Pickle Jar Communications

I paused as I was writing the title for this blog post over whether to use the word ‘marketer’ instead of communicator. I tend not to like the use of the word marketing when it comes to talking about social media, but to some extent that’s exactly what most companies have as their core objective [...]

Many of those who follow my blog work in communications roles in the UK Higher Education sector and so I’m hoping that this post will resonate with you and move you to help this very very worthy appeal for funds in support of Donald Macleod… Donald Macleod, former education editor of the Guardian and Head [...]

This week I’m running a workshop in Rome for CASE Europe’s International Schools Summit. Because there is a focus during this workshop on engaging with international audiences, I thought I’d use this opportunity to share some useful resources for global social media usage: On 10/10/10 TNS launched their Digital Life report. Their survey interviewed almost [...]

The title of this blog post is, I must confess, a tiny bit misleading. When I say ‘best practice’ I perhaps should actually just say ‘examples that I like’. ROI doesn’t really seem to have woven it’s way into the mix as yet for social media engagement practices in the higher education sector. However, I [...]

I’ve just this minute spotted a tweet from Danny Yoder of Eastern Mennonite University (EMU) in the US, urgently asking the Twitter community what a university President ought to know about social media. This is a question that I get asked a lot and to some extent advise on a fair bit in the strategy [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

“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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]