Could Augmented Reality help to bridge the print prospectus and the online interactive experience for prospective students?
I’m a great believer that the printed university or college prospectus is not dead, nor will it be so for a while yet. However, I think universities and colleges are increasingly becoming aware of the need for their print materials and online presence to interact with each other to enhance the student experience. However, to date this is very much limited to including urls in print materials to direct students to further information online, some of which is beginning to be quite exciting and interactive, but some of which remains very static and web 1.0.
A few months back I posed the question on this blog about how augmented reality (AR) might be able to enhance campus tours. I think the potential for this is huge. Today, however, having just been playing with the General Electric Company’s Smart Grid Augmented Reality programme I’m beginning to think that the potential for AR to really bridge that divide between the print prospectus and the online experience could be huge. What if you wave a department’s page from the print prospectus at your webcam, and it launches a range of videos from students in that department, welcoming you and sharing their experiences and telling you about the course? Or you wave the page telling you about student accommodation at your webcam and suddenly you’re launched into a virtual tour of the different student halls, and watching 360 degree animations of student rooms? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this and where you think this might go. Personally, I think it’s pretty exciting!
Top 100 websites students visit
In response to an enquiry by London Business School, Hitwise has produced a list of the top 100 websites visited by students in May 2009. Quite a useful list for those of us working in Higher Education communications. It’s available to view here.
Online PR is a marriage, not an affair
I occassionally browse online sites where people post projects that they require freelance support for. This morning one caught my eye because it’s right up my street – a small company wanting support to boost their online PR. Great! A small company thinking along the right lines. Many don’t even yet understand the benefits of online PR, so fantastic to see one that not only understands the benefits, but realises that support is potentially needed.
Then, this line in the description of their requirements:
‘We estimate approx 4 days, 2 days for each website should suffice.’
Not so great. 2 days work, then nada, for online PR for a website? Online PR isn’t a ‘project’ that can be done and dusted in 2 days. It has to be a sustained effort, ongoing, nurtured and loved. Otherwise it is doomed to failure! Sure, in two days you can do enough to improve your SEO in the short-term, but for real online PR, companies should be dedicating much more time and resource to supporting an ongoing campaign. Think of online PR as a relationship – it interests you, yet you begin with caution at first, then you get carried away in the rush of excitement and can’t tear yourself away, then you settle down into a nice comfortable routine – at ease, dedicated, devoted even – with the odd pleasant surprise but otherwise a nice routine of committment and sustained effort. Online PR is a marriage, not an affair!
Only make a PR effort when you’re prepared to receive the response
As an avid reader of the Mashable blog and a communications professional working largely with the Higher Education sector, I was quite interested to see the recent Startup Review of Unigo ‘a free online platform for college students to share their opinions, photos, videos and documents’.
It’s important that I keep aware of sites like this given that I work so closely with universities, and it’s always good to see if any of these have the potential to migrate to the UK. So, I clicked on the link to take a peek at the site and was greeted with a pop-up asking me for a username and password. Now, not only has this site had excellent coverage through Mashable, but according to some of the commments, it appears they have also appeared in the New York Times Magazine. So, why oh why would anyone get such great publicity and mess it up by having a site that doesn’t work just when thousands of people will attempt to visit it? I couldn’t resist but to express my opinions through the mashable blog post and my own blog.
There’s a key message here, and a real fundamental of good communications and PR practice, that if you are going to get some great publicity (and good on them for getting such great mentions) you really need to have everything else in place to back that up, such as a website that actually works otherwise all of that publicity will just go straight down the drain. Such a pity.
Twitter drives traffic to the PJC website
I keep saying this and I will say it again – I love Twitter. I am a big fan. This week as I was updating the Pickle Jar Communications website, I was twittering about my progress. This was simply done as an update to what we have been upto at PJC – not with the pure intention of driving traffic to the site because I think you have to be very cautious about this kind of approach to micro-blogging. However, I was delighted to take a look at the web stats and see that by simply tweeting about this, I saw the highest ever peak so far in unique visitors to the site. Interesting how something as simple as 140 characters that took 30 seconds at most to publish can make a difference to site traffic.
New Pickle Jar Communications Website Launched
We’re delighted to announce that we launched our new website this week. As with any successful website, we aim for it to be an ever evolving project, but we’re happy with the results so far. New features include a Twitter feed (anyone reading this blog for a while will know what a big fan I am!), a feed directly from this blog and a ‘handy guides’ section where we will be providing guides and resources for communications projects. Our guide to preparing for a broadcast media interview is aready there, as is our video project planning sheet. Do visit the website, take a look around and let us know what you thing. www.picklejarcommunications.com
Multimedia PR flying high
Scott Berinato’s post, Delta-Northwest Create the Press Release of the Future, on the Harvard Conversation Starter blog highlights an exemplary use of a micro-site for PR purposes. In my mind this is a great example of a multimedia release. Clear thought has been given to the stakeholders and communicating direct with key groups (staff, customers, communities), but this is also coupled with an excellent news centre with extensive quotes, web videos available for use, broadcast-quality video clips available to access, audio clips for download, and a great selection of images too. This is a great example of best practice for such issues, and one that really isn’t difficult to replicate by other organisations with a bit of foresight and a modest budget – it really need not cost a lot of money, and I expect many organisations would see significant return for investing in a site like this for certain issues.
Digital Media for Business
As part of the work we’ve been doing for Ideas for Life TV, we were recently involved in a conference on digital media for business hosted at Alton Towers (18 March). Working with Ember Regis, we interviewed the key speakers from the event. Two of them were specifically speaking about how digital media can be used to communicate science and can be used by business. Both videos are available below. The first features Magic Lantern Chief Executive, Anthony Lilley, while the second is an interview with Adam Rutherford, online editor for Nature.
Another brick in the wall
It’s all about the kids today. What are they doing online? How can we make the web and video games safer? The launch of the report of the Byron Review is of course welcomed by most people – parents in particular, I suspect. The report itself acknowledges that “headlines have contributed to the climate of anxiety that surrounds new technology and created a fiercely polarised debate in which panic and fear often drown out evidence” (Byron Review, Foreword) but I fear that the press reports surrounding the publication of the review will simply serve to heighten those anxieties even further. The fact that the report calls for a strategy for e-safety for children, which is of course what the press will report on, in itself seems to me to say that the w
orld wide web is an unsafe place. The emphasis is on the negative. Why isn’t there, for example, a strategy being launched on the educational value of the web for children? Why should parents be educated to protect their children in an online environment, but not at the same time also be educated on how to support their children productively use the web to influence their education and development. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t for one second see the web through rose-tinted spectacles, and the dangers to children do need to be addressed. However, they need to be addressed in a balanced context that also embraces the positives and I sincerely hope that the new strategy will achieve this.
But it isn’t just what our kids are reading or doing online today that has hit the headlines. What they are reading offline is also of interest as The Guardian reports on the Read Up, Fed Up: Exploring Teenage Reading Habits in the UK Today study also published today which looks at the reading preferences for 11-14 year olds. As someone with two degrees in literature but not exactly what you would call a bookworm as a child (I think I finally managed to read The Bell Jar and The Catcher in the Rye at around aged 15 or 16 – my introductions to really great literature!), the reading patterns of young people fascinates me. I’m disgusted to learn, for example, that Heat magazine is the most loved read for this age group. However, at number four is blogs, showing an excellent example in my opinion of why the web is an excellent educational space for young people – encouraging them to write, debate and digest other people’s opinions. I’m slightly suprised that facebook ranks so low in this age groups’ opinions (it is number nine on their most loathed reads), but maybe that’s just a clear sign of how us ‘oldies’ just don’t understand the content that makes young people tick – although I know plenty of well-educated ‘oldies’ too that would probably rate Heat magazine as one of their favorite reads. But I do have to applaud the youngsters that participated in this poll for putting BBC Online in their top 10 most loved reads. Isn’t it great to see young people engaging with news, current affairs, world affairs and fantastic educational resources? Perhaps this needs to be taken on board when the government come to writing their e-safety strategy.
They’ve done it again
I just have to say that the BBC have done it again and created a really wonderful, very usable, new homepage for their website. I adore the features like the radio links on the right-hand side, the clock at the top and more news on the homepage. With the iPlayer link at the bottom and the blog feed in the bottom left, it really is a great example of various media coming together all in one seamless place. Well done BBC!
