MMP10: This Is Not a Brand

[Intro Music]

Announcer: You’re listening to one in a series of podcasts from the 2009 HighEdWeb Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Doug Gapinski:� Hey everybody.� How are you doing?� Welcome.� Thank you for coming to our session.� The title of our presentation today is "This Is Not a Brand."� The subtitle is "Using the Web to Better Present Your Institutional Brand."� I am going to introduce Patricia and she's going to introduce me. So Patricia, in addition to being the executive director for communications and strategic initiatives at Mount Holyoke College, is a nationally recognized expert in her education marketing and branding.� She has published numerous articles.� She is an adjunct faculty member for the theater department at Holyoke.� So I expect a high degree of drama from her.

Patricia Vandenberg: OK, I'll see what I can do.

Doug Gapinski:� And I will jokingly say that the reason I lined up with Patricia is I have a thing for Dutch girls from Grand Rapids.� My wife is a Dutch girl from Dutch Rapids as is Patricia.

Patricia Vandenberg:� It's true.� And I'm so pleased to have been chosen.� Actually Doug and I met for the first time last night.� But I agreed to present with him when he called.� Actually I was delighted that he called because I had done work with mStoner prior to Doug's coming on.

But I had heard that they had a great new creative director.� He has been with mStoner for 2-1/2 years.� And I looked at some of the work that they've done under his auspices, which I really appreciated. �And I also know that Doug will bring something to the workshop that I can't.

I did branding at UMass Amherst.� And then I've done branding at Mount Holyoke.� And I know a lot about the field and I've met many people in the field.� But Doug has actually worked with a wider array of universities and colleges, over 30 now.� And he has done tiny colleges, major universities, privates, publics, et cetera.

So between the two of us, what we hope that we can do with you today and for you today is to give you some sense of how we, and I'm speaking for myself now, from the marketing need you.� Those of you who are techno wizards, I always said any institution I join I immediately try to make friends with those who can make my dreams and seams become reality.� And I also know how much I appreciate it when the people from IT are able to say to me, "At a recent conference I saw this that might help us field our branding."� So I have taken many of the ideas from my IT people and vice versa.

By the way, are we standing in front of our slides?� Can you see over us?� Do we need to move forward?� Is that it?� Right.� We don't want to upstage.� OK.

Doug Gapinski:� So today the title of this presentation was actually inspired by an experience that I had with a private institution in Chicago.� The artwork and the title of it are actually based on a painting by French surrealist Rene Magritte.� And the title of the work was "The Treachery of Images" which you can see here.

The caption that he wrote on the painting is "This is not a Pipe", the joke being of course that it's not a pipe; it's a painting of a pipe.� Back in the early days of surrealist painting, this was considered one of the funniest and most incendiary pieces in the art world at the time.

So I'm using that as a framework for talking about what a brand is.� Branding is a word that gets tossed around in higher ed a lot.� It often gets conflated with things like marketing platforms or advertising messages.� And sometimes it gets conflated with pieces that are much simpler.

This experience that I had with this private institution in Chicago was we were engaging with this university for a website re-launch.� And we came out to meet with the marketing team.� And they said they wanted to make sure that our brand is really carried well on the new website.

And so what we said, "But what exactly do you mean by that?"� And they said, "Well, we want to make sure that the green is prominently displayed."� And I said, "Well, the green isn't exactly your brand.� It's just a piece of your brand."� But I think that that's a pretty good illustration of how the pieces sometimes get confused with the whole.

Patricia is going to talk a little bit more about what a brand is.

Patricia Vandenberg:� So I think the simplest way actually for all of us to think about a brand for our institutions is, what is it that is special about this institution to our various constituencies?� And what is it that will add value that they are looking for and will make them understand whether or not they should choose us.� So what's special about us and what do we have that will add value to our potential constituencies?

Now interestingly the reason that we're all here is that within the past decade but even more so within the past five years, the Web has become the primary force for building a brand in the world.� And so what we're here to do is explore some of the ways that one can build what is special about one's institution while meeting the needs of the users of the Web.

Doug Gapinski:� So why is the Web the brand medium and the way to deliver your messages?� The first thing is that it is increasingly becoming a place for authentic content, a place where I can not only see what the experts think about an institution but from my perspective I can go and see what other 17-year-olds are saying about the place.

The Web is experience-oriented.� So we can use rich media in the form of video or audio or interactive pieces or storytelling devices.� Storytelling is one of the best ways to carry ideas about branding on the Web.

The third thing is effective distribution.� So what I mean by that is oftentimes when you think about creating content for the Web, you're talking about a little bit more of an investment on the front end.� But you don't have to pay recurring printing costs.

And then the fourth thing is it's convenient.� In a little bit we're going to look at this piece that Patricia's team at Mount Holyoke did for parents that basically provides content in different languages for parents to watch.� And she'll show you a sample of two students speaking in Chinese, two Chinese parents about what their experience has been like.

When you think about somebody halfway across the world thinking about sending their daughter to a liberal arts college in the United States, it is so convenient for them to be able to use the Web as a medium to explore what the place is all about.

Patricia Vandenberg:� So as you know, people come to the Web not to hear us promote our stuff but actually to do a job for themselves.� And the research shows that there are specific questions that students who come to our websites have.� They want to know what it's like to be at your institution.� I'm going to move further over here.� What can I do?� Sit down?� You're OK?� All right.� What is it like to be at your institution?� They want to know what can your institution do for me.� And they want to know what other people think of your institution and my institution.

So what Doug and I are going to do for the rest of our few minutes together is I'm going to do a little case study on how we think about answering these questions at Mount Holyoke while letting them know what we think is special about Mount Holyoke.� Actually not just what we think but we know they value about what is special about Mount Holyoke.� And then Doug is going to show you a range of ideas from other schools who have implemented clever ways of answering these questions while still promoting their brand and what's special.

So what is it like to be at Mount Holyoke College?� We've done a lot of research about what our alums, what people who are affiliated with the college think is special about it.� And we've done a lot of research about what prospective students and their parents are looking for.� And the intersections of those two things are these three themes which we repeat over and over, visually, orally, in words, et cetera.

So first of all, Mount Holyoke is special because it's one of the premiere liberal arts colleges in the world and in the country.� It is unusual because of all of the national liberal arts colleges, it is unusually international and diverse.� We have around 20% international students.� And one in three students on our campus is either an international student or a domestic student of color.� And many of our students are also persons of color.

So we have an extremely diverse not just in terms of ethnicity but social class and all sorts of things except for gender.� We have only women.� We are the oldest women's college in the world, founded in 1837.� And that is one of the things that make us very special.

We know, however, that most people are not interested in single-sex education.� But we also know that high-achieving women and their families are interested in a legacy of women leaders.� Mount Holyoke has educated women who had gone on to lead in every field imaginable.� So that is one of the things we need to convey on our website.

So we'll go to the website now.� And let me just show you a few things.� We think about it really for every page but this is the homepage.� And on the homepage we have a series of photographs which convey that we are venerable, state-of-the-art, that women are leaders and that we have international ties.� So visually we try to convey these things.

I want to show you our About page.� We go to About because we know from our analytics that many, many people who go to the homepage then go to the About page.� And on our About page we put what Doug calls our avatars.� We put 10 brilliant reasons for choosing Mount Holyoke.� And it's high-achieving young alums who are going on and doing amazing things.

So you see people and you can tell immediately they're from all sorts of backgrounds.� And they are being doctors.� They're on Wall Street.� They are being ambassadors.� This woman was actually part of the international division of Mexico's Ministry of Energy.� So they are breaking down boundaries.� And we actually embed these things throughout our website.

I want to then show you the virtual tours.� I'm sure you're aware that many, many people, perspectives and appearance, head straight to the virtual tour when they come to your site.

So what we are trying to do is answer the question what it's like to be there and what are the benefits that I can get from it.� So we start, again, by answering that question but giving it a context.� So we put Mount Holyoke on a global map, implying that we are not just regional but we are thinking about the world and you will meet the world if you come here.� So we have the map.� And then you can zoom in to see exactly where we're located in the United States, in New England, et cetera.

In terms of answering the question what is it like to be there, we have our Living Here section.� And in the Living Here section, we have embedded some rich media and again trying to reinforce that when you live here, you are looking at...

[Video Start]

Speaker 1:� When I was looking at the map of the area around south back in Bulgaria, I drew a conclusion for myself.� I'm going to spend the next four years in a very, very small place.� And it might be a bit of a challenge because I'm coming from a big city on the coast and entertainment is low in the place.� But I was ready to make the tradeoff.

And when I came here to Mount Holyoke, only for the first week it became clear to me how wrong I was because Mount Holyoke is a small place but only physically.� And I was so overwhelmed with all the different cultures and perspectives that I was immersed in that I felt like I was traveling all over the world although I was stationed in a little town.

[Video End]

Patricia Vandenberg:� We are a tiny New England town.� So to try to get across the accurate impression that we are very cosmopolitan is important.� So women being leaders, doing all sorts of world-class stuff.

[Video Start]

Speaker 2:� I like to hang out with my friends, go up to the barn, play with the horses.

Speaker 3:� The network is responsible for planning all the social events on campus, Las Vegas Nights, Spring Weekend.

[Video End]

Patricia Vandenberg: So creating a sense of energy, of community, of excellence in liberal arts but also highly diverse and for women where they can find their place and explore their intellectual passions.� They of course are extremely interested students who come about the academic enterprise.� So we have a learning section.� And here we are trying to show again that it is going to be a rigorous education, that you are going to get lots of faculty attention.� And we use 30-second videos to try to convey this.

[Video Start]

Speaker 4:� OK.� My thesis is we are trying a very big laser and we are shocking various minerals.� Basically we're simulating the environment experienced in the very short time space when a meteorite is ejected from its source planet.

Speaker 5:� And of course NASA is very interested in this.� This research purpose is funded by about five different NASA grants right now, most of them having to do with Mars but some of them having to do with broader applications around the cosmos.� So US project OnShock is one of them.� So that's one of the reasons why Eli and this other student here are going to Errol Rostein are going to Belgium this summer.� I'm going to go wherever interest takes me.

[Video End]

Patricia Vandenberg:� In the social sciences or throughout, we show women excelling obviously, being pushed, working with their faculty but also the global aspect of it.

[Video Start]

Speaker 6:� I'm Penny Hill, I'm a professor of politics.� This is a seminar in globalization and its discontents. �And in fact my classroom really is a global classroom.� Half of the students in the group are from other parts of the world, largely the third world, a woman from Afghanistan, from Tibet, from China, Sri Lanka, Ghana, Hungary, Korea, Japan.� It's really quite a crowd.� And so when we talk about globalization, this is a group that knows what it's talking about.

[Video End]

Patricia Vandenberg:� So another thing that students are asking is "What can you do for me?"� And specifically we know that serious students, which is the kind of student that we need to attract at Mount Holyoke College, look deeply into academic websites.

So about a year ago we decided that we needed to make our academic website more robust, do a better job telling what is special about Mount Holyoke.� And we asked our IT people to work with our designers and come up with a template that would illustrate in many different ways what was special about the academic experience at Mount Holyoke.

We know that they are looking for majors and minors.� "Do you have my major?"� They are looking for academic rigor and they are looking for whether they can get a job after they're done.� So these are things that we were trying to promote on our academic website.

So here I'm going to show you chemistry.� We have 40 of our 48 majors done.� And this is the template that our IT and design people came up with.� And so we have on all of the academic sites now a large photograph.� We have Meet the Faculty.� And you go in and you find out it's rotating.� And you find about the faculty, about their research, what they're interested in.

Then other through lines, throughout all of the templates for academics, they're very navigable and easy to search because they are the same but Research and Internships, Learning Abroad, Research Guides.

And so in every instance when they go to the academic site, that is what they find.� So again, as I said, it's easier for them to navigate.� And we are very consciously promoting what is special.� And we're doing it in a way that the academic sites themselves, I mean the academic programs themselves would not frankly because, well, you know about the motley assortment of things that one gets.

Doug Gapinski:� I think the thing that I love and I think Patricia is about to pull up the theater department site about the way Mount Holyoke is answering that question of� "What can the college do for me?", their perspective student, is that they're answering that on 40 out of 48 of the major pages.� So they're saying, "Here you're going to have research opportunities.� You're going to have internship opportunities.� You're going to have travel abroad opportunities."

And they're also using rich media, video and audio, to better describe that experience and how those things are going to play out over the course of their education.

Patricia Vandenberg:� So as you see, we have the internships and research, the learning abroad, again.� And we are just trying to reinforce on every subpage they go to the value of choosing Mount Holyoke for the right kind of student.

The next thing that I want to show you, actually I think we need to go back here, what other people think of your institution.� And so obviously now all of us are dealing with social media.� And by the way, we were not terribly on top of this.

There were Mount Holyoke Facebook sites.� We did use it for admitted students but we didn't have our own official Facebook site until June.� There were several rogue Facebook sites that were not being tended appropriately.� And we couldn't find the owners of them.� And so we decided, OK, we're just going to launch our own and we're going to try to attract people to it by making it more interesting, more vital, more lively.

And so we have about 2500 people who follow us now and they chose to on their own.� And you see that here again we're trying to build the brand by having the upper left hand corner photograph and then right here the Mount Holyoke, a premiere research liberal arts college for women is renowned for its academic rigor and internationalism.

So what we do every day we have someone in the news and events who is responsible for this.� She checks this seven days a week.� And five days a week she puts new things up.� Often they have to do with news but not necessarily.� So for instance, Mount Holyoke College on this anniversary of the attacks of New York World Trade Center.� We paused to remember those who are lost.� How are you observing the day and where were you on that day?� And so then we get many, many comments.� And people coming back to the site and sharing that experience again.

Other sorts of things that we post, Mount Holyoke College, the Boston Globe has named the MHC Art Museum as one of the best college museums in New England.� But instead of stopping at that, we say, "What's your favorite thing about our art museum?"� And we get alums from all over the world writing in and saying, "I love this, I love this, I love this."

So it is a way to build a community.� And one of the things that we hope and actually we are finding to be true is that when prospectives or their parents or other people come to our Facebook site, they really get a sense of the community, of the commitment to the college, of the intellectual curiosity, of the quality of education that one can get at the college.

We also are working hard on our Twitter site.� We started it in June 02.� We have over 1000 people following us now.� And what we do here is we not only put our own tweets out there but we re-tweet the tweets that are responses to them.

And, Doug, I think you particularly that.� Everyone does that right?

Doug Gapinski: �Yeah. �I think the two things that I love about how Mount Holyoke is handling Facebook and Twitter, they're trying to generate a dialogue about MHC with current students, with alumni, even with prospective students.

And they're doing that particularly well with the questions they post.� It's not uncommon to see these epic threads on their Facebook page that have 36 thumbs up, 15 or 20 responses.� And it's simply because they're asking questions instead of just posting essentially newsfeeds.� So it's an invitation for you to participate daily and talk about the MHC brand and talk about the kind of experience that you had there.

The lovely thing about the Twitter feed, too, increasingly institutions are starting to do different things with Twitter.� I love the way that Mount Holyoke mixes the institutional newsfeed daily with the re-tweets of what alumni are saying.� So when alumni come to follow them, they follow the alumni.� And when the alumni mention Mount Holyoke, they re-tweet it.� So their channel is essentially a collection of the institutional voice and what everybody else is saying about Mount Holyoke.

So again there's this idea of a two-way street, of a dialogue about the Mount Holyoke brand.� And you're using the voices of all the people that graduated there as a way of illustrating the brand.� But they also do a really good job of the institutional references as well.� And I don't think you want to ignore that.

Patricia Vandenberg:� By the way, one can wonder well how much time does it take to do all of this because obviously all of our offices are trying to juggle too many things.� And because we assigned this to news and events people, actually two people are responsible for feeding it, and they are writing the news releases anyway.� They're doing the calendar on the special events and things like that.

And so they are just repurposing things that we are doing already.� And they said that what's so fabulous is that now they feed each other.� So for instance, we tweet something and many more people go to our news and events and read what's there than would have done so before.� So it builds on itself on a very positive way.

So one of the things that we said that we would do in this session is to help you think about ways of evaluating whether in fact you are promoting your brand effectively on the Web.� And one of the best ways is to simply ask yourself the question "Are we answering what's it like to be there, what's in it for me and what are other people saying?" in ways that help people understand what's special about your institution.

But another way that you can use the Web in order to just really get right down to it in terms of figuring out what people think of your institution now and whether your messages are getting through is use SurveyMonkey, which probably you're all familiar with.� SurveyMonkey is a free tool for doing surveys online.

And so for instance, since we knew what huge traffic we get to our virtual tour and we had done the virtual tour originally about four years ago, we do update it.� But we thought is it actually saying what we want it to say?� Are people getting the impressions that we want them to get from our virtual tour?� And if not, what do we need to do to change it?

So we went to our applicant pool.� And Mount Holyoke buys names from the college board.� So we have tens of thousands of names.� And they don't necessarily know about us but we know we want them because they have high SATs and other things.

So here you can see that there are just a few people at the top who are very familiar with Mount Holyoke, here somewhat familiar, somewhat unfamiliar and not familiar at all.� So we know we're dealing with a lot of people who really don't know a lot about our college.

So what we did then is we asked them before they looked at the virtual tour.� And of course we offer iPods or something glamorous so that they'll take the survey.� We asked them a range of things, some of them having to do with our brand but other things having to do just with things that we know would be of interest to them and that would predispose them to liking Mount Holyoke.

So it is I'd like to visit, Mount Holyoke develops women leaders.� Mount Holyoke is known for strong academics.� I would have access to the richness of the larger five college communities.� I would get a great deal of personal attention.� Mount Holyoke's name is prestigious.� Admission is very selective.

Mount Holyoke has a diverse community.� Students are a lot of fun.� One of the things we knew from research is that people thought Mount Holyoke was a really good academic school but none of the students had any fun. �So we've been working on making it look like it is fun and hopefully it is fun as well.

MHC provides an excellent career preparation.� MHC would be a good investment.� The facilities are up-to-date.� I would get a distinctly global education there.� I would fit in there.� Students are closely mentored by faculty.� The faculty is outstanding.� And the quality of majors I'm interested in is excellent.

The blue here, people agreed with this to begin with, which isn't too bad.� So we have OK.� The red is I Disagree but the green is I Don't Know.� So many people really didn't know a lot about us.

Then we asked them to look at our virtual tour for 10 minutes and fill out that same survey again.� And the results were very different in a very positive way.� So the blue shows that in fact after they had seen the virtual tour, all of these things that we hoped they could say yes to got considerably bigger.

This one, Mount Holyoke's name is prestigious, apparently there we didn't make a lot of progress because some people are saying no after they see it.� So we're going to look at that some more.� But very few people don't feel that they don't know anymore.� So they obviously gained a lot of information.

So before I turn it back to Doug, you need to help me because I forgot to show them the videos on admissions that I want to show them, the international.� Can we get back there?

Doug Gapinski:� Yeah.

Patricia Vandenberg:� I need my techno wizard, I have to tell you.� So one of the things that I'm really excited about that we have just done that I wanted to show you is, as Doug said, we have a lot of international students.� We want even more international students.

And we talk to our students and they said, "Well, one of the barriers is that our parents don't want us to go that far away.� They don't know what a liberal arts education is.� They don't know why you would go to a women's college.� And they can't read English. So when they go to the website, they can't read it."� So what we decided is the best way we could help them would be to have them talk to each other in their native languages and give a little bit of background about the school.

So here even if you just go to the page, we are going to be doing 17 of them.� We haven't gotten them all done yet.� But you see a bunch of women who are obviously from a lot of different backgrounds.� The languages are not even romance languages necessarily.� And then they are translated into English.

I'm going to play this little bit of the Chinese one.� And you'll see that it's not just the student talking but we used the opportunity to show various aspects of the campus while they're talking that reinforced the brand and the value of affiliating with Mount Holyoke.

[Video Start]

Speaker 7: �[Chinese 28:18]

Patricia Vandenberg:� Hello, I'm a senior majoring in economics.� I'm a junior.� Perhaps most people can find and recognize large universities with the Ivy brand but are not aware of the advantage of a liberal arts college, what is liberal arts education.

Speaker 7:� [Chinese 28:27]

Patricia Vandenberg:� Actually, the liberal arts education has a lot of advantages over those big universities.� Sure they say all the right things, that's great.� But they say it in the language that their parents can't understand.� And so we are helping.� We'll see, we haven't tested it yet, that this will help us get parents who are reluctant to be willing to let their daughters go across oceans and come to South Hadley, Massachusetts.

Speaker 7:� [Chinese 28:11]

[Video End]

Doug Gapinski:� The really artful thing about this to me is that not only does it help answer the question of what's special and highlight this sort of global piece, it's also really getting students to talk about what the university can do for other students.� So it effectively covers a couple of bases in terms of the brand

Patricia Vandenberg:� One more thing.� You noticed all of our background is yellow?� The Mount Holyoke color is blue.� And we tested this all with a blue background.� We tested it with yellow.� We tested it with a tasteful green.� And lo and behold, what we found is that prospective students have no affinity for the Mount Holyoke blue.� They thought it made it seem cold and unwelcoming whereas this gold yellow made them think that it was a warm community where they would be welcome.

And so then our alums were up in arms saying, "What happened to the Mount Holyoke blue?"� So we put it on the Alumni Association page because they have affinity for it after they've been there but not before hence.� So as Doug said, colors are symbol but only if it means something to you in relationship with the college already.

Doug Gapinski:� With so many universities using blue as their color, it makes you wonder if they tested it.

So the first part of this sort of focused on evaluating your brand in terms of how well does it answer big questions for prospectives.� The second part of the presentation is sort of an overview or more topical guidance to a bunch of different kinds of institutions.� And what I would encourage you to do is think about how well your institution websites cover your brand and key areas.

So obviously, and I do want to say this, this isn't meant to be an mStoner portfolio review.� So what I did was I took some of our work.� And I also took a sampling of basically a lot of work that we're not responsible for.� Unless you're really interested in whether or not mStoner did this, just come talk to me later and I'll tell you what we did.� But I wanted to give you a non-part as an overview of what's out there and how it's being handled.� So a lot of this work is not mStoner work at all.

I did open with a site that we did that probably a lot of you have seen, the William & Mary website.� And this is a great example of handling brand messaging on a homepage because it's a very simple way out that leads with a position statement that changes seasonally.� In this case it's some college history, we call it Campus.

And then right next to that we have essentially this full Ajax widget that presents three different ideas; impact which is outcomes, alumni outcomes; inquiry which talks about academic rigor; and style which is just a piece of the William & Mary brand.

To give you an idea what the personality of this place is like, John Stewart is their quintessential graduate.� When the site went live, they had a photo of the Thomas Jefferson bronze statue wearing aviator sunglasses.� So that's what style is really all about and that's a piece of their brand.� So really carrying it in a couple of ways, the brand on the homepage, in a couple of nice ways.� And usually you see those widgets being used for more timely information.

So another way to look at your own site and evaluate whether you're handling the branding while it is the content on highly trafficked pages.� For Ball State University, they do these publications that talk about possibilities by framing them with word parents.� So you can see in their enrollment piece and in their search piece people and ideas they did experience some success.� They're carrying this a little more three-dimensionally on the Web with these things like tradition and innovation.� New in bold is one of them.� And they also changed this seasonally as a way to talk about possibilities.

But it's not just about the homepage.� It's about carrying that idea in a thematic way across the site.� So you can see in the About page for example that they run that theme, Breadth and Focus, Emerging and Exploration.� And if you visit some of the other top-level pages you're going to see that the branding leg which filters in is very highly integrated.

So that's a place to look at your own site and think about are we addressing this with top-level language on the highly trafficked pages and is it integrated with the other materials that we're putting out there.

So a third place that you want to think about addressing your brand is these syndicated features.� And this is the American University site, a private mid-sized institution in Washington, DC.� This is a great one to look at because you can see that they're starting to categorize and syndicate different kinds of content not only in the homepage but throughout the site.

So from left to right we have content that's about arts and more.� We have content that's essentially interviews with students and faculty.� We have the Eopedia which is sort of like fun facts and blog-type content.� And then we have a news and events calendar.

The beauty of it is it's all RSS feeds.� And it's all features that can be turned on and off inside their CMS.� So in the arts department section it's easy to imagine syndicating the arts in more features.� In a place like admission, they're probably going to want to highlight the Eopedia because that's more fact-based.� But it's sort of a very elegant way to group information and then make it easier for people to customize it if they're using a reader or something like that.� So syndicated feature is another place to think about servicing your brand message.

Another place that is becoming increasingly popular is social media sites like YouTube.� A lot of you are probably aware but there's now an edu section of YouTube where you can put up an institutional page and control what's going in there so that a video of some drunk coeds isn't the first thing that comes up if I do a search for Wesleyan for example.

Really like the Wesleyan University example because they've gone out of their way to style the page to get it to fit with their existing university site.� And they've done a great job of arranging the rest of the content of the page.� They have the About information in the left column.� They have a social networking box below that that allows you to connect with them in different ways.� A random video loads every time you visit the page in the main area.

But then you'll see that below that, there are categories of videos.� So there are different ways of talking about an institution's brand.� And they've created these categories so far where you have sort of top videos, events videos.� You have student life videos, students talking about what's it like to be there, trying to answer that question.� And then arts and athletics as well.� So a really elegant arrangement within YouTube that's basically a brand school existing elsewhere, not on the college site.

That is another thing that we're starting to notice in our industry.� It's that this new generation may be the first generation that goes to Facebook or YouTube before they go to the institutional homepage.� So you effectively need to think about how your brand is carried on these other sites.

The LinkedIn, a great one for connecting with alumni.� This is DePaul University Alumni Association's homepage.� This effort is headed up by Keidra Chaney, who is their director of new media.� The inception of their LinkedIn presence was in January of 2008.� They now have 6500 members; it's amazing.� This is a great idea about moderating discussions about what the institution means to people.

So people are going to use these tools no matter what you do.� In fact there are a lot of alumni associations on LinkedIn that are not generated by the institution.� They are generated by recent alumni.� In their case, they happen to either start this or take it over.� They've got 6500 members and Keidra checks this weekly.� And she will create areas of the LinkedIn site to serve alumni requests.

So they noticed a lot of young alumni posting very self-promotional stuff, basically looking for jobs.� And Keidra tried to speak to that by creating a specific forum for people who are looking for jobs.� So a way of talking about your brand, observing what people are saying about it after they graduate is to use LinkedIn and sort of moderate these discussions.

This is a site that just went live.� This is sort of the opposite end of the spectrum to marketing professionals.� This is one of the sites that make me worry about my job, the viability of a marketing professional long term.� It's University of Maryland at the Baltimore County.

And this site is essentially a channel navigation page that collects their YouTube channel, their Flickr feeds, Flickr feeds of any student that signs up; Twitter feeds of any student that signs up, blog feeds of any student who blogs through the institutional blogging tool and even music stuff that I believe is fed in from MySpace.

So they've not only fed all of these in to a single page with tabs to visit each thing; they've made this a destination by allowing you to comment, tag, give the thumbs up or thumbs down or message other students within this destination.

So you think about this as a brand tool while if I'm not interested in hearing what the experts have to say about the brand, I'm going to be interested in what other students have to say about it.� And this is a consolidated source for that that takes all of these different presences from all over the Internet and gives them a single destination for it.

Anybody who looks at the site, I would recommend you check it out.� It's be.umbc.edu, is going to notice that this is probably outside of the comfort zone of many institutions because you're going to go on the Twitter section.� You're going to see that there's some profanity in there, that this isn't being moderated at all.

So I think the University of Maryland is being very bold and being very forward-thinking with this.� I think that there is going to be a little bit of an outcry from administration when they see the kinds of things that kids are doing with it.� But it's a great example of true authenticity in a totally unmoderated way and it's very bold.

So another place to think about how to handle your brand is actually a brand-specific page.� I'm going to start off by showing you the Oakton Community College homepage mStoner is working on.� Are there people who work at community colleges in the room?� So one?

So the community colleges represent a very unique branding challenge because they typically have a much broader audience than a typical university.� We're talking about people at any stage of their life.� We're talking about people who want two-year degrees.� We're talking about people who are looking for certification for vocation.� And we're talking about people who just want one-off courses.� So they just want to take yoga or they want to learn how to paint.

And so we're talking to people at any stage of their life.� And it's not necessarily a destination in the same way that you're trying to paint a picture of a destination at a liberal arts college.� It's a place to start something new, whether that's a two-year degree, whether that's just taking up a new skill, whether it's vocational certification.

So we started up by creating this brand platform called Start Here.� And anytime you come to the homepage you see one of 8 or 10 messages that say things like "Expand your options, start here," "Invent your own future, start here," "Learn something new, start here."� But if they click that, they come to this sort of unique branding page where we're grouping all of these ideas about what it offers.

So Start Here is something that could easily be cliched if you don't do a good job of illustrating what it means to people.� So in the left column we're explaining what it means specifically about them.� We're following that with some program highlights.� There's a transactional navigation below that.� There's room for rotating features.� I think we're going to have four when we launch the site next month.� And then there's a grouping of profiles to start meeting people.� Here are the students.� Here are the alumni.� Here are the faculty and here are the staff that will support you at this place.

And I think that this is sort of becoming a standard approach at mStoner where we give people this page template that allows them to aggregate marketing content.� And I expect that this will be a trend that you see with institutions.

So the next piece of this is hopefully what we've done is given you two ways of evaluating your own institution's brand on the Web.� The first is how well does it answer those big questions.� The second is SurveyMonkey, thinking about tools for actually gathering metrics.� And there's also Wufu out there.� There's probably a couple of others that you guys have seen.� SurveyMonkey is a nice one because it's free and it has been around for a while.

And the third one is thinking about are you covered in the main areas.� So we looked at some examples of how you cover your brand in different areas on your website and in other websites on the Web.

And the last piece is the bibliography.� And I think Patricia has a book that she highly recommends and I've got a couple.

Patricia Vandenberg:� This book "Strategic Marketing for Educational Institutions, Second Edition" is actually the only book you would need on marketing higher education.� It is not quick and easy.� But if you have it as a reference, it's really, really useful because marketing is both an art and a science.� And the more you understand the nuances of what you're trying to do, the more you will be able to contribute.� So I just highly recommend that if you're going to have one book, that this would be a good one for you to have.

Doug Gapinski:� And then a couple that I really have enjoyed recently, "Zag" by Marty Neumeier.� And he's the author of "The Brand Gap" which I'm sure most of you have read.� Not everybody has read "Zag".

The title of the book is based on the main idea which is something that Patricia opened with.� She said the brand is really about telling the story of what makes you special.� And that's Marty's premise, too.� He says that when everybody else is zigging, you have to figure out how to zag.

And another one that I highly recommend is this collection of essays that's edited by Nicholas Ind.� It's called "Beyond Branding:� How the New Values of Transparency and Integrity are Changing the World of Brands".� Just a collection of essays about how authentic content is changing how people look at brands.

Patricia Vandenberg:� We got the one-minute sign, my friend.

Doug Gapinski:� Yeah, we got the one minute.� So I'm trying to wrap up here.� So the presentation and our contact information are available for download at this URL.� It's clients.mstoner.com/hew. �I basically maintain a Twitter presence that just highlights interesting things that I see in design and in higher ed.� So if you follow me, I will follow you as well.� And I think that's about it.

Patricia Vandenberg:� Also our email addresses are going to be on there as well.� And I really do welcome calls or questions if I can be helpful.� It's great for me to have contact with people all over who have wonderful ideas of their own.� So I'm happy to answer questions if you have them.

Host:� Doug and Patricia, thank you.

[Applause]