London workshop
The 3rd SCASEO workshop took place at the JISC London offices on 27-28 July. Once again, we had a full house (32) of attendees from diverse roles including academics, web designers, web editors and management.
George Munroe and Steve Boneham kicked off the session by outlining the fundamentals of web site search engine optimisation – including content and site structure, accessibility, integrity and metadata. Brian Kelly of UKOLN then led the ‘Promotion of content’ session, talking about how social media can allow you to engage with people and bring them back to your website.
This theme was expanded on by our guest speaker, Mike Richwalsky from Allegheny College, Pennsylvania. Mike talked about how the college has been using services including Facebook and Twitter to connect with past, present and potential students. This has led to a change of working practice where staff now monitor the college twitter accounts and engage with students.
Mike admits that support time is an issue, but getting help from students to provide content such as such as videos for the Allegheny college channel on youtube and to respond to other students has been a real plus. He also made the point that just as much time has traditionally been spent supporting students via email.
These talks were followed by a series of practicals where attendees discussed what the main opportunities and challenges of using the social web to improve access to their resources and services. The key points are summarised below.
Opportunties
- Reaching new audiences
- Engaging and interacting with your audience in new ways
- Getting more honest feedback and addressing it
Challenges
- privacy, copyright, data protection and data ownership
- strain of human resources, trying to keep up to date and accurate
- focusing on social tools may not attract all audiences equally (just the geeks!)
- getting institutional support
- loss of (central) editorial control
Lessons for improving your online presence
- be mindful how users access your online resources and design to accomodate them
- there’s more to your online presence than where you rank in Google
- simply ignoring the social web can have a negative impact
- be clear on how to measure ’success’
- trust your users (e.g. students) to be your advocates
Edinburgh workshop
An semi-tropical Edinburgh hosted the second in the series of events on Improving your online presence. This brought together forty attendees, with Edinburgh University being well represented, together with Heriot Watt University, Queen Margaret University, the Scottish Library and Information Council, Edina, Mimas and Link Housing Association.
The first day covered the basics for web content such as: the importance of structure, total accessibility and barriers to such and content integrity. This laid the foundation for the ‘heavier’ sessions, dealing with topics such as RDF, microformats and the semantic web.
UKOLN’s Brian Kelly also ran a session on some of the challenges of introducing the social media tools to the academic world.
Among the issues that emerged were:
- do organisations need a policy for blogging and social media or would this stifle spontaneity and participation?
- how does an organisation monitor and respond to positive and negative feedback?
- how can staff be enthused to see the social media tools as a benefit?
- time needed to maintain a social media presence
- identify a clear purpose and objective for each social media service used
We were joined remotely via Skype by Nicola Osborne, Social Media Officer for EDINA. Brian will be reflecting on the experience soon on his UK Web Focus blog.
Participant highlights
“I’ve read a lot about the semantic web, but never quite got it. I do now.”
“Great to network with people from different, but related backgrounds and talk to those who’ve had similar problems”.
”A useful refresh, a more stricter approach to using keywords, metadata, microformats…”
“Provided a great set of references to get stuck in to”
Actions
- created a facebook fan page during the event. Now need to promote it.
- add microformats to staff contact and event information web page
- start blogging about our news to get it out there and get some feedback
We take a two week break now, with the final two events running in London and Cardiff in the week starting July 27th. We hope you’ll join us then!
Belfast workshop
The first in a series of workshops on Improving your Online Presence ran in Belfast this week and generated a lot of lively discussion about how organisations can optimise their web content for search engines as well as people and how to make best use of the social web.
The event brought together attendees from higher and further education, as well as diverse public sector organisations including Voluntary Arts Ireland, National Museums Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission, Advice NI and the Northern Ireland Assembly.
This led to some lively conversations on issues such as how to introduce social networking tools to their organisation and influence change, how to work with content management systems that may restrict what the provider can do, how some are only responsible for part of the overall site and concerned how they can improve structure across a site. Also for those from government departments, social media offered opportunities to meet the desire for government to be open and to request feedback from the public, but there was some concern over how to monitor and respond to this.
We asked attendees to share their highlights, surprises, lessons and actions that they’d take away from the event and these are summarised below. We also asked some of the attendees to tell us in their own words and these videos will appear here soon.
Highlights
- designing content to accommodate human online behaviour
- learning about web analytics and measuring impact
- the risks of not using web 2.0 tools for individuals and organisations
- thinking about the future of a semantic web
- the impact of using social technology to enhance live events
Lessons learnt
- that there are more audiences for web content than you might expect
- the social web should be a key part of online promotion, but don’t neglect more traditional methods
- use blogging and social media to interact and share with colleagues as well as the public
- ensure appropriate metadata exists throughout site
Actions
“will now take a radical look in updating an organisation’s web site”
“ensure that appropriate keywords will be selected for their site content”
“check that our Wikipedia entry is relevant and up-to-date”
“have a more co-ordinated and strategic approach to revamping our web site”
The next event starts in Edinburgh tomorrow. It’s already fully booked, but if you want to follow it or participate, you can do so via the hashtag scaseo, with tagged content being aggregated at http://tinyurl.com/scaseo