Pickle Jar Communications

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 [...]

Through the community that we built over at HE Comms (the online social network for HE marketing and communications professionals), we’re going to be running our very first workshop bringing together people from across the HE sector. Usually we’d run these in-house, but we thought we’d open it up. The workshop will take place at [...]

“Useful, interesting and relevant” Those three little words have very much become my mantra over the past couple of years since I started being asked widely to talk with organisations about social media and how they can integrate it into their marketing-communications activities. It’s now more widely accepted and understood that in order to successfully [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Ploughing straight into a social media campaign without first considering where your audience might be and how they are using social media is a little like booking a flight and not knowing where the plane is going to land. Somewhat pointless, and yet a lot of organisations are doing just that. Social and digital media [...]

It was only going to be a matter of time before some bright spark came up with a decent iPhone app to enhance university campus tours. uTourX does just that – for US-based universities at the moment, but it’s the potential of the technology that makes it useful for us Europeans too. Check out this [...]