Changes to the Blogging Homepage

1. A feed for the official campus blogs, with an excerpt from the most recent post featured.
2. A site-wide posts feed.
3. Tweets from the MIIS community list.

Two categories to be featured prominently on the homepage

Note that these are categories, not tags.

News: General news and announcements or reporting on past events.

Events: Posts related to upcoming events.

Please don’t categorize posts as both news and events.

Events are events, and articles about past events are news.

What is the difference between categories and tags?

Categories tend to be broad. For example, my personal blog uses the following categories: Middle School, High School, College, Real World. Tags are specific topics that fall under the categories (driver’s ed, job searching, marching band, etc.). This is just one example and the categories and tags for each blog will vary, but I encourage you to include both “News” and “Events” as categories.

Other best practices

• Title posts appropriately. Remember that not all viewers are reading the post directly on your blog, so more context is better when titling posts.
  • Example: Lynn blogged about searching for student speakers for TEDx Monterey and titled it “TEDx Student Speakers.” But what does that mean? The post should have been titled “TEDx Call for Student Speakers” or “TEDx Student Speaker Contest.”
• Avoid the caps lock (THIS IS NOT VERY EASY TO READ AND SORT OF LOOKS LIKE I’M SHOUTING AT YOU)
• If you’re posting an event, include the day/time in the title. Also use the first few sentences to communicate the most relevant information about your event so that it appears in the excerpt on the homepage and under the “Events” navigation. GSIPM has a great format for this:
• If your post content consists mainly of a large image (a flyer advertising an event, for example), make sure you also write the event details out using text since RSS feeds do not always display images and readers may miss out on your event information
  • Example: this DMC blog post doesn’t show up on their site’s section landing page bottom
• It is possible to be strategic about writing and publishing your blog posts. You can write 3-4 blog posts at one time and set them up to publish at different times.
• Talk to me about adding Google Analytics or FeedBurner to your blog.
• Use the Knowledge Base to find answers to FAQs about the blogging community.

As always, feel free to leave a comment or shoot me an email if you have any questions or concerns! I look forward to working with you to improve the front page of Blogs @ MIIS.

These tips were provided by Rob Horgan, but I wanted to share them with all of you here.

There are tools available on YouTube which allow us to evaluate the efficacy of our videos on the MIIS channel.

The content of the MIIS YouTube channel falls into several broad categories:

1. CNS videos –These have a small but dedicated and regular viewership, presumably of alumni and various nonproliferation or security stakeholders . They are by far the largest contributors to the MIIS YouTube channel and upload most of their conferences, lectures, luncheons, etc.
2. Recruiting department videos – The 50+ videos that the Recruiting department has produced have focused primarily on interviews with alumni or current students. More than just telling an individual’s story, these videos usually involve an underlying message that promotes a specific MIIS program or builds on the MIIS brand.
3. Student produced videos – Contrary to what one might think, we actually don’t have many of these at all. The ones which are currently up are either very amateur footage of minor campus events or very sophisticated productions which some student has produced either for a class or to add to their portfolios.
4. Student Services – Kathy Sparaco has uploaded many useful videos related to visa, immigration, housing and student services videos.

When I looked at the data in early January, we had about 145,000 views of the various MIIS videos. Of the 278 videos on the channel, the 52 which the Recruiting department has produced have been viewed over 30,000 times. Roughly 21% or one out of every five MIIS YouTube views is of a video produced by Recruiting.

As we discussed at the website meeting, one of the main reasons why I think that the Recruiting department’s videos have been viewed is NOT because they are well produced or particularly sophisticated. In fact, one of our most watched videos, “10 Questions for a UN Translator”, which has been seen by about 5,000 people, was poorly produced with a Flip video and was hastily edited. Rather, I would argue that our videos have been appropriately TITLED and TAGGED. In addition, they appeal to a large audience outside of the Monterey Institute because THE CONTENT answers the questions prospective students have about future professions and careers and how graduate school fits with those.

If you are considering adding video content to the MIIS website, may I offer a few suggestions so that it may be seen by as large of an audience as possible:

• On YouTube, tag your video with as many suitable words and phrases as possible. YouTube will allow you to tag it with about 25 search terms or phrases. Make SURE YOU USE EVERY PERMUTATION or conjugation of important words related to your video. That means, if it is a T&I video, don’t just tag it with “Translation” or “interpretation”. (You will want to add – “translator”, “translation”, “interpretation”, “interpreter”, “interpreting” “Spanish translator”, “Spanish translation jobs”, “working as a Spanish interpreter”, “UN jobs”, “international careers with Spanish”, “how to become a translator”, etc)
• If it is an MBA: “international business career”, “international business”, MBA careers, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, “how to start a career in …..”, MBA, “international careers”, “how to get a job in ….” , “best business careers in ….” “international jobs” “working in ( country)”, management training, sustainable business, “globalization”, “localization”.
• TESOL or TFL – Make sure you use far more than just those two terms (“EFL”, “ESL”, “working in Japan”, “teaching English abroad,” “teaching French” “how to become a Spanish Teacher”, etc. If your discipline has a society or association or large regular employer – For example, the JET program, Peace Corps, etc. Make sure you tag extensively for those.
• IPS videos are very problematic because depending on the theme, subject matter or discipline, you will easily come up with FAR MORE THAN 20 terms or phrases. Use the “hot” terms in that discipline. (“terrorism”, “how to work for the UN”, “fair trade”, “sustainable development”, “jobs in Africa”, “working in China”, “renewable energy”, etc. Absolutely add phrases related to GETTING A JOB in that discipline.
• Title your video with effective search terms. Don’t title it “Mary Smith’s Internship with USAID” The term “Mary Smith” isn’t likely to be searched for and the “USAID” already has hundreds of other videos competing for eyeballs. Instead, how about “How to Get an Internship with USAID” or “How to Start a Career in International Development”?
• Most importantly, think like a 24-year old. Create titles and tags with most relevance to this demographic. That means focus on jobs, internships, and career development. Also provide them with content that answers their questions – not necessarily about MIIS, but what they should do with their life! Caroline Mansi made uploaded a video that has been seen by 1,000 people, mostly in India. What was it called? “How to Submit a Successful MBA Application”

Do you know what the most watched video on the MIIS YouTube Channel is?

“A Day in the Life of an Interpreter”

Please contact Rob if you need any help with tagging, titling, or content development. The new website is really starting to take shape and the more dynamic media that we can add to it can only enhance its value to increasing enrollment.

Rebecca’s back!

Rebecca Walters will be helping out Kristen & Jen with various web-related needs.

Cool web stuff is happening

• The alumni site (http://alumni.miis.edu) is getting a new look in the very near future
• Advancement just launched the microphilanthropy site (http://globalgiving.org/miis)

New process for adding stories to MIIS Around the World

New MIIS Around the World stories should be added at the following URL: http://www.miis.edu/community/world/stories

The groups interface

Workflows are still coming, but in the meantime you can start setting up your group(s) of web authors. This is pretty easy to do:

1. Login at http://login.middlebury.edu/groups/ using your Exchange credentials.
2. At the bottom of the page you will see an option to create a new group. Make sure to select “web data / MIIS” from the dropdown menu.
   
3. Use the interface to add or remove members from your group.
   

B@Mmy Awards Nominations

Nominate & Vote for Blogs in the Following Categories

• Best group blog
• Best class blog
• Best student blog
• Best staff blog
• Best teacher blog
• Best use of Twitter

Upcoming TLC professional development workshops

The Teaching & Learning Collaborative will be offering a few professional development workshops for faculty and staff during J-term. One of the sessions will be hands-on video editing and we are going to use the videos produced in this workshop to help Jill’s team create a virtual campus tour.

Our virtual tour inspiration:

Issues with workflows/permissions

Middlebury activated workflows on Tuesday morning and it created permissions problems for some people. We have since disabled the module, so everyone should be able to log in and edit their content as usual.

Creating groups for your department’s web editors

You will soon be asked to create groups using Middlebury’s group interface (http://login.middlebury.edu/groups). You can log in using your Exchange credentials. I encourage you to get familiar with this tool since it will allow you to manage authors and editors for your individual sections of the site. More on how this will be used as I learn more from the web team Middlebury.

Homepage Drop-up Menus

Homepage Drop-up Menu

We would like to rotate the featured items (located in the homepage drop-up menus) every 2 weeks, so please be thinking about what could go in the drop-up menu for your section. Jason suggested meeting every quarter to discuss and prepare the next 6 rotations.

Helpful Work Study Students

We should be getting some extra help very soon via new work-studies being hired for the 3 deans’ offices, including the lovely Rebecca Walters, who will be working jointly with Kristen and Jen. Rebecca’s efforts will benefit the entire website, so don’t feel left out!

Change of Meeting Dates

Jason noted that the next meeting was set to take place on Thanksgiving and we wouldn’t want you to miss out on your turkey and family time! Therefore, our next meeting will take place on Thursday, December 3 and repeat bi-weekly. I have updated the Exchange calendar event to reflect this.

Thanks for the opportunity to talk with you about how we use analytics in our department. It’s incredibly powerful and has helped me make better / more confident decisions about spending budget and our time.

This is the keyword report that I mentioned. Let me walk through some of the data here. And with both of these, if you have ANY questions or want to see more specifically how I use the data, just contact me and we can set up a time to go over it. We could also brainstorm about how you and your department might use it.

Some general overview

Organic search results: the free (unpaid) ads that pop up when you do a search. These are the best type because they are:

• Free
• Users value them over paid b/c they think they are more objective than paid ads.

AdWords: Google’s name for its online ad buying program. When you see them on a search, they say ‘sponsored links’

My goal

Increase our organic search results – or search engine optimization (SEO). Why? It will drive more people to our website, which is our primary recruiting vehicle. I want that when someone types into Google (which has over a 90% global market share for search engines) something like: international MBA programme, that the www.miis.edu website comes up in the first organic position on the search results list. This increases our brand, and hopefully drives enrollments.

How do we do it?

A variety of ways and the way the Google calculates positions changes. Google changes its algorithms as people / advertisers get more savvy about driving clicks to their site. But, there are some tried and true ways to do this that are completely free and within our control.

Title tags / page headers – make sure our web pages have clear title tags with terms similar to the search terms a person would use, for example: Master in Translation.

Meta tags- behind the scenes text that can help drive traffic to sites. You can view anyone’s meta tags by right clicking on a page and going to “view” and “source.” You might see a bunch of html code, but you’ll also see what their tags are. I do this regularly to our competitors sites and get ideas for our tags….

Content- (here’s what we can all do) the ‘spiders’ that crawl the web and search sites, read web pages much the same way we would: text that is in the upper right corner, upper left corner or is in bold, italic, or somehow stand out on the page is given more weight. Text that is on top level pages gets more weight. The spiders are trying to match search terms that a user enters with text on the pages. So, if we know that some of the biggest search terms in our category – education – are: MBA, TESOL, ESL etc, we should use those on top-level pages, in tags, and headers.

Now on to the report!

We do 2 things with our Google AdWords buying – buy certain key words in Google searches and also buy some key words on specific content sites. You’ll see both in the report – “usnews” is a content site, “study policy” is a key word.

Here’s what the column headers mean:

• Campaign: which school / programs we’re focusing on
• Placement / Keyword: the site or keyword we’ve used
• Match: means that the user has to enter the keyword exactly as shown, if it says “exact”
• Impressions: how many times our ad was displayed w/ those key words
• Clicks: the # of times that ad was clicked on
• CTR – click through rate: percent of clicks to impressions
• Avg CPC – average cost per click (yes, I have to pay for each click! Some words cost more than others!)
• Avg CPM – Cost per thousand
• Cost – total cost for one year to buy that keyword
• Avg Posit – average position – where did our ad appear? First place, second?

In our case – I think there are two columns that help us determine which keywords are the best:

Impressions – this tells us how many times those search terms were entered into Google in the report period, in this case 1 year. This tells us which are the most active / most used search terms for our ‘category.’ I think this is the most important value in this sheet and the report is sorted that way, in descending order by this field. These are the most used words, and we should try to use them, too.

Clicks – this is important because it helps us determine if our ad copy is compelling enough to get someone to click.

Avg CPC – the cost. You’ll quickly see that some words cost more than others. These values are figured by Google for the entire category and tell us which words they think are the best to use.

Again, improving our organic search results (free!) helps drive applications and, did I mention, they’re free? Let me know if you want me to walk you through ANY of this. I’d be happy to!