Archive for September, 2011

I mentioned in last week’s Web Forum that we’d been working on the first College smartphone app – Imperial Mobile.  I’m pleased to confirm that this will launch in the App Store and Android Marketplace this evening, ready for new and returning students joining Imperial at the start of October.

Users of Imperial Mobile will be able to:

• Search campus maps
• View current PC availability in the Central Library clusters
• Search for books and articles
• Find students and staff in the people search – call or email them directly, or add them straight to your address book.
• See where your friends are on campus and contact them to meet up
• Get the latest College and Union news and find out what’s on
• Follow the College on Twitter and read the latest student blogs
• Hear about student announcements and promotions
• Explore a guide to College services and facilities
• Get help and support
• Alerts – receive alerts and information

Find out more about Imperial Mobile, including FAQs and installation advice.

We’ve prepared some online adverts for Imperial Mobile – if you would like us to add an ad for the app onto your College website, please email me with the URL and I will add that for you.

Tell us what you think

• We’d love to have your feedback about Imperial Mobile – email us your thoughts or suggestions.
• Got an idea for another Imperial app? Send us your suggestions.
• If you like Imperial Mobile, don’t forget to rate it in the App Store.

Thank you to those of you who attended the first Web Forum last week.  It was standing room only in the lecture theatre with over 120 attendees from across the College.

The session was led by Pamela Agar, Digital Media Manager who took a look at how the College is using social media to communicate with its multiple audiences.

If you attended this session, please tell us what you thought by completing a short survey – your answers will really help us ensure we provide the information and support you need.

• Download the presentation slides (pdf)
• View a video podcast of the Forum (coming soon)

* Also posted on the CASE Social Media blog *

Several of my colleagues at other universities raised an eyebrow when I suggested that we would be placing a live twitter feed on Imperial’s homepage for a day. What if people abused the opportunity to get rude content published? Or an over enthusiastic tweeter took over? What if no-one tweeted at all?!

June 13-17 marked Universities Week 2011 in the UK—a national campaign demonstrating the benefits of universities within UK society. To close the week, the campaign aimed to bust some of the myths about 21^st century campus life by inviting institutions and their supporters to contribute to a 24-hour twitter stream sharing what they were doing—using the hashtag #uniweek.

We’d been keen to try something more interactive on our homepage and are lucky to enjoy lively and popular engagement on Twitter, so we jumped at the chance to participate.

I spoke to J-P Jones, our press and communications officer who coordinated the day at Imperial, about how he planned it:

Why did you decide to take part?

We thought the “day in the life” Twitter idea was a good way of building a greater sense of community among Imperial’s regular tweeters and connect with new ones. In addition to providing insight into College life it allowed us to better understand who the other Imperial tweeters are.

Why did we run a second hashtag?

We used #ImpCol in addition to #uniweek to clearly identify the tweets from our own staff, students and alumni, so that these could be pulled into the live stream on the College homepage.

Why the College homepage?

We felt it was important that the entire Imperial community could participate and read the content being generated, rather than just those already engaged with Twitter.

Were you worried that placing the feed on the homepage was too risky?

It was a risk, but preserving the authenticity of a live feed was key to the spirit of the exercise, so our digital team created a homepage design which regularly refreshed to show the most recent #ImpCol tweets, whether they were positive or not. The only moderation was a limited filter for offensive language. Communications staff monitored the feed throughout the day though, and we had a backup plan in place in case it was hijacked—which was to change the homepage to show @imperialcollege tweets only.

How did you engage with the College community to encourage participation?

We created a webpage in advance of Twitter day, outlining our aims and the kind of content we were looking for and promoted that page though ads in College publications and mailing lists. We also pulled together a list of all the tweeters we knew well and informed them, as well as approaching alumni. And, of course, we tweeted!

What did people talk about?

We had a great mix of staff, students and alumni getting involved. People were talking about what they had to do that day—whether it was lab research, lecturing abroad, revision for finals or staying in bed!

What were your favourite contributions on the day?

Two in particular stood out for me:

@limeytweet Half listening to a chap on train (#impcol PhD student) educate communters on physics thesis work. To his credit, they’re totally into it!

@mattallinson: I’ve been working for 6 months in a lab and not once have I accidently turned myself into a superhero #impcol #uniweek

Was it worth it and will you try it again?

Definitely, though we heard that productivity across the College was probably a little lower that day as staff became engrossed in the feed! It was particularly satisfying to see people who never normally use Twitter getting involved via the homepage. We had over 600 tweets using our hashtag and even trended on Twitter in London at one point during the day.

We would really like to try something similar again, perhaps around Welcome Week at the start of the next academic year to engage new students.

Read the full archvie of #impcol tweets from Universities Week 2011

Read a full analysis of #uniweek on Twitter on Brian Kelly’s UK Web Focus blog.

Interested in finding out more about Social Media at Imperial?

Come along to the first Web Forum meeting – Wednesday 14 September 2011, 2pm

This morning, we have released a small improvement to the College CMS editor.  This development adds a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) view of the content you are editing.  This means that when you open the editor (by clicking on the ‘Edit content’ link) in a right column area or on a page using the wide template, the editor form adjusts the width accordingly.  So now the content is as near as possible to what you will see when you publish it to the web page.

This is the first part of a substantial development of the editor over the next few months which you’ll hear more about at a future Web Forum presentation.

Note: On some browser versions you may find that the editor form opens in a strange place on the screen.  This is a computer cache issue and you will therefore need to refresh your cache by pressing CTRL-F5.  This only needs to be done once.