Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Guest: I think the thing that the private sector does quite well is realizing that they have an engaged number of employees that want to help with how they communicate to the outside world, and they do well at identifying who those people are and then supporting them with the tools and the resources and the guidance to actually get it out there. And I think universities have all the best intention to do that, but because of the lack of resources, they often perhaps don't give these people enough of a platform and a voice.
[00:00:37] Host: Welcome to the EdTechConnect podcast, your source for exploring the cutting edge world of educational technology. I'm your host, Jeff Dillon, and I'm excited to bring you insights and inspiration from the brightest minds and innovators shaping the future of education. We'll dive into conversations with leading experts, educators and solution providers who are transforming the learning landscape. Be sure to subscribe and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform so you don't miss an episode. So sit back, relax, and let's dive in.
Will Noble is a seasoned leader in the SaaS and digital content space, currently serving as a Vice President at Folon, a platform helping organizations create engaging, interactive content without the need for coding. With over 12 years of experience in software sales and go to market strategies, Will has a deep understanding of the challenges institutions face when it comes to content creation, approval and distribution. Before joining Foleon, Will held leadership roles, working extensively with universities to improve their digital experience, search capabilities and content strategies. His expertise spans enterprise sales, market analysis, and helping organizations build scalable digital solutions. Will is passionate about transforming how institutions think about content, moving away from outdated formats like PDFs and rigid web pages towards more dynamic, user friendly experiences. He also brings a unique perspective on how AI will shape content creation while preserving an institution's authoritative voice.
Welcome to the latest episode of the EdTech Connect podcast, everybody. Today I'm excited to have Will Noble with us. Will, welcome to the podcast.
[00:02:34] Guest: Oh, thanks Jeff. It's good to be here. It's always good to catch up with an old friend.
[00:02:38] Host: Yeah, it's been a while. So your career has spanned SaaS, Sales, Enterprise Content Solutions, DXPS? What drew you to the world of content creation and digital transformation in higher ed? I know Foleon isn't all higher ed, but I know it's a big part of your verticals there.
[00:02:57] Guest: Indeed. Yeah, so most of my career has been connected with higher education. My step into tech was through an information retrieval platform. What I loved about information retrieval is that it's the kind of antithesis of why the Internet exists and the world Wide Web, right. For us to accumulate knowledge and share it within our peers. And through that organization I was connected to the higher education market because they actually came out of a university research project. And what do universities have, right? They have a lot of content and what are they interested in? The idea of pedagogy. So that got me really interested. Actually the problems with information retrieval tie in very nicely with universities. So I've been working with them for the last 10 years trying to solve those problems. And that was really cool. And then a few years later, content discovery can only go so far when the actual content itself isn't of good enough quality.
And we used to come across this problem all the time. Content wasn't tagged correctly or the actual structure itself wasn't right, or it was living in a server that wasn't being indexed correctly. And that got me interested in the actual delivery of content, the format it's in, whether it's bite sized enough and is the actual content performing, is the message absorbed by the audience is meant to be sent to. And those questions may be very curious. And that's led me to now work in content creation.
[00:04:22] Host: And that's a lot of our overlap, you and I, is that I've spent the last, gosh, it's been almost four years now in that realm too of content discovery. It's one of my focuses and it's so relevant to so many industries. One of the things I want to ask you is institutions often struggle with the content approval process. What are the biggest bottlenecks you see in that and how can that be addressed?
[00:04:49] Guest: Yeah, interesting question. I think first you got to appreciate the scale of the challenge. There's content that goes on your www, right? Cool. Marketing, communications focused content. But an institution will generate a whole sway of other business critical content that has to be relating to hr, related to corporate comms, related to accessibility or sustainability. There's a lot of content that's get generated by student affairs and this content comes in all shapes and sizes. And there are people everywhere within the institution that can do a great job of supporting content and that actual creation process and how this relates to the approval process. Of course, universities, they really embraced Web 2.0, right? In 2003 and 5 the idea of user generated content was taken really seriously. And you saw all those blogging platforms and every institution has a WordPress microsite generator and those are spun out and they've been widely quite successful. But then marketing and communication start to realize that they've got a Problem. Right. Too many people are creating lots of different types of content that's servicing a broad number of different audiences. And they have no control over brand, they have no control over quality, and they have little control over the actual type of output that's that's sent. And small marketing communications teams, they just don't have any governance over all of this. And then they start to put in all of these really stringent workflows. Say if you want to publish in the main corporate site, you've got to go through these layers of approval and that works for a while, but then you realize you become the bottleneck itself. And then it's going to take, you know, if the business school want to create an ESG report or something like that, okay, yeah, we can create this, but it's going to take us nine months to get to it. And what do these disparate departments do when they have that bottleneck? They find ways around it. They'll go and buy other bits of tech, or they'll go and build something in PowerPoint and publish it and try and zip it up as a PDF. And what's quite interesting is 85% of the content production doesn't happen within the tool that you use to publish the content. It happens elsewhere. Yeah, it's a very tricky situation.
[00:07:01] Host: Now is probably a good time to tell us a little bit about how Foley on helps solve that problem. And I know that's kind of one of the core.
[00:07:10] Guest: Yes. So like with that issue, I think for Folion are the whole reason that we exist is we want to help to an ideal state where you can increase content production but without compromising on quality. So if you've got centralized management but decentralized creation, that's what a content creation platform like Foleon does. But differentiates that to your main authoritative voice. That's done by your enterprise content management system. So this is for all of the content lives around your main authoritative www. Things like inside reports, white papers, things that are going on for students on campus. All of that content that typically ends up as a PDF you can generate in an interactive format.
[00:07:54] Host: That's right where I wanted to go next. And what drew me to really get you on the show was I saw on the Foley on site, I think somewhere about how one of your core missions is to really have an alternative to PDFs. These legacy formats like PDFs are still so widely used despite their accessibility and engagement challenges. Why do institutions default to them so often? And what's that alternative?
[00:08:22] Guest: Oh yeah, it's a big question, isn't it? They are the.
I think every digital director has a beeline for hating PDFs. Every institution feels the same way. There was a great talk by Stephen Pemberton, don't know if you heard him, he's a lecturer at University of Amsterdam, one of the early creators of xml. And he has this great talk that the web imitates the old. And he has these great reflections thinking like, isn't it interesting that we use vernacular and recreate something online that imitates a physical product? Like receipts look like receipts from a till from way back when. And if you think about even the earliest versions of the car, for example, they looked like a horse drawn cart. Just because it's the only way that we could really think about it and get our head around it and hit the system. It takes around about 50 years for the creation of a new format, delivery format for us to really move away from how we're doing it. So. And the Internet, decades ago, we have a few decades to go. Yeah. And PDFs and web pages and book. We were imitating physical media, right? Physical pages and physical books and physical brochures and just trying to do it in a digital version. And the outcome is they look a bit rubbish. Right?
[00:09:36] Host: That's so true. I remember when I was a web director trying to decide what should be a PDF and thinking back, what the main driver was, is like, does this need to be printed or not? Oh, great. It's great for printing. Who prints anymore, right? I mean, once in a while we print, but. And on mobile they're horrible. Like, you know, when we did our big redesign project, we limited the process to where people could publish new pages. So like, what a great idea. But guess what happened when we did that. You can't rename a page, can't create a new page. Guess what people did? They created PDFs. That was their way around it. So we had, we locked down this process for web pages and then it created this whole PDF problem. It was just like herding cats.
[00:10:16] Guest: Yeah. And your creators want to be creative, Right. And if their current system of publishing it on a CMS or the template is very limited and it's not supporting them, they'll find other ways to get the content out there in a way that they like the look of. And PDFs are usually the. Usually the point, the alternative and our big reveal is that HTML5 content is the answer. It's responsive by default, it's got interactivity, it updates anytime. And you can Gather intelligence on performance that's really good for an institution.
[00:10:48] Host: I often see the problem is that people just don't have enough time. It's so easy just to print to PDF or save to PDF and it's going to be in a format that you can, you can envision. But so many teams are under resourced, the marketing comms teams and universities. How can we help these teams do more with less with technology?
[00:11:08] Guest: Well, I guess it comes down to if you choose the right technology and when it's implemented correctly, it's going to help you scale your operation. And the way that you can scale in the idea about content is by looking at what areas can be reusable. Is there reusability in, in what we're creating? I think for content in general, you've got your high value marquee content that you may engage with an agency to create. There's always going to be a space for that and that should take, you know, a dedicated amount of time. And you want to create something that looks beautiful and it's unique in the market. But there's also about if we use the parento principle, like 80% of other content, that we could create some template sized versions of that and provide enough flexibility for non technical users to make copy edits, copy changes, work within the confines of that area. And that enables your under resourced or limited resource communications team to work on those marquee pieces I said at the beginning and democratize the creation of the rest of the content. But you have the confidence to know that what they're creating is on brand uses the right colors and formats and text is going to be easily indexable by the big search engines and uses the imagery that's right for you.
[00:12:29] Host: That's a good, I think overview of the situation. When you think of the ideal tech stack, you talk about these technology pieces that need to be in place. What are the core components that you think should be there?
[00:12:42] Guest: If we start from someone actually looking at a piece of content, you got the delivery layer. What device is that person looking at that content on? And with the explosion of the Internet of things and iPads and iPhones and digital signage, that's going to be fairly varied. So you need to have something that can deliver that content into multiple formats. You also need to have something that can work along with the presentation of that content. So how you put together the look and feel of that, that experience, that's really important. Behind that you need to look at content ideation and creation. So like how does our team actually come up with the content and what we're going to say. Are we collaborating with our peers? Are we looking at getting our experts from those departments, the subject matter experts to help with us? What you probably don't want to do is or try and move away from or is having a creation process where it's just like lots and lots of email tennis, right? You're sending 30 emails, version one, version 1.5, final, final version. To try and have a look in your stack about is there a way that we can create a collaborative environment where we can look at the changes that are made, suggest edits and do so in a way that doesn't need going into. Into your email inbox?
[00:14:00] Host: So I'm trying to envision where the Folion product fits in. University, let's say a large university, they have their enterprise CMS that's maybe widely adopted, but most large universities have multiple CMSs. You know, advancement teams are siloed. There's admissions teams that are often siloed. Often the advancement alumni divisions can do their own thing. They have their own budget and they have their own systems. Are you seeing or do you recommend that these, like an advancement team use a separate CMS that kind of fits their needs more closely and how does that integrate with the rest of the university?
[00:14:38] Guest: So I don't know if an advancement team should use a different content management system, but they should definitely look at do they have a content creation tool that enables them to create interactive content that can supplement what's in the main corporate website?
The use case of advancement is quite interesting, right? So you're often having to create lots of information for donor relations. You're obviously having to say, this is how our spending has happened. But you're also a bit more tied to revenue generation. It's definitely demand and brand marketing use case. And when you're creating that content, personalization also comes to into the fray. So if you've got some donors that provide a lot of funding for your institution, you want to be able to take all of that funding and be commensurate in the actual experience that you provide to them. So it's like, oh, Geoff, this is where your investment in our institution went this year.
Creating those kinds of assets in a way that lends itself to storytelling that can help generate and secure further funding for the institution.
[00:15:41] Host: What level of personalization are you able to provide through the Folion solution?
[00:15:47] Guest: So individualization is probably as far as we can go. So we can create a document or an experience that's unique to that person. So have your name, your institution, it will use imaging that's unique to you. Brighton University comes to mind. They're seeing some success with creating personalized prospectuses. So rather than, you know, the physical prospectus is just this big large thing that sits on your desk and you've got to flick through all the different programs that may or may not be relevant for you. When you create a digital version of that, you can then just present the programs and information related to those programs and that type of campus directly to that potentially interested student. And that drives really good engagement.
[00:16:29] Host: So I try to wait till halfway through the podcast to ask this one because it often will suck up all the time. But people want to know, how does AI fit into the future of content creation, especially for universities? Will it improve efficiency? Can it do that without sacrificing the institution's voice?
[00:16:47] Guest: Oh, wow, big question, isn't it? And it's fraught with risk. We're in the risk of, you heard the phrase on LinkedIn, you know, AI slop, basically content that's created by AI for other AI and universities to be very careful and they've got to have a strategy for it.
What you definitely don't want to do is put your head in the sand and not have any kind of strategy about how to use AI in your institution. Because then like we spoke about at the beginning, people who want to create some content quickly will just go into ChatGPT or Claude and it will generate it and it won't have your tone of voice and it will smell, smell and sound and look exactly like AI generated content, which is a big turn off for certain, certain audiences. And I think there's scant AI oversight, actual AI oversight infrastructure that's related to content creation and content management systems in general. So we need to have a think about how is AI working? Do we want it to an AI agent to rewrite every program description for SEO? Probably not. However, there are some interesting use cases that I've seen in the industry that we could talk about.
I was meeting with Cambridge University recently and they use it to increase the ratio of their images. So if they've got an image and it doesn't fit into the experience they want to create, they'll put it into AI and AI will expand that image and not just stretch it out, right? Actually expand, like fill in the blanks. And so if there's a building on the left hand side of that image, it will start to replicate that out, which is really interesting. So for the actual generation of individual pieces of content and media and I do know that they're using it for another talk at AMA I was at, which was using it to create Personas that you can a b test messaging for. For us at Foleon, automatic translation is something that's already embedded, helping just the speed and the ideation of content that's. That's useful. And then I think in the future it's going to be used just to speed up the actual operational tasks of creating content. Adding alt texts or suggesting alt texts, putting images, suggesting the presentation, like how all the blocks put together. That's definitely going to be a really useful thing.
[00:19:01] Host: Yeah, I love the translation example. I do demos on that with. There's so many tools that you can be using and it kind of blows people away that that's here already. Right. It can make you look like, you know, a language that you don't.
[00:19:16] Guest: Yeah.
[00:19:16] Host: One example I think, because I see Foleon has this CMS that can really provide rich, robust content. I know I'm simplifying it and you have a better take on it, but with cmss, I feel like one of the low hanging fruit AI implementations would be.
You kind of got to. This is like alt tag suggestions. But what about, hey, we know what content's on this page. Write our meta title, meta description or it suggests that. I feel like in the last year every CMS should be doing something like that. Kind of low stakes, I would think. Types of things. Is that something you're working on or have you.
[00:19:54] Guest: Yeah, I mean, absolutely. The ultimate, I think we spoke about form of PDF's ultimate aim for Folion is to get institutions to move away from using PDFs. For all of the downsides that we've spoken about with accessibility and responsiveness and flat ui. But the way that we're going to use AI is to provide a way for you to automatically upload and transport your PDFs into interactive versions, but keeping the look and feel, keeping that area. And that's going to be really useful for any kind of web director who has this huge corpus of. We've got these 30,000 PDFs right. I can't get rid of them for compliance reasons, but I need them to get off from a legacy format. And what's a way that we can do that? And that's where AI becomes really useful for.
[00:20:40] Host: So as someone who's worked with search technology, how should institutions think about search when they're structuring their content?
[00:20:50] Guest: Interesting. Okay, so back to your roots. Yeah.
Well, it has to whenever you generating a piece of content, you got to realize, okay, who's going to read this? How are they going to find this content, what they're going to make of it when they do get there?
So think about structure, right? We're all familiar now with the idea of the Semantic Web and providing a lot of context for a search engine to understand the content at a greater level than just the words that are on top of it. So having good meta descriptions is one way of doing it. There is also the idea about how are we going to make sure that our content is discoverable in large language models. And that's a really interesting field. And there's some new research that's showing. The old wisdom for SEO used to be never use a subdomain, they would be bad for your SEO ranking. And now the new research has said actually subdomains, because you can have a bit of long form content within a subdomain, you can talk about a particular topic with some authority and go into detail. They're actually ranking higher than your WWW because they actually have more sentiment for large language models. And the same is happening with pr. Did you hear this, Jeff? That is having a bit of a comeback for the ranking in LLMs. So they're using how many authoritative voices are referencing what you're saying and how you're working into it. So that's another thing that I wasn't too aware of until this year that we're now advising our customers to look at.
[00:22:24] Host: Yeah, that's good info right there. What role does data play in measuring content effectiveness? What metrics do you think University should focus on?
[00:22:33] Guest: Yeah, it's hard for an institution compared to working in E commerce. Right. Where you can have direct attribution and it's all about clicks to conversion and ultimate revenue. For us at Folion, there are a few metrics that we want to look at. Like what determines a performant piece of content? Time spent on site on page is a top line metric or one that we can look at. Typically with long form content, you want to have at least two to three minutes of engagement. And then you can use things like heat maps as well that you can start to look at. Okay. What areas of your content on a particular page or a particular chapter. That's a great way of doing it. And then tracking calls to actions. Right. Clicks from what's the next step? So someone really engages with a piece of content about what's campus life like? Right. What's their next step in the journey? How can you follow up with what they've liked at. We have a lot of success in what we call mitigating at Folion. So you send specific types of content to a particular audience type and rather than asking for their details up front, you provide about halfway through the report or the piece of content. So people have got an idea of, okay, this is actually relevant to me. I'm getting some insights in here. And that's when you ask for that call to action. Hey, seems like you're enjoying what we're talking about here. Hey, provide us our details and we'll send you more about it. And then you improve the lead quality and reduced bit of waste.
[00:24:00] Host: I think it's getting more complicated because as more, more industries and more sites roll out Gen AI summaries and answer engines above their search results, we're seeing less click through rate. Right. Like that's good. I got to my answer quicker. You click through, it might go down. It's not quite there in higher ed yet. I think I found one school doing it well, a few schools experimenting with like Gen AI summaries. But it's just changing so fast. The expectation of what people think a search bar can do now, it's just, just different.
What lessons do you think higher ed marketers can learn from the corporate world when it comes to digital content? Because you have now you're, you're dabbling all these other industries, right? Not just higher ed. Give us some insight, Will.
[00:24:48] Guest: I think the thing that the private sector does quite well is realizing that they have an engaged number of employees that want to help with how they communicate to the outside world. And they do well at identifying who those people are and then supporting them with the tools and the resources and the guidance to actually get it out there. And I think universities have all the best intention to do that, but because of the lack of resources, they often perhaps don't give these people enough of a platform and a voice. And you see some institutions who do it quite well, especially with engaging with students, supporting their creation efforts. University of Manchester comes to mind. That is something that the private sector does quite well that I'd love to see the education institutions to do as well.
[00:25:39] Host: Great. So if you had to give one piece of advice to a university chief marketing officer or CIO looking to improve their content strategy, what would that be?
[00:25:51] Guest: Focus on the operations. How is content actually created from ideation and how is it getting out to the world? And I think you'll be surprised about how complex and how much friction there is in the actual process. Because the only way to know if content is any good or not is to get it out there.
Too often content just gets stuck in onerous workflows and approval processes that can be hard for someone if you're on the ground actually trying to write that content.
[00:26:21] Host: I like it. I'm going to wrap it up with that advice and say thank you for being on the show, Will.
[00:26:27] Guest: Thanks Jeff.
[00:26:28] Host: We will put links to Foleon in the show notes and Will's profile. So get in touch with Will. And thanks again. Bye Bye.
As we wrap up this episode, remember EdTech Connect is your trusted companion on your journey to enhance education through technology. Whether you're looking to spark student engagement, refine edtech implementation strategies, or stay ahead of the curve in emerging technologies, EdTech Connect brings you the inspector insights you need. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an inspiring and informative episode. And while you're there, please leave us a review. Your feedback fuels us to keep bringing you valuable content. For even more resources and connections, head over to edtechconnect.com your hub for edtech reviews, trends and solutions. Until next time, thanks for tuning in.
