A Critical Look at IST2U
Among my many responsibilities at the College of Information Sciences and Technology, I am the Media Director of IST2U. In a nutshell, this means I’m the guy that gets e-mails about upcoming events from all the folks in the offices at IST, which I then condense into short blurbs that contain the essential information (date, time, location, a sentence or two summarizing the event.) The purpose of IST2U is to be the official source of information about events and opportunities happening within the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State.
In my previous semester as the media director, I focused primarily on keeping the wheels spinning. The transition from the previous director was a tad bumpy (due to no one’s fault in particular, just the nature of the beast), and so my main efforts were spent meeting folks around the office and processing updates as they came in. However, towards the middle of the semester I began to get a bit more experimental. First, I added Google Analytics tracking into the Drupal installation that runs the site. With the help of one of the IST system administrators, the analytics results exclude any traffic from inside the IST Building (since many of the workstations there have IST2U as their homepage). This greatly reduced the number of “false hits.”
I also setup a Twitter account for IST2U. This was my first stab at “real” marketing for the site. While I have given brief talks at student government meetings, in classes, and so on, I had never really actively “pushed” IST2U to people. By integrating IST2U with the Twitter social network, I took the first steps towards giving students the opportunity to select from a variety of content delivery mechanisms. My predecessors used e-mail campaigns, essentially carpet bombing all-student mailing lists with a weekly digest of news and events. However, students often begrudged this approach and would create spam filters, or simply delete the messages without reading them.
The best thing about the Twitter account for IST2U (for me) is that it is fully automated. Using the TwitterFeed service, the RSS of the page is checked every half hour and updates are automatically posted to the Twitter account. This is a great payoff, as it takes only a few minutes to configure, and after that you can just let it do it’s thing. My ideal marketing solution is the passive “trickling” of data to different outputs, from which the userbase can choose their preferred method of content retrieval. This will leave me free to compose new posts, analyze traffic and advertising results and develop new campaigns based on these results, and improve the site by adding new features.
I believe that RSS is highly underutilized within the college demographic. I know very few people that use any sort of RSS reader, and even fewer that are “up to date” on the articles they subscribe to. Therefore, having the website and an RSS feed as the only mechanisms for content delivery is, in my opinion, a terrible strategy. For this reason, I am trying to extend IST2U into more social networks that I know are utilized by college students.
Tonight I setup a Facebook “Page” for IST2U. On it, I have created a discussion board where students can post feedback, feature requests, etc. that I will evaluate and hopefully implement during the re-launch of IST2U. My goal is to have IST2U fully migrated to WordPress (I find it to be considerably less “clunky” than Drupal) by Monday, January 26th. It is my hope that through these improvements and renovations, IST2U can finally become what it was always intended to be: a useful, viable web resource for IST and SRA students.
I am currently in the process of drafting a traffic report, in which I’m conducting an analysis of the data I currently have on IST2U, as gathered by Google Analytics over the past several months. This will be the baseline upon which we compare the success or failure of IST2U in the future.