As my time as an undergraduate at Durham University comes to an end, I’ve been thinking about those who I’d like to keep in touch with at my university. After pondering the usual list of friends who will remain in my phonebook for quite some time, I started to think of others I want to continue to connect with. Soon three groups of people emerged; other alumni, my department and current university students. Yes, that’s quite a lot of people, I admit, but I very much believe that with the vast array of communication tools available, it’s not a big ask… and I have some thoughts.

Like any alumnus, I’m keen to connect with other alumni to see what they’re doing, where in the world they are and whether there are any opportunities to learn and/or work with them. Whilst I see LinkedIn alumni groups as a key forum for sharing and discussion, I’d be interested in pushing some of these conversations out into other platforms like Google+ to utilise functions like Hangouts for real-time conversations.

During my time at university, I’ve been quite proactive in exploring the research and events taking place within my department. Whilst I think alumni teams appear to “do” the events thing well, I’m less sure about how well they engage alumni in their research. I don’t want my relationship with my department’s research to end when I’m no longer a student. I don’t need to know too much, 140 characters should be enough backed up with a couple of blog posts around the more prominent research taking place. I’m also quite interested in my university’s take on current affairs, so it’d be good to see some commentary on the upcoming Facebook IPO for example! Hint, hint!

Lots of alumni communications tends to be about them communicating with me, but I’m not just interested in the “stuff” that’s about me. I strongly believe that becoming an alumnus is your chance to give back to your university and support the next generation of students as best you can. It’s a tough world, if I can support others like others have supported me – great! I think it’s important for alumni teams to support this relationship between alumni and current students by providing the forums and opportunities to make it happen. I’m currently a member of the University’s ‘Connections’ group on LinkedIn and will continue to contribute to this, but also keen to share my experiences through blogs and engage with students through Twitter chats. I’m sure I’d learn this and that through the process too!

Hopefully you can see here that I’m keen to become an active member of my university’s alumni community – now go make it happen!

Wordnik is a new way to discover meaning – it shows definitions from multiple sources, so that you can see as many different takes on a word’s meaning as possible. It’s like having the world’s biggest dictionary come thesaurus come encyclopedia – but better and at the touch of a button, with audio pronunciations and imagery to boot.

So, if for example you want to learn about the word ‘education’ you simply type the word you are looking for in the search bar at the top and it will immediately give you definitions (taken from multiple dictionary sources), and examples of how to use the word in context.

Wordnik search results for Education

As you scroll down the page from the definitions, you next see lists of related words against a number of different categories. These categories include – amongst others – words in the same context (like a thesaurus) a ‘reverse dictionary’ which is a list of words that contain the word you are looking up in their own definition, and tags.

You then come to lists and comments (which are user generated), images that are pulled in from Flickr, and audio pronunciations. With the sheer amount of information available for each word, it’s easy to see why this really lends itself well to the web.

As a user, you can use Wordnik either with or without an account, but if you have an account (you can register for free) you can also engage with it’s social user-generated features. These allow you to tag a word with something else you associate with a word you have looked up,  record your own pronunciation, add a comment, create (or add to) a list of words. Wordnik, will also allow you to create favorites and remember what you have previously looked up and engage via comments with the wordnik community.

And if all that wasn’t enough, Wordnik also has a ‘word of the day’ and ‘random word’ generator, so you really can learn something new every day. It’s totally fascinating, informative and addictive.

User Generated Content in Wordnik

As an aside, Erin McKean, creator of Wordnik (as well as long term dictionary editor and lover of dresses) spoke last year at the Thinking Digital conference, about how the concept came about. This one is well worth a watch if nothing else for Erin’s infectious enthusiasm!

Erin McKean of @Wordnik @ThinkingDigital 2011 from Codeworks Ltd on Vimeo.

However, a longer and more detailed version of this topic is available online as a free on-demand webinar here.

• Deliver a keynote address to FE colleges at the Association of Colleges Annual Communications conference
• Go to SXSW in Texas (again) for my serious dose of professional development and time-out ‘thinking time’ (and Austin in the Spring – stunning *sigh*!)
• Speak at the annual Chartered Institute of Marketing Higher Ed special interest group conference (HEMIG)
• Or, head to Asia Pacific to speak at CASE APAC’s annual conference (and a couple of other events ‘out East’)

Tough call, hey? AoC and CIM events would give me great exposure in my home territory, but then I already do a LOT of speaking at conferences in the UK, and perhaps folk there are a little bored of hearing from me (?). SXSW has had me for the last two years as a delegate and is a truly awesome event and great thinking time for me. But then the East was calling too, and since Asia is such an important part of the world for those of us in the West to be aware of, and Australia poses such competition to European HEIs, I decided to head East instead. So, here I am writing this blog from a hotel room in Singapore, having just flown on from last week’s CASE APAC conference in Hong Kong (and shortly on my way to Australia where I’m going to be running a social media workshop for Australian universities next week). As I write this I have an eye on a tweetchat screen checking out what I’m missing at the CIM conference (#hemig5) and, as much as I would love to be there, I am so pleased I made the decision I did. And so, I can’t help thinking that more European organisations should be investing just a little bit more budget to send their advancement professionals in an Easterly direction to really start to understand this crucial region.

While I found that many of the Asian organisations in particular were really just beginning their journey with social media (what I was there to talk about – see my presentation here from the main conference), I certainly didn’t find them ‘behind’ in any other areas. The cultural insights I have taken away from that conference are so valuable and insightful. And the real enthusiasm and belief in what they are doing really rubbed off on me. Tricia King from Birkbeck Uni was also there and in an opening to another session commented on how ‘gloomy’ the HE sector can feel in the UK at the moment. I couldn’t agree more, and I must say that getting out of there for a bit and coming to see education and the impact it has on those who work in it and those it serves in the rest of the world, has been an absolute inspiration and left me feeling energised and ready to take on the world (albeit a very jet-lagged one).

In an exchange on Twitter with someone from the UK, it was commented that their organisation would never stump up the budget to send them to an event like CASE APAC. I hear that kind of thing a lot. But I would just like to make the point that I don’t earn a vast amount of money, and as a proportion of my annual turnover, my financial commitment to coming out on this trip is significantly (significantly – I feel the need to emphasize this point!) more – percent-wise – than any investment a university would be making to send a member of their staff out (who could also then return and conduct a thorough debrief with their colleagues, thus also helping others). Yes, this is an investment in my knowledge and professional development, and thus in my company (I didn’t come on this trip with the objective of winning new business though), but so too should universities be making those kind of investments. So many HEIs claim to be global institutions these days, or with a global outlook, and yet I come across very few marketing and communications folk that are ever allowed the time and opportunity to learn from their counterparts in other parts of the world. Shame on you, HE, shame on you. How can we call ourselves global if our staff are, at most, only ever allowed to London, Manchester, Birmingham or, if we’re really pushing the boat out, Edinburgh. I’ll continue my commitment to learning from the rest of the world for the benefit of myself, my clients and education as a whole. I really hope some of you may join me too.

I very much hope that this is just the beginning of my relationship with, and work in, the education sector in Asia Pacific. There’s a lot to be done, and I’ll be over in a hurry if the opportunities arise. There are some folk out here that I would just LOVE to be working with.

I hope you’ve found this series helpful. It gives just a tiny insight into my thinking and just one of the processes that I apply in workshops and to the strategy work that I do for clients. If you’d like to find out more, please do take a look at the services we at Pickle Jar Communications offer, and drop me a line if you have any questions.

The entire series can be viewed again as much as you like here.

ScreenFlow is software that enables you to record your screen, audio and video. Now, in the past I have profiled Screenr as one of my Friday favorites. So, what’s difference with ScreenFlow and why am I now profiling a tool that you have to pay for (it costs US$99 at the time of writing) when I’ve already included one that is free to use?

To begin with, screenr only allows you to record up to 5 minute videos. Those videos are then also branded with the screenr logo, and you can only record audio from your microphone. On ScreenFlow, length is seemingly unlimited, there are considerably more editing features (though they are a bit limited if you’re used to video editing programmes), and you can record audio into your computer, audio from your computer itself (i.e. if you are playing a video on your screen as you are recording) and video, using your webcam. This makes it the perfect tool for recording non-live webinars.

Within a day of posting the first webinar I’d had an email from a presentations expert/trainer saying he was impressed with them and interested in how I produced them. It turns out to be a very simple answer: a combination of Prezi (another former Friday Favorite) and ScreenFlow together. And in truth, these were very much ‘knocked together’ this week and I could do a lot better. I keep pondering what I could do with a professional voice artist being used, for example, and perhaps some music. I could easily knock up a highly engaging promotional showreel for an organisation using this combination of tools (and happy to do some for people if they’re interested in commissioning them).

I suspect I shall be recording a lot more of my conference presentations from now on using this. Now I just need to find a clip-microphone (radio one) that I can also plug into my laptop. I wonder if they exist…

In this episode we look at the ‘interest’ stage in the audience engagement journey and how social and digital media have a role to play here in marketing and communications, with a particular skew towards education marketing (naturally).

In this episode I highlight the importance of wikipedia at this stage, and I mention guidelines from wikipedia and the CIPR. Here are the links to those resources (well, well worth a read):

Wikipedia’s guidelines for PR people
CIPR Social Media Guidelines
Useful resources on CIPR website (courtesy of Philip Sheldrake) on wikipedia and PR