During the last week I was at the Jboye conference in Aarhus, Denmark. The conference is described as a ‘Knowledge sharing conference for online professionals’, core themes included CMS choice and implementation, project management, content management and the use of social media. There was also, for the first time, a Higher Education track (where I presented the use of Google Analytics).’
It was an excellent event, here’s some of my immediate reflections on some of the key topics and how they can relate to our world of Higher Ed, and particularly the web project. This is a large post, so I’ve broken it down into a few sub headings.
Social Media
There was a general feeling that Social Media (discussed most in the context of Facebook, Twitter and, to a lesser extent, blogging) is totally here to stay – avoid it, and not use it, at our peril. There was, however, a real interesting panel discussion where Eric Reiss, Hannu Vangsgaard and Tomas Madsen-Mgydal suggested rather than waiting for a full on strategy, simply going for it and seeing what works and does not work. This provoked a immediate push back from some of the industries which were represented at the conference, particularly those which operate in compliance heavy and legally complicated sectors (such as the health sector). For them to encourage employers to blog about certain subjects (for example, World Health Organisation employees publicly blogging about whether to vaccinate or not against H1N1) could lay them open for potential legal action. I totally see the issue here. But I don’t think we need to be so hysterical in the world of Higher Education – I don’t believe the risks are so great and, besides which, employees and students are protected by law to say whatever they want about the organisation (though, clearly, being deliberately slanderous or inciting some kind of hate is illegal). Furthermore, what we stand to gain by properly interacting with our students, researchers, tax payers and fellow staff will have huge benefits. So, in the context of the project, I’m going to be encouraging the work package which deals with visibility and social media even more strongly. Lets be prepared to experiment and, if it happens, fall flat on our faces. One word of caution, based on my own experiences from blogging – you have to have the time. Social Media is about content and interaction. If you set up a facebook group, based around a particular subject (e.g. ‘Student Counsellors From Lund’) then you have to be prepared to listen, talk and - most of all – act on the feedback we get. However, let’s not let this stop us from doing anything – let’s start today and, if we are hugely successful, then that’s a good problem to have.
Content
Bob Boiko spoke at several occasions during the conference on the subject of content or, has he would define it, information management. There was a huge quantity of good stuff and you can can see an outline of the tutorial here. Take home messages? Information, whether it’s on our websites or in a brochure, is all about helping us to talk to people who are not in front of us. From this basic platform he expanded into getting the right information to the right people, in the right way – by doing this we get what we want for our organisation. The issue is that we have no strategy for the information on our websites, or moreover for the total production of information from the university. It’s rare that, if for example, someone suggests starting a website that the question is asked ‘why’ and then a discussion can begin regarding whether a website is the right choice for the information in question. For example, if it’s a research group of only a few members then maybe an email send would be more appropriate. He provided a simple strategy that by starting with an organisation’s goals you can then identify the types of audiences these goals have to the type of information these audiences need. He does however, also have the message that some organisations are simply too large and complex to adequately manage all their content – focusing on the audience, and the way their goals fit with the organisation’s is a strategy for overcoming this – check out the video interview below.
Project Management/Higher Education
The take home message for me, after listening to a number of speakers describing projects which were extremely similar to our own is that we must focus on one thing, and one thing only – specifically with regard to areas with an underlying technical solution, or change, of some kind. Trying to relaunch numerous technical systems at the same time will result in failure for this project. If we try to, for example, create an new extranet, intranet and learning management system at the same time we will fail. Step wise progress to a clear goal is definitely still best practice, and it’s particularly useful in the higher education world where the decision making process can be so drawn out. You can see the speakers from the Higher Education track here, which includes presentations from Aarhus, New York , Kings College and Uppsala university on their web projects. There’s a great, but relatively new knowledge base that we can use to further sharpen Lund’s web project. A further key message to project success is that all stakeholders must be involved; this was further evidence why I still stand by the time we have in the project to engage and listen to our audience, our students and the staff who run our websites, as well as management.
There was a huge amount of great stuff from other speakers, not least BJ Fogg covering persuasive design, see the video below. Update, 11th November 2009: Unfortunately BJ Fogg did not want this presentation made public so the conference organisers have had to remove the video from their web site. Shame, it was a great presentation.
Tags: conference, jboye, management, media, project, social, university, web
