Last week we launched a new digital experience for Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. The new website, msb.georgetown.edu, gives alumni, global executives, prospective students, master’s candidates, faculty and staff a world-class digital experience. It is specifically designed to show how the McDonough School of Business helps its students succeed in their goals and the institution move up in the highly competitive business school rankings.

Site launches are always an exciting time for the Bluetext team, and McDonough was no different. It’s opening night, the curtain is raised, and the target audience will determine if the strategy, creativity, discipline and hard work have paid off. Shortly after the site launch, we gathered the team to review the project, discuss lessons learned, and identify ways to apply those to current and future projects.

The session was also an opportunity to further refine our core approach to innovative digital experiences to Higher Education as a market. Here are some of the key take-ways:

• Build a strong and sophisticated brand connection. Clean, bold, and straightforward design lets the institution’s brand speak for itself. The design, imagery, headlines and copy should convey confidence. Videos, infographics and interactive functionality can showcase the value proposition and the work of faculty and students.
• Address Return-On-Investment up-front. Students are savvier than ever. They want to understand the value proposition and why the degree at any particular institution is worth the cost. Address the question up-front in a way that students understand, speaking to their concerns and goals.

• Show the “bigger picture.” How will the education experience help students make an impact or shape their world in a positive way? Talk about how their education correlates to what’s relevant today. Depending on the discipline, it could be entrepreneurism, clean energy research, transforming the public education system, or even global citizenship.
• Engagement is essential, just like in the real world. It’s about social engagement and community. Smart use of social tools will put a face on the educational product, faculty and institution.

• Simplify. Put phone numbers and contact information at their fingertips. Clearly describe the admissions process and what they need to know to get started.
• Deliver a coherent digital experience across all touchpoints. Digital audiences are more connected, more empowered, and more distracted than ever before. They are constantly interacting with one or more devices that place data from websites, apps, and social media at their fingertips. Responsive design can give a consistent brand experience across multiple devices. What’s also important, but often neglected, is making sure that content is structured in a way that makes it reusable across desktops, laptops, mobile devices, social media and digital campaigns.

These core principles provide a solid foundation for creating a successful digital experience that drives ROI for any institution. Today, the user experience is about how a broad range of audiences interact with the brand and product across multiple contexts. That requires thinking of the .edu presence as a digital platform, not simply a “website,” to drive enlistment, revenue, and engagement goals.

Blackphone, powered by Silent Circle – the most secure solution in mobile privacy – launched earlier this year at the Mobile World Congress with such an overwhelming response to the user privacy features delivered by the phone’s state of the art PrivatOS operating system that MIT Technology Review recognized Blackphone on its prestigious list of the “10 Breakthrough Technologies” of 2014.”

When Switzerland based Blackphone and Silent Circle sought out an agency partner to deliver their story – and the freedom of privacy their new encryption technology brings to the world – they chose Bluetext. To coincide with the announcement that Blackphone handsets have started shipping to the device’s first pre-order customers around the world, Bluetext officially launched the brand across Europe and the Middle East via a trio of in-flight campaigns featured in Lufthansa, Emirates Air and American Airlines that you will have the benefit of seeing if you are traveling along any of those carrier’e major routes across the region this summer.

The first campaign – “Privacy. Purpose Built” – highlight’s the phone’s key differentiator – a device built from the ground up by a privacy company versus a privacy ‘bolt-on’ by a device manufacturer. The inherent beauty in the phone’s elegant simplicity gave us the license to let the device itself standout as the focal point of the artwork for the campaign.

The second, “Whisper” campaign focuses on the security and peace of mind delivered across 130 countries worldwide by Silent Circle, the device’s hard core, ultrasecure PrivatOS operating system to protect what matters most…your personal privacy.

In the early days of search engine optimization Meta Keywords were all the rage. “Keyword stuffing” your Meta header was tactic #1. Unfortunately for today’s markets, those days are long gone.

Since this point of education and correction is reviewed nearly every time we consult clients on search engine optimization, I thought it would be good to write a quick blog outlining two reasons why meta keywords are dead.

1. Google ignores them
About a decade ago, search engines judged pages only on the content of web pages, not on any so-called “off-page” factors such as the links pointing to a web page. In those days, keyword meta tags quickly became an area where someone could stuff often-irrelevant keywords without typical visitors ever seeing those keywords. Because the keyword meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keyword meta tag.

2. They alert your competition to which SEO words you are focused on
SEO is a very competitive sport. Source code is publicly available. So if you have a set of keyword research in which you have identified great long tail and short tail keywords, you don’t want to show your competitors what words you are optimizing for. Your competitors can emulate that organic strategy and buy those keywords to one up you on the search engine results pages.

To learn more about the latest SEO strategies and trends please download this white paper or contact me to discuss your SEO goals.

In an era of budget cuts and dwindling resources, hundreds of government organizations are achieving real success and showing a measurable return on investment using GovDelivery’s communications platform to communicate their messages and services.

Bluetext was hired by GovDelivery to help them reach public sector organizations who can benefit with tremendous cost savings while reaching more people, automating complex communications and driving mission value through deeper engagement with the public.

Bluetext conceived and designed a responsive landing page with an infographic demonstrating the benefits of using GovDelivery for Government agencies as the centerpiece of the campaign. We also developed a responsive email template and infographic poster to be used across many marketing channels.

CSC turned to Bluetext to design and launch an industry-specific landing page around its approach to targeting the requirements of the manufacturing industry. CSC’s vision is called Orchestrated Manufacturing, and it represents an age where manufacturing processes are orchestrated through digital interactions and cyber-physical production systems. CSC is working with clients to implement advanced solutions that leverage a new generation of systems is providing real-time awareness and autonomic interactions between machines, systems, assets and things.

Bluetext worked with CSC’s digital brand marketing team, as well as their Manufacturing industry marketing team, to design a landing page unlike anything CSC has ever launched inside of its corporate domain. It includes a modern design with one long, scrolling page to showcase the vision and its practical application to the market, and then lead visitors to download key content and interact with CSC.

At Bluetext, we find that many large companies with diverse industry focuses and solution offerings sometimes make it hard for target audiences to find exactly what they are looking for. The idea behind Orchestrated Manufacturing is for CSC to tell its story in a unique way with an online and offline strategy to drive a consistent visual message into the market. The landing page is complemented with two videos that can be used by sales teams to succinctly tell the story, as well as a highly produced poster for sharing at events.

Please check it out at www.csc.com/om. We would love to hear about how you are designing landing pages targeting unique audience groups and what strategies you are finding work best.