The Dean's View; a lay person's view on the importance of 'twitterisation'

This week; a guest spot. Huge thanks to Sally Bentley, Executive Dean of Education and Sport & Health and Social Sciences, who shares her insight into social media

I suspect that neither most of my faculty executive, nor the vast majority of my portfolio leaders across HSS and E&S have ever been on Twitter. We don’t really understand it - being of the email generation - and most of us haven’t even got a Facebook account let alone those other social media apps that we hear about. Indeed we are rather proud to be able to use the word app without putting inverted commas around it in an embarrassed way.

That said we know it's important and so we listen when anyone briefs us (as happened at Senior Leaders' Team last year) and we try to get ourselves better informed (inviting Claudia to present to Faculty Executive Group on a couple of occasions). We write actions into plans and monitor their progress – noting that not much has changed and doing a bit of mea culpa along the way. We appoint staff to lead on School Twitter accounts and exhort everyone to share stories.

So far so good, and let’s not mock the progress we’ve made, but we’ve plateaued and this blog is to explore the blockage. The slight fly in the ointment is it is written from the perspective of naïve ignorance, but that’s never stopped me before so here goes. 

Some accounts are thriving and have for a while now – the School of Sport Science and Physical Activity (SSPA) for example. Why is that: perhaps the subject is more photogenic and the activities of broader appeal?  I’m convinced about the former but not the latter. Do the staff have a younger demographic? Or is it just about Claudia’s personal/professional connections with the sports staff that gets people participating? I suspect a bit of both.

Other accounts have stalled – Education exists but isn’t flying high. Why not? In Education Studies key members of staff have left or are off on leave. Then there is Teacher Education (TE) which of course is a Professional, Statutory and Regulatory Body (PSRB) and they get special exemption don’t they because PSRBs are different. Or are they? Do the rest even tweet at all?  So what else is the problem … Are the stories less tweetable?

Maybe that tells us something about the engaging outward facing nature of the subject area and the interesting activities embedded in the curriculum. Are these staff less well-connected, less out-and-about? If any of the above that would be disappointing. Okay so let’s speak the unspeakable - is the subject more ‘boring’? Surely that can’t be the case; what would get you more worked up, your kid failing at school or your sport team playing on Sunday? Are we being lazy – there are plenty of stories to be had out there aren’t there? For example, why aren’t we tweeting this week on ‘parents’ being marked on the support they give their child? Scary thought! Can we piggy back a tweet on every local or national news story about education?   

So we’ve managed to get some stories to our twitter leads, how well do we do with them?  Sport’s got it cracked. It has pictures and friends and networks that bounce things around. They’ve got it easy, you might say, there’s a culture that’s alive and kicking.

And Education? We only need to be better than our competitors in Education – not in sport. So let’s be canny. Almost any picture of children or adults learning, talking in groups, reading, writing, playing, running, jumping, looking happy, looking worried, thinking etc can represent any story, so how hard can it be to take pictures that don’t infringe personal identity but provide us with a bank of pictures that ostensibly represent the topic in question? Or can we send text messages to staff every week asking for their photo of the week and award a decent prize for the one that produces the best 3 in a month?

Next barrier: ‘I don’t have any networks on Twitter’ who will re-tweet my stories. How can we help people? Here I’m too ignorant to even suggest anything, but you will know a way. Should we be tweeting on other people’s accounts? Is there a list of good blogs that we can point staff at? Can we link up with our students in some ways?

And then there’s this funny little creature the # ! Okay, I confess, I just had to search my keyboard to find the little blighter. I know he’s important, and yes, for me, he’s a he, but I never know what to do with him when I’ve found him, just that it was important. Over to you, I’ve found him, what shall I do with him?

So Claudia and the central team continue to browse the world of tweets and trying to cajole us to take our first steps in the world of twitter, while most of us prefer the safety of crawling on all fours. The good news is that we all learn to walk sooner or later.

If you are interested in contributing to this blog and telling your own University of Bedfordshire Marketing story, please let us know.

Wrapping up for winter

It's a wrap

This time of year tends to be a time of reflection – we’re looking back, evaluating the cycle with the help of UCAS end of year data, which is due this week, and the National Clearing Survey (NCS), which has just been released. We’ve been listening to commentators and thinking about lessons learned.

The consensus is that the undergraduate market is changing and not just because of the increased competition amongst HEIs. Student behaviours are changing too.

Commentators tell us that 49% of our recruitment will be from direct applicants through Feb- Aug and that more students will enter through clearing in 2017-18 than ever before. The NCS tells us that 67% of clearing students hadn’t visited the HEI they chose before they went there, but that 77% had visited the website and, apparently, attendance at open days is falling across the sector.

What’s our lesson? That we can’t rely on past behaviours or be complacent about the recruitment cycle or confirmation and clearing?! This is evidenced in sector wide undergraduate applications for 2017 entry, which are currently 8.6% down and the likelihood that HEIs will experience the submission of 20% of applications just before the January 15th deadline.

It's a rap

We know that we’re operating in a shrinking market with fewer 16-18 year olds in the UK; a situation that is not predicted to improve until 2020. We also know that there are more alternatives to university on offer, such as apprenticeships. A buyers’ market clearly now exists for UG enabling the prospective student to wait until clearing before applying.

So how do we identify and engage our potential students? It’s challenging - we have to engage early, interact and make loyal, so that at the point of decision, the University of Bedfordshire is front of mind and a positive choice. Students need to have heard of us to consider us in clearing; the NCS states that 85% are aware of the institution they enrol at prior to results day.

Top motivations for students are still subject 1st, career 2nd and institution ranking 3rd, but students also want to see and experience student life. They want to know about the community that they could become part of, so the opportunities we have to engage with them have to create emotion and connection.

So in 2017 watch out for more storytelling from students, virtual open days, web chats with academics, web tools to ease decision making, interactive video to select the content that is relevant to the student (mature, international etc.), digital champions and social media across the University, user generated content, more use of alumni, social media engagement not broadcast, softer calls to action that lead and nurture relationships and communications that connect with segmented audiences; parents, mature students, teachers.

Oh to be like the film industry and have a party at the end of every project, but working in marketing we can never really say ‘It’s a wrap’ because relationships are on-going, they evolve, take new forms and provide us with new communication challenges.

It's a rapper

Our shop window needs refitting, it has to look awesome and here is why

For a while now the university website has needed a refresh from its current tired design. As the storefront to what the university has to offer, we’ve questioned whether the current site is reflective of the vibrant, modern culture rooted in Bedfordshire. Awesomeness however is hard to achieve, so let’s talk about some of the challenges we face and how we plan to overcome them.

Is less more? 
Choosing what to display in your window is tricky, I’m assuming it is a little like the poor merchandiser working for John Lewis at Christmas. Faced with hundreds of great products, but what to display, where and how? We are taking the approach of showcasing our key messages, the real need to know and the real conversion points for our users.

Deciding on key messages
Internally we talk about showcasing ‘key messages’, but for us the challenge is how do we get these across to the user in an implicit way? News highlights many of our values and harnesses subject matter around topics such as student experience and investment, in a way that gets it out to the public domain. Dressed as news however this content can often be overlooked, so in order to elevate it we will be presenting the news stories in the same format as any other content on the homepage, but with functionality to make it dynamically pull in those exciting achievements we shout about in press releases.

Driving users away

#bedsmas +University of Bedfordshire 

Convert, convert, convert is the aim, yet so often you work so hard to get the user on to a page you then send them off in another direction. Twitter feeds and Facebook comments were cool, once. They still have their place, but where you want to convert a user, do you want to be the one to turn the user away from the site. My only exception to this is Instagram, sometimes a little visual gratification works wonders in bringing otherwise seemingly dull content alive, but still, this doesn’t have a place on a homepage, unless of course it is a #bedsmas pic of me in a Santa suit.

Don’t put key content below the fold.. 
… was the hard and fast rule, the F shape, the don’t scroll, but times are changing. Look it is nearly 2017 and anything could happen, I mean a celebrity President, a female Prime Minister and talk of a wall, oh wait, actually it could be 1989! Now I’m not going to suggest these rules of the web are dead, but with over 40% of our users accessing our website via mobile, scrolling is the only way to navigate, and the way we write content for a stacking format needs to reflect that.

Search 
The wider topic of search is best left for a blog in itself, but I will say this. In 2017 we will revolutionised the way user’s find what they need on our website, and their journey through the site will be more personal and tailored, like we’ve come along and measured their inside leg. I will keep you in suspense on that one.

Purpose
Staff always want everything on the website, from seeing HR's Tracey in her wedding pictures to student information on how to hand an assignment in. But is this content right for an external, recruitment focused website? From the homepage we will be directing staff to the university’s intranet and current students to their learning resources, getting them off a site that’s content is (or at least should be) irrelevant to them.

Final thoughts
There are so many influences to a web project. You have your core users to think about, the users you don’t want on the site but have a say regardless, and the stakeholders who hold the purse strings. There are so many people having their two pence worth and so many to please, it is a tough old job being the one to get it right. Like being in the shadow cabinet, the jobs really important, but no one really wants to be the one to do it. Although I believe Jeremy Corbyn does have some staff in place now, and like us with our website, has a plan, let’s hope we deliver and our challenges are overcome.

Check back to www.beds.ac.uk before Christmas to see our new shop window, and we’d love to know what you think.