Is the prospectus dead?

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 owned a computer at home but it was purely a word processor. We had no internet connection and I had only seen this thing called the internet in action a couple of times. We used floppy disks.
• I didn’t have an email account.
• The word ‘tweet’ referred to the noise a bird makes. The word ‘blog’ would be considered nothing more than a mistaken drunken slur. If someone said ‘Facebook’ you’d probably think it was an insult, and ‘MySpace’ would have been nothing more than a sign hanging on an angry teenagers’s bedroom door.
• My parents owned a brick of a mobile phone. 17 year olds didn’t have them. Instead we carried phone cards and 20 pence coins as our key to remote communications.

And so my search for universities began by using the giant UCAS directory in the college careers centre, manually trawling through courses and universities to put together a shortlist of those I wanted to find out more about. The information available at this stage was so limited that I think the criteria for my shortlist was something along the lines of a) did they do the course I wanted to do (I studied literature, so this wasn’t much of a factor to work with given that just about every university in the country offers literature degrees) and b) what grades were they asking for for their course (I only wanted to look at the top universities so this seemed to be a good way to tell whether they were good or not)? Shortlist determined, I picked up the telephone and spoke to a real person and requested further information. The giant prospectuses one by one dropped on the door mat and the coffee table became burdened under the weight of glossy publications with university after university marketing themselves to me.

Now, I’m sat here 13 years later writing up this thing called a ‘blog post’ on my iPad using a wifi connection in my house. Later I’ll ‘tweet’ about it too. If I need to check a reference I’ll quickly dive into safari and google it. I’ve just been on Facebook and my news feed tells me that my teenage cousin has just joined the Middlesex University 2010 freshers’ page. I’ve watched her journey online as she updates us on her application, and shares her frustrations with finance and funding questions. Typically her friends chip in and comment on just about every status update she makes. Everything has changed when it comes to the information now available to students about joining a university, and how they access that information. And yet one thing remains exactly the same: the coffee table creaking under the weight of the prospectuses.

So, last week I spoke at the Discovering Futures ‘Future of the Prospectus’ conference. The question of what will happen to the traditional printed prospectus over the coming years is still being bashed around and nobody really has an answer and I can’t yet see anyone brave enough to do away with it altogether. I expect the arguments are valid: parents like it, people from different countries like them… the arguments go on. But I do find myself questioning the surveys that tell us how popular prospectuses are and how ‘useful’ and influential students say they were in providing them with information. I fear that in some cases they only say this because a) prospectuses are the norm and therefore remain the core item in the student marketing process (perhaps shortly followed by the open day), and b) universities continue to put so much money and effort into producing them, that by the sheer drain in resources that they cause, a decent alternative marketing experience isn’t really given a chance. It’s going to take a brave university to break the mould.

And so discussions at the conference last week focused on alternative formats and print sizes, personalised prospectuses, and some thought to online ‘versions’ (sadly many of which, including mobile versions, remain text-heavy and not fully optimised for the device that they are intended to be used on or bearing in mind the user-experience of using them in a particular way – essentially they are just repurposed versions of something originally written for print). The talk of online PDF versions of the print prospectus fills me with horror.

Universities are all looking to each other to try to be different and find their unique selling point (USP). In doing so, they end up looking the same, online and in print. But I believe the threat doesn’t come from other universities when it comes to defining that USP. Yes, of course each university does need to be distinctive from the next, but I think the real threat that we need to deal with comes from a much bigger question: what is a university and what will it look like in 10 years time? You see, advances in technology don’t just provide us with new spaces in which we can market ourselves as providers of higher education, but they also provide very real opportunities for non-traditional organisations to enter this space and challenge the very notion of what it is to be a university. Academic content and scholarly discussions are no longer jailed within the ivory tower: Google and Apple (amongst others) have set them free. TED provides us with access to the world’s leading thinkers and challenging ideas, and the BBC helps us to learn in such an engaging way that we don’t even realise that when we’re watching their latest documentary, we are in fact learning. And through wikipedia, we can be taught by some 80,000 people, instead of one, and the content can constantly evolve rather than be carved in stone for 10 years until the next edition is published. Social and digital media isn’t just challenging the way that we market universities, but I think it has the potential to fundamentally challenge what a university actually is and who will be the major providers of academic thought and higher education in the future. So, I think when we’re having these discussions about the future of the prospectus, there’s a much bigger question we need to be asking ourselves: what is the USP of universities?

Social Media for Higher Education Marketing-Communications: From Ideas to Strategy to Reality

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 Scarman House, University of Warwick, Coventry on Thursday 3 June (10am-4pm). Fees for members of the HE Comms social network start from £150 + VAT (£175 + VAT for non-members) for the full-day workshop, including all refreshments throughout the day and a three-course lunch. Bargain, if I do say so myself! Places are limited to 20 people so book early to avoid disappointment (and get the early-bird rates). Proceeds from this first workshop will also be going to the charity for whom I’m running the London Marathon this year. Hope to see some of you there.

Further information can be viewed on the flyer here, and you can book online here.

“Useful. Interesting. Relevant.” Putting the audience first and finding the middle ground.

“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 engage with target audiences through social media organisations need to:

• accept that social media is about individuals communicating with other individuals
• understand that social media is all about conversation, not push messaging
• appreciate that all social media spaces are conversations, with every network unique to every participant, and not an advertising platform.

Accepting and understanding these three things gets you a fair way to beginning to think about integrating social media into any communications or engagement strategy that you may have (I err away from the term ‘marketing strategy’ here as I don’t really believe social media is about marketing, but is instead about communication and engagement). However, the next step is really to think about the audience (and remember that you’re dealing with an audience of individuals, not a homogenous group of faceless and nameless drones). Any social media engagement strategy must first understand what it is that the target audience wants and needs, and the kinds of things that they find useful, interesting and relevant. Then the organisation needs to consider what it wants or needs to say to that audience – what the message is. A successful social media engagement strategy will then find the middle ground – something that the organisation can offer that the audience wants, needs, or finds interesting, relevant or useful, but also something that resonates with the messages or the objectives of the communications campaign. I’ve represented this in the following image:

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.

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.

Measuring audience social technographics profile

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 has opened up new and free platforms for them and they therefore think they must be there, regardless of any real consideration about whether their audience is going to be there with them. Think of buying exhibition space at a trade show and turning up to find that there are hundreds of exhibitors but no guests.

I therefore find Forrester’s social technographics profile really help in, if nothing else, challenging my clients to think about where there audience might be online and how they use online tools. It doesn’t provide all the answers, but it prompts the right kind of thinking. Now the nice people at Forrester have made their tool embeddedable, so I thought I’d bring it into my site here:

And here’s their presentation to explain what the different profiles mean in terms of audience use of online tools:

And if you’re looking for more information, I can’t recommend enough that you read their book Groundswell – it’s akin to being my bible.

Using augmented reality to enhance university campus tours

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 video:

I’d like to see it go one step further and integrate video clips, perhaps students talking about their campus, alumni sharing their memories, or even virtual fly-throughs of the inside of buildings when you use your camera to ‘point’ at them. Wouldn’t it be great also (and I know it can be done), for example, if when someone touring your campus in winter hovers over an open green space, they are greeted with an image of that space busy and bustling in the glory of a beautiful summer day – we need never worry about those horrid drizzly autumn/winter campus tours again! And think of the commercial application if when a visitor to your campus points the camera at one of your food outlets, they are greeted by the menu of the day and a full price list, including details of special offers. The potential is incredible.

An easy way to monitor your brand on Twitter direct to Outlook

I was asked earlier today about how you can monitor a brand on Twitter, or find people who tweeting about things that interest you. I always advise people to use search.twitter.com and type in their brand name or search terms relevant to their interests, but I also showed the people I was talking too how easy it is then to set up automatic updates in your outlook inbox using an RSS feed from search.twitter.com. I’ve therefore used screenr.com to create this short video guide on how to do this:

Using social media for events

Here’s the presentation that I gave today on using social media for events. It’s probably worth pointing out that this was for an hour long workshop, so barely time to even scratch the surface. You might find some of my other blog posts and presentations helpful too though:

… and in case you’re wondering ‘Remember the green fish’ refers to the importance of the individual in social media spaces (for those of you looking at the presentation online who didn’t attend the workshop in person).

Acknowledgement must go to teachertube.com for the excellent video (available to view on YouTube here).

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