Pickle Jar Communications

This feels marginally like massaging my own ego, so I hope you’ll forgive me for sharing this. Derfel Owen from the Quality Assurance Agency interviewed me recently for a couple of podcasts on the use of social media in universities. Here’s the first podcast. I hope you find it useful (it’s about 10 minutes long). [...]

The irony of this blog post is that it’s probably a question best asked on Quora itself – the social Q&A site that has very much been the buzz word of social media circles, and seems to have seen incredible growth in the past couple of weeks (read various articles about it on mashable, here). [...]

I paused as I was writing the title for this blog post over whether to use the word ‘marketer’ instead of communicator. I tend not to like the use of the word marketing when it comes to talking about social media, but to some extent that’s exactly what most companies have as their core objective [...]

Many of those who follow my blog work in communications roles in the UK Higher Education sector and so I’m hoping that this post will resonate with you and move you to help this very very worthy appeal for funds in support of Donald Macleod… Donald Macleod, former education editor of the Guardian and Head [...]

This week I’m running a workshop in Rome for CASE Europe’s International Schools Summit. Because there is a focus during this workshop on engaging with international audiences, I thought I’d use this opportunity to share some useful resources for global social media usage: On 10/10/10 TNS launched their Digital Life report. Their survey interviewed almost [...]

The title of this blog post is, I must confess, a tiny bit misleading. When I say ‘best practice’ I perhaps should actually just say ‘examples that I like’. ROI doesn’t really seem to have woven it’s way into the mix as yet for social media engagement practices in the higher education sector. However, I [...]

I’ve just this minute spotted a tweet from Danny Yoder of Eastern Mennonite University (EMU) in the US, urgently asking the Twitter community what a university President ought to know about social media. This is a question that I get asked a lot and to some extent advise on a fair bit in the strategy [...]

Following attendance at a workshop this week during which I led an exercise in aligning organisational messages with audience wants and needs (see my diagram for this, and blog post about it,  here), a colleague from the University of Nottingham this morning sent me a link to this comic entry on xkcd.com. Very appropriate!

I posted this over on HE Comms this morning and thought it worth sharing here too… A question that I increasingly come up against now as I go out and run workshops for HEIs on social media strategy and implementation is how to monitor your online reputation. There are a number of free tools available [...]

I’d like to take you back to 1997. I’m at college. I’m 17. A year previous I had decided I wanted to become the first member of my family to go to university. So, time comes round to start looking for universities. Now, there’s a few things to bear in mind at this point: We [...]