — you can reach the audience that wants to hear your message.Users susbscribe to what they care about. RSS is Tivo for the web.

The internet is evolving to be usercentric. (I’d say it is usercentric. And the pool of users who are taking advantage is what’s evolving, growing)

What you can do to take advantage of this

• Create content. Who is your new user? What are they demanding?  Blogs. Notes from depts. Open forums for students to talk about different.subjects.

• Make it searchable. Make sure you have a robust search on your site.  (We do — Google) Tag clouds are one new way. When someone searches, give them option to save their search.

• Enable RSS. With RSS you don’t have to know their name. They gave you the key word they care about. Now you can generate content that’s geared to what they care about. This should direct your publishing efforts. feed it constantly. No other technology gives you this. and it’s free. But if you don’t have the content it’s useless.

• Listen. Adapt your content according to what users want. It’s key to success.

Tool sets to use to track  usage/interest

• Feedburner. Collects data for you.

• Google Analytics will analyze anything, and I’m barely kidding. More reports than you can use! (It’s free, too.)

• Server log files on what key words people are subscribing to.

People use RSS even though they don’t know it: Social networks. My Yahoo, etc.

*********************

Nothing here that I’m not aware of. I do feel that Ross might have spent a little more time on collecting and reading RSS feeds, other than to give the example of My Yahoo (which enables users to configure their home page with whatever content interests them.) Afterall, if you’re going to collect content, you need a place to aggregate it for you for consumption and I got the feeling that the folks asking questions had little or no knowledge of  RSS.  A lot of people nowadays capture feeds using Google Reader. I use NewsGator. Etc….

 

eduWeb Conference 2007
Baltimore, Maryland
July 22-24 

Yeah, I know. It’s Monday night and I’m just now posting from yesterday afternoon. Lame.

I didn’t really plan on live blogging — I can’t type fast enough or summarize that well on the fly … plus I was (avoidably and undeniably) late for the conference start and I’d left my laptop in my room … Anyhow enough excuses. Let’s dive in.

Sunday Keynote
Marketing and the Web: Trends and Tribulations in Communication
Bob Johnson, Bob Johnson Consulting

"Tomorrow is emerging today as Wikipedia, blogs and social networks transform online marketing communications … We’ll review innovative examples of what’s already happening today at colleges and universities …

• You can’t control the message that gets out there about your institution. Message control is dead. Amen! I learned that big time at  my last job and they’ve learned it the hard way. Try as you might to control the messaging that’s out there, students and others are putting real content out there for the world to see. You can’t stop it, so embrace it; deal with it.  Example: Check out MSU on Wikipedia. Michigan State University Student Riot. You can bet the PR department didn’t put that out there. But it’s available for all to read.

• Gerry McGovern says "The best websites are useful and ugly." Hmmm. Something to think about there. Look at Wikipedia, one of the top 10 site in the US today. Practically no design. Pure content. Easy to use. And full of the information you’re looking for.

• Content trumps design. YEAH! Of course, in your heart you know this. Everyone does. But does anyone act as if this is so?  I’ve been hearing for the last 3 years that content people are going to have the most secure jobs in the world … anytime now … c’mon, people — wake up!  You know it’s true!

• Blogging is where it’s at. WTF! I’ve been on that bandwagon for 5 years now. Lots of folks here are blogging at their institutions, yet they’re saying that only about 25% of universities are doing it. Presidents blogging? Bob Johnson says only about 15 in the country are doing it. SO — what I want to learn here over the next 3 days is this: What practical steps do we need to take to get this rolling at DU? (And of course, you know, at the edge, where I read, Flow is the new buzz word. And that’s something beyond bloggging, beyond RSS, beyond social networking apps — it’s what brings all that together. But save me! Let’s get a couple of these things working for us first!)