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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!