Archive for January, 2012

The British Library Business & IP Centre are running a “Web in Feb” programme of workshops and events throughout the month. Whilst mainly oriented towards business, there are some events which may be of interest to those who wish to engage with their audiences using social media, such as the global Social Media Week. Other events cover topics such as marketing sharpness and intellectual property.

More information is available from the British Library Business & IP Centre website.

I gave a short presentation at this week’s UCISA “Using social media to communicate” conference in Birmingham. I was asked to talk about how we get more out of our social media activities by integrating it in our wider communications outputs.

You can download my slides if you’d like to see the complete presentation – but I showed the group:

• The College homepage – how we regularly feature the student blogs as the main story and always have something in the interact box bottom right
• Our Interact page – the main social media aggregator on our site
• The social media accordion – on the right hand side here
• Other embedded social media feeds, like the Twitter feed on the Institute of Global Health Innovation homepage and the blog feed on the Web Guide homepage
• Our live Twitter page from last Summer
• How we used storify to report on events like Commemoration Day
• Imperial Mobile
• The College screensaver
• Some print integration examples, including bookmarks, postcards, prospectuses and Reporter – all of which use social media content to varying degrees.

I wanted to share with you all that I received some really positive feedback about our activities from the UCISA delegates.  I quote some of the twitter comments I received during and after the presentation below:

• Loving the Interactive Screensaver at @imperialcollege which pulls in their social media content!
• Twitter feed on managed desktop screensaver at imperial – love this idea!!
• Impressed by how Imperial College utilise various social media channels across website, including a wide range of twitter feeds.
• Imperial.ac.uk/interact is an interesting page to check out
• Integrating social media with other communications channels at Imperial, i.e. print, bridges the gap between online & offline
• Wish all HEs would use social media like that
• Imperial Mobile looking good, using campusM

I can’t capture all the comments and questions I had in person, but I was really proud to present Imperial’s work – huge thanks to my team for creating some fabulous social media integration tools and to all of you for contributing some great content!

The event was excellent, with a really engaged audience made up of individuals from university IT services, marketing, library and alumni teams.  If you’re interested in learning more, check out the full conference programme – you can see most of the presentations given this week.  They covered everything from blogging to Google+ – it’s well worth a look!  And I’ll certainly be keeping an eye on future events planned – anyone fancy coming with me?