Pickle Jar Communications

Last week I spoke at the Association of Marketing and Development in Independent Schools (AMDIS) admissions conference. I spoke about the online audience engagement journey and how social media plays a role at different stages in the schools marketing, recruitment and admissions process. Here’s the prezi from that conference:

Here is the plenary session prezi I am giving at the College Marketing Network conference in Coventry on Tuesday 29 November.

Almost 2 years ago (yes, 2 years ago… sigh!) I blogged about how Augmented Reality (AR) could enhance the college or university prospectus. However, to my endless frustration, the most ‘vision’ that I’ve seen in universities and colleges (particularly in the UK) has been the use of QR codes to direct people to web content. [...]

This week Mashable reviewed a new mobile app that enables you to create and send real postcards direct from your mobile phone. Postcard on the Run is a free app. When you launch it it gives you the option to create a postcard from existing photos in your phone’s photo library, to take a new [...]

Why is it that when someone says something negative about our organisation online we think we have a social media problem or a social media crisis? And yet if someone says something positive about us we pat ourselves on the back and remind ourselves what a great organisation we are. The action is the same, [...]

For a while now I’ve been flippantly pondering whether the group purchasing phenomenon led by GroupOn and the like could make its way into the education world as a means of attracting students. Not so much prompted by GroupOn, but inspired by a session I attended at SXSW that looked at trends in the use [...]

I was sitting in a pub enjoying a few drinks with my fella on Saturday afternoon. We’re both a tad geeky, so we’re sat there with our iPads scrolling various things, catching up on what delights Twitter has to share, laughing out loud as we scroll through awkwardfamilyphotos.com … as you do… Then he waves [...]

A couple of years back I conducted a study for the CIPR Education and Skills sector group on the use of online tools for education PR. You can view the report here (pdf). I’m now re-running the survey element of that study to see how the sector has moved on in the past two years. [...]

Please do shoot me down for self-ego massaging with this, but The Guardian have this morning published my blog post about using social media strategically for internal communications. I’m not going to re-publish the whole thing here as out of courtesy to the nice folk at The Guardian, it would be great for you to [...]

This is a guest blog post kindly submitted for inclusion on the PJC and HE Comms blogs by Dr Matthew Ashton of Nottingham Trent University. In this post Matt offers the academic perspective on the benefits of blogging. You can check out Matt’s blog at www.drmatthewashton.com. You can also listen to a podcast I recorded [...]