News - The University of Montana

I’m not a Tweeter or a regular Facebook status updater, but communicating ideas in 140 characters or less is a skill we all should practice.

There it is. A lead paragraph exactly 140 characters long.

Sure, I have more to say, but readers with attention spans the length of a cell phone text message got the gist of my idea. I’m grateful that my first 140 characters enticed you smart people to keep reading.

Technologies like SMS and Twitter force communicators to get to the point through the boundaries they impose. Other emerging online behaviors reinforce the need to strip your ideas down to the core.

Smart people (like you) are using web portals and RSS readers to aggregate and filter vast amounts of information on the Internet. Smart people who have something to communicate are making sure their messages are available through RSS feeds and consumable in web portals.

RSS feeds display a headline and (sometimes) the first 140 or so characters of the message. That’s all readers have to quickly decide if they’re going to follow the link and read more. How do you deliver your message effectively given these constraints?

Chip and Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Other Die, say you have to start by finding the core of your message.

“Finding the core means stripping an idea down to its most critical essence. To get to the core, we’ve got to weed out superfluous and tangential elements. But that’s the easy part. The hard part is weeding out ideas that may be really important but just aren’t the most important idea . . . It’s about discarding a lot of great insights in order to let the most important insight shine.”

In the first 140 characters, of course.

Google’s search page features a button labeled “I’m Feeling Lucky.” Currently, when you used the Google search tool on The University of Montana website, you might be lucky to find what you’re looking for.

For example, if you search for “bookstore,” from the current UM homepage, the results don’t include the bookstore located in the University Center. That’s because Google’s campus search only looks at the UMT domain, and the bookstore’s site is an external dot-com site.

Another common problem is that highly relevant UM pages are often buried on page two of the search results.

Those problems go away with the next UM homepage.

The new site has incorporated a locally-managed Google Mini Search Appliance, which will enhance search results. But the real improvement comes from additional modifications by the UM web team. Searches on the UM site now look for UM links stored in the local A-Z index database and display those links as featured links at the top of the results page.

With the new tool, when you search for “bookstore,” you get featured links at the top, followed by results from the Google Mini appliance:

Maybe now we can have our own “I’m Feeling Lucky” button.

TIP

If you have University web content that your audience has a hard time finding, consider suggesting a link to be included in the UM A-Z index database. That will also make it a featured link on relevant UM searches.

A “Suggest a link” for is located on the right side of every A-Z index page.