Archive for February, 2012

A new schedule of skills surgeries is now available online.

• Web Skills Surgeries Schedule

Following feedback from the web editor community, we have tried to make sure that all of the subjects that you’d like to find out more about are covered in this year’s schedule such as:

• Social Media
• Video tips
• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
• User testing techniques

new topics:

• Additional CMS skills – access, permissions and uploading files
• Why isn’t it working? – common editing problems
• What is a website for and what should I consider when developing one?

More venues

We are also now running sessions at Hammersmith and St Mary’s.

Registration

If you would like to come along to any of the sessions please register for your place by clicking on the date that corresponds to the surgery of your choice and then completing the online form.

The sessions have limited places so if you do register for a session that you are no longer able to attend please do let me know: e.chesterman@imperial.ac.uk.

If you are new to twitter and are thinking about incorporating it into your social media strategy, here are some tips and guidelines that might help you get started.

Before setting up a twitter account we would strongly recommend that you think very carefully about the following:

• Why do you need a twitter account? What are you hoping to achieve through this medium? What are you going to tweet about? What will you say? Tweets should be interesting, relevant and useful (not always all three!)

If you are going to be scratching around for things to tweet about then do think hard about this. There are College accounts through which we can send out tweets on your behalf.

• Who is your audience? Who do you want to reach, inform, inspire? Are you driving traffic to somewhere?

• How will you manage your twitter account? Who will be tweeting? And when?

- A focused key content tweeter
- More than one person on the team?

If you are going to have a team of tweeters, maybe you could create profiles of people who are tweeting. Each person could sign off their own tweets with their initials – showing the people behind the tweets. E.g. the College press officers on the @Imperialspark twitter account or President Obama (@barackobama) and his campaign team – any tweets from Obama have his initials (BO) in them.

After consideration of these points you might find it useful to draw up a simple policy in which you set yourself and your other tweeters some guidelines.

You should also ensure that you stick within the College policies:

• Conditions of Use of IT Facilities:

www.imperial.ac.uk/secretariat/policiesandpublications/informationsystemssecurity/policy/policy2

• Collaborative interactions guidelines:

www.imperial.ac.uk/webguide/technologyservices/collaboration/webbasedcollaborationguidelinessupplement

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The Symplectic Elements system will not be avaliable on Friday 17 February from 7-9 am. The ICT team will be upgrading the current version to v3.7.13.

This upgrade will temporarily effect Personal Web Pages (PWPs), which will appear blank during this time. This is because PWPs take a live feed from Symplectic.

Please contact the ICT Service Desk if you have any problems. You can call: +44 20 7594 9000 or log your problem online: www.imperial.ac.uk\ict\servicedesk\selfservice (requires you to log in).