"The core of any communication initiative is content."

Lance Merker

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Lance Merker

Content Reigns Supreme for Higher Ed Websites

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PEOPLE WITH IMPACT INTERVIEW - Lance Merker, Writer, President and CEO, OmniUpdate

Q: Tell us a bit about OmniUpdate.com—what do you do and for whom?
Lance Merker: OmniUpdate offers web content management solutions that allow our clients, who are comprised of marketing and communications folks within colleges and universities, to better maintain the content on their websites. Our mission is simple: enable every college and university—large or small, private or public—to fully utilize the latest Web technologies by providing solutions that are incredibly easy-to-use, simple to deploy, campus-wide and highly cost-effective. Over 450 college and university websites use OmniUpdate products to simplify the process of creating, editing and publishing over 3 million web pages.

Q: You advocate for the concept that ‘content is king’—what does this mean in terms of website design?
Lance Merker: The core of any communication initiative is content. It is inherently related to everything else that a communications professional does and is especially relevant to website design. While design is extremely important as a means of guiding the eye through a site, frankly speaking, a website is only as good as its content. The thing about site design is that there are just as many well-designed websites as there are poorly designed sites. Some are truly great, but those sites combine effective design with compelling content. In terms of diversity in website design, our brains are trained to separate the good sites from the bad fairly quickly, and the most discerning audience have effectively grown up with the Web, specifically young adults of high school and college age. Because this generation easily navigates through both good and bad websites and is calloused by the non-standard nature of the Web, these students are quite confident in their abilities to find the information they need quickly. All of this gets back to the notion that content is king—content has to be up to date, accurate and helpful, or else the website has failed. While there is something to be said about a good first impression, a beautifully- designed website no longer wows the prospective student audience. Sure, it might help, especially if it can guide visitors to the right content, but a website is only as good as its content—once again, content emerges as king, and should be the foremost consideration of any higher education site.

Q: What are some common mistakes colleges make on their website?
Lance Merker: The biggest mistake that institutions make is failing to focus on the content. There is an important shift that happening today, and it’s a shift that admissions and marketing folks need to acknowledge if they haven’t already. Students, the target audience of any college website, are unplugging from traditional media—TV, radio, print publications, and even email. If you think about it, the millennial generation uses their TiVo or DVR to skip commercials and don’t watch ads on TV anymore. They listen to their iPods rather than the radio, no longer hearing ads over the airwaves. These students read their news online more often than print magazines, and they practically live online through communities like MySpace and Facebook. These sites have become more than social networks, they are now information sources for news and other issues, and they’ve even replaced email accounts because they now offer built-in email services. In light of this shift, what are college admissions professionals and higher ed marketers to do? Fortunately, there are Internet-based and equivalent ways to reach this online audience, and in some ways, these vehicles make it easier than ever to execute target marketing. For example, there are new pathways into MySpace and Facebook to reach virtually anyone in any desired demographic. But overall, the game has changed in many ways because the termination point of all messaging is now almost exclusively the college website—all marketing roads, whether they are online ads or Facebook links, lead prospective students back to the college website in only one click. The question then becomes: Is your website ready and able to complete the message and tell the whole story? Websites are tasked with this burden like never before and it is suddenly the most valuable asset an institution must manage. While the website is one click away from the intended audience, at the same time, it only takes one click for a prospective student to leave it in the dust. If an institution’s website is purely a resource of information, it is likely not engaging enough for today’s students. Effective sites go beyond providing information and tell a story, one that puts prospective students and perhaps their parents into that story. Once again, content emerges as king.

Q: What kind of content is crucial to a successful website?
Lance Merker: The primary consideration is content—it must be accurate, up-to-date, and be written in a way that speaks to prospective students and their parents. If a school can do that, they are way ahead of the pack. Other features and considerations that can be easily added to a college admissions site are blogs, RSS feeds, chat and video. As I mentioned before, the goal is to tell a compelling story and to try to put the prospective student into that story. Blogs are a great way to achieve this as student bloggers add an authentic voice to the admissions pages that is nearly impossible for prospective students to ignore. Prospective students want to hear from current students and blogs convey this information amazingly well. One of the challenges associated with blogging, however, is how to manage this type of content. Fortunately there are great new technologies that allow schools to approve blog entries before they are posted. RSS is another easy-to-add and extremely effective technology for admissions pages. The magic of RSS feeds are that the content is delivered to users after they have visited the websites to students’ preferred mediums, whether to their cell phones through text messages or to their Facebook accounts. RSS is an undeniable tool that admissions marketing and communication folks should use on their college websites. Chat is another low-cost feature that should be a staple of any good college website. The main concern with chat is staffing to manage the discussions that are occurring, but the management facet is actually a lot easier than people think, and there are so many great success stories that prove how effective online chat is in the admissions process. Lastly, video should be included in effective websites. Since the college recruiting game is all about content—good content that tells a story—great content should put the site visitor into that story. If a picture tells a thousand words, then a video must tell a million words. Prospective students have grown up with the Web and are the largest demographic driving YouTube and the online video viewing phenomenon. Video has never been cheaper or easier to create and display on websites, and I would strongly recommend these website features to any higher education institution looking to keep an edge in the increasingly competitive college prospecting game.

There are some wonderful tools that are available to make the job of managing this content easier. Website content management tools, like those offered by OmniUpdate, can help tremendously in terms of the Web 2.0 technologies discussed above. I always encourage schools to get good tools and make effective use of them. The right tool for the right job will not only make content easier to manage, but they will open up new recruiting opportunities and help admissions websites speak to this new generation of students in the way they expect to be spoken to.

Lance Merker, President and Chief Executive Officer, OmniUpdate

See an index of all the "People with Impact" Interviews

Additional sections of this journal address student recruiting and student retention. We have also placed all articles with a common theme of online education and distance education programs in a separate portal. New articles will be posted each Monday, please check back by bookmarking this site or placing a link to this Innovative Practices in Communicating with Students portal.