Tracy's Friday Favorites - Screenr

I have quite a lot of need for being able to show people how to do things online in quite bursts of information sharing. This can be in presentations when I know that a live demo might be too risky, or for sharing on my blog and other websites. That's why Screenr has become, in the last couple of years, an invaluable tool to me. It's a very very simple web-based tool that allows you to select an area of the screen on your computer, record what you're doing on it for up to 5 minutes, and record a voiceover to explain what you're doing. Very very simple online tutorials and great if you're ever trying to help someone understand how to do something online (training staff for using social media, for example). You can then automatically publish the videos to Twitter, YouTube or download the video file. It's one of those sites that it beautifully simple and so damn useful. Their video explains more:



Because I use Prezi for most of my presentations, that ability to upload a screen cast direct to YouTube and then just simply paste the YouTube video url into prezi for showing the video in presentations is really very quick and seamless.

The audience online engagement journey (AMDIS conference presentation)

Last week I spoke at the Association of Marketing and Development in Independent Schools (AMDIS) admissions conference. I spoke about the online audience engagement journey and how social media plays a role at different stages in the schools marketing, recruitment and admissions process. Here's the prezi from that conference:

What's next for social media? College Marketing Network Conference

Here is the plenary session prezi I am giving at the College Marketing Network conference in Coventry on Tuesday 29 November.

Finally - an education prospectus that does AR properly!

Almost 2 years ago (yes, 2 years ago... sigh!) I blogged about how Augmented Reality (AR) could enhance the college or university prospectus. However, to my endless frustration, the most 'vision' that I've seen in universities and colleges (particularly in the UK) has been the use of QR codes to direct people to web content.

Now, finally, Kendall College have launched a prospectus and AR prospectus app that I think takes real advantage of the trend in AR experiences to merge multimedia with their print prospectus. Check out the video:



Read their info on it here. I'm ordering a copy now to play with it. I hope they've done a big print run to manage all the non-student requests they're about to get!

Tracy's Friday Favorites: Prezi

It was definitely coming, wasn't it? Prezi (www.prezi.com) had to be one of my Friday favorites sooner or later. Those who know me know that this is by far one of my favorite 'tech' tools and one that I think has really helped to make me stand out as a speaker at conferences. Okay, it's not the tool but what you do with it that counts, but Prezi has transformed the way in which I am able to deliver presentations, making them far more entertaining, interactive and visually appealing that dull PowerPoint slides with bullet point after bullet point. It's also enabled me to develop wiki-style workshops, which I love doing as they really engage the participants and get them involved in co-creating their own workshops and programmes, fully sharing the collective knowledge within a room rather than just having a lone voice speaking out at them.

For those who aren't familiar with it, Prezi is a presentation tool, but rather than have individual slides, you work with one large canvas that you can zoom in and out of to highlight key areas of your presentation, talk or workshop. If you like mind-mapping, then you'll probably love Prezi. It's perfect for me as my mind doesn't tend to work in a very linear, structured way anyway. So it means that when I'm planning a conference talk, I can just dump all of my initial thoughts into the one big canvas, then create groupings and move them around to make sense of them, give them shape, and eventually take shape into, hopefully, a beautiful presentation.

The key is not to move too quickly through the presentation, otherwise your audience will complain of feelings akin to sea-sickness! So, as with all technology, don't get carried away with whizzy technology for the sake of whizzy technology.

Here are a few features that it has, beyond just producing beautiful presentations, that I particularly love (and use a lot):

• The ability to embed presentations into other websites, blogs, etc. If you scroll through my blog you'll see a number of posts that have presentations I have given embedded in them.


• Seamless embedding of YouTube videos into your presentations just by pasting in the url for the video (so no fussing with uploading large video files).


• The offline editor (okay, you have to have a paid-for account to get this, but it's worth it if, like me, you do a lot of editing and speech/presentation planning on the go. Many of my presentations are put together as basic structures on train journeys, for example, when I wouldn't be able to use the online editor).


• iPad app. You can't yet edit presentations through the iPad app, but you can show them. And they look amazing. These are great for when you're seeing a prospective client or client on a one-to-one or small group basis and just want to show them something quickly, or for chatting with people on exhibition stands, at recruitment fairs, etc.

IE University have made good use of this for a student recruitment presentation (and I also briefly advised the University of Warwick on one that they created for the same purpose for themselves a year or so back). This is also something that I can help universities put together, or put together for you (with input of graphic designers where required, depending on the brief) so give me a yell if you want to know more. To develop them yourself, it takes a little time to get used to using the site, but after you are used to it, you'll find yourself wanting to come up with all kinds of creative and beautiful presentations. To understand the basic functionality and get my head around it probably took about a day, though of course it takes longer to really get to grips with it and come up with compelling presentations. I've been using it for over 2 years now and for me there is no going back.

"To what end?" The importance of objective setting in marketing and communications

Measurement and evaluation is without doubt the plague of the communications professional. It is also quite probably the reason why communications functions often aren't better resourced and supported than they currently are. Nobody is going to invest in something that they can't be sure is actually working for them. So, the only way that we can really push for better resource to deliver more creative campaigns online and offline is to show the impact that our work has had (or perhaps is going to have).

When I'm running a workshop, speaking at a conference, or just starting out developing a strategy for a client, I'm often asked how we can know whether a particular social media campaign, profile or account is working for an organisation. My question back to them is always the same: 'what were you trying to achieve?' Sadly, the answer back is rarely delivered with confidence and depth. And the answers that most fill me with horror are the following (which I hear a lot):

* "We're trying to build a community"
* "We're trying to engage with our students, alumni, parents, businesses… or just anyone who's interested in us"

So, how do you measure either of those things? And, most importantly, what's the point of doing either of those things?

Building a community for the sake of building a community is a pointless exercise. Everything we do in our organisations as communications and marketing professionals should be done to support some overarching goal or vision (the organisational strategy, if you will). In this respect education organisations are no different to any other business or institution. We have a purpose and in order to deliver on that purpose, we must be clear about where we are going and that every bit of resource allocated to getting there is actually aligned with that vision. Building a community therefore cannot be an end in itself. Even in society at large 'community building' isn't an end in itself. We build communities because we want those communities to do something: to help one another achieve a common goal, to earn money, to reduce crime in neighbourhoods, and at its most basic of levels to work together to provide food so that we don't all die. There is always an end point, and those end points are measurable.

So, this is why when we are planning and developing strategies for online and offline engagement, we need to really push ourselves to develop SMART objectives (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-bound). And so, I suggest that every time you are justifying why you should be doing something in your marketing-communications activity, you need to be asking yourself the question "to what end?" And keep asking it until you get to the point where you can no longer answer that question. Then, and only then, do you have your objective. At that point, you can then check that it is aligned to your overall organisation's (university, school, college, whatever it might be) vision and strategy. And if it's not, forget it. Move on. Do something else that is aligned to that. Otherwise you are wasting resource. You might deliver great things, but if it can't be linked back to what the organisation is trying to achieve, then why should the person or people responsible for steering and leading that organisation (or the tax-payer) be funding you to do it? And unless your organisation has specifically determined in it's overarching strategy that it's purpose in life is to build a Facebook page with 10,000 members and two new posts per week and a minimum of 5 likes on each of those posts, then your online stats and analytics are also only a tiny part of that measurement process. They might form part of measuring the journey that helps you to get to delivering the objective, but they will rarely measure whether the objective itself (if the objective is correctly set) has been achieved. The only instance I can think of where the web analytics can provide the full picture is in an e-commerce scenario.

So, the process you'll go through and what you'll end up with is something like this:

"Our objective is to achieve x which in turn will deliver y which will mean z, and we need to do this by [date]"

In this process, x and y are equally tactics as well as being part of the objective (they may actually be your strategy). But z must be directly traceable to the organisational vision.

So, please please please, when you're doing any communications and marketing strategy and planning work (especially for online communications, because most people are still just playing with this and not doing it strategically), keep asking yourself "to what end?" If you can answer that clearly and concisely, then you may well also find that your leaders and managers might be more ready to come on that journey with you and put a little resource your way.

As always, give me a yell if I can do anything to help you on that journey.

Tracy's Friday Favorites: Evernote

I'm not good with paper. On my office shelves I have a range of notebooks filled with varying degrees of random notes, crossing many different projects, events, etc. In reality, I take notes and never go back to them not least because I can never remember which of my multitude of notebooks I have written the darn things down in. Don't get me wrong, this is nothing against paper. I love paper. I love books. I love buying beautiful notebooks. Writing with pen and paper is something I do so rarely nowadays that having a beautiful notebook and writing in it has an almost romantic feel for me. But it's just not practical for me.

Enter Evernote. I love this product. Basically Evernote is a tool for note taking. It's multi-platform (I have a single account that is accessed from iPad, mac and iPhone, and seamlessly synchronises between the three) and just so incrediby useful. Within it you create individual notebooks, and then create individual notes within each notebook. This enables you to make sense of everything. I have notebooks for different clients, one for conference notes, another for blog ideas (blog ideas come at anytime, so keeping an archive of them is really starting to help boost the productivity of my blog, and is the place in which I start drafting blog posts now, with several on the go at any one time that I add to as and when I can). Within the notes you can add files, images, links, whatever you need really.

Furthermore you can also email notes to Evernote, and you can tweet to it too, making it easy to store those tweets that you want return to later.

So so very useful for me! I'm even drafting this blog post within it on the iPad. Then when I'm ready to post it, I'll just pick up the same entry on the mac and post it to the blog. Seamless, very easy to use, and an invaluable tool for me.

Can social media help you build trust? (Presentation)

I'm speaking at the LG Communications Reputation Seminar today (#lgcomms). The subject of my talk is whether and how social media can help you build trust amongst employees. Here's the prezi for it. If you'd like to have a chat with me about it, please do email me: tracy@picklejarcommunications.com. You might also be interested in the full day workshop on social media for internal communications that I'm running with PR Academy on 18 October (see here for more info).

Is Facebook's 'subscribe' feature a game-changer for teacher-student engagement?

Could Facebook's latest feature be a game-changer for personal/professional issues around its use in the education sector? Teachers and lecturers have been grappling with the question of whether they should 'friend' or accept friend requests from their students, but the 'subscribe' option may offer an alternative solution.

My recent work developing social media strategies and running workshops for primary and secondary schools reveals that there is particular nervousness about the use of Facebook, and rightly so, for those who work with children. Typically representatives from the schools that I have spoken with are advising teachers to either not be on Facebook at all (!) or at least to not accept friend requests from their students (Missouri in the US even went so far as to attempt to make it illegal for friends and students to become friends on Facebook, though this is currently being questioned as to whether this law can pass, and the decision held until february 2012). However, the danger of this is a 'bury our heads in the sand' mentality, unable to see and understand how young (and old!) people communicate with each other via social media, and unable to see what people in spaces such as Facebook are saying about your school or perhaps even you as an individual.

Some schools have been fighting social media in its entirety: banning it in the classroom, banning it on the school network, ignoring it, and advising teachers not to use it. But some, as this recent article in the New York Times reveals, have realised that this is a battle that they cannot win. Schools are better off to be in there where it is happening, rather than at the edges not understanding the platforms that their children use every day and that influences their lives so much. Whatever children spend a lot of their time doing and interested in should be of paramount interest to teachers since it can tell us so much about how to engage young people and how they want to receive information (which may well extend to teaching materials). I believe that schools also have a fundamental role to play in educating young people in using social media (and any forms of communication) appropriately, and they cannot do this if they do not understand the tools and concepts themselves. Therefore we should be encouraging teachers to be in these spaces and learning about them not closing them down.

Now, however, Facebook has introduced the new 'subscribe' feature for individual profiles. This provides a way for users to see select updates from other users in their news feed, without actually becoming fully-fledged 'friends' on the social network. This is clearly Facebook's response to the audience segmentation that Google+ has introduced to the world of social media through their 'circles' functionality.

The ability to control who sees which messages and updates that you post is a powerful game-changer in social media terms. Until recently, our answer to presenting our different personas depended on us having to manage multiple accounts and profiles: Facebook for friends and family, LinkedIn for professional networking, etc. In short we would have multiple personas developed and communicated through multiple sites. Now through a single platform we can communicate with friends, family, co-workers, clients, whoever it might be, in different ways without having to switch to a different site for each group. We have multiple personas, but through a single site. The rapid early growth of Google+ has meant that Facebook has had to respond fast, and so it has.

The subscribe feature will now enable anyone to be able to share updates with each other, but to select which updates they see by choosing to either make them public, 'friends' only, or private. This is achieved simply by people becoming a 'subscriber' of individual updates, not a friend (i.e. they can't see your full profile if it is fairly well protected). This has particular benefits to teachers, as Mashable highlight in their article on this new feature.

So, as teachers and lecturers may now decide to start those kind of connections on Facebook, one thing needs to be considered: we need to be careful and cautious every time we publish a status update to check the privacy settings of each update. Make sure that you check how it is being posted so you don't accidentally post a status update designed to be 'private' or for your friends only to your 'public' feed. However, common sense and best practice dictates that if you're going to publish an update that you don't want others to see in any form, then you probably shouldn't be posting it online anyway, no matter how 'private' your Facebook account is.

Whatever happens, we're fully expecting this to be something that we're asked to talk more about and demonstrate in our workshops and strategies for schools and universities, and we think this is a positive step for Facebook and for schools.

Tracy's Friday Favorites: Pinterest

I've opted for one of my personal favorites this week, a site that I use purely for personal interest, but could be a marketers dream if they'll ever truly embrace the move towards 'personalisation' in the way in which we engage with people.

Pinterest is a space where you can collect and categorise things that you see that you like, and share those things with others. In my mind, it's a little like a beautifully designed, easy to use, and highly visual social bookmarking site. But most of the stuff that people 'pin' (read 'bookmark') are actual objects and things (or things to do/make, etc) rather than ideas (though you can pin those too if you wish, but it needs an image to go with it). And, quite frankly, it's a space in which I come across stuff pinned by others that are truly cool, creative and inspiring. It's nightmare for the bank balance though as it triggers the 'I want' reaction. Here are my pins.

So, how does this translate to marketing and communications? If you look at very targeted, highly personal campaign approaches like KLM Surprises (thanks Chris Gibbons for alerting me of this), then it provides a great way for companies to get a personal insight into the things their individual customers or stakeholders like and to surprise them with a gift or something they have pinned. Likewise, you'll also want customers and potential customers to 'pin' your products since this is social sharing, and others might make purchases off the back of what they see on Pinterest. And for universities or independent schools, if someone is paying several thousand pounds to attend your institution or send their child there, a few quid spent on something that they truly like and want to say 'thank you' could be money well spent in terms of forming a lasting relationship with them. So, check out if they're 'pinning' anything perhaps?

Happy pinning folks!

Postcard on the run - useful for engaging after events?

This week Mashable reviewed a new mobile app that enables you to create and send real postcards direct from your mobile phone. Postcard on the Run is a free app. When you launch it it gives you the option to create a postcard from existing photos in your phone's photo library, to take a new one, or to use one from Facebook. You then enter in some text (up to 200 characters) and can sign your name using your finger so it appears hand written. You can then select addresses direct from your address book or add a new one (if you don't have the person's address stored in your address book, the app will email them to get it for you). You then pay for the postcard using a credit card and job done - they print it and post it to the recipient for you. It cost me £1.69 to create and send a postcard in the UK and I'm now waiting for it to arrive on my bloke's door mat later this week (will report back on quality, etc when it does). (UPDATE: when I received the email receipt for this it said $1.69, not £1.69, which is a fair bit different. Although on the app it said £1.69, so I'll let you all know the actual price that it worked out at when I get the bank statement in!)

I rather like this idea. The review and the marketing materials for the site focus very much on personal use of it - postcards from holidays, notes to friends and family, etc. However, I can see huge potential of this for marketing and professional networking. Let's say, for example, you're at a recruitment fair for your university or an open day. You can take photos of the guests that you chat with and send them a postcard to remind them of your conversation a few days later. You could have an image ready created to use on the front that includes a QR code or short url to send them directly to your university's mobile site or prospectus app, or you could take a pic of them at your stand or with you (cheesy grins please!) and send that to them to remind them of the friendly person that they chatted with from the university. It could be a great way of adding that personal touch and combining the online and offline experience. For my own purposes, I can see this being rather powerful for use at networking events. When someone hands me their business card or comes to chat to me at the end of a talk, I can then following up not necessarily with an email, but with a little postcard to remind them who I am, where they met me and what we discussed. This could be a lot more memorable than just handing over my business card and having that gather dust on their shelf. I may well start doing this (I'm tempted not to publish this post and to keep the idea to myself too!). I see it as well worth the £1.69 investment per card.

Here's a little slideshow of the steps involved in creating the postcard on the app. Mine is estimated to arrive at its destination in 3 days time.



Created with flickr slideshow.

Introducing Tracy's Friday Favorites: Wordle

One of the most popular conference presentations that I've ever given in terms of the audience reaction at the end of the session was a session entitled 'A toybox of tools to enhance your online communications'. It was an indulgent session that threw strategy out of the window for a while and just looked at some cool and useful (and mostly free) online tools that you could use to enhance your marketing and communications activities. I've been asked to repeat that session a fair few times since I first did it (incidentally it was also the first time I ever used prezi, one of my all time favorite online tools). The attention that I got from that session and the requests for more since have left me suddenly realising that this should be a regular theme for my blog...

And so I give you Tracy's Friday Favorites...

From now on, every Friday I shall aim to share with you a cool/useful tool, site or resource that you can use to add value to your marketing-communications or other engagement activities, or even just for your own self interest. These will be randomly picked and shared, and will swing enormously from stuff that is mindblowingly useful to stuff that is mindnumbingly useless (but nevertheless cool). Just a little fun for a Friday, but hopefully with something useful to it.

So, this week I am kicking off with a fairly well known site, a much-loved one and one that did indeed feature in my 'Toybox' session two years ago, but I still love it and use it as much now as I did then: Wordle.

Wordle.net is a site that you can dump in a random selection of text to create beautiful word clouds. You can manipulate the word clouds, changing the size of words, the colours, fonts and layouts. I've seen these used in marketing and communications, and also seen them used regularly in reports as a creative way of sharing feedback about an organisation, product or idea.

I'm redeveloping my personal website at the moment (tracyplayle.com) and used this to drop a nice little wordle in about things I like. Silly, but I'm sure you can come up with a world of other wordle uses.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Tracy's favorite things, created on wordle.net"][/caption]

 

And here's a little 2 min video showing how easy it is to create one:



I have a fair few ideas and sites already in mind to share with you in future Friday Favorites, but I'm also very happy to receive suggestions for others that you've found that you think I should blog about. Or if you're a company launching a cool site or product that you'd like me to review, then send it through. You can either email them to me (tracy@picklejarcommunications.com) or tweet me (@picklejar).

Do you have a social media problem or an organisational problem?

Why is it that when someone says something negative about our organisation online we think we have a social media problem or a social media crisis? And yet if someone says something positive about us we pat ourselves on the back and remind ourselves what a great organisation we are. The action is the same, albeit with different content, and yet the reaction is different. One we consider to be an issue with a platform or channel (or, worse still, a 'problem customer'), the other we consider to be feedback on our organisation. But both are feedback and the only difference is that one we want to hear, the other we don't.

When Dave Carroll posted a YouTube video about United Airlines breaking guitars, United Airlines didn't have a social media problem, they had a problem with sloppy baggage handling. When a disgruntled customer posted a video of one of their engineers asleep on her sofa, Comcast didn't have a social media problem, they had a problem with an engineer behaving inappropriately on the job. And when 2000 students form their own Facebook group to find out whether their exams are going ahead or not tomorrow because it's snowing too heavily and they haven't had a firm answer from the university, you don't have a social media problem, you have a flawed communications process.

Feedback is everywhere for us to listen to, take note of and, if appropriate, respond to and do something about. We need to hear the bad as well as the good and so does the senior management team. This is a good thing. Because if we don't listen, those problems that might have seem minor at first will escalate, and people will talk about them more, and eventually they'll realise they're not the only one to have a bad experience, and then the power of the group begins. And when that happens, reputations are damaged, organisations fail, and perhaps (if you believe the argument), governments can even be overturned. This is why senior managers cannot bury their heads in the sand and see this as a social media problem. There is no such thing as a social media crisis, only a crisis that finds its voice and resolution through social media. You don't have a social media problem, you have an organisational problem.

Reflections on being a 'consultant' (aka what exactly do I do?)

I wasn't always a 'consultant'. And even to this day it's a word that sits uneasy with me. At last week's CASE Europe Annual Conference I found myself sat in the main opening session next to a young lady who had never met or heard of me before. And the usual opening question came fast: "where are you from"? I found myself, as I often do, apologetically mumbling something along the lines of "Well, my company is Pickle Jar Communications, so I'm a consultant now... but I used to work for the University of Warwick and, erm, I'm speaking at the conference." Let's break this down: I start with a company name that she's probably never heard of, explain that that means I am a consultant, and then attempt to claw myself back into a place of mutual respect and understanding by pointing out that I used to work in-house too and that I must be okay because I'm a speaker. Quite frankly, what I want to scream when I first introduce myself to someone new who works in an in-house role is "I'm not going to instantly try to sell something to you. I'm here to learn and to listen too." I usually only feel comfortable at conferences after people have heard me speak as that's the point at which they realise I'm not there to give them a sales pitch, but instead I hopefully have said something valuable and useful to them - and they haven't paid me a penny for it.

This hesitancy and apologetic nature of the way I at times explain what I do stems back to the fact that I did, indeed, previously work in-house where, like everyone else, I was subject to the sales calls from the wide range of consultants and other vendors trying to get me to buy in their product or service. I know how it feels to be on the receiving end of those phone calls. I know that sinking feeling that you get when you realise the person you are speaking to in the seat next to you at the conference is someone who will at some point probably try to sell something to you (and some really don't waste any time). It sucks, especially when you don't have budget to spend or a need for the product or service. So, when I set up my business I was determined to find another way. I think I have, but I do still miss that ability to close a deal that probably is needed to make me really successful as a business owner. I find it difficult to do because it makes me uncomfortable.

I'm happy that the way in which I've managed to raise my own profile in the sector in which I work has mostly been by providing, hopefully, useful sessions at conferences (without a whiff of a sales pitch), by blogging lots on sites like this and elsewhere, by my voluntary work with the CIPR, and by creating HE Comms, a free social network for HE marketing and communications professionals to network and share ideas, best practice, ask questions etc. In short, I almost try to make up for the fact that I am a consultant who works for the sector and needs business from the sector in order to make ends meet, by giving a lot in return, and sometimes perhaps giving too much of my time for free. Granted, off the back of giving a lot of my time for free I do manage to raise my profile and ultimately win new business, so the returns are there (sometimes - not always), but I still feel apologetic about being a consultant. Why is that?

I like the wikipedia definition of "consultant" at the time of writing this. Or, at least I like this bit: 'A consultant is usually an expert or a professional in a specific field and has a wide knowledge of the subject matter.' I'm at ease with that description. I think that sums up who I am (not so much expert, but perhaps a deeper knowledge than those who work in-house have had the time to develop). And I wonder if my sense of shame (for want of a better word) about being a consultant is all in my head and simply a consequence of the sheer volume of people who whinge about 'social media consultants' and 'PR consultants'.

So, regardless of what I choose to call myself or what others might call me, I've reflected a little on what it is I do that hopefully makes me add value to the lives of those I work with and makes me love this 'job' so much:

- I offer an external perspective on marketing and communications that isn't bound to internal politics or jaded by years of being told you can't do something "because...". This is often why I am bought in to deliver high-level seminars and workshops. I am able to bring a fresh perspective.
- I provide additional resource and support on an ad-hoc basis without the client incurring another salary bill. As such, I provide support as- and when- needed. This isn't always about specific expertise, just about ability and time. The work I did this year to help put the programme together for the University of Warwick alumni day, and the work I did last year on Imperial College's undergraduate prospectus are perfect examples of that. I have the head space that some people within an organisation just don't have, particularly when it comes to projects.
- My distance from an organisation, and yet my knowledge of the sector, mean that I am able to apply proper strategic thinking to projects, again without the distractions of the 'day-job'. I am able to focus and see the bigger picture that sometimes it is difficult to see when you are working within an organisation. This was very much the case when I spent the last Christmas holidays writing an online PR strategy to support the University of Leicester with their Leicester Exchanges initiative, or when I was writing social media strategies for the University of Nottingham, Warwick Business School and Maastricht University in the past year.
- I help people come up with creative ideas by providing them with time-out and the tools and templates to think in a slightly different way about things. I hope this is what I achieve when I run workshops and seeing some of the fruits of that, as has recently been the case in chatting with people like David Girling from UEA (more on this in a later blog post), is really very satisfying.
- I spend a lot of my time focusing on key areas so I can bring specialist knowledge of my subject area, dedicating a lot of (unpaid) time to improving my knowledge and staying fresh in a way that it is difficult to do when you work in-house. In short, I act as a bit of a 'filter' or a sounding board for the sector for new developments and ideas and attempt to apply some critical thinking to that for everyone else in the sector.

People often ask me what exactly it is that I do. So, I think I can summarise this as follows:

- I come up with new ideas for marketing and communications (overarching strategies, projects and campaigns)
- I help other people come up with new ideas themselves (by providing workshops, training and coaching)
- I help organisations put those plans into action (by sometimes doing whatever needs doing: building social media spaces or sites, copywriting, managing events, overseeing a video production).

A lot of what I do could be done in-house, but people don't always have the headspace to do it themselves. And that's what I'd like to be seen as. Instead of an evil 'consultant' trying to sap the sector of its money, I'd like to be seen as a critical friend, a useful pair of hands and as an extension of the sector rather than as a 'consultant'. But I'll carry on using the word 'consultant' until I come up with something better (and before anyone else suggests it, guru is very very much not acceptable and should never be used by anybody in a job title or description). And whatever I call it, I love it. I just wish I was a little better at actually closing the deal on work instead of just having a good profile and reputation.

Can universities get in on the group-purchasing act?

[caption id="attachment_546" align="alignleft" width="180" caption="Image courtesy of DonkeyHotey (Creative Commons/Flickr)"][/caption]For a while now I've been flippantly pondering whether the group purchasing phenomenon led by GroupOn and the like could make its way into the education world as a means of attracting students. Not so much prompted by GroupOn, but inspired by a session I attended at SXSW that looked at trends in the use of online media in China towards forming online groups and using the purchase power of many to approach shops and other vendors (car showrooms, for example), I've thought about this many times over the past couple of years but never really developed that thinking.

This morning, however, I read on Eric Stoller's (@ericstoller) blog that National Louis University will be using GroupOn for an introduction to teaching course.

It was only a matter of time before someone did this. Eric rightly points out that this appears to be a bit of a PR stunt for them with the claim that they are the first university to use GroupOn in this way. This is one of those cases where the medium is being used as a message, rather than as a functional tool, I think. But there's a place for that kind of activity and hats-off to those who try these things first.

But is the GroupOn model really useful to Higher Education and is it, indeed, even feasible? In its current form, I think not. How, for example, do you assess the quality and qualifications of the individual purchasing their GroupOn voucher? Most universities have stringent standards about who they will accept on courses, so I think this model is only really going to work for courses where there aren't entry standards, such as short lifelong learning or 'leisure' courses. But there I can really see a huge opportunity for universities and colleges using this approach.

But I don't want to dismiss the group-purchasing trend altogether for Higher Education degree programmes. And the reason for this is that I don't really think the model is all that new. Universities providing training programmes and bespoke degrees for companies, for example, is nothing new and this is in-line with the group purchasing model. In 2005, for example, the University of Warwick (Warwick Business School) were commissioned by Network Rail to deliver their leadership training programmes. And now they deliver a specific MSc in Network Rail Project Management, on the basis that at least 20 Network Rail employees participate in the course. Universities themselves use group purchasing power to get the best prices for some of their products, forming consortiums to negotiate the best deals. So, why shouldn't this approach be applied by those wanting to study at your university?

I think technology might provide ways for us to form new and unique groups of people (individuals?) to come together to exert some group purchasing power over universities. With the heightened competitiveness that the UK/European sector is about to throw itself into, I think now is the perfect time for prospective students to start thinking in these terms too and testing the waters. But perhaps also universities need to be ready for this, and know how to benefit from such approaches. Afterall, one 'sale' to 20 students is a lot more time efficient that 20 individual 'sales'. And yes, to those in universities who don't like to think in terms of 'selling', it is a sale. And negotiation is going to be part of that.

What do you think?

No place for content errors. They'll haunt you.

I was sitting in a pub enjoying a few drinks with my fella on Saturday afternoon. We're both a tad geeky, so we're sat there with our iPads scrolling various things, catching up on what delights Twitter has to share, laughing out loud as we scroll through awkwardfamilyphotos.com ... as you do... Then he waves under my nose a job description for an anesthetist  at the Royal Liverpool & Broadgreen University NHS Trust. A tiny bit tedious, I think, but I read through it wondering what I'm going to see and thinking perhaps I'm missing the point here, or that he thinks I need a career change and a 'real job'. Then, there it is, the offending line, 'Usual rubbish about equal opportunities employer etc...'. Oops. We have a little chat about how poor that is, then move on (more hilarious photos to look at of someone's dreadful haircut and jumper taken in the early 80s - this is the important stuff that the web was invented for). Then yesterday I'm sitting at my desk and the same story pops up on my Twitter feed a few times, because the local newspaper have now written about it and it's spreading around social media. This is the way things go.

Now, I've written a lot of copy in my career in communications. And many a time I have inserted something in as a space holder while I wait until I write what I actually need to write in there. I have also used beautifully and painstakingly crafted 'filler' phrases such as 'blah blah blah', 'write this bit later' or the even more offensive 'Lorem ipsum'. The point is, we've probably all done it. Granted, not all of us have written something that could be deemed offensive (though I expect I've done that too), and most of us probably have replaced the offending text before it gets published. But you can see just how easy it is for it to happen. Quite frankly, I think it's shocking that we even still need to say things about public sector organisations being 'equal opportunities employers' anyway - shouldn't that be a given? However, the point I'm coming to is that these kind of mistakes will have been made hundreds of times all over the place. They'll be spotted, reported and replaced. But now, social media means that the speed with which a mistake can be made and shared leaves us with no room for these kind of errors. A decade ago that mistake even if it made the local press would have been tomorrow's chip paper. Now, it's out there, forever. It's searchable, and it's archived online.

Social media sites are full of mistakes, and we're pretty forgiving of many of them. The odd spelling error, occasional links that don't work, poor grammar. It's really not the end of the world and nobody's organisation is going to die because auto-correct changed a few 's's to 'z's (God bless America). But when the error is in the content, not the construction, then it is less forgivable. This riles me a little as we all make mistakes, but we never used to take everybody out and flog them for it. But now, we do. But I have to say, it did make reading a dull NHS job ad' and the equal opportunities rubbish so much more interesting! Surely we can make this stuff, even the essential 'policy' stuff a little more interesting otherwise who would want to work for you? Just perhaps less offensive... But then employer branding is a whole other topic of conversation.

Getting senior management to understand and support social media activities

This week I delivered a session at the CASE Europe Annual conference. With a different workshop title advertised on the website from that printed and promised to delegates in the programme, I ended up squeezing two themes into one hour-long session, but I think I may have got away with it (feedback suggests I did), and I'm kinda glad that I managed to cover both themes. So, the session started out by looking at how to motivate individuals to use social media, how to motivate them to do it strategically, and then moved on to thinking about how to get senior managers to buy-in to supporting social media engagement activities. As usual, my presentations don't contain a vast amount of text, so feel free to drop me a line or pop a comment on here if you want me to elaborate on any of the points.

Taking another look at online tools used for education PR

A couple of years back I conducted a study for the CIPR Education and Skills sector group on the use of online tools for education PR. You can view the report here (pdf).

I'm now re-running the survey element of that study to see how the sector has moved on in the past two years. The survey will be open until the end of September, so if you can take the time to complete it online here, it would greatly appreciated. Many thanks! I will share results here and on www.he-comms.com

Should you RT every positive comment about your organisation?

NO! Please stop it!

Okay, I should expand on that a little I guess. Here's the thing... for months now I've been noticing a growing trend of some university and college 'corporate' Twitter accounts (ugh!) retweeting positive comments that people say about them. This can be anything from someone enjoying an open day to a student excited to have been offered a place at your organisation, to someone celebrating their graduation. In the past ten days I've been asked by at least three universities whether this is something that they should be doing, so I thought it merited a blog response.

First, the positive. The fact that they are doing this demonstrates that universities are now spending more time monitoring and listening to what people say about them online. Great! Well done. This is very much a step in the right direction.

Now, the reason why I don't think we should be retweeting all of those lovely comments: it looks needy and desperate. This is personal opinion and I am sure many people will disagree with me, but the need to shout out and spread every single good thing said about us online to me almost suggests that we don't hear many good things said about us. People follow people and organisations on Twitter who provide them with some kind of added-value to their lives, not those who simply pat themselves on the back. Your RTs of someone saying something nice adds no value to the user experience.

I am not for a second, however, suggesting that you shouldn't do something with all of those lovely tweets. Too bloody right you should. They're great! We revel in them and we want to see more. So, here are a few thoughts for what you might do with them instead of simply retweeting them.

1. Say thank you
Simply thank the person for saying something lovely about you. Other people will see you thanking someone for their kind comment and will therefore know that people are saying good things. But you won't be shoving it down their necks in a desperate 'look! look! someone said something nice' way.

2. Have a conversation
Beyond just thanking them, have a conversation with them. Find something out about them, engage with them, find out what prompted them to say such a lovely thing... what did they like most about their visit to your campus, etc? Use this as an opportunity to develop a deeper connection with that person and to gather crucial feedback. You might even prompt them to say even more lovely things in the process.

3. Favorite it
Many people use the 'favorites' functionality on Twitter as a bookmarking tool. Turn it instead into a recommendations/endorsements tool. It's more subtle than retweeting those comments, but it gives you a place that you can direct other people to (link from your website) to share the great things that people are saying about you. I do this for myself and my work, but this could easily be done by organisations too.

4. Build lists
Create a list (can be private if you wish) of all of those lovely people who say nice things about you. This can be your 'ambassadors' list and will provide you with a way of keeping in touch, and maintaining engagement, with those people. They're your fans, and they'll continue to be if you keep them involved and engaged. You never know when you might need to call on them for something further down the line. Alternatively, the comment that they make might reveal who they are in relation to your organisation, so you might add them to a list of 'prospective students', 'alumni', 'current students', for example. These lists could become very valuable to you as part of understanding your target audiences, what makes them tick and how they use social media platforms like Twitter to help you finesse your engagement plans and activities for them, as well as just keeping in touch with those individuals.

There should be a number five here I think. It will feel tidier. But, I'll leave that open to you. What else do you think you can be doing with positive tweets that people make about you or your organisation?

How can a university best use social media for internal communications?

Please do shoot me down for self-ego massaging with this, but The Guardian have this morning published my blog post about using social media strategically for internal communications. I'm not going to re-publish the whole thing here as out of courtesy to the nice folk at The Guardian, it would be great for you to add to their viewing figures by reading it there.You may have already seen it anyway since it seems to be spreading on Twitter rather a lot today!

If that interested you, then a couple of workshops that you might be interested in...

Now, the really shameless self-promotion bit... for those with a specific interest in using social media for internal communications, I have launched with the PR Academy a full-day workshop on this very topic. We ran the first one a few weeks back and was rated 'excellent' by every one of the attendees (**blushes with flattered embarrassment**). It is run jointly by Kevin Ruck and I and we'd love to have you join us at one of the next ones being held on 7 July or 18 October. More information can be found here.

Or if you're interested specifically in how to use social media strategically within your university, then I'm also running a full day workshop for that on 12 July. I've only ever had great feedback from these workshops, so hopefully you'll get a lot out of it. Booking info is available here.

Thanks for indulging me by reading this!

The Benefits of Academic Blogging (a guest post by Dr Matthew Ashton)

This is a guest blog post kindly submitted for inclusion on the PJC and HE Comms blogs by Dr Matthew Ashton of Nottingham Trent University. In this post Matt offers the academic perspective on the benefits of blogging. You can check out Matt's blog at www.drmatthewashton.com. You can also listen to a podcast I recorded with Matt about his approach to social media on the HE Comms iTunes channel.

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As a politics lecturer at Nottingham Trent University I’ve been writing a blog for the past six months, updating it roughly once a day. Most of the articles are quite short, around the 500 word mark, and range from topical pieces to reviews and commentary. I’ve found this to be an incredibly rewarding experience and thought I’d write a quick post outlining the benefits of blogging. However it should be made clear that some of the reasons I’m listing are subject specific and wouldn’t necessarily apply to everyone.

1) New ways of teaching and learning and of student engagement

I blog on a wide range of political topics every week. One problem I’ve found with students is that they don’t fully engage with the wider subject area. For instance, while politics students often have an excellent knowledge of contemporary politics they’re sometimes less aware of events from before 1989. I write a column every Friday called “Great political mistakes” where I spend 500 words discussing a famous political mistake. If students read this it has the effect of slowly drip feeding them knowledge. Equally my column every Saturday on “Political advertising” helps raise awareness amongst students of political advertising techniques and campaigns and how they’ve changed over time. I also find that blogging can be a new way of engaging with student learning. By writing reviews of political films and books I can point students towards interesting ideas and resources. For instance I recently wrote a review of the classic political thriller “All the President’s Men”. I then asked the students to watch it and used it to kick off a wider discussion during a seminar that included journalism ethics, the power of the press and the right to know.

2) Encouraging writing and research

By writing 500 words every day I’ve found that I’ve become much more productive. The 500 words acts as a warming up exercise every day getting me in the mood to write. It’s also a useful way of stockpiling material. I recently had to give a lecture at quite short notice, and by going back through my blog I quite easily managed to put a brand new lecture together by using material I had already written.

3) New ways of sharing ideas and research findings

The traditional dissemination of research through books and journals is still the bread and butter of academia. However, one downside to this process is that it can be sometimes months, or even years, between writing something and it being made available to read. Using blogging I can put up an idea within 24 hours to see what my colleagues or other academics think of it. It can act then as an unofficial means of peer review.

4) Engaging with people outside the academic community

One of the problems I sometimes face as an academic is demonstrating the importance of what I do to people who work outside the university. Via my blog I’ve shared ideas and dialogue with people from a huge range of countries and backgrounds. For instance I’ve had some hugely illuminating conversations with an American about Native American rights in the media and how they relate to the US Constitution. This is an area of academia it would not have occurred to me to think about if it hadn’t been for my blog. In the same way people have pointed me towards books and documentaries that I wasn’t aware of that I’ve subsequently shared with my students.

5) Raising your academic profile

One of the benefits of creating a good quality blog is that it is a great source of material for the media. I’ve written several blog posts that have subsequently been used by the press as newspaper articles or led to me being interviewed on the radio about them. This is useful in terms of both raising my own profile and promoting the excellent work done by the university. On one recent occasion the press office contacted me to let me know that a blog article I’d written on Mubarak’s options in Egypt had appeared in a newspaper in Tanzania. On a more local level I wrote an article based on my recent research on the coverage of female sports that was featured in the Nottingham Post newspaper.

Social media for internal communications

This is my presentation from the CIPR social media conference in April.

Encouraging Academic Faculty to Start Using Social Media

This blog was originally written for and published on the CASE social media blog.

When it comes to social media, we can’t depend on our marketing or communications teams to create all the content. Organizations are the collective culture of the body of individuals that work there. Nowhere is this truer than in a university or college where we’re home to experts in all kinds of wonderful disciplines! Given the busy schedules of teaching, research, admin, families and hobbies, how do you persuade academic faculty to add social media into the mix?

My key advice: focus on them as an individual and how it will benefit and add value to their lives, not necessarily the organization (though secretly you’ll know that your organization will benefit too). Here are a few more thoughts…

1. Understand their needs
When running workshops for universities, I sometimes find a narrow understanding of social media. This typically is limited to blogs (“can’t do that, takes too much time”), Facebook (“I don’t want to be friends with my students”), and Twitter (“why on earth would I want to tell the world what I’m having for breakfast?”).

Focus on their individual needs. Faculty with demanding teaching schedules might find social bookmarking a useful tool for their students, while a research-intensive social scientist might find blogging, or just commenting on blogs, a good way to raise their profile amongst policy makers. Tailor your argument to every individual: they’ll feel flattered that you’re paying attention to them as an individual and you’ll find a solution that works for them. University social media handbooks are helpful but they can homogenise something that is actually very individual and niche so supplement them with one-to-one conversations.

2. Explain what they can get out of it
It’s easy to think that because we have to do something to make social media work for us that it becomes all about what we put into it. However, social media is as much about what we get out of it. Show them, for example, that hours spent trawling through Google search results can be reduced by asking your Twitter community or folk on Quora a question and have them do the filtering for you, or how RSS readers can save them time. In a recent podcast I recorded for HE Comms with Dr. Matthew Ashton, a prolific blogger from Nottingham Trent University, Ashton explained how writing a 500 word blog post every morning eases him into ‘writing mode’ for the day and as a consequence his academic writing output has actually increased.

3. Select and suggest the right tools for the right people
This is similar to point one, but here you need to think about how they already use social media and how they are, for want of a better term, culturally disposed towards using it. Think of Forrester’s Social Technographics profile and suggest tools and approaches that gradually move them up the ladder. Trying to encourage someone to go from being a spectator to a creator in one step is probably not going to work so think about where they start from and what baby steps can ease them upwards.

4. Show them others
Bring out their competitive spirit, inspire them, or reduce their fear of being the first to do something ‘different’ or ‘wacky’ by showing them what their colleagues are already up to. Find out who within your academic community (or within their subject area from other universities) is already using social media and be armed with those examples. Twitter lists are great for this. And getting academic colleagues to persuade them on your behalf might be more powerful than the development or marketing offices asking them to do it.

5. Massage their ego
Everyone wants to be thought of as interesting. Make them feel that way by simply being interested. It’s very motivating! In social media where niche communities exist with very specific interests, there is going to be a space for even the most complex thinkers to find a voice and people who are interested in what they have to say. So dropping them a line with a link to a blog post or online discussion that you think they could make a valuable contribution to might be a good starting point here to ease them in and make them feel that you and others are actually interested in them.

Tracy in Texas day 4: branding entertainment and story-telling

It just goes to show, doesn’t it, that the luxury of being away from work for a week and having thinking space also provides the luxury of time to blog? Return to the UK, and all time disappears and the blog suffers. As much as I communicate to my clients and attendees at conferences I speak at that it is important to maintain a regular blog if you are going down that route, I too struggle to find the time sometimes to keep it going. And so, now, I am only just returning to the remaining blog posts from my trip to this year’s SXSW conference to reflect on some of the discussions I participated in and listened to there. I'd like to suggest that the gap was deliberate - allowing myself pondering time - but actually it's purely because I've been busy since I got back from the US. (You guys really keep me on my toes running workshops, speaking at conferences, writing strategies and the like!)

So, in this blog I’m going to reflect a little on how brands can be involved with the creation of entertaining content online. This is inspired by a panel discussion I attended called ‘Branded entertainment: do brands hurt good storytelling?’

What really makes people tick in social media spaces? What is the content that people keep returning to? I often reflect on this in workshops I run for clients. What we see when we look at the most popular videos on YouTube or successful social media campaigns are often strong stories, engaging personalities (think Old Spice campaign) or the element of ‘entertainment’ running through those campaigns. Think of the ‘Compare the Meerkat’ campaign, for example, where a whole world and story, with a cast of characters and a life of its own has been created in order to promote an insurance comparison site… When we think about it, it’s not really all that different to the Nescafe adverts of the 1980s and 90s.

So, how can education organisations engage in story telling and entertainment online? One of the views I often hear from universities I work with is the view that universities are ‘serious’ organisations, in the business of education and innovation, not entertainment. So, how can we create stories and ongoing entertainment online in a way that sits well with our brands?

For a long time now I have been suggesting to organisations that demands of the digital age mean that we must now show people what we do, instead of just telling them. For a university or college that means allowing people to really get inside your organisation: literally, virtually and, importantly, culturally. Story telling online might just enable us to do this. It might be the vice-chancellor’s video blog, through a student’s regular updates on audioboo, or an entire drama series or online ‘fly on the wall’ documentary (universities are interesting places, full of incredible characters and a world of stories – why shouldn’t we capture them in a way that television series like ‘Airport’ and ‘Lakesiders’ have done for other organisations and places?). I confess, I haven’t entirely thought this through but there are some thoughts and approaches emerging in my little grey cells about what this could mean and could ultimately become for a university.

The alternative, of course, is not to create our own stories but to work with content creators, many of whom need investment to keep their content going, to ‘sponsor’ in some way content that they are producing online that is already resonating with our target audiences. This model works on television, so why shouldn’t it work online too? The ‘Charlie is so cool like’ videos are viewed by millions of people (over 120,000,000 views on YouTube). I can’t help thinking that a lot of the audience for these videos might well be intelligent teenagers (like Charlie himself) – a key target audience group for universities. Would it be so wrong for a university to sponsor his content? Not control it, just sponsor it? It’s a kind of brand association, I guess…

As always, I don’t have all the answers but plenty of thoughts developing on this. I really welcome yours in the comments below…

Tracy in Texas day three (part 2): enhanting our way to success

I became a big fan of Guy Kawasaki when I heard him speak at last year's SXSW conference. I've followed him for quite a long time on Twitter quite simply because he tweets randomly interesting things! In my mantra for social media content of positioning yourself and your brands as 'interesting, relevant and useful' to your target audience, Guy Kawasaki mostly ticks the 'interesting' box as my own reason to follow him. Positioning himself that way meant that I had an existing good feeling towards the Guy Kawasaki brand, and therefore was enticed to attend his talk, where he then positioned himself as 'relevant' and 'useful', thus fulfilling all three of my must-haves for engagement, and meaning that as a consequence I will most definitely be investing in a copy of his new book when I return to the UK (and recommending it here too of course!)

Through his talk he outlined his ten top tips for how to be 'enchanting' in order to achieve the things that we want, or to 'change the world'. In this post I will summarise what he said and challenge you to think, as you read on, about how these might apply to you both personally, professionally, and as an organisation. The key point underpinning all of this is that becoming enchanting to people is all about achieving their trust.

1. Achieve likability
This isn't about faking likability, but showing genuine likability. For Kawasaki, this is the difference between someone who smiles just with their jaw and someone who smiles with their eyes. He recommends dressing appropriately for an audience (not trying to out-dress them which suggests you think you are better than them, or underdressing which suggests a degree of disdain for your audience) and mastering the perfect handshake. Map this to your organisation, I question how likable your front-facing staff can sometimes be. Do they smile with their eyes (or with their voice when they answer the phone), do they genuinely care?

2. Achieve trustworthiness
Trust others first. Amazon is a good example of company that places trust in their customers: you can return a kindle e-book up to 5 days after buying (a time frame in which most people could have already read the e-book). This means that their customers trust and feel loyal to them in return. In universities do we ever really trust our students? Kawasaki encourages us to think not in terms of how much we can take from a relationship but in terms of how much we can give. When we meet new people, make 'yes' your default position. I'm not sure that university structures allow us to do this, but perhaps they should. Let's think, for example, of how universities engage with businesses. If we listened to their needs and just said 'yes' instead of starting out by saying 'we can do this, this and this for you' (the 'take' mentality even though it sounds like giving), then we might discover more creative ways in which to do business and establish a relationship of trust and mutual respect.

3. Get ready
In a business context, Kawasaki urges us to have great products - those that are deep (something really great - given that his background is in working for Apple, Kawasaki knows all about having great products!), those that are intelligent ("wow, what a clever product"), those that are complete (this is about everything, not just the product - the packaging, the aftercare, the purchasing experience), and that are empowering (for example, a mac isn't just functional, it also makes you feel more creative) and elegant. And when it comes to marketing our products, make our communications short, sweet and swallowable (not something that the HE sector is particularly good at I'm afraid). He also encourages doing a 'pre-morterm' to pretend that your product has failed, brainstorm all the likely reasons why, and then eliminate them one by one.

4. Launch
Tell a story. Give it the human angle (see part 1 of today's blog posts from SXSW on this very subject). Remember that these days nobodies are the new somebodies. Anyone can be an influencer for your brand and the success of your project so you need to be engaging with all of them, not just the editors of the big newspapers (though they remain important). Talk about your product in ways that people can understand. Don't just focus on the score from the student satisfaction survey - put it into a story, make it real for them...

5. Overcome
Overcome resistance. Think about how you can provide social proof that your product is great and used by many (Kawasaki here used the example of the proliferation of white ear-buds when the iPod launched). Enchant all of the influencers along the way, not just the top bosses. For university decision making this therefore might not just be the student themselves and their parents, but it might also be grandparents or friends, or just someone they happen to listen to (and trust) online...

6. Endure
Don't use or rely on money in order to 'sell' your product. If you pay someone commission or an affiliate fee for selling a product, people are less likely to trust them in this transaction. And invoke reciprocity: when someone says thank you, don't say "you're welcome", say "I know you'd to the same for me". And let them pay you back for things that you do for them: it makes them feel good and keeps the relationship of reciprocity going...

7. Present
Great enchanters know how to present. Customise the introduction to your audience. Sell your dream ie Steve Jobs pitches iPhones as a lifestyle item, not a sum of parts.

8. Use technology
Use technology as an enabler, not a barrier. Remove all technology barriers. Technology should enhance the experience and provide added value to your audience. If you use your social media presence to provide information, insights or assistance, then you will make yourself enchanting. Engage with people. Engage fast, and engage with many people (not just the ones you think are important). Engage often - social media is not the thing to do whenever everything else is done, it should be embedded in your ongoing communications.

9. Enchant up
Always enchant the people that you work for: if your boss wants you to do something, then drop everything else to do it. And prototype fast: if your boss asks you to deliver a powerpoint presentation for them to present from in 3 days time, send them a rough outline within an hour.
And always deliver bad news early and with solutions.

10. Enchant down
Enchant those who work for you. Above all else never ask anyone to do anything that you're not prepared to do yourself. Enable them to master new skills, work autonomously, and give them a sense of purpose. Empower them.

I've barely done Guy Kawasaki's talk any justice at all in this blog post. It's very much a summary of the points he covered, and I'm sure nobody communicates these points better than he, so you might be better off buying the book.

Tracy in Texas day three (part 1): what can we learn from story telling for social media engagement?

Day three at SXSW offered a real mix of sessions for me, from the art of storytelling in transmedia, to the future of location-based services and geo-social networking and gaming, through to the incredible Guy Kawasaki's session on enchantment. So, because there's so much ground to cover, I'm breaking them down into different parts. In this first part I'm going to reflect briefly on what we might be able to learn from story telling and narratives for our social media engagement activities.

The story telling and creative narratives in transmedia session that I attended focused mostly on what makes a good story. It was one of those sessions that I went to thinking it sounded broadly interesting but not entirely thinking about what I'd take away from it but with a couple of days in between, I think the lesson that I have really taken away from this is what we can learn from story-telling and narratives in the way that we approach communications activities. It's all about character and depth of character, about how we learn about others and our selves through relationships with those characters and our own emotional responses to them, and through the way that stories engage through the fluctuation of high and low points, and through the increasing pressures that occur in those stories, and the twists and turns that they take. For me, the point is that stories engage - nothing complex in this. Why is it that we watch the TV show, but leave during the ad breaks? Because ads rarely tell stories, and brands rarely have characters representing them. If we can replicate the art of story telling in our communications, particularly in social media spaces, then perhaps we can be more successful in engaging people with our brands. We can even make them co-creators in the stories if we're really smart about it. This, then, boils down to who those great characters might be and the great narratives that we can build or share about, around, or with them. We have them in our organisations, so why not communicate about them? Or perhaps we can create them. Aleksandr Orlov has 767,000+ fans on Facebook - I bet a page specifically for comparethemarket.com wouldn't get even close to this. Their whole approach introduces a character and a story, and because of that, it is successful.

We spend so much time in organisations thinking about message and consistency of message. But in stories (albeit movies, books, TV programmes or real life), while there is often some consistency, there is by far more twists and turns, false starts, changes of pace, changes of character and personality. Is it the differences and the changes that we experience - the 'journey' that we take, and the extensive range of emotional responses that we experience along the way, that maintains our interest and keeps us engaged. Surely there has to be a way to achieve this in brand communications and engagement activities...

Tracy in Texas day two: connecting with audiences in real-time and converting crowds into communities

So, following my little trip to Texas A&M on day one of SXSW, day two meant that I was properly able to dive into the conference programme. In this blog post I’m going to share notes and reflect on the content from two of the sessions that I attended, particularly thinking about the relevance of those conversations to the education sector (particularly universities and colleges).

Rob Garner’s (iCrossing) session on “Marketing in the Moment” highlighted the importance of speed in today’s world of real-time communications. Websites that take years to design, build and implement, then months to review and measure, are rapidly becoming a thing of the past and brands that can be agile and respond in the moment to their customers and audiences will be the ones who ultimately win. Making mistakes along the way is ‘simply part of how this works’. This takes me back a little to yesterday’s post about how Texas A&M have embraced the real-time quality of social media and are, mostly, empowered to respond quickly in these spaces and, furthermore, respond to the wants and needs of their communities to influence the content that they create for such spaces. How well are universities really set up though to operate in this world when decisions are made by committees and communications staff often, in my experience of working with lots of them over the years, do not feel empowered to speak and respond quickly, or weighty internal structures and sense of 'that's not my job' mean that they feel they can't always respond to everything. My pet hate, which I regularly have a good whinge about, is when someone, say for example a prospective student, asks a question on a college's Facebook page and, instead of answering the question, the community manager responds with something along the lines of 'you need to email admissons@university.edu'. Doh! In doing this, everything is slowed down, the 'customer' is left dissatisfied and you're making them work in order to get the answer to their question, and you are showing yourselves to be a fragmented and disjointed organisation with the right hand not talking to the left, but instead making your customers do that job for you.

Rob also described how the customer buying process is no longer a linear process, but more like a ‘rabbit warren’ where individuals jump around a network of information spaces in order to make purchasing decisions influenced by a range of opinions and views (in my mind, though, that doesn't mean that it's acceptable for you as a brand to send them off on even more branches of that rabbit warren than is necessary or desired by the customer). The same is very much true when we come to think about student marketing: prospective students of a university will each take their own unique run around the rabbit warren gathering their information from a variety of sources and influencers along the way, not all of them ‘official’ university information sources, and certainly no two experiences the same. And while they are on this journey the audience themselves (the students in this case) can become ‘brand publishers’ in their own right as they comment on, discuss, and therefore shape and influence the reputation of the brand. And they do this in a language that is likely to be completely different to the language that the brand itself might use to talk about itself. Though this leads me to wonder whether there could be a potential shift here towards brands adopting more of the language that their customers use in order to align these overlapping discourses more closely.

And thinking about how different individuals talk about, influence and even represent brands online, brings me nicely on to thinking about Thomas Knoll’s session that asked the question “Are your customers are crowd or a community”? In this session, a number of distinctions were drawn between the definition of a crowd, and the definition of a community. I think these are particularly helpful from a ‘audit’ point of view for organisations to consider in light of their target audiences.

1. "Crowds have pride, communities have purpose"

This therefore begs the question as to whether we can turn crowds into communities by giving them purpose? Again, thinking back to yesterday’s blog post, Texas A&M’s social media scavenger hunt is a near-perfect example of this. The hunt literally gave a crowd a combined sense of purpose, and the impact of that was community building (online and offline). Ordinarily, Knoll suggested, it takes time for communities to discover their purpose and that this isn’t something that we can force on them through a single marketing message. And in order for them to agree their purpose (or purposes), they need to have the right spaces provided for them to have those conversations.

2. "Crowds are looking for benefits, but communities are looking to belong"

Having a great brand, or the best price is not enough. Relationships and experiences help to make people feel a sense of belonging. For the HE sector this is the difference, for example, between 'I study at the University of X' vs 'The University of X is my university'. Belonging is caused by trust, relationships, and experiences, so how can we ensure that we foster those relationships and experiences? I think this distinction is particularly interesting when thinking about the academic body of an organisation. A lack of common sense of purpose (see point 1) driven by very individual and specific areas of research expertise, means that academics/faculty often don’t behave like a community and seem to lack a sense of belonging to a particular organisation, but instead have a sense of belonging to their subject. In this respect, perhaps we could argue that they are a crowd within the university because they simply look for the benefits from that environment (office space, funding, facilities, etc), but they exist as communities in a way that transcends the campus walls. This is a big internal communications challenge for universities: how can we turn faculty from a crowd to a community when they true sense of ‘belonging’ exists within their subject area, not the bricks and mortar environment in which they work.

3. "Crowds are driven by connection, communities are driven by collaboration"

How many places do you have to connect with your customers?
How many places do you have to collaborate with your customers? Where are the spaces where your customers can connect with each other, tell their stories and influence each other and, ultimately, your brand. This is all about letting go and empowering your audience, perhaps your students, to have a voice. In return for empowering people to feel that they have influence, you can achieve loyalty and community. Again, this is something that we could see in Texas A&M’s approach to social media: within their spaces students have their own voice and they can ask for and influence the types of content that get posted there. For example, the students have been known to ask for more content on a particular sport’s team or activity, and that in turn influences the content that Diane and her colleagues create and share in those spaces.

4. "Crowds prefer to get, communities prefer to give"

Communities like to help and have influence, and they like to share and spread. They like to 'give back'. Communities want to inspire and influence each other and be part of the experience. For example, they want to be part of the process of entertaining each other rather than just being entertained. Considering this in an education context again, I think this is an interesting point from the perspective of alumni engagement. How many of our sites and spaces truly enable alumni to give and share amongst each other? I think we’re getting close to this through spaces such as LinkedIn groups, but while the content that we place in there as an organisation retains a ‘push message’ feel to it, and while the spaces are heavily branded as ‘belonging’ to the institution, are we simply nurturing the ‘crowd’ mentality. We push, they receive (they get), they never really therefore get the message that they can share and give in these spaces, therefore they don’t become a community. Again, how can we facilitate this shift amongt alumni communities?

5. "Crowds are sustained by service, communities are sustained by story"

This distinction nicely also relates to point 4. Your crowd will remain a crowd as long as you service them enough. However, if you allow them to tell stories, then they become a community. This is the distinction that I explored above in relation to the ways in which we engage with alumni. By providing content for them, we are servicing them and therefore not giving them the freedom or the clues to share their own stories or to create their own common story (think again back to the point about shared purpose).

6. "A crowd is powered by inspiration, a community is powered by influence."

Finally, this point again is a difference between top-down communications and bottom-up communications. It is the difference between being ‘talked at’ and ‘listened to’ in my opinion. Audiences will only feel that they have influence, and thus behave as a community, if they are given the spaces in which to do this. Social media lends itself perfectly for this purpose if used well. Brands often use social media as ‘channels’ through which to push their content on to target audiences rather than really fostering true engagement through them. If a crowd feel that they don’t have influence in your own social media spaces, then they are likely to establish or engage in spaces where they do feel they have influence, which in the world of the UK university, for example, might be in spaces such as The Student Room.

In tomorrow's blog post we'll reflect on Guy Kawasaki's excellent talk on 'enchantment' and how to be 'enchanting'... that talk was so good that's it overshadows everything else I heard that day, so it will get my fullest attention! See you tomorrow...

Tracy in Texas day one: learning how Texas A&M University “do” social media

This is my first blog post in a special series that I’m doing from my trip to Texas this week. I’m out here attending the SXSW conference in Austin again. This is my week to refresh my own knowledge of where social and digital media is going, spot new trends and products, and network with others feeling their way in new ways of communicating.

However, I bailed out on day one of the conference to take a drive over to College Station, about an hour and a half out of Austin, to visit Texas A&M University. Why? Well, they’re a university that has constantly impressed me with their use of social media. Their Facebook page has over 260,000 fans, and they grabbed a lot of attention recently for a social media-enabled scavenger hunt that they organised around their campus. Furthermore, they have their very own Director of Social Media. So, I headed over there for a chat with Diane C. McDonald and her colleague John Chivvis to get to know a little more about their approach to social media.

The first thing to say is that when they say ‘social media’ they mean social. They explained that for them the key thing that social media enables them to do is communicate a sense of the University’s culture that cannot be communicated in any other way. I guess this is something about its people, and you can only communicate that by providing the spaces in which those people can make their voices heard. That’s what social media does. It provides that space and that connection to act as a bridge between the inside and the outside, allowing others to experience the University’s culture for themselves.

Empowerment, management buy-in and support also seem to be essential for enabling Diane, John and colleagues to progress their social media efforts. Their managers seem to get it and seem to have placed their trust in those colleagues working on it to just do it. That means no committees to sign off every single tweet. Empowerment and trust from senior managers is critical for any organisation to be successful in social media, and because the team involved in this have a strong sense of brand, corporate identity, and levels of what is ‘acceptable’, they are empowered to be able to generate the quick content and real-time responses that social media demands. This means, for example, that they know that they can be ‘fun’ in social media spaces, but not try to be ‘funny’ because that wouldn’t sit well with the University’s overall brand.

They then bring that knowledge together with working closely with the student body to ensure that the content that they produce for these spaces is the kind of content that the students actually want to consume. Diane and John have no illusions that they are of the same mind of their students, so they recognise the need to understand and respond to student wants and needs in order to create spaces that they will want to engage with, be part of and, ultimately, influence the future direction of. That audience-centred approach has to be a key reason for the success of their spaces. They know that traditional ‘push messaging’ approaches don’t work, and that simply posting press releases on these sites just wouldn’t resonate with the audience. It also seems that Diane understands the importance of being there the whole time. She speaks about when she has to leave her desk to head off somewhere, about how she hands over to John to make sure that he is on the Facebook page or whatever else it might be in her absence. More on the need for real-time marketing in tomorrow's blog post!

It strikes me that their social media efforts, and in particular the scavenger hunt, have helped them to turn a student ‘crowd’ into a student ‘community’ (more on the distinction between crowd and community in tomorrow’s post, following my attendance at Thomas Knoll’s session at SXSW). The scavenger hunt (which, incidentally, had complete buy-in from the University President who allowed them to use his on-campus house as a destination in the hunt and donated and presented one of his trademark bow-ties as a prize to the winners) was really designed to grow engagement amongst the student community with their social media sites. It was designed to boost the number of followers on Twitter and increase the use of Foursquare amongst the community (they estimate that out of a 40,000 student body, about 6,000 of them are currently actively engaging with the University’s Foursquare activities). A side effect, however (albeit an intended one), of the scavenger hunt was actual, genuine face-to-face community building, and interaction with community members from outside of the campus. It prompted students to meet other students, form new friendships, and it excited interested observers from off-campus. One prospective student commented online that she now couldn’t wait to join their University after following this activity, and alumni of the University pitched in and helped participants out, or commented on how hard or easy the clues were.

So, having had this fantastic insight into their approach to social media, I presented Diane and John with the killer question, the one that all of my colleagues and clients back home want to know: so, just how many people are actively leading social media for Texas A&M? I expected a big number. Instead, I was told “oh there’s only three of us, kind of, and John is also responsible for the University website too”. For quite some time now, I’ve been going along with my UK counterparts and nodding in agreement when they say that the reason that we can’t ‘do’ social media like the Americans is because they are so much better resourced than we in the UK are. I no longer believe that. In reality, Texas A&M have only one member of staff wholly dedicated to social media, and two that help to support that process (amongst others). The difference, it seems to me is not one of resource and budgets, but one of empowerment, internal culture, embracing the ‘letting go’ and accepting that mistakes will get made along the way but that they’ll learn from them. We are, after all, in the business of learning!

In tomorrow's post... the need for real-time marketing, and thinking about 'crowds' and 'communities'.