University of Chicago Law School: The Electronic Projects Blog

New Year, New Home Page

If you've been to the Law School's website lately, you may have noticed that just before the New Year, we quietly rolled out a new look for the site's home page. Highlights of the new design include:

• a striking new emphasis on the photographs accompanying our featured stories
• a streamlined and simplified information architecture
• more real estate devoted to publicizing our faculty's research
• removal of the old "News," "Audio," "Video" sections in favor of a "News & Media" column, which will aggregate not only those content types, but also blogs hosted both on our site (e.g. Accolades & Achievements) and elsewhere (the D'Angelo Library Blog, the Becker-Posner Blog, etc.) and other types of content that are updated regularly (such as The Record and Faculty Research).

Here in the Commmunications office, we're very happy with the changes. We feel that the new page, designed by Rogue Element, Inc. (the same firm that designed the previous home page and the rest of the site) continues to give visitors a glimpse of the vibrancy of the Law School, while making it easier for them to find the information they're seeking. But we want to know what you think -- please let us know in the comments.

Introducing the Law School's New Mobile Site

Today we're happy to officially unveil the Law School's new mobile-optimized website. Users accessing the Law School's website from a mobile device (with the exception of iPads) will now be automatically redirected to a version of our website that is specifically designed with mobile users in mind. How so? It features:

• A re-imagined information architecture, making it easy to find the information that, according to our research, is what our mobile users are usually looking for.
• Fewer images and other bells-and-whistles, so pages load more quickly (and with less drain on your data plan).
• Quick and easy means to find your way to and from the Law School, or to get contact information for faculty and staff.

Like all websites, our mobile site is a work in progress, so we welcome your feedback on how we can best enable your use of mobile devices to access the site.

When developing an institution's mobile presence, there are many options. You can, for example, build native apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, etc. as the University has done; and certainly, there are advantages to that approach. However, given the limited staff for this project and the increasing proliferation of new mobile devices, we wanted to create a mobile presence that would be platform-independent (i.e., viewable on all devices, from iPhones to Droids to Blackberries, etc.). Luckily, the content management system we use for the Law School's website, Drupal, is flexible, robust, and supported by an incredible community of contributors. By plugging in the Mobile Tools module and a modified version of the Mobile Garland theme, we were able to easily create a mobile site that serves up the same data as our standard site, repackaged in a mobile-friendly fashion.

Who @UChicagoLaw Follows, and Why

You might have noticed that the Law School's main twitter account has a lot of Twitter followers (nearly 5000 as of this writing), and also follows a lot of people. But we don't follow everyone who follows us. Why not? Because we feel that Twitter is as much about listening as it is about broadcasting, and we want to be able to hear what the people who are interested in our content are saying and to be able to converse with them when appropriate. To do that, we need to be able to slow down the firehose and filter out the signal from the noise. While we have no hard-and-fast rules and each decision is made individually, below are some of the things we consider when we decide whether or not to follow someone back.

In general, we will follow you if:

• You appear to be a real person. Hint: a photo and a bio go a long way toward establishing that fact.
• We know you are a student or an alum.
• Your feed consists of more than links to other people's content. We are especially excited to see you in conversation with other users.
• You are following us because you are interested in our content. If your feed provides evidence that you are engaged in the sorts of issues we tweet about, we'll be a lot more eager to add your stream to the river of tweets we encounter every day.

In general, we will not follow you if:

•  You are a spambot, or your account is used purely for the promotion of goods or services. We tend to see a lot of follows from law firms whose entire feeds consist of "So-and-so provides personal injury counsel in the area of Such-and-such County," over and over again. We do make an exception for other law schools and libraries, who usually provide links to quality content that may be of interest to our community.
• Your account is protected. We figure that if you don't want most people to see some of the stuff you're tweeting, you probably don't want us to see it.
• You have never actually tweeted. Not much point in us following you, then, is there?
• You tweet primarily in a language other than English. This is entirely our failing, rather than yours. We wish we had staff that could read the dozens of languages spoken by our followers, but alas, we do not. Tweets in languages we can't read could quickly begin to drown out those that we are capable of interacting with, and we would all be the worse for it.

What do you think of these lists? Do you have guidelines for which accounts you will or won't follow?

Alumnipalooza! The New and Improved "Accolades & Achievements"

Here at the Law School, we love our alumni. We love them so much, in fact, that until now we had two different places on our website where we were compiling alumni updates and profiles: aside from our Accolades & Achievements blog, we also had a section of the site called "The 50-Year Plan," which included longer profiles from The Record, our alumni magazine. As of today we've consolidated the two, merging the Record profiles into Accolades & Achievements, and making Accolades & Achievements much easier to use. Want to see only updates from your class year, or only posts mentioning the phrase "Supreme Court"? Just use the handy-dandy filters provided on the Accolades & Achievements home page. If you so desire, you can also see only profiles that were contained in The Record, or  ones from a specific issue. Take a look, and let us know what you think!

Help us evolve the Law School's home page!

The Communications office is currently mulling some changes to the Law School's home page. Before we do anything, though, we want to know what you think. Please take two minutes to fill out this short survey so that we can ensure the you get the most out of your experience on our website.

Spotlight on Faculty Research

You may have noticed that, in an ongoing effort to promote the scholarship of our distinguished faculty, the Law School’s website is now highlighting faculty research on our  home page. A small archive of abstracts of articles is now live; aside from being featured on the website, these abstracts are also featured on the digital signage in the library tower, and will be automatically fed into our Facebook and Twitter streams.
 
At the moment, the Communications office finds most of this content by periodically checking SSRN for new uploads (the archive currently features articles uploaded to SSRN in the last 3-4 months). Faculty who have research that they would like us to highlight that is not included in SSRN should email me with the article’s title, coauthors (if any) and either a link to where it can be found on the web or a PDF that we can upload to the website. We are also happy to promote longer-form pieces such as books, though our methods for doing so will be different than those for promoting articles; please get in touch with myself or Marsha Nagorsky to discuss if you have a book coming out that you would like us to promote.

Website Updates Today (1/10/11)

The Law School's website will be undergoing maintenance this afternoon; while the upgrades should be seamless, it's possible that you may experience service outages during this time. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Faculty Reading Recommendations, 2010 Edition

Just in case you haven't seen it on our home page, Facebook page, or Twitter account, our annual faculty book recommendations are now up.

Tracking the Law School's Social Media

I recently spent some time immersed in Google Analytics, trying to track the effectiveness of some of the Law School's social media efforts. As these results may be of interest to colleagues at the University of Chicago and elsewhere, I thought I'd share the results here.

Goals

The goals of the Law School’s social media presence are:

1. to increase engagement between the Law School with both current students and alumni, thereby strengthening their bond with the school;
2. to increase engagement with prospective students, thereby increasing the chances that those students will choose to attend Chicago over one of our peer schools;
3. and to increase awareness in the general public about the achievements of the Law School’s faculty, students, and alumni.

The primary method for achieving these goals is to distribute content from the Law School’s website through a highly dispersed network of “followers” and “fans,” and to allow those followers to not only consume our content but to spread it to their own friends/followers.

Tracking Method

My measurement for tracking the effectiveness of this method is to trace the amount of traffic driven to our website by these social media channels, as a means of indicating consumption of the content contained therein. I did this by creating segments based on referring URLs and examining the content consumed by the different segments. Of course, visits and pageviews are not perfect indicators of content consumption, but they are the best option that I could figure out how to measure using Google Analytics. It should be noted that the numbers below are based on sampled data rather than absolute numbers.

Facebook

• The Law School currently has just over 2,000 fans on its Facebook page, an average of 450 of which are active on the page in a given month.
• Between 10/1/09 and 10/01/10, Facebook sent nearly 8500 visitors to the Law School website (this does not include the number that it sent to the Faculty Blog [just over 350] or the Becker-Posner Blog [just over 4,000]).
• Other than search engines and the University’s site, only Wikipedia and Leiter’s Law School Reports sent more visitors during that period.
• 27% of visitors from Facebook had never before visited the Law School’s site. This means two things:
  • 1) over 2200 people who had never visited the Law School’s site before were brought there by Facebook, and
  • 2) the remaining 6300 visits were from people who engage with the Law School repeatedly. Over 500 of the pageviews from those visits
• 18,728 pageviews resulted from Facebook
  • 17% were views of the home page
  • 16% were views of “student” pages
  • 7% were views of “news” pages
  • 7% were views of “prospective” pages
  • 3% were views of “alumni” pages  
  • 2% were views of audio/video pages

Twitter

• During the same 10/1/09-10/01/10 period, Twitter.com sent nearly 5,000 visitors to the Law School’s website; however, because of the many different ways people can access Twitter (third-party applications, etc.), it is likely that the actual minimum number sent from the Twitter platform is closer to 6,000, and the total could be as high as 10,000.
• The Law School currently has over 3,500 followers on its primary account.
• 19,013 pageviews resulted from Twitter.com
  • 22% were views of the homepage
  • 8% were views of “student” pages
  • 4% were views of “news” pages
  • 33% were views of “prospective” pages
  • 2% were views of “alumni” pages
  • 1% were views of audio/video pages

LinkedIn

• During that same 10/1/09-10/01/10 period, while only 492 visitors came from our LinkedIn group, 40% of those were new visitors. This is important because we know that the vast majority of our interactions with LinkedIn users tend to be with alumni, so this stat potentially indicates that alumni who are not otherwise visiting the Law School’s site are engaging with the Law School there.
• There are currently just over 1,300 members of our LinkedIn group.
• 1,552 pageviews resulted from LinkedIn
  • 18% were views of the homepage
  • 6% were views of “student” pages
  • 18% were views of “news” pages
  • 4% were views of “prospective” pages
  • 4% were views of “alumni” pages
  • 4% were views of audio/video pages

The biggest surprise for me out of all of these results was the large percentage of "prospective" pageviews generated by Twitter; I really had no idea whether our Twitter feed was reaching prospective students or not, but it appears that they are indeed our largest and/or most engaged audience on Twitter.

So, what do you make of these numbers, and how do they compare to your own? Suggestions for ways to improve both the accuracy of these results and the effectiveness of our social media efforts are, of course, more than welcome.

Update: One stat that I forgot to mention: all of those pageviews generated by our social media were equal to just 1% of our total pageviews for that time period, which seemed surprisingly low to me. However, visitors referred by social media spent approximately 33% more time per page than the average time per page, which indicates that while social media may not be driving massive amounts of traffic, it is driving people who are more likely to actually engage with our content.

Sharing Law School News: Now Even Easier

Love the latest Law School news story about your favorite professor's research, or a big clinic win? We just made it easier for you to spread the word far and wide. If you visit one of the Law School's news pages, you'll notice several new additions to the menu on the left-hand side of the screen: buttons to "like" that page on Facebook, tweet it on Twitter, or share it using any number of other social media (or even print it or email it, if you're feeling old-school).