Author: Fran Zablocki

Every time I come back from a HighEdWeb Conference my head is full to bursting with great ideas and my energy level is up from all the inspiring people and presentations. This year in Austin was no exception, and I wanted to share the golden nuggets of wisdom that I found with you. The titles link back to the full length LINK blogs that attendees wrote for each presentation.

Seth Odell: Engaging Your Global Audience with Real-Time Campus Event Coverage

Anyone who hasn’t had the good fortune to witness the force of nature that is Seth Odell is missing out. Seth gave an incredible, red stapler winning presentation on using live video streaming at Southern New Hampshire University, and you can check out my full LINK writeup here.

Golden Nugget: We spend 99% of our alumni resources on the 1% of alumni that can physically come to campus. Interactive live video streaming can bring that number up to 100%. Make a room for 200 a conversation of 50,000.

Jeff Stevens: I’d Buy That For a Dollar: What Robocop Can Teach us about Alumni Engagement

Jeff Stevens not only wowed the crowd with his Johnny Cash cover band performance and 20 gallon hat, he also delivered a great presentation on how higher education can use online donation site strategies and practices to engage our alumni donor base to give smaller but no less important gifts to specific causes. My full LINK article is here.

Golden Nugget: Use online tools to allow benefactors and beneficiaries to interact with each other beyond the initial transfer of money. The human connection is vital.

Lacy Tite: Using WordPress to Power Your Institution’s Entire News Presence

Lacy walked us through how to unlock the true capabilities of WordPress with automation of page styling, intelligent content tagging, and on the fly news mashup pages that any content manager can create easily. It was an inside look at how great programming can provide a foundation for great content.

Golden Nugget:  You can use WordPress to do magical things, such as dynamically changing the page branding design based on content tagging. Tag a story as performing arts and *poof* the page is branded with the arts template. 

Karlyn Morisette: What Colleges Can Learn From The Insane Clown Posse

Karlyn’s presentation (also a red stapler winner, SNHU was rocking in Austin) lit a fire for me by showing that the best way to be successful is to be yourself. She told the story of a couple of rappers who got dropped from their label and decided to go out on their own. They built an empire of loyal fans by sticking to their true selves and knowing who their true audience was. Higher education has many audiences, but we can’t appeal to all of them at once.

Golden Nugget: Be yourself, and never apologize for it.

Dan Frommelt: Project Management According to Attila the Hun

Dan walked us through the strategy and tactics that he uses for project management and how a brilliant (though brutal) leader and tactician such as Attila the Hun was able to train, empower, and lead his troops to victory after victory in spite of numerous obstacles and tough odds. I loved Dan’s no nonsense approach to things, and hope to channel some of that candid and challenging attitude in my own job.

Golden Nugget: I am the person who is fighting for my project, if I stop fighting, the project will die.

Lastly I just  wanted to say thank you to Jenny Anspach from Central Methodist University for doing a summary of my presentation, In The Shadow of the Colossi: Alumni Online Communities in the age of Facebook and LinkedIn. The slides for that presentation are available here on Slideshare.

A super shout out to the LINK staff for doing an amazing inaugural print version of LINK for the conference and to all the people and volunteers that made HighEdWeb so amazing this year and every year – keep up the great work!

“Perfect is a fault, and fault lines change.”

– R.E.M., “I Believe”

It’s your fault that you have unrealistic project deadlines from others

There, I said it. People who don’t know how to create websites don’t know how long it takes to do it. Maybe they never will. They are picking arbitrary amounts of time for you to complete things because they don’t know how long it takes. Guess what? You DO know how long it takes, and you need to tell them that, again and again.

This is going to sound crazy, but you may need to stop meeting every deadline. Does this give you a little twitchy nerve over your right eyebrow? Mine is twitching right now just typing this. But let us face a harsh truth: If you work on the web in higher education, it is almost guaranteed that you have been given many projects in which the deadlines are grossly unrealistic. It is easy enough to just complain that this is unfair and unreasonable, but that isn’t actually going to change anything. Why does this happen? What can you do to change it?

And speaking of expectations, you need to change yours. It is easy and fun and cathartic to tell stories about how “they” just don’t get it, and “they” think the web is magic, and “they” need to figure it out. Guess what? They don’t. They need to figure out the web and how it works as much as you need to figure out your home’s electric wiring grid and how it works. They need the web to work, and that is as far as they will ever go. But they also need to know how long it takes for the web to work well, and in order to shape this expectation, they need you to hammer it home, every single day. If you don’t hold the line as far as what is reasonable, it will never become reasonable.

It’s your fault that you don’t have the time to do what you want to do

Everything has a cost. Doing nothing has a cost just as much as doing everything at once, because time is a finite resource. The things you could have done in the time you spent doing something else is known as an opportunity cost. If I put $10,000 under my pillow for a year, it costs me the interest I could have gotten out of putting it in a bank. If I visit friends in another city over the weekend, it costs me the opportunity to complete some household projects. If I spend the amount of time needed to complete a project perfectly, it costs me the completion time to do 3 other projects very well. Do you have time to complete every project perfectly? Nobody does. Can you afford the cost of being perfect?

It’s your fault that “they” don’t understand

Here is my challenge to all of you. I personally have failed this challenge so many times it isn’t even funny, but I keep on trying nonetheless. The next time somebody tells you that you need to get a project done in an unrealistic period of time, tell them you can’t and this is how long it will take to do it well. Here comes the hard part: when the unrealistic deadline arrives, don’t finish it. That’s right, don’t complete it on time. Just let it go. “But I’ll get in trouble! I’ll be seen as lazy! Irresponsible!”

Maybe, maybe not, but it is likely that the person who made the unrealistic deadline in the first place will have to consider why, in all the time you have done projects for them, this one was late. And that is when you have your conversation with them, that it isn’t done because it isn’t possible for it to be done. Do this enough and you could actually start to move the expectations gauge down a bit from the ‘insanity’ level it is always at.

It’s your fault you work too much

Here is the real rub. All that extra time, all that extra effort, that you are putting in to make something perfect? The people who want you to have this done probably won’t notice the difference. And guess what? They probably never will, because they are not looking for it. Their only gauge to how much can be done in a reasonable amount of time is how much you do for them in the time that has been given to you. So pull an 80 hour week to meet unrealistic expectations, and boom! 80 hour weeks are the new expectation. Nobody knows how much work goes into the web, you say. People think the web is magic. Well, it isn’t. Stop making it seem like it is.

It’s your fault you are stressed

We need to stop. Stop working overtime on unrealistic deadlines. Stop skipping lunch just to ‘tighten things up’ on a last minute request. Stop feeling constantly let down when what could have been done perfectly in a reasonable amount of time falls short in a rush job, in spite of us killing ourselves to make it so. Stop the blood, sweat, and tears. Stop the martyrdom. This is your job, and you are a professional. You know what great work looks like and you know how long it takes and you need to tell everyone and hold the fault line.

We need to rethink the way we react to these situations. Let me be clear: I am not condoning laziness or shoddy work. I am condoning sanity and balance, and the only way to arrive at a sane, balanced point is to begin with our own behaviors. Stop trying to be perfect. Change the fault lines.

(originally published in Link: The Journal of Higher Education Web Professionals)

When I first found out that I had received the newly minted position of online community manager in SUNY Geneseo’s Alumni Relations office, I told my friends the good news. Being the snarky, brutally honest types that I tend to associate with; they immediately took to mocking and envying me in equal measure for getting paid to play on Facebook. I assured them that this was a serious job with serious things to do, dammit, and that I would only on occasion, perhaps every Tuesday, be doing anything they would be completely, irrevocably jealous about.

I began to dream big about what I was going to do as this new hybrid employee: half physical man, half virtual avatar. This was a new position at a new place in a new field in a new plane of existence; I could literally taste the newness. A vision of my future role came to me. There I was, swashbuckling atop a giant bust of Wil Wheaton against evil hordes of forum trolls and spam bots with my lightsaber … pretty typical expectations, really.

The truth is, I didn’t have a clue what to expect. I knew what the job description said to expect, but who has ever trusted those? And I didn’t personally know anyone else with the online community manager title. For that matter, I didn’t know any web pros in higher education that had the exact same title as anyone else, period. People go by many names and titles, be it web manager, specialist, strategist, master, maven, guru, overlord, or just web guy/girl. Titles are about as useful as job descriptions in predicting what exactly you will do, as it turns out.

Higher Ed web pros often don’t have much structure to work with when it comes to defining their jobs and what they do. In fact, the term ‘generalist’ is probably the most common self-definition people make. If I’m not alone in my ambiguity and find it hard to find anyone who feels more grounded than me, it must be more systemic. If we cannot be categorized and defined by the existing job roles, then why not create a new set?

You have so many very stylish hats

You may not play all of these roles or you may play many more, but in order to be a professional web person in higher education it is likely that you have been or will be the following:

Evangelist – You will almost never be preaching to the choir. There is no choir. Preach on nonetheless. Preach to anyone who will listen about web standards, web accessibility, and proper web writing. Make them disciples of the cult of usability. If you live what you preach and keep on spreading the good word, things will change for the better over the long run.

Diplomat – You are adept at getting what you want while convincing everyone else that they are also getting what they want. You offer better promotion, easier process, broader exposure and time savings. In return you ask for more leverage, autonomy, support, and compliance. You know how to work a room of technology buffs into seeing things from the user’s perspective and presenting technology to users in a non-threatening way they understand.

Architect – You build temples of information from scratch. From the architectural frame, the metadata plumbing, interior CSS decorator skills, tasteful curatorship of the artwork, right down to the signs pointing people to where they need to go; it’s all you. The best information architects are like the best physical ones: visually provoking and uplifting their audience while being firmly grounded in function and practicality.

Ur-Communicator – You can take a message for a particular audience and craft it a dozen ways from Sunday. Whether it ends up as a wall post, press release, 140 characters, or cross-media extravaganza – you get the word out.

Prophet – Let’s be honest, you don’t really know where any of this is headed…ever. Sure, you may know what the next few months or even year look like, but nobody knows what new technology will flip everything we do on its head overnight. We all like to think we’re ‘ahead of the curve’ but in reality most of us just hope the curve doesn’t move out from underneath us. Don’t tell that to the administration, though – as far as they know, you’re able to predict the future.

Rebel – If you follow all the rules you will never get anything truly progressive done. Ask for forgiveness instead of permission, and all that. Don’t be mutinous, just be daring enough to go out and take a small risk every day. Sometimes it will work, sometimes it won’t. The beauty of the modern, open web is that the rewards almost always outweigh the risks.

Disruptor – People hate change, and you change how people work and think by introducing things they’ve never seen or done before. That does not mean they have to hate you. Own the disruption by admitting that it will take time to get used to the new. Better to gradually familiarize someone with something than to lose them forever by overwhelming and scaring them.

It is no wonder that our jobs are both exhausting and rewarding – we get to be such different people every day and every hour. So go ahead, give yourself a new title. Today you could be a disruptive cms evangelist, tomorrow a diplomatic microsite architect, and next Tuesday you could really make your friends jealous as the rebel social media prophet. I’m certain there are many more possibilities and I hope you will share them; this list is far from exhaustive.

Because we move so fluidly from one role to another, web professionals are ideally suited to move institutions forward in a world where ambiguity and uncertainty are the new normal. Institutions of higher education need people who are at home and comfortable living and thriving in this environment. They need new renaissance men and women who will take on whatever is thrown at them, adapt, and evolve. Luckily, we brought a stylish hat and title for just such an occasion.

The 2% Rule:

I think of the 2% rule as a cousin of Murphy’s law. Murphy’s law states, “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” The 2% rule states that “No matter how right something is, 2% will find a way to use it wrong.” So you know what? You should let that extra 2% go. Don’t spend a lot of time trying to accommodate or anticipate the problems that a small minority will have. It is pretty simple: the amount of time spent building solutions to problems should be proportionate to the amount of users who will have that problem. Don’t spend a day coming up with a workaround for 400 people when you could spend a day improving the experience for 19,600 others. Just let it go. There will always be a minority who find a way to break something in a way you can’t anticipate. Good customer service and troubleshooting can take care of them after the fact.

There are a lot of things wrong with higher education websites and the way they are made, a smaller number of things right with them, tons of ways to make them better, and an absolutely amazing group of people who make it their livelihood to attempt to do so on a daily basis.

I hope that the reflections, experiences, and ideas written here will be helpful to your own work, because so many of yours have already been so immensely inspiring for mine.