They hurt. Believe me. First they hit the wallet then they slowly attack your back, making you slouch forward in an attempt to hold up the weight. Textbooks transcend education years and make their way from backpacks of kindergarteners to graduate students.

With the growing popularity of tablets the electronic textbook is lifting part of the burden. The actual text is the same, but for visual and kinetic learners, the e-textbook could revolutionize content retention.

Apple takes a bite out of the market
Apple is the newest company headed to school with students in the form of electronic textbooks. A month ago, at the Guggenheim museum in New York City,  the hegemonic tech leader announced their free textbook experience, iBooks2. They claim iBooks2 will reinvent the classical education tool of textbooks. At $14.99 a book, the price point is hard to beat. Just three days post-announcement, 350,000 textbooks had been downloaded!
Life on Earth, the most popular of the eight books currently available, is a free preview chapter download. The book demonstrates the multi-engagement factors that a regular page-turning ledger cannot. Instead of just looking at the picture of an insect’s exoskeleton, the reader gets to slide, tap and rearrange the image. Students are unable to copy and paste the information, but can highlight and save notes on the text. Glossary terms are easily aggregated into flashcards.

Click here to watch the keynote introduction speech in full.

If any company is going to make e-textbooks mainstream, it will be Apple. As of June 2011, there had been 25 million tablets sold. Did they revolutionize the digital textbook? Debatable. Will they continue to develop it? Of course. This is a huge market share for potential publishing partnerships and publishers will want to sign contracts with the platforms that are able to garner the most sales.

Reading ahead
Apple is competing for market share against the Amazon Kindle, Barnes and Noble’s Nook and Chegg.com’s eTextbook Reader app. That market share is only growing and in 2011, sales expanded to $267. 3 million, according to Simba Information. Silicon Valley start-ups including Inkling and Kno are assertively pushing for the e-textbook with interactive content.

The catch with Apple’s textbook offerings are only for high school level courses. The technology hegemon has yet to fire in to the large college textbook market.
International learners will certainly help propel digital textbook integration. South Korea announced in 2011 that they plan to have all students migrated to digital textbooks by 2015 and are spending two billion on the cloud-based system.
A few U.S. higher education institutions are jumping into app land. Incoming students at Seton Hill University receive both a 16 GB iPad2 and a 13” MacBook Pro. At other schools, such as Duke University, certain colleges within the institution are handing out the iPads.

The future of the e-book will focus on the interactive capabilities of quizzes, games and videos. But the future also holds some roadblocks for the popularity of the e-book.

Failure to link up
Currently there are some socioeconomic barriers to industry adoption; tablets are expensive. The e-textbook could create more disparity between learning of poor and wealthy students. And, the tablet may not even be worth it. In a recent study done at Daytona State College, students were found to only save approximately $1 on e-textbooks over print.

Without then general student population using digital versions, social integration opportunities within the textbook are inactive. Inkling links classmates together through Facebook, but until the entire class utilizes the information, it is a futile platform.
Most textbooks have now some form of digital version, the general populace has yet to catch on to the technology. Only 11% of college students have purchased e-textbooks. Understandably, most digital textbooks lack the feel of highlighting, writing in the margins and the inability to re-sell the book back for some refund money.

Schools: Is your institution leveraging digital textbooks? If so, how?
Students: What’s your preference? Physical book or e-book?

The following is a guest post by Brenda Harms, Associate Vice President for Client Services at Stamats, Inc.

It’s true! The digital world really does bring us together. I am always delighted to see constituents reaching out to colleagues from across campus to leverage their knowledge in a way that will positively impact their institution. Stamats Catchfire is partnering with  the Northeast Regional Computing Program (NERCOMP), an organization historically serving the educational needs of IT professionals, to  deliver a series of best practices workshops to advance to the digital marketing success of higher education marketing, admissions, and advancement professionals.

In a series of four workshops being offered by NERCOMP and Stamats Catchfire,  participants from across campus will come together to gain information on analytics, mobile, and social media—which are quickly becoming important tools in our efforts to communicate with key audiences.  Clearly, it’s no longer an issue of “if” your institution should be engaging in these efforts, but “when” and “how.” The workshops are positioned to share digital marketing best practices and answer your toughest questions on these sometimes overwhelming topics.

Workshop No. 1: Web Analytics, January 13 in Southbridge, MA

Takeaways:

• Participants will set up and leverage Google Analytics for their institutional websites and various other sets of data, including accounts, profiles, filters and goals, performance measurement of campaigns, and customized dashboards.
• Participants will understand the power of analytics and results-based decision making as they move forward in evolving their digital presence.

Workshop No. 2: Social Media Basics, February 6 at UMASS Amherst

Takeaways:

• Participants will learn how to approach social media strategically and how it can support a variety of marketing initiatives.
• Participants will have a strong grasp of the benefits and best uses of each platform.

Workshop No. 3: Social Media Advanced Topics. March 5 at Holy Cross in Worcester, MA

Takeaways:

• Participants will learn how to implement complex social media strategies by leveraging advanced applications and functions.
• Participants will understand how social media impacts their bottom line through established ROI metrics.

Workshop No. 4: Mobile Basics, April 12 in Norwood, MA

Takeaways:

• Participants will learn how to approach the mobile landscape strategically and how it can support marketing initiatives.
• Participants will have a strong grasp of the mobile spectrum, the alternatives available to them, what it takes to implement a mobile solution, and how to approach implementation strategically.

Regardless whether your institution is a member of NERCOMP, please make plans to join us in the Northeast for these exciting opportunities to expand your knowledge, bring your campus departments together, and truly embrace digital marketing. To learn more, please go to www.nercomp.org and register for one or all of these workshops! We look forward to seeing you.

The following is a guest post by Brenda Harms, Associate Vice President for Client Services at Stamats, Inc.

I must admit that I am not what most in the digital arena would consider an early adopter.   Perhaps said in a nicer way, I adopt without ever letting go of the past (I still own a paper planner that I actually write in).  I can’t help myself. I like paper. I like talking on the phone, and I have a strong urge to not let everyone in the world know when I am heading to the airport, doing my laundry, or hanging out on my couch!  But really, this is not about me.  This is about our adult students and where THEY find and connect with YOU.

At Stamats 2011 Adult Student Marketing Conference the conversation turned, repeatedly, to the use of digital media to reach out to (through marketing) and stay connected to (through recruiting) our adult student population.  We simply can no longer deny that even adult students are looking for the digital connection.  From how they “shop” for college (from the 2010 Adult Student TALK™ research) the No. 1 place adult students reported that they look for information on institutions when considering a return to school was via search on the web; Google, Bing, Yahoo!, etc.  Adult students also noted that this the web is their preferred channel for how they want to continue to get information about their admission process. Clearly, most adults are easier to connect with via digital means than any other way.

Do you feel like your school is “current” when it relates to leveraging digital media to market, recruit, and serve adults at your institution?  Are you even sure where to start considering all the elements of digital media that are in the marketplace?  If the answer to either of these questions is no, or even maybe, I want to encourage you to keep an eye on the Stamats website in the next few weeks as we post descriptions of the sessions being offered at the 2012 Adult Student Marketing Conference.  While the conference will continue to be a strong mix of marketing and recruiting strategies and tactics, as well as the unveiling of the 2011 Adult StudentsTALK™ research, you will notice a number of opportunities that relate to learning more about the digital marketplace.

From analytics to digital marketing to social media, I think you will find something that challenges your thinking and expands the toolbox that you use to enroll adult students to your institution.

To help us prepare content for the conference, please share any questions or topics that you’d like to see covered in the comments below.

In each session there was a palpable divide in attitudes regarding social media in particular. However, in a testament to social media’s maturity, the divide is no longer believers and non-believers – social media has proven its utility in the college admissions world. Its practitioners now fracture into those who deeply understand and embrace innovation on the various platforms, and those who envy and struggle to replicate those successes.

“Should we have our own Facebook app? How many Twitter accounts should be run?” Concerns on the minutia of social media campaigns were voiced on a regular basis, the conference’s social media lectures offered standing room only, and explanations of successful campaigns were met with rapt attention. Yet for the all of the fantastic data presented at NACAC, the common thread in universities posting social media success is deceptively simple. These departments thoroughly understand that this new communication model still adheres to age-old marketing truisms: tie your efforts to concrete goals and measure effectively.

Goals

Understanding that social media must plug into your department’s end goals largely demystifies what can be a daunting platform. While students expect your department to have a Facebook presence, it is difficult to justify hours spent on the platform if stakeholders see no tie-in with admissions goals. Start early by establishing both goals and messaging schedules specific to social media. At first, simply use your judgement and don’t hesitate to focus on seemingly arbitrary goals. Aim to increase time spent responding to users, run small campaigns, push for more “Likes”, more mentions, etc. By focusing on specific goals, your metrics will be vastly more helpful down the road.

Metrics

An astonishing 29% of universities don’t measure social media! This was one of the most disappointing stats presented at NACAC. To that 29%, I am happy to reveal that there is virtually no end to social media metrics. Measure away! Large platforms like Twitter and Facebook provide their own, frequently updated toolsets and a handful of third-party companies offer expansive dashboards for tracking any number of accounts and platforms. With a clear set of social media goals, the data pulled from these reveal the efficacy of your efforts over time. In some of the most helpful advice at NACAC, speakers unanimously extolled the benefits of meticulously comparing established benchmarks and initiatives with spikes in core metrics. Through these methods, several universities have realized that large increases of Facebook visitors related directly to e-mail blasts. Develop on this methodology to reveal how social media plugs back into your bottom line and constantly tweak your strategy accordingly. You’ll soon understand how 65% of admissions departments see social media impacting their 2010 yield efforts.

Share the love! What are some basic social media strategies that have proven effective for your institution? What do you consider your most important metrics?

As much of Stamats Catchfire’s focus for development is continually centered around mobile, I tried to attend as many sessions dealing with the topic as possible. As I sat through those sessions, the one phrase that really stuck with me was “Is it mobile worthy?”.

Keeping this question in mind can be a big help in developing either a mobile website or a native application; the question can even change to “Is it native-worthy?” as you go down that path. What the question means to me is that your mobile site does not need to be, and I argue shouldn’t be, a mirror of the content of your full site. When you start to think about creating your mobile site, take a look at each page and ask that question; it helps to also look at your analytics data to see what sections of your website are most visited by mobile users.

This mobile site inventory is just the first step. Once you’ve narrowed down the pages and/or posts that you want to feature on your mobile site, you should look at the actual content of those pages. The very nature of a mobile device makes long-form text fairly ineffective, so concentrate on ways that you can present your content in a more mobile-friendly way. Think about rewriting content to be more brief, or approach the content as more of a bulleted list instead of a long-form article.

If you’re using a CMS to manage your site (…and I really hope you are), look into existing tools within the CMS that can help control both the the look and feel of your mobile site, as well as the content that gets pushed to those mobile visitors.

Have you deployed a mobile site recently? How did you choose what content was served to your mobile visitors? What tools did you use to help you with this?

Are you starting to look into taking your site mobile and need some guidance from the Stamats Catchfire team?

The University, like most in the current economic environment, was dealing with some difficult challenges: major budget cuts in 2009, layoffs in 2010, continually rising costs, declining enrollment, and flat revenue. Senior administration sought to actively address these issues by implementing a new strategic plan for the University. What’s outstanding about ISU’s story is how the plan was conceived, managed, and executed.

Some Highlights

• The final plan, titled “Pathway to Success,” consisted of seven goals, 34 initiatives, and over 300 work plans.
• The entire plan was essentially made public – see for yourself. Each plan was aptly tracked and measured. And these metrics, as well, were available publicly.
• All of this planning information, documentation, metrics and reporting was available via a hosted website solution that all involved could easily access. Documents were shared in various forms to ensure everyone could appropriately view.
• Students were invited to planning meetings. Meetings were openly marketed campus-wide.

Due to the above tactics, the strategic plan completely saturated the University’s daily operations, so much so that planning committee members were able to walk up to students on campus and ask them about the seven goals. Leveraging a modern planning and communications approach, focused on accessibility and transparency, allowed everyone on campus to truly buy in to the strategic plan, and recognize that the work that is done daily is critical to the bottom line success of ISU.

The resulting successes prove the value of such an approach:

• Fall overall enrollment in 2010 was up 1000 students
• Completed a large capital campaign ahead of schedule
• Enhanced infrastructure work
• Implemented a data warehouse solution
• Assigned $15M to support and continue the strategic planning process

What do you think of ISU’s approach? How are you applying information age traits such as accessibility and transparency to your organization’s strategic planning efforts? If not, share your challenges with us.

Last week I had the opportunity to attend and present at EduComm, an education leadership conference focused on technology and innovation held in Orlando, with Lawrence Cunningham, a Senior Client Consultant with our friends at Stamats.

I left the conference with a strong sense of how the higher education community is addressing innovation institution-wide, from senior administration to marketing office interns, and the challenges they’re facing as they seek to leverage new technologies.

Over the next week, I’ll share some of the key takeaways from a few, standout sessions.

Dries & Drupal

The Tuesday morning keynote featured Dries Buytaert, creator of Drupal and co-founder and CTO of Acquia.  As a WordPress fangirl, I’ve always been skeptical of Drupal, and tend to lump it into a group of less-often utilized open source content management systems and frameworks such as Joomla and MODx. Dries stated that Drupal currently powers 1.7% of the web, which is nothing to balk at, but doesn’t hold much weight in comparison toWordPress’ 14.5% share.

What’s truly intriguing about Drupal’s market share, per Dries, is that over 2000 higher education institutions, globally, use Drupal. Colleges and universities such as Columbia,McGill, Amherst, MIT and Harvard are among this mix (though we know that Harvard leverages WordPress as well). As to why colleges and universities are leveraging Drupal? According to Dries, Drupal “slips through the back door at institutions because it’s accessible and open source.”

Dries then went on to discuss why open source is winning in today’s digital marketplace, stressing how open source systems foster a sense of community among developers and users, and due to this network, are often technically superior. That’s an argument that we at Catchfire often use; there’s an incredible amount of value in leveraging an open source system that can take advantage of a network of thousands of developers seeking innovative ways to advance a system, collaborating together to fix bugs and share improvements, compared to a few people that have engineered a closed, more specific CMS and/or CMF.

Open source, from both the developer and marketer perspective, means freedom to run a program, study it, and modify it to fit the needs or your organization. Leveraging open source systems let you and your organization stay nimble and malleable, so you can appropriately react to user’s experiences and expectations; a must to succeed in today’s digital marketplace.

Do you leverage open source software for your organization or institution? If so, what platforms are you using, and why? What challenges or successes have you experienced with leveraging these platforms? Share in the comments below.

In my mind, the issue comes down to a few major decision points:

1. What’s the goal of your mobile presence?
2. Does your analytics data show that the majority of your mobile visitors access your site from a particular device?
3. Is your site already an application?
4. How much money are you willing to spend?

Let’s talk about each of these in a little more detail.

What’s your goal?

Perhaps a better way to think about this is to identify your current mobile visitors’ goal. It only makes sense to prioritize improvement based upon what your users are already utilizing your site for. If analytics show that 90 percent of your mobile traffic simply visits your contact page to look up a location or phone number, then a good first step for your mobile strategy might be to create a simple landing page for mobile traffic to easily access that information. If, however, your mobile visitors are going through your checkout process to purchase items, then you’ll want to streamline that process for a mobile visitor.

Who’s using your site via mobile?

If all your traffic is coming from a single device, let’s say an iPhone, then you probably don’t have to worry about developing a native app for more than just iOS. However, if your traffic is equally split among a few devices, then it might behove you to develop a mobile site that translates to all platforms, rather than creating native apps for each.

Is your site an application?

People need a reason to download your app; if your site is just informational with limited functionality, then it’s going to be hard to convince them to trouble with downloading it. If, however, your site is user-driven or offers great interactivity, it’ll be much less effort to justify your app.

How much are you willing to spend?

From a technology and development standpoint, creating a native app is very different than building a website. If you have an internal staff or a relationship with an outside vendor, you can’t take for granted that they have the skill set to also create your native application. With that said, you’re going to have to either hire new staff or find another company to create the app for you. Because web development is a more mature field than iOS and Android development, there are many more options for outsourcing or internal hiring.

I don’t think any one of these questions can, by itself, make your decision on whether or not to go native or stay HTML; however, when you consider your collective answers to these questions, you should have a good idea of which will benefit you and your customers the most. If you need help making the decision, or if you’re ready to delve into app development,Catchfire Media can help.

Has your business wrestled with your mobile strategy? What did you decide to do? What were the main things that influenced your decision?

Many classes have organically sprung up out of the buzz from the Silicon Valley hotbed—classes such as “Digital Media in Society,” “Virtual Communities and Social Media,”  “Psychology of Social Media,” “Digital Journalism,” and “The Rhetoric of Social Media” just to name a few. Classes like “Brands, Experience, and Social Technology” are exploring the ways in which the social media space is changing the corporate landscape in a drastic way and are examining how leading organizations are creating compelling brands and connecting with consumers through shared social experiences.

As today’s savvy consumers are increasingly participating in brands (rather than merely receiving their messages), the coursework aims to explore what certain companies are doing to foster better experiences, conversations and relationships—with both their employees and customers. Furthermore, cornerstones of these classes include ways in which to harness social media to build and amplify a brand.

In the department of Management, Science, and Engineering, students are being taught that attention to and literacy with social media is not only important, but essential for entrepreneurial success in today’s modern business climate. With recent campus visitors such as Jack Dorsey (The creator of Twitter), Bill Gross (the founder of IdeaLab) and even Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, classes here have the opportunities to engage with experts in the field who stress that social media is not only here to stay, but that it will continue to change the landscape for product consumption and brand interaction.

There have also been some interesting additions to the Management, Science, and Engineering department including MS&E 237: The Social Data Revolution: Data Mining and Electronic Business, a course that includes “hands-on exploration of current and emergent data sources and their impact on individuals, business and society.” Guest speakers and group projects (e.g., Twitter and Facebook apps) combining data strategy, machine learning, modern and traditional marketing, behavioral economics, and incentive design. Classes like these include hands-on projects and app developments, which teach students how to align branding with emerging technologies.

Another course, born form the digital media revolution, that has become a popular addition to many Stanford student’s academic schedule is CS 193P: iPhone and iPad Application Programming.

Stanford’s new programs in the areas of social media and technology development are synthesizing tech-entrepreneurship and lessons for business success, which in turn, illustrate the burgeoning presence of digital and social media in the business sphere.

How have you experienced social media changing higher education course offerings? Share your thoughts below.

Who loves filling out forms?

To the general consumer, forms are a pain, a time consuming and potentially confusing attempt to extract information. Yet these same forms are vital for businesses, crucial in e-commerce, social networks, marketing, and so much more. Bad form design frustrates users, many of whom will simply abandon both the form and your site. In brief, form design is subtle but hugely important … so do it right. Consider the tips below to improve your visitors’ interaction with site forms:

Alignment

Humans engage all information with a discernible cognitive path. Play into this as a way of enhancing the user’s experience. Some great insights into these cognitive paths were revealed in a 2006 study by Matteo Penzo that tracked users’ visual navigation of various form layouts. The study determined that the most natural layout for human interaction places bold labels directly atop corresponding entry fields as in Ebay’s registration form. If this isn’t an option, defer to aligning labels along the edge of entry fields. These changes, while small, result in a clear and natural interaction from the user perspective.

Break It Up

Websites are broken into sections for a reason—do the same with your forms. Group similar questions into sections and make each section distinguishable using visual elements such as headers, line breaks, or subtle design. If necessary, add some brief explanatory copy to the top of a section. Breaking long forms into clear sections is particularly important, as it keeps users on track and makes the process seem much less daunting.

Humanize the Experience

Giving your street address and credit card number to stoic machine isn’t pleasant. Assure your users that they are indeed exchanging information with a person through humanistic instructions. If a casual tone is acceptable, consider asking full questions instead of dry single-word requests. “When were you born?” is much more inviting than “Date of Birth.” For a more professional tone, try replacing abbreviations with full words and making these short requests easily comprehensible with little context. Even replacing “mm/dd/yy” with “Month, Day, Year” could be an improvement, given adequate space.

Be Transparent

Consumers are suspicious, and rightly so. Asking for personal information, especially when it doesn’t seem vital from a user perspective, invokes a sour and resistant stance. Make sure your users understand exactly why they are being asking for this information. Explain succinctly the purpose of collecting this information to quell their fears.

Show a Path to Completion

As with any unpleasant process, people want to know how long it’s going to last. For multi-page forms, let users know how far along they are, either with progressive graphics or bydisplaying the total number of pages upfront. While some users are likely to skip a long form outright, those same users would very likely have abandoned the process after the second or third page.

Minimize Design

In an honest attempt to clearly separate form sections, many simply overdo it. While branding and site consistency is important, be sure to keep your graphic elements and varying colors to a minimum. Remember, padding and spacing is the most effective tool in constructing an easily-navigable form.

Are your online forms driving away potential customers? Consider renovating using the tips above, and contact Catchfire Media for in-depth analysis and ways to optimize the user experience.