Pickle Jar Communications

I’m speaking at the LG Communications Reputation Seminar today (#lgcomms). The subject of my talk is whether and how social media can help you build trust amongst employees. Here’s the prezi for it. If you’d like to have a chat with me about it, please do email me: tracy@picklejarcommunications.com. You might also be interested in [...]

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 [...]

I’ve opted for one of my personal favorites this week, a site that I use purely for personal interest, but could be a marketers dream if they’ll ever truly embrace the move towards ‘personalisation’ in the way in which we engage with people. Pinterest is a space where you can collect and categorise things that [...]

This week I delivered a session at the CASE Europe Annual conference. With a different workshop title advertised on the website from that printed and promised to delegates in the programme, I ended up squeezing two themes into one hour-long session, but I think I may have got away with it (feedback suggests I did), [...]

NO! Please stop it! Okay, I should expand on that a little I guess. Here’s the thing… for months now I’ve been noticing a growing trend of some university and college ‘corporate’ Twitter accounts (ugh!) retweeting positive comments that people say about them. This can be anything from someone enjoying an open day to a [...]

I became a big fan of Guy Kawasaki when I heard him speak at last year’s SXSW conference. I’ve followed him for quite a long time on Twitter quite simply because he tweets randomly interesting things! In my mantra for social media content of positioning yourself and your brands as ‘interesting, relevant and useful’ to [...]

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’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 [...]

I’ve decided to give ‘Flock’ a try. It’s a browser developed by Mozilla that’s supposed to be revolutionising the way in which we use browsers, and makes them more sociable. In theory in looks good. It was easy to install and has familiar enough basic functions not to alienate me (yet!). However, I’m going through [...]

Here’s a little slidecast (31 mins 17 secs) that I’ve created for a couple of the Association of Colleges’ regional PR/marketing group meetings. Thought some of my blog readers might also find it interesting: Social media: new opportunities and challenges for FE college communications View more documents from Tracy Playle.