Pickle Jar Communications

Could Facebook’s latest feature be a game-changer for personal/professional issues around its use in the education sector? Teachers and lecturers have been grappling with the question of whether they should ‘friend’ or accept friend requests from their students, but the ‘subscribe’ option may offer an alternative solution. My recent work developing social media strategies and [...]

Earlier today I presented to the West Midlands PR and Marketing group of the Association of Colleges about social media. As regular readers of this blog know, I often present about this subject, but usually to university or business audiences. Presenting to colleges was particularly interesting. Typically I make the point that if an organisation [...]

Yesterday I delivered two workshops to a number of delegates at the EUPRIO annual conference in Averio, Portugal. My session was one of seven on the progamme, all running twice that morning. Across the two workshops I seem to have been joined by more than half the conference delegation. This staggered me but just goes [...]

I’ve been reading this blog this morning by Samuel Bradley giving tips to college students on using Twitter (though the tips could extend beyond that audience). Bradley advises: Don’t simply link to your Facebook bio if there’s anything on your profile that you wouldn’t show in front of the class. Rule of thumb: If a [...]

The news that Facebook has finally launched a Chinese-language version of the site will undoubtedly excite many British universities. China is an important market for recruiting students and developing research partnerships. It is clear that British universities have over the past few years started to get to grips with the opportunities for communications (and dare [...]

Facebook have announced the launch of Facebook Chat, the instant messaging service for facebook users to communicate with their friends logged on to their profiles. I have to express a few reservations, however, about this new service. First and foremost, I’m already a fairly avid user of Windows Live Messenger. I have a handful of [...]

As part of the work we’ve been doing for Ideas for Life TV, we were recently involved in a conference on digital media for business hosted at Alton Towers (18 March). Working with Ember Regis, we interviewed the key speakers from the event. Two of them were specifically speaking about how digital media can be [...]

It’s all about the kids today. What are they doing online? How can we make the web and video games safer? The launch of the report of the Byron Review is of course welcomed by most people – parents in particular, I suspect. The report itself acknowledges that “headlines have contributed to the climate of [...]

So, here is a dilemma that has been rife in the press recently. Supposedly journalists are dipping into individual’s profiles on social networking sites like facebook, MySpace and Bebo to find out more about them for stories they are developing. I’m ever so slightly surprised that this has caused such an outcry, in truth. I [...]

Now, Coventry doesn’t have the best of reputations. Being said to be “sent to Coventry” is no good thing, and Hitler clearly didn’t think much of the city either when he chose to drop a considerable amount of explosive on in over 50 years ago. Some visitors consider the ring-road to be an impenetrable barrier, [...]