In this concluding part of our week-long webinar series, we look at the action stage in the online audience engagement journey and think about how social and digital media plays a role here for education marketing. I mention in this webinar Philip Sheldrake’s book The Business of Influence. Find out more about this and more of Phil’s work here (highly recommended – I’ve even been using his book as a core course text on the PR Academy Digital Communications certificate that I lead).

I hope you’ve found this series helpful. It gives just a tiny insight into my thinking and just one of the processes that I apply in workshops and to the strategy work that I do for clients. If you’d like to find out more, please do take a look at the services we at Pickle Jar Communications offer, and drop me a line if you have any questions.

The entire series can be viewed again as much as you like here.

Many of you have been following my webinar series this week on the online audience engagement journey and how social and digital media play different roles at different times in education marketing (incidentally, the final part will be posted today). Producing this series this week gave me the opportunity to play with a new tool that I’ve been meaning to try for quite some time: ScreenFlow.

ScreenFlow is software that enables you to record your screen, audio and video. Now, in the past I have profiled Screenr as one of my Friday favorites. So, what’s difference with ScreenFlow and why am I now profiling a tool that you have to pay for (it costs US$99 at the time of writing) when I’ve already included one that is free to use?

To begin with, screenr only allows you to record up to 5 minute videos. Those videos are then also branded with the screenr logo, and you can only record audio from your microphone. On ScreenFlow, length is seemingly unlimited, there are considerably more editing features (though they are a bit limited if you’re used to video editing programmes), and you can record audio into your computer, audio from your computer itself (i.e. if you are playing a video on your screen as you are recording) and video, using your webcam. This makes it the perfect tool for recording non-live webinars.

Within a day of posting the first webinar I’d had an email from a presentations expert/trainer saying he was impressed with them and interested in how I produced them. It turns out to be a very simple answer: a combination of Prezi (another former Friday Favorite) and ScreenFlow together. And in truth, these were very much ‘knocked together’ this week and I could do a lot better. I keep pondering what I could do with a professional voice artist being used, for example, and perhaps some music. I could easily knock up a highly engaging promotional showreel for an organisation using this combination of tools (and happy to do some for people if they’re interested in commissioning them).

I suspect I shall be recording a lot more of my conference presentations from now on using this. Now I just need to find a clip-microphone (radio one) that I can also plug into my laptop. I wonder if they exist…

In the penultimate episode we look at the desire stage of social media marketing for the education sector (student recruitment). Like the credibility stage, this is also a critical stage where social and digital media can play an important, and emotive, role in the decisions that your audience makes that hopefully move them to the most important stage of all, action, which we will cover in part 6 tomorrow.

Keeping ‘em coming… here’s episode 4 in our little webinar series for the week. In this one we chat about the credibility stage in education social media marketing and communications. I always think that this is the stage in the ‘journey’ where social and digital media brings us the greatest benefits and opportunities, and some of the greatest risks too. I also highlight the importance of ‘show not tell’ in this episode illustrated by the fantastic Hartwick Experience site.

Here we are, episode 3 is here…

In this episode we look at the ‘interest’ stage in the audience engagement journey and how social and digital media have a role to play here in marketing and communications, with a particular skew towards education marketing (naturally).

In this episode I highlight the importance of wikipedia at this stage, and I mention guidelines from wikipedia and the CIPR. Here are the links to those resources (well, well worth a read):

Wikipedia’s guidelines for PR people
CIPR Social Media Guidelines
Useful resources on CIPR website (courtesy of Philip Sheldrake) on wikipedia and PR

In this second part of my audience engagement journey webinar series we dive in to have a look at the first stage of the journey: awareness. The remaining four parts of this series will be posted on each day this week. Again, I hope this is helpful.

This week is ‘social media week’. This is a week in which some of the major cities around the world host events and activities to celebrate, discuss and innovate in social media. To celebrate this in my own little way, I decided to produce a six-part webinar series. In this series I focus on one of my favorite ways of thinking about applying social and digital media strategically in our education marketing and communications activities: the audience engagement journey. In this first part I set the context for what we are talking about and how I am approaching it. Then, throughout this week I will post another episode looking at each of the five stages in greater detail, starting today with ‘awareness’. I hope you find these useful and helpful.

Since I founded Pickle Jar Communications in 2007 my focus has always been on strategy and planning, rather than implementation. I firmly believe that when it comes to digital and social media, your money is better spent investing in the people, skills and resources in-house to manage your campaigns than outsourcing it to consultancies and agencies who will never, no matter how great they are, really know your organisation like you do.

The value that we as a company bring to your projects is in developing those strategies and campaign ideas in the first place, building robust plans that you can then work from and progress in your organisation, and helping you understand how digital and social media can be integrated with wider marketing and communications activities. Sometimes this involves a little handholding from us to start with (or some training), but always with a view to enabling you to bring those skills in-house, and thus keep tight control of your budgets.

However, there are sometimes gaps that need to be bridged, or our plans and strategies might reveal the need for technical developments (one-offs or otherwise) that just can’t be managed by you in-house. With this in mind, we have developed a partnership with Status Digital Marketing to help add implementation and technical development to the range of products and services that we offer.

Working with this HEIST-award winning team, we are now able to work closer with you to help with:

• website redesign and developments;
• building applications (‘apps’) and sites for mobile and social media;
• implementing your social and digital media campaigns;
• ongoing technical and strategic support for your campaigns.

If we think that you are best placed to deliver something in-house, we will still say this in our recommendations to you. But on those occasions where we agree that more technical design and implementation is required, or where you want to deliver something bespoke and truly spectacular, but you want to do this in the knowledge that I am still helping, handholding and supporting you through that process, then we now have an arrangement in place to manage that.

I have had many opportunities to join forces with digital companies since I founded Pickle Jar Communications, and many conversations over the years to this effect. However, until now I haven’t had the confidence in the approach, creativity, and quality of delivery that I now have in Status, in order to forge those relationships. The partners that I chose to work with and that I recommend to you have a bearing on my reputation and that of Pickle Jar Communications. I therefore only select to work with people and companies whom I think mirror our ethos, approach and commitment to quality, and are thoroughly fun and enjoyable to work with while remaining focused on the objectives of the project.

Please do drop me a line (tracy@picklejarcommunications.com) if you’d like to discuss how this can work for you and your organisation, or alternatively contact Nick Salloway at Status (nick@statusdigital.co.uk) who will also be happy to help.

There are many many Twitter apps and tools available out there, some far better than others (some verging on the utter pointless). So, it’s rare that I recommend one as generally they have quite a lot of holes in them or don’t really provide any data that is really very useful without further data mining to understand it.

However, in a return to Friday favorites, I’m spotlighting Tweriod. I like the simplicity of it. It analyzes up to 5,000 (for free, or up to 15,000 for a few dollars) of your followers to tell you typically when they tweet and therefore provide you with an idea of the timeframes as to when it is best to reach your followers.

There are some useless results, for example telling me that most of my followers are online between 9am and 10pm (no s**t Sherlock), but when you then look at the graphs in a little more detail, they do give greater insights that just might be useful. For me, it’s clear that the busiest period for my followers is from noon (probably because that’s when many of my US-based followers typically start coming online, which heightens the effect).

It’s all too easy when you’re someone who only follows a handful of people to forget that other people may follow a lot more than you and therefore will miss your tweets all too easily if they aren’t timed well (i.e. when they’re actually on Twitter), so this kind of insight is probably, in my opinion, one of the more useful out there. It does, however, also mean that just about everyone else also targeting your followers could also time their tweets to coincide with these peak times, thus increasing competition for your tweet actually being seen, but that’s a risk that seems worth taking at this moment in time.

I recently had a little purge on Twitter and unfollowed a number of people. It’s a healthy process and makes you feel somehow cleansed (a bit like having a good old clear out of your wardrobe). As I did so, I reflected on the reasons why I unfollowed people and thought I’d summarise those reasons here.

I unfollowed:

• People who only tweet about themselves (when their lives aren’t particularly interesting);




• People who tweet inane crap (sorry, this is very general, but I’m looking for value-add from Twitter, otherwise I’m wasting my time on there, so if all your tweets are about how it is snowing in London, but I live in Newcastle, then that goes into the ‘inane crap’ bin for me);




• People who bulk-tweet and then disappear for a while (I cannot stand this – it’s like invading a stage at a conference, shouting something, and then making a speedy exit without waiting around for the reaction);




• People who were interesting to me when I first started using Twitter, but have been ‘overtaken’ in the interesting/usefulness stakes by other people (this doesn’t mean you’re using Twitter ‘wrong’, it just means I have finessed and revised what I am using Twitter for and what I can get out of it – this has shifted as more and more people have joined the conversation in recent years);




• People who don’t post any relevant information for me (absolutely critical for me – it is all about value-add);




• PR people who spend all their time tweeting about their clients (ugh, that’s all I have to say about that one);




• People who just tweet press releases (ugh again, enough said);




• People who retweet positive things that others have said about them (okay, this won’t necessarily make me unfollow you, but if you’re great, then I’ll know you’re great and I won’t need to see this little piece of self-indulgence – there are many other things to do with positive tweets about you that retweeting them to everyone else).

This isn’t remotely scientific, but I often advise people to think about how they use social media themselves (and their own mental filtering processes) when they think about how they use social media to engage other people. Or, if you’re not a heavy social media user, think about the mental filtering processes that you apply when deciding which emails to open first in your bulging inbox. We all apply these filtering processes to just about everything we do (it’s decision making and prioritisation), but I often find that when we’re trying to get messages out to other people, we forget that they too have their own mental filtering criteria (whether they’re aware of it or not).

So, with this in mind, how can you ensure that people (forget about me, I’m not important) don’t unfollow you or your organisation on Twitter or other such sites? Here are a few thoughts:

• Apply my mantra: useful, interesting, relevant. Make sure that what you are sharing is at least one of these things to them (this might not be the same thing as what is useful, interesting and relevant to you);




• Add value: provide content that adds value to their lives. This might be providing them with something that could save them time, offer them a new perspective on something, add another string to their professional bow, etc. If they are followers who really matter to you, then look out for opportunities to help them with something through signposting or forming useful connections for them;




• Be personable but not self-centered or self-obsessed. It’s possible to inject your personality without talking about yourself all the time;




• Be humble. Be confident in your own worth and awesomeness. We don’t need to see that someone said something great about you. Just be great, and we’ll think the same thing anyway (show us, don’t tell us);




• Don’t tweet too much (you’ll overpower us and make us weary);




• Don’t tweet too little (we’ll forget about you).