Missouri State University

Skip to content Skip to navigation
a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

Web Strategy and Development Blog

  • Web Strategy and Development
  • Web Support
  • @msuweb

#GoMaroon on GIPHY

June 28, 2016 by Web Strategy and Development

Playfair

Missouri State has launched a brand partnership with GIPHY, a search engine that allows people to search for and share GIFs on the internet.

Welcome Weekend

What are GIFs?

GIFs are animated images that loop endlessly. From a technical side, they are an image file type that stands for Graphics Interchange Format. They’re a great way to engage audiences on social media with an engaging visual component.

Why Missouri State uses GIFs

This is part of an effort to make MSU-branded assets readily available to the campus community (and the world). GIPHY provides a search engine that allows people to find GIFs featuring Missouri State campus activities, Boomer Bear and President Clif Smart.

How to access MSU GIFs

  • Go to the Missouri State GIPHY page or download the GIPHY app on the App Store or Google Play
  • Select the GIF you’d like to share
  • Tap or click the “Share” tab
  • Select the social media site you’d like to use

Alternatively, GIPHY is integrated with Twitter‘s GIF search engine, which is available on the Twitter app on mobile devices.

  • Select compose a new tweet
  • Tap the GIF button
  • Type “missouristate” in the search box
  • Select the GIF you’d like to share
  • Compose and send your tweet

Filed Under: Social media, web strategy and development Tagged With: brand, new media, Social Media, web and new media

Lessons from CASE VI: Brand consistency, storytelling and institutional longevity

February 7, 2014 by Lucie Amberg

Carrington Hall

Carrington Hall

Standing out in a flattened world

A few thoughts from the recent CASE VI conference, which I was fortunate to attend:

I first attended It’s the End of the Web as We Know It by Mark Greenfield, consultant and director of the office of Web services at the University at Buffalo. One main contention: the exponential growth of technology is “flattening” the higher education landscape, particularly with the rise of new curricular options such as MOOCs and competency exams. (Greenfield covers this topic on his blog and avidly chronicles it through aggregated articles on his Delicious feed.)

These trends seem positive for enrollment and accessibility, but if a university is assuming a majority of students will follow the four-year, on-campus path, it may be assuming too much. And there are other concerns. It’s challenging to fully evaluate MOOC-driven learning against traditional models, and it’s hard to gauge whether proving skills on a competency exam has much to do with the critical thinking and personal development colleges have historically provided.

Greenfield’s presentation started me thinking that as technology muddies curricular waters, a university’s culture, history, environment and goals– basically, its brand –must become more prominent. The university experience should be bigger and richer than a math equation of credits and degree; it should be an opportunity to play a role in a story that spans generations.

Thinking about depth as well as breadth

I didn’t expect these thoughts to overlap with another presentation, Empowering Faculty to be Brand Advocates, led by Kristen Smarr of the University of Missouri’s College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources. She described how she designed and executed training workshops for select faculty with the goal of helping them provide “more human” context to their highly technical lectures. In order to achieve this goal, she led participants through a series of exercises that strengthened their storytelling techniques. A couple of sample exercises Smarr shared:

  • She had participants craft and present their life stories — in a three-minute format.
  • She had them explain their field or research and why it matters in 60 or fewer seconds.

These exercises revealed that each faculty member had a gripping story to tell about his or her intellectual journey, and each of these stories illustrated the committed pursuit of knowledge. Essentially, they were all brand advocates, now eager and equipped to tell personal versions of the university’s big brand story.

Bringing it back to brand

The two presentations offered such different– and such effective –views. Greenfield’s bird’s-eye, futuristic, tech-driven world really overlapped with Smarr’s highly personal, elegantly simple vision of scholars telling stories. In both cases, I heard that brand consistency is the key to success. And meaningful branding is about so much more than using the proper logo and language (although that’s important). It’s about the big story, the one that spans generations, the one that students want to participate in and contribute to.

 

 

Filed Under: web strategy and development Tagged With: brand, branding, CASE, CASEVI, greenfield, marketing, smarr

2011 UCDA Design Conference Takeaways

October 31, 2011 by

I attended and presented at the 2011 UCDA Design Conference in Phoenix, AZ on October 16-18, 2011. I wanted to share a few key takeaways from some of my favorite sessions at the conference:

Creativity, Confidence & Collaboration

by Wil Heywood, Arizona State University

  • This was probably my favorite session I attended, however it is really difficult to put down to words all of the creative concepts that Wil shared with us.
  • My main takeaway is that one must be vulnerable to be creative, and you also must be confident enough to state your thoughts and expose yourself to being vulnerable to rejection.
  • Wil also shared with us some interesting ideas about how to ‘force’ collaboration among groups; he used his students as an example. He puts them into small groups, gives them a difficult problem, and then has them solve it in ten days. The students hate the project, but by the end of it they have gained better social awareness, as well as self-management skills by being forced to collaborate with others.

Bridging the Gap: Building Design Strategy on Marketing Research Data

by Elizabeth Scarborough, SimpsonScarborough

  • Elizabeth shared with us that your brand should never (ever) be deviated from. Once you pick your brand, you have to stick to it no matter what; if you or other stakeholders don’t commit to it then you lose the impact of that brand immediately. All stakeholders on your campus must use the brand; if they do not like it, they must find their niche within that brand and figure out how it works for them, instead of deviating from it.
  • She also shared some great examples of other universities she has worked with, namely American University and Thomas Edison College.
    • American University initiated a new campaign called WONK (which is “know” spelled backwards). This campaign labels their audience as wonks – someone who knows something backwards and forwards. This is a very original campaign and is definitely worthy of further investigation.
    • Thomas Edison College went from traditional spotlight-style advertisements to more modern, typography-heavy ads. These ads were very popular with prospective students and those in the younger demographics, helping them to better reach younger audiences. While the ads were not as well-received overall as the traditional spotlight ads, they were very popular with this particular demographic and therefore were very successful in helping to recruit new students.

My presentations

I presented two general sessions at this conference on Sunday, October 16. My morning session was a new version of my presentation on Transitioning Alumni Magazines from Print to Web and my afternoon session was on Ten Tips for Creating Online Video.

Filed Under: web strategy and development Tagged With: alumni, brand, branding, collaboration, conference, creativity, design, magazine, marketing, new media, presentation, takeaways, ucda, Video, wrapup

Subscribe

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Follow @MSUWeb

My Tweets

Calendar

  • Complete Calendar

Categories

  • Accessibility
  • brand
  • email marketing
  • Mobile
  • News
  • Redesign
    • Academic websites
    • Web redesign 2010
    • Web redesign 2015
  • Social media
    • Social media kit
  • template
    • updates
  • Training
  • Video
  • Web Press
  • web strategy and development
    • Technical
  • Web Support
  • WordPress blogs

Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org

Connect with web strategy and development

  • Twitter

Make your Missouri statementMake your Missouri statement
  • Last Modified: November 1, 2011
  • Accessibility
  • Disclaimer
  • Disclosures
  • EO/AA/M/F/Veterans/Disability/Sexual Orientation/Gender Identity
  • © 2013 Board of Governors, Missouri State University
  • Contact Information
 

Loading Comments...