Now, finally, Kendall College have launched a prospectus and AR prospectus app that I think takes real advantage of the trend in AR experiences to merge multimedia with their print prospectus. Check out the video:

Read their info on it here. I’m ordering a copy now to play with it. I hope they’ve done a big print run to manage all the non-student requests they’re about to get!

I rather like this idea. The review and the marketing materials for the site focus very much on personal use of it – postcards from holidays, notes to friends and family, etc. However, I can see huge potential of this for marketing and professional networking. Let’s say, for example, you’re at a recruitment fair for your university or an open day. You can take photos of the guests that you chat with and send them a postcard to remind them of your conversation a few days later. You could have an image ready created to use on the front that includes a QR code or short url to send them directly to your university’s mobile site or prospectus app, or you could take a pic of them at your stand or with you (cheesy grins please!) and send that to them to remind them of the friendly person that they chatted with from the university. It could be a great way of adding that personal touch and combining the online and offline experience. For my own purposes, I can see this being rather powerful for use at networking events. When someone hands me their business card or comes to chat to me at the end of a talk, I can then following up not necessarily with an email, but with a little postcard to remind them who I am, where they met me and what we discussed. This could be a lot more memorable than just handing over my business card and having that gather dust on their shelf. I may well start doing this (I’m tempted not to publish this post and to keep the idea to myself too!). I see it as well worth the £1.69 investment per card.

Here’s a little slideshow of the steps involved in creating the postcard on the app. Mine is estimated to arrive at its destination in 3 days time.

When Dave Carroll posted a YouTube video about United Airlines breaking guitars, United Airlines didn’t have a social media problem, they had a problem with sloppy baggage handling. When a disgruntled customer posted a video of one of their engineers asleep on her sofa, Comcast didn’t have a social media problem, they had a problem with an engineer behaving inappropriately on the job. And when 2000 students form their own Facebook group to find out whether their exams are going ahead or not tomorrow because it’s snowing too heavily and they haven’t had a firm answer from the university, you don’t have a social media problem, you have a flawed communications process.

Feedback is everywhere for us to listen to, take note of and, if appropriate, respond to and do something about. We need to hear the bad as well as the good and so does the senior management team. This is a good thing. Because if we don’t listen, those problems that might have seem minor at first will escalate, and people will talk about them more, and eventually they’ll realise they’re not the only one to have a bad experience, and then the power of the group begins. And when that happens, reputations are damaged, organisations fail, and perhaps (if you believe the argument), governments can even be overturned. This is why senior managers cannot bury their heads in the sand and see this as a social media problem. There is no such thing as a social media crisis, only a crisis that finds its voice and resolution through social media. You don’t have a social media problem, you have an organisational problem.

Image courtesy of DonkeyHotey (Creative Commons/Flickr)

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 of online media in China towards forming online groups and using the purchase power of many to approach shops and other vendors (car showrooms, for example), I’ve thought about this many times over the past couple of years but never really developed that thinking.

This morning, however, I read on Eric Stoller’s (@ericstoller) blog that National Louis University will be using GroupOn for an introduction to teaching course.

It was only a matter of time before someone did this. Eric rightly points out that this appears to be a bit of a PR stunt for them with the claim that they are the first university to use GroupOn in this way. This is one of those cases where the medium is being used as a message, rather than as a functional tool, I think. But there’s a place for that kind of activity and hats-off to those who try these things first.

But is the GroupOn model really useful to Higher Education and is it, indeed, even feasible? In its current form, I think not. How, for example, do you assess the quality and qualifications of the individual purchasing their GroupOn voucher? Most universities have stringent standards about who they will accept on courses, so I think this model is only really going to work for courses where there aren’t entry standards, such as short lifelong learning or ‘leisure’ courses. But there I can really see a huge opportunity for universities and colleges using this approach.

But I don’t want to dismiss the group-purchasing trend altogether for Higher Education degree programmes. And the reason for this is that I don’t really think the model is all that new. Universities providing training programmes and bespoke degrees for companies, for example, is nothing new and this is in-line with the group purchasing model. In 2005, for example, the University of Warwick (Warwick Business School) were commissioned by Network Rail to deliver their leadership training programmes. And now they deliver a specific MSc in Network Rail Project Management, on the basis that at least 20 Network Rail employees participate in the course. Universities themselves use group purchasing power to get the best prices for some of their products, forming consortiums to negotiate the best deals. So, why shouldn’t this approach be applied by those wanting to study at your university?

I think technology might provide ways for us to form new and unique groups of people (individuals?) to come together to exert some group purchasing power over universities. With the heightened competitiveness that the UK/European sector is about to throw itself into, I think now is the perfect time for prospective students to start thinking in these terms too and testing the waters. But perhaps also universities need to be ready for this, and know how to benefit from such approaches. Afterall, one ‘sale’ to 20 students is a lot more time efficient that 20 individual ‘sales’. And yes, to those in universities who don’t like to think in terms of ‘selling’, it is a sale. And negotiation is going to be part of that.

What do you think?

Now, I’ve written a lot of copy in my career in communications. And many a time I have inserted something in as a space holder while I wait until I write what I actually need to write in there. I have also used beautifully and painstakingly crafted ‘filler’ phrases such as ‘blah blah blah’, ‘write this bit later’ or the even more offensive ‘Lorem ipsum’. The point is, we’ve probably all done it. Granted, not all of us have written something that could be deemed offensive (though I expect I’ve done that too), and most of us probably have replaced the offending text before it gets published. But you can see just how easy it is for it to happen. Quite frankly, I think it’s shocking that we even still need to say things about public sector organisations being ‘equal opportunities employers’ anyway – shouldn’t that be a given? However, the point I’m coming to is that these kind of mistakes will have been made hundreds of times all over the place. They’ll be spotted, reported and replaced. But now, social media means that the speed with which a mistake can be made and shared leaves us with no room for these kind of errors. A decade ago that mistake even if it made the local press would have been tomorrow’s chip paper. Now, it’s out there, forever. It’s searchable, and it’s archived online.

Social media sites are full of mistakes, and we’re pretty forgiving of many of them. The odd spelling error, occasional links that don’t work, poor grammar. It’s really not the end of the world and nobody’s organisation is going to die because auto-correct changed a few ‘s’s to ‘z’s (God bless America). But when the error is in the content, not the construction, then it is less forgivable. This riles me a little as we all make mistakes, but we never used to take everybody out and flog them for it. But now, we do. But I have to say, it did make reading a dull NHS job ad’ and the equal opportunities rubbish so much more interesting! Surely we can make this stuff, even the essential ‘policy’ stuff a little more interesting otherwise who would want to work for you? Just perhaps less offensive… But then employer branding is a whole other topic of conversation.

I’m now re-running the survey element of that study to see how the sector has moved on in the past two years. The survey will be open until the end of September, so if you can take the time to complete it online here, it would greatly appreciated. Many thanks! I will share results here and on www.he-comms.com

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 add to their viewing figures by reading it there.You may have already seen it anyway since it seems to be spreading on Twitter rather a lot today!

If that interested you, then a couple of workshops that you might be interested in…

Now, the really shameless self-promotion bit… for those with a specific interest in using social media for internal communications, I have launched with the PR Academy a full-day workshop on this very topic. We ran the first one a few weeks back and was rated ‘excellent’ by every one of the attendees (**blushes with flattered embarrassment**). It is run jointly by Kevin Ruck and I and we’d love to have you join us at one of the next ones being held on 7 July or 18 October. More information can be found here.

Or if you’re interested specifically in how to use social media strategically within your university, then I’m also running a full day workshop for that on 12 July. I’ve only ever had great feedback from these workshops, so hopefully you’ll get a lot out of it. Booking info is available here.

Thanks for indulging me by reading this!

As a politics lecturer at Nottingham Trent University I’ve been writing a blog for the past six months, updating it roughly once a day. Most of the articles are quite short, around the 500 word mark, and range from topical pieces to reviews and commentary. I’ve found this to be an incredibly rewarding experience and thought I’d write a quick post outlining the benefits of blogging. However it should be made clear that some of the reasons I’m listing are subject specific and wouldn’t necessarily apply to everyone.

1) New ways of teaching and learning and of student engagement

I blog on a wide range of political topics every week. One problem I’ve found with students is that they don’t fully engage with the wider subject area. For instance, while politics students often have an excellent knowledge of contemporary politics they’re sometimes less aware of events from before 1989. I write a column every Friday called “Great political mistakes” where I spend 500 words discussing a famous political mistake. If students read this it has the effect of slowly drip feeding them knowledge. Equally my column every Saturday on “Political advertising” helps raise awareness amongst students of political advertising techniques and campaigns and how they’ve changed over time. I also find that blogging can be a new way of engaging with student learning. By writing reviews of political films and books I can point students towards interesting ideas and resources. For instance I recently wrote a review of the classic political thriller “All the President’s Men”. I then asked the students to watch it and used it to kick off a wider discussion during a seminar that included journalism ethics, the power of the press and the right to know.

2) Encouraging writing and research

By writing 500 words every day I’ve found that I’ve become much more productive. The 500 words acts as a warming up exercise every day getting me in the mood to write. It’s also a useful way of stockpiling material. I recently had to give a lecture at quite short notice, and by going back through my blog I quite easily managed to put a brand new lecture together by using material I had already written.

3) New ways of sharing ideas and research findings

The traditional dissemination of research through books and journals is still the bread and butter of academia. However, one downside to this process is that it can be sometimes months, or even years, between writing something and it being made available to read. Using blogging I can put up an idea within 24 hours to see what my colleagues or other academics think of it. It can act then as an unofficial means of peer review.

4) Engaging with people outside the academic community

One of the problems I sometimes face as an academic is demonstrating the importance of what I do to people who work outside the university. Via my blog I’ve shared ideas and dialogue with people from a huge range of countries and backgrounds. For instance I’ve had some hugely illuminating conversations with an American about Native American rights in the media and how they relate to the US Constitution. This is an area of academia it would not have occurred to me to think about if it hadn’t been for my blog. In the same way people have pointed me towards books and documentaries that I wasn’t aware of that I’ve subsequently shared with my students.

5) Raising your academic profile

One of the benefits of creating a good quality blog is that it is a great source of material for the media. I’ve written several blog posts that have subsequently been used by the press as newspaper articles or led to me being interviewed on the radio about them. This is useful in terms of both raising my own profile and promoting the excellent work done by the university. On one recent occasion the press office contacted me to let me know that a blog article I’d written on Mubarak’s options in Egypt had appeared in a newspaper in Tanzania. On a more local level I wrote an article based on my recent research on the coverage of female sports that was featured in the Nottingham Post newspaper.