Chairing a couple of good events for education PR folk
At the beginning of this year I took over from Emma Leech as Chair of the CIPR’s Education and Skills sector group. In April we’ll be holding a couple of events that I think will interest some of the readers of this blog, so I thought I’d share some info about them here (I’m chairing both events):
On the evening of Wednesday 14 April we’ll be hooking up PROs from the education and skills sector with relevant journalists at our ‘Speed Meet a Journalist’ event. We’ll kick off with a discussion with the journalist and then allow plenty of time for networking. This event takes place at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Then on Wednesday 21 April we’re heading up to the University of Nottingham for a Creating Video Podcasts Masterclass. This will be a full day of training with lots of practical hints and tips from the award-winning team at Nottingham.
For further information about both events, you can view the latest Group newsletter here (issued to members of the CIPR Education and Skills Sector Group). I hope to see some of you at the events.
The panel is no longer just the 3 or 4 people at the front of the room
Anyone that’s ever heard me speak about social media and new methods of communication will know that I often express an irony that in order to speak to (with) audiences at events about social media, you typically end up standing in at the front of the room speaking out at the audience. But social media isn’t about a single person on a platform talking out, it’s about multiple voices crossing each other, conversing, engaging, sharing and interacting. Above all, it’s about harnessing the power of a community of voices to bring value to each other.
Now, the use of technology amongst audience members during the conferences that I often speak at is typically fairly quite low at the moment. You’ll still hear requests for mobiles to be turned off, and coffee breaks are often used to check voicemail and email (I get asked to speak to PR people a lot so they’re always checking for those all important messages from journalists). I tell people to turn or keep their mobiles and laptops on, and to share with each other and with me. This is because I know that multiple voices have far more value and knowledge to bring than just one. I can present my opinion from the front of the room, but everyone in that room will also have experiences and knowledge to share, so technology offers us the means with which to capture and share that knowledge.
This week I’m at the South by South West (SXSW) Interactive conference in Austin, Texas. Here, as you might expect, the use of handheld devices during workshops and sessions is universal. And every workshop has it’s own hash tag meaning that audience members can tweet to participate throughout and see what others are saying, thinking and sharing. Anyway, the purpose for this blog is really to tease myself a little with the question of whether this adds value to a session or detracts from the session. My attention span for what the people at the front of the room are saying is certainly compromised but is this because what they’re saying just isn’t hitting the mark for me, or is it because the twitter buzz and the multiple voices from the audience are providing me with a richer experience so it no longer purely matters what the headline speakers are actually saying (they’re now just prompting)? Either way, what I am clear about is that as an audience member you can enrich the experience of others in the room (and importantly those not in the room) by sharing links and additional information above and beyond what the panellists or speakers are offering. This might be in the form of links to relevant case studies, resources or articles that tap in to the subject matter being discussed. So, now when I’m attending a panel discussion, it isn’t just the voices of those on the panel that are important, but the views of everyone in the room also pitching in on that conversation. Yes, it causes a lot of chatter and buzz to cut through, but I think the key challenge for all of us is just to develop new filtering mechanisms, to be able to listen out or watch out for the ‘keywords’ relevant and interesting to us and, importantly, as audience member to share and not just receive. That’s the spirit that social technologies helps us to foster.
Could Augmented Reality help to bridge the print prospectus and the online interactive experience for prospective students?
I’m a great believer that the printed university or college prospectus is not dead, nor will it be so for a while yet. However, I think universities and colleges are increasingly becoming aware of the need for their print materials and online presence to interact with each other to enhance the student experience. However, to date this is very much limited to including urls in print materials to direct students to further information online, some of which is beginning to be quite exciting and interactive, but some of which remains very static and web 1.0.
A few months back I posed the question on this blog about how augmented reality (AR) might be able to enhance campus tours. I think the potential for this is huge. Today, however, having just been playing with the General Electric Company’s Smart Grid Augmented Reality programme I’m beginning to think that the potential for AR to really bridge that divide between the print prospectus and the online experience could be huge. What if you wave a department’s page from the print prospectus at your webcam, and it launches a range of videos from students in that department, welcoming you and sharing their experiences and telling you about the course? Or you wave the page telling you about student accommodation at your webcam and suddenly you’re launched into a virtual tour of the different student halls, and watching 360 degree animations of student rooms? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this and where you think this might go. Personally, I think it’s pretty exciting!
Sometimes leaving technology aside is no bad thing
It’s no secret to anyone that knows me that I love social media and fill my life with it. I’ve had many positive experiences of using it for professional purposes, and even some for personal issues too. Some of you may recall, for example, how I embraced the support I received through my social media networks when my bunny, Herbie, passed away in April last year. So, this morning I was browsing back over some of the things that I had posted as notes on Facebook over the years, and I came across this one from March 2007, when I was still working for Research-TV at the University of Warwick:
Today I spent 4 hours sitting on a train travelling up to Newcastle. Always a great opportunity to get my head down in silence and crack on with the “real work” of writing proposals and developing quotes for potential clients, I despaired when I realised by the time we reached Birmingham International that the 2 little old ladies sat opposite me were also in for the long haul.
I felt awkward as I boarded the train and had to get one of them to take her feet off of the seat opposite so I could climb over and sit down (spotting her walking stick just made me feel worse). I felt awkward again when I got my laptop out and had to edge a space for myself on the table where their magazines and used coffee cups were strewn. And the silence that fell upon them when I returned from the buffet car clutching a small bottle of wine for myself was something not to be missed. I had to do all I could to stop myself from smirking. Daft old ladies – don’t they know that it’s the “done thing” for us busy 21st century women to wind down of an evening with a glass of wine?
So, they twittered away about the trip they had been on, discussed (while I sipped my wine) the alcoholism of one of their friends, criticised a 50-something for “not getting any younger”, and shared their £2.95 buffet-car tuna and cucumber sandwich (after splitting the cost) as I hastily and lovingly buried the receipt for my tea and wine in my purse for the expenses claim.
But with the wine taking its usual evening effect on my stress levels, and with the laptop momentarily put away, I started listening to the sense that they were talking. When I pulled my laptop out again, one of them asked the other why she hadn’t yet bought herself a laptop. She said that she was perfectly happy to be using her PC, that she loved being able to book flights online, and that she really didn’t mind working from her bedroom. I advised her against buying a laptop, suggesting that you’re always just too close to work when you have one.
When they departed the train at Darlington, I actually felt quite lonely and disappointed that they didn’t say good bye or wish me well as they got up and left. It’s all very well burying myself in technology on the train, as I am wont to do, but I really hope that when I’m 70 I have someone to sit with and have a good old gossip with on the train. And I really hope that I don’t care what the 20-something sat opposite me thinks either.
Sadly, almost three years on, I realised that I just hadn’t learned anything from that experience. In fact, I had completely forgotten about it. If anything, since I started my own business in September 2007, I grew worse. As most of my work is focused on social media, I have a professional excuse to fill my life with social media interactions. Ironically, clients are always asking me about the separation of personal and professional in social media spaces and how to deal with that, and while I’m happy to give them sound and solid advice on this, for me personally I have always been happy to be a fairly ‘public’ person online. It has proved to be good for business, and at times good for personal comfort and social interaction.
But something has changed recently. (And, yes, before it is pointed out to me I do see the irony of delving into my personal life in a blog post in order to suggest that too much social media can be bad for you …)
I’ve had some fairly big changes in my life recently. I’m single again for the first time in seven years (I was due to get married in March this year but took the difficult decision to call it all off) and I moved house two days before Christmas. There has been an inevitable impact on some of the relationships I have with other people. Friendships, relationships and my own sense of ‘home’ are being redefined. My work has very much been (other than my family of course) the key constant in my life throughout this period. You all know how much I love my work – I’m one of the lucky people who look forward to getting stuck into it everyday, love the people that it brings me into contact with, and thrive on the challenges that it brings. However, having a job that depends on me spending so much time in social media spaces, where many of my friends also have a presence, has put an interesting slant on my personal life lately – not always for the best. This is a rather long winded way of saying that I’ve come to realise how much damage an innocent 140 character tweet or a text message can actually do. It rarely tells the full story, it can leave us wondering, and it can leave us filling in the gaps for ourselves, putting two and two together and coming up with 27 (or sometimes coming up with four but not always liking what that means).
The point here is a fundamental one about the way in which we communicate, hence why I’m allowing myself to wear my heart on my sleeve in what I would ordinarily perceive to be a ‘professional’ blog. While social media spaces, including instant messaging and text messaging, are a great way of keeping in touch and by their very nature are chatty and conversational (I tell my clients how important this is), tone, style, content and language used remains as critical as it does in any other form of communication. Without paying attention to that, messages are misinterpreted and damage can be done. But how can we do that effectively in just 140 characters? It’s a challenge for us all to grapple with and to think through the consequences of every tweet, and every text message. The need to write, review and re-write before we hit the send button is one of the things that makes me a little nervous about something like Google Wave, for example, where that essential process of good communication is taken away.
So, last weekend I took a break and visited Marrakech with a good friend for a girly weekend away. While the blackberry and laptop came with me, I stayed off of Twitter, messenger and Facebook and I learned the value of silence. I think I appreciated the city more for it, and I think that blocking out the noise and buzz of everybody else’s lives for just a few days has been a positive experience in helping me to recover or understand who I am and what I am about. I’m also learning a lot about happiness, serenity and positivity right now too. And so, I’ve started to carry with me a little notebook in which I write down the silly little every day things that make me smile or make me feel good. A friend has suggested that I used tumblr for this purpose, but I think I’ve rediscovered the joy of writing some things down on paper, with ink, and keeping them just to myself. Any while it’s ironic that I’m sharing all of this through a blog post, it felt like an important experience and message to share as it spills into our professional lives too and is a message that I often repeat to my clients. Social media is a wonderful thing, and presents communications professionals with great opportunities, but it is not everything. Sometimes pen and paper, a conversation on the telephone, a face-to-face meeting or saying nothing at all is for the best, so everything has to be done with balance, and with close attention to message, tone, style and consideration of impact before the appropriate ‘channel’ is selected for that communication. I know this all too well in my professional life, but didn’t think about it for my personal life and it’s clear now that too much technology for communications and not enough face-to-face has not been for the best. It’s funny, I often advise clients to learn from their personal interactions in social media spaces and then apply them to their professional experiences, but for me I’m learning now that I have to apply some of the lessons of my professional experiences and knowledge of such spaces and apply it to my personal circumstances.
How Teens Use Media
I’m doing various bits of work at the moment for universities looking at social media and student recruitment opportunities, and helping them to develop strategies for using it effectively to engage with potential students. Through my research into trends in the use of social media amongst young people I came across this report published by Nielsen in the summer last year. It offers a great insight into teenage consumption of media, and squashes a few myths along the way. Check out the How Teens Use Media report here (pdf).
