Global Experts Capstone Project
Fall 2011
Steven Hsieh, Yue Jiang, and Stacey Schutzman
Executive Summary
The United Nations Alliance of Civilizations, in connection with the
University of Missouri School of Journalism, offered us the opportunity to work on a
project revamping its online database of media contacts. The Web site, Global
Experts, features more than 300 experts from around the world, available to
journalists for use as sources. Our work centered on making the site easier to use,
as well as devising plans to increase traffic, which included optimizing social media
marketing and site branding.
We worked directly with Stephanie Durand, Daanish Masood and Aaron
Fineman from the UNAOC office in New York. Because of the distance, we
conducted all of our communication by weekly conference calls and email. Though
this arrangement presented some challenges in establishing direction, we were able
to work around by prioritizing assignments that were completely clear, and leaving
any questions for our weekly call.
In early September, we devised a work plan that focused on design changes
and implementation of those changes. In the end, we deviated from this plan
because the UNAOC hired a Web designer, Regan Wilders, to handle the design
aspect of the project. With this in mind, we narrowed our focus to the usability of
the Web site and reorganizing the database so as to best feature its wide range of
experts. Furthermore, with less of our resources devoted to design, we were able to
concentrate on updating outdated sections and cleaning up bugs on the site.
In the following pages, we will present our work, from market research, to
data updates, and finally, recommendations.
Phase I – Market Research
Competitor Analysis
In one of our first tasks, our clients asked us to examine sites similar to
Global Experts in order to determine what distinguishes it from sites with a similar
purpose, as well as to find models from other sites worth emulating. They
suggested we look at (1) Big Think, (2) Project Syndicate and (3) The Elders. In the
end, this process turned out implications for more narrowly focusing Global Experts’
branding. Based on our analysis, our clients agreed that Global Experts’ most
unique aspect is its worldwide reach, or the “Global” aspect of the site. Our report
follows:
Competitor Analysis – September 9, 2011
Big Think
Homepage
Due to Big Think’s constantly updated content, the news-esque organization
of its homepage works well. Additionally, the photographs accompanying
each “story” gives the page visual appeal. GE might consider this block-style
organization, rather than the blog style listing of content. Also, rather than
using author photos, perhaps photos specific to the commentary would give
the sight more visual variety and public-friendly.
Experts Database
Like Global Experts, Big Think has the challenge of presenting a massive pool
of experts in a way that’s both accessible and useful. Big Think’s database
succeeds, but there are still some troubling areas.
As for positives, the two-column presentation of the experts allows users to
see many experts with minimal scrolling. Additionally the style and location
of its navigation system works tremendously. With the topics sidebar, users
avoid clicking through multiple pages – a problem on the Global Experts site.
The checkbox method is a simple, effective way of narrowing down experts,
which we highly recommend Global Experts emulate.
Another feature on this database that Global Experts should adopt is the
short expert description under each expert’s name. Although we already see
descriptions in under GE’s “featured” experts, we believe adding them to the
database would increase clarity, and consequently, usability.
One problem with this database is that some experts don’t get enough
prominence because they’re pushed too far back by the hoard of experts
who’ve been added since. This issue is a result of the combination of the
database’s default “By Most Recent” organization and huge number of
experts. If Global Experts were to adopt this model, we could avoid this
problem by adding subtopics. (Example: Under the Belief topics, adding the
subtopic, Monotheist Religions, and under that, Judaism, Christianity, Islam,
etc.).
Expert Bio Pages
Big Think’s video interviews provide insight into experts’ philosophies, as
well a glimpse into their personalities. While a video for each expert would
be unfeasible with Global Experts’ tiny staff, something that humanizes our
experts could be a step towards reaching a more general audience. Perhaps a
couple quotes would do?
Project Syndicate
Overview
Project Syndicate provides original op-ed commentary from scholars and
experts to media organizations. Besides a resource, the site also presents all
of its content for the general public -- like Big Think, a pool of ideas.
Homepage
Organization is rather confusing. The site’s target issues for commentary are
scattered about -- rather than organized in a specific place. This seems to be
an effect of the mass and frequency of content the site displays. The left
column categories don’t make much organizational sense. Indeed, the site
focuses on economic issues -- but separating the economic issues by
commentator -- while world issues by subcategory is incongruent and
confusing. Aesthetically, the page looks like a news site, heavy on text, except
all of the content is commentary. This is problematic
Authors’ Pages
The content-based author pages link to all of the original content authors’
have provided for Project Syndicate. It seems that rather than including long
biographies, PS lets the commentary tell you about the author -- which makes
sense for the site, because commentary is their main focus. For GE, this
would be a fantastic way of providing more insight into experts’ philosophy
and manner-of-speech, as an addition to their experience and educational
background.
The Elders
Homepage
The page is clean and eye-catching. Since The Elders is a a small group with
very specific missions, they can give each of these missions prominence on
the page, under the heading “Latest initiatives.” The top display works
tremendously in teaching the Elders’ vision, and introducing each member.
Although the size of the header wouldn’t work on the Global Experts page,
we might consider using their quote model to provide examples of what GEs
can provide. Perhaps, rather than the arbitrary Featured experts, GE could
concentrate on Experts with name-recognition (Karen Armstrong, Riz Khan)
to help brand the organization.
Bio Pages
The Elders’ bio pages are clean and to-the-point. Without any site columns,
they are able to devote entire pages to each of the Elders. While the right
column on GE should remain for navigational purposes, the left column
seems unnecessary. Perhaps the main body of text on GE pages could be
moved to the left, like the Elders. With a “Commentary” column, where
“More” is located on the Elders’ sight. Also, the videos in the right corners
are a notable multimedia component. Perhaps it would be better if the
videos played straight from the page, rather than linking to another page.
Initiative Pages
Again, clean and to-the-point. The sub-category boxes are an effective way
of dividing the complexity of each issue by topic. If the Global Experts
decides to expand on its issue commentary -- these pages would provide an
excellent model to emulate.
Conclusions
1. Global Experts’ database of experts is unique in its expansive, yet
narrowly-tailored selection. Instead of big names, GE’s focus on world,
academic voices should be highlighted.
2. If Global Experts intends to increase public use of its site, it needs much
more content in its “Comments & Analysis” section. It seems much of the
content is pulled from articles written for other media. This is not a huge
problem, because GE’s focus is pretty narrow, so the site could act as an
aggregator for cultural crisis/religious commentary.
3. GE’s original content is fantastic, but its presentation does not do it justice.
The most unique and noteworthy content are the ones which compile
experts together for discussion (Religion & the Public Space, 100 Questions
about Islam). These stories should have a more visually appealing page, and
should have prominence on the site. The Vimeo page for the Islam project is
a good model -- it might be a good idea to find a way to organize this content
onto the main Web site.
Phase II – Data Update and Analysis
Expert information update
One of our long-term tasks on this project was updating the information that
our client has for each of the experts—name, title, location, etc. All of this
information was stored in an Excel spreadsheet. Our job was to contact all of the
experts in order to update their information, and then create a new spreadsheet for
use as the official, internal expert database. To accomplish this, we sent out the
following email to every expert on September 26, 2011:
Dear Expert,
Global Experts is currently revamping its experts database. First, we will be
updating the location category to more narrowly specify your
location. Secondly, we want to make sure our current information is up to
date. Please take a moment to reply with the following information:
City, Country of Residence: (If you move among cities, please name all of
them)
Areas of expertise:
Geographic expertise:
Languages you speak:
Please respond to capstone@theglobalexperts.org
Thanks for your time, and commitment to Global Experts!
Unfortunately, out of more than 300 experts, we received replies from only 55
experts. Making sure that each expert’s location in the database is accurate
remained a high priority, however, and so we turned to an alternative: Google
stalking. We sent direct emails to the experts that we couldn’t track down through
Google. We got a much better response rate from those direct emails than from the
initial mass email. In the end, we managed to locate all of the experts and create a
complete, updated spreadsheet.
Statistics
After the team finished updating all of the experts’ information, we turned to
pulling statistics from the data and creating charts to be used in presentations and
analytical materials for the Global Experts website. Below are just a few of the more
illuminating charts we created, showing the range of professions among the experts,
the gender distribution of experts, and exactly how “global” Global Experts really is.
Phase III – Recommendations
Categories
On the Global Experts website, the expert database is searchable by subject
area of expertise, geographic expertise, and location. Once we entered the data
update phase of the project, updating these categories became our first priority. It
was a top priority for our client as well, as Ms. Wilders’ work involved updating the
look of the expert database with our category changes included. Initially, we thought
that the best course of action would be to add subcategories to each area of
expertise in order to allow for a more tailored search, but we realized that in
practice, doing this would actually make the area of expertise search field cluttered,
possibly less efficient, and, in some cases, a political minefield—for example,
deciding which groups should be put under the “Terrorism” category became tricky.
In the end, we decided that the most useful revamp of the categories would include
adding a “Field of Work” search field, adding a “Language” search field, adding
subcategories for the “Geographic expertise” search field, and narrowing down the
“Location” search field from countries to cities. We left the subject area categories
alone, though based on the results of the survey we conducted, our clients opted to
get rid of the “Arts and Entertainment” and “Culture” search field.
Concurrently to our work, Ms. Wilders was coming up with a new design for
the search page itself, which we all agreed needed an update. When the changes are
implemented, the database search page will go from a simple drop down menu for
each “search by” option that then leads to a list of experts when a category is clicked,
to a menu with which it’s possible to search for multiple criteria at once, allowing
for search results more tailored to what the user is actually looking for. Below are
the current and proposed database layouts.
Current:
Proposed:
Following is the final list of categories that will be used to search the
database, devised by our team and approved by the client.
Categories List, September 26, 2011 (approved October 25)
AREA OF EXPERTISE
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War and Conflict
Terrorism
International relations
Defense and Security
Religion
Migration and the integration of migrants
Law and Human rights
Women’s rights
Minority Rights
Media
Civil society
Development
Business and Globalization
Youth Issues
GEOGRAPHICAL EXPERTISE
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Europe
North Africa and Middle East
North America
Latin America and the Caribbean
Asia
Subsaharan Africa
Oceania
Israel
Palestine
Pakistan
Iran
Afghanistan
Iraq
China
Korea
Russia
Balkans
Somalia
Northern Ireland
Australia
India
Indonesia
FIELD OF WORK
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Academia
Non-Governmental organizations
Government
Journalists/ Commentators
Think Tanks/ research centers
Politics
United Nations
Military
Law
Author/Novelist
Religious Leader
Pollster
Activist/Humanitarian
Tags
In the course of examining every expert’s biography page in order to assign
them to professions, the team noticed some issues with the way the experts were
tagged. There were inconsistencies as well as inefficiencies that needed to be
addressed. We therefore started taking note of each expert’s tags in order to come
up with suggestions for how to improve them. The client had already hired someone
to give a report on how the tags could be better utilized for search engine
optimization, and we were sent that document to help us in our work. Because the
SEO work had already been done, we focused more on the need to clean up the tags
and make them more consistent. What follows is our initial tags analysis and the
guidelines for tagging that we sent at the client’s request to help whoever ends up
doing the tagging.
Tags Analysis, October 7, 2011
The main issue with the tags right now is inconsistency. For example:
1. Most experts are tagged with their names, but some are not.
2. Some experts are tagged with their organization’s name, whiles others
are not. This applies even to experts who are from the same
organization, such as Christopher Dekki, who has a Pax Romana tag,
and Christopher Malano, who does not.
3. Experts from the same organization have tags that differ greatly from
each other. Susan Collins Marks, the senior Vice President of Search
for Common Ground, has a peacebuilding tag, but John Marks, the
president, doesn’t. Matthew Clements, an analyst for IHS Jane’s, has a
crime tag, but Anna Gilmour, IHS Jane’s organized crime senior
analyst, does not.
4. Experts on the same topic have different tags. For example, out of the
experts on the Israel-Palestine conflict, there are the following tags:
Israel, Palestine, Israel-Palestine, and Arab-Israeli conflict. There’s
also Jew, Jewish, and Judaism; Islam, Muslim, and Muslims; WestIslam relations, American-Muslim, and Muslim-Western communities;
Interfaith, inter-religious relations, and multifaith relations; and EuroMed and Euro-Mediterranean, among others. While it’s good to have
all permutations of a topic tagged for search purposes, each expert
needs to be tagged with all permutations.
5. Some experts are tagged with alternate spellings or common
misspellings of tags, while others are not. For example, Usama Hasan
is tagged with Sharia and Shariah, but Mohammad Hashim Kammali is
tagged with only Shariah. Farish Ahmad-Noor is tagged with The
Madrasa, while Abduallah Khan is tagged with madrassa.
Another issue with tags is that some people are missing tags for their
research/work/interest areas. Others have no tags at all. Tagging everyone
with their areas of expertise, both geographic and by subject, would fix a lot
of this issue. Experts would need to be reviewed on a case-by-case basis to
see if additional, more specific tags need to be added.
Tagging Guidelines, October 30, 2011
Purpose: To make all tags consistent, according to SEO recommendations.
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Most importantly, every expert should be tagged according to these
guidelines. Some experts aren’t even tagged at all.
For the most part, experts are tagged to their full name. There are
some inconsistencies, however. Tag all experts with full names.
Tag all experts to their organization’s name.
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o Ex: Christopher Malano should be tagged to “Pax Romana.”
Inter-organization experts should share relevant tags.
o Ex: Matthew Clements of IHS’s is tagged to “crime.” However,
Anna Gilmour, IHS Jane’s organized crime senior analyst is not
tagged to “crime.”
Every expert should be tagged to every permutation of a specific tag.
o Ex: Some experts are tagged to “Israel-Palestine conflict,” some
to “Arab-Israeli conflict, and others to “Israel-Palestine.” To
increase SEO, tag each expert dealing with this issue to all
three permutations.
o Also notable:
 Jew, Jewish, Judaism
 Islam, Muslim, Muslims
 Euro-Med, Euro-Mediterranean
 Sharia, Shariah
 Madrasa, madrassa
Every expert should be tagged to his or her area and geographical
expertise.
Social Media
One aspect of the project that was lower on the priority list but still was
important to our client was coming up with a plan to improve Global Experts’ social
media presence. As convergence journalism students, we felt confident in our
abilities to offer an effective social media plan to optimize Global Experts’ use of this
increasingly important engagement platform. Our two main tasks included (1)
cleaning up unprofessional errors on both Global Experts’ Facebook and Twitter
pages and (2) recommending frameworks for posts that best engage the sites’ users.
Our plan follows:
Social Media Plan – November 4, 2011
Goals: To utilize social media for promotion, as well as engagement.
Facebook –
1. More frequent posting will increase Global Experts’ social media
presence; invite more opportunities for community/customer
engagement.
2. Every commentary link should include three components:
 News, Expert Identification, and Context
 ‘News’ works as an anchor, to ground the link into something
relevant (trending in the SM community). Identifying the author
of links is crucial because the ‘Experts’ are GE’s ‘product.’ Finally,
it is worth offering some context as to what the article is saying.
Example: Qaddafi is dead, but the work in Libya has just begun (News).
Henry Wilkinson, Associate Director of Janusian (Expert ID), discusses the
challenges and concerns for Libya’s transition (Context).
3. Clean up. There are some unprofessional mistakes on the page. Most
glaring is the four identical pictures under our “wall posts” section.
(We can do this once we have the log-ins)
4. Encouraging experts to post directly to the Facebook page would offer
a unique engagement model.
5. Do not use imperative language. Directives like “read now” or “watch
today” are implied in the initial posting. This type of language sounds
commanding, and is old fashioned.
Social Media Integration1. Finally, the site itself should integrate Experts into the site’s Social
Media presence. Currently, the extent of Social Media integration is
the button links to GE’s SM pages, and the “Find us on Facebook box.”
Giving experts the option to link on their bio pages to their respective
Facebook and Twitter pages, and blogs, etc., would tie everything
together nicely.
Blogroll
One feature of the Global Experts website is the blogroll, found at the bottom
of the home page. It consists of links to commentary, analysis, and news sites that
our client believes are useful to Global Experts’ users. We had the task of revising
that list. This involved checking the current list for dead or outdated links, as well as
suggesting new sites. Some of the sites that we suggested our client add include:
Media Matters, Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, Middle East Post, and Islamic
Research Foundation.
Ms. Wilders had the task of revamping the design of the blogroll to make it cleaner
and easier to use. Below are the current and proposed blogroll layouts, respectively.
Branding
One of our final tasks was to come up with tagline recommendations for the
site, based on our market research. We believe that Global Experts’ current tagline,
“Analysis on Demand,” whilst succinct and to the point, does not accurately reflect
expert response rates. Based on our survey, we found that some experts take up to
two weeks to respond to requests. Thus, we concluded that Global Experts’ tagline
should instead highlight its function as a marketplace of ideas, as well as its “global”
reach. We aren’t sure as to whether our clients will use any of our taglines, but we
believe our brainstorming process offered some usable possibilities. Here are our
suggestions:
· Knowledge across borders
· A network of knowledge
· Bridging the gap
· Ask us
· Your link to answers
· Reaching answers
· Connect with us
· Ask. Learn. Understand.
· Reach. Learn. Understand.
· Insights and analysis
· A world of insights
Conclusion
Working on the Global Experts website was a positive experience. While our
work ended up being more speculative than we initially expected, thinking of and
composing recommendations proved a valuable learning process.
The United Nations Alliance of Civilizations aims to bridge gaps in
understanding between often-conflicting cultures. We believe our proposed changes
to the Global Experts website, an active agent of the UNAOC, will be beneficial in
helping the Alliance achieve its aims. Furthermore, our concrete contributions to
cleaning up and updating the website’s database information will help make the
website more credible and efficient in the future.