Best university websites?

Ok disclosure upfront: I am a massive Pixar fan. And before that I was already a massive Disney fan. When I was at university I seriously considered writing for Disney as one of my top job options (and I wrote a screenplay and music for a "Jason and the Golden Fleece" Disney movie for my A-Levels...).

So, with that disclosure out of the way, I have been loving the promotions for the new Monsters University movie.

  

How far do you go to make a campaign feel real? With Monsters U, there is so much more than the average movie promotion. They have created a whole brand that mimics a real world university, including university website and twitter feed. Neither is about the movie or writes about the movie. Instead it's immersive, writing as if Monsters U is a real institution, and you might really be reaching out to students or faculty with these channels.

As the Chronicle commented in this article, the website is so good it might generate some serious envy from real world institutions! It has everything from admissions information to staff notices, school course listings and of course the university news room. The videos are slick and the whole thing is incredibly realistic.

Now bearing in mind that for Monsters Inc, Pixar generated $62,577,067 at the box office in its first weekend, you can imagine that the marketing and PR budget for the film is pretty large, which enables a campaign of this nature which requires a lengthy content plan, a large number of man hours, not to mention the upfront costs of designing and hosting all this multimedia. I still vividly remember sitting at the ALPSP annual conference back in 2010 where Grace Baynes of Nature commented that they spent several hours each day updating a single Facebook page. So how can a campaign of this nature be replicated on a smaller scale?

To create something that has a real brand, outside of the publisher brand, would need careful planning to consider the time that could be invested, and over what period. I'm curious as to Monsters U's exit strategy too. Now that the movie has hit the cinema, how long will these channels be maintained?

Getting the most out of attending conferences

I spent today at another fascinating conference. Today it was the British Library's 'taking a long view on the impact of the social sciences'. For anyone not familiar with SAGE, social science is the backbone of our company and key to our mission, so immersing myself in the debates both last week and this has been fantastic.

Ordinarily I don't get out of the office all that often, but whenever I do I am strongly reminded of how important events like this are, and how valuable face to face dialogue remains even in a digital age. Building relationships is such an important part of PR, and it really is important to use the limited time we get for face to face engagement effectively.

I've blogged a little before tangentially about conferences, but tonight it felt appropriate to reflect back on making the most of the in-person event, including where and when to incorporate online tools. It should be noted that these are just my views: other tips and tricks are of course plentiful, and comments are welcomed.

1. Get a delegate list. Obvious, but it helps so much to have had a chance to digest who is going to be attending the event with you. More often than not I'll set up a spreadsheet to examine the whole delegate list, googling names I think I know but can't remember where from, or to add background information for people I want to pick up a conversation with. Additionally it is a great way to ensure that (as the PR Manager for my company) I've prepared an adequate brief for anyone else from my senior team that might be participating. Pulling out the key influencers makes sure they make good use of their time away from the office.
2. Check what the social media landscape is for the conference beforehand. More often than not, a conference will have an established #tag set up for the event a while before it takes place, or set up a Facebook or LinkedIn group, allowing for additional networking before delegates even arrive. See point 1), then use point 2) to really maximise the networking opportunities that this presents: you can see what people are planning to talk about, arrange to meet up with like-minded delegates, or even get questions in ahead of getting into a session.
3. Network! Let's be frank, I HATE networking. As an introvert, the prospect of making small talk makes my insides turn over. But it's a necessary part of my job and one that anyone that wants to work at a more senior level in PR must be able to do. So my tips on doing this well? Well tips 1) and 2) are really excellent contributors to this! Again, as an introvert, having a text-based conversation, where I feel more at ease with myself, makes it possible to avoid that awkward "umm..hi!" and cuts straight to the "so I totally agree with that blog post you wrote last night." Also it never hurts to be up to speed on relevant industry headlines and issues, so you can join in with the discussion without fumbling for a point of view. Trust me if you're an extrovert and find that these sorts of things come naturally: for an introvert, being put on the spot really is painful. Other tips? I have to say I've found it much easier with practice than when I was younger: it's now less traumatic to just go up to a group and say "Hi can I join you?" Generally people are nice, and receptive to an introduction. I've met some really interesting and useful contacts this way that have often been unexpected. What also works well is listening out for the people who ask interesting questions in a particular session, mentally recording what they look like, then finding a way to chat to those attendees during a break or by finding them during another session. And the last networking tip merits a point all of its own:
4. Plug into the digital conversation. I blogged recently about my own particular Twitter issues, but as I mentioned in that post, engaging in the conference back channel discussion on Twitter really is valuable. With relation to point 3), you get to meet a huge range of delegates and hear their views before you've had a chance to physically engage with them. As above that further reduces the need for small talk and ensures you can immediately have some great conversations with those people when you do meet face to face. Beyond networking, I also find the Twitter back channel a great way of re-emphasising the most important nuggets from a conference: it distills the sessions in a way that can trigger your memory after the event too, with tools like Storify and archiving tools collating the tweets into permanent conference notes.
5. Swap contacts. Old school style: swap your business card. Digital style: follow your new contacts on Twitter, connect to them on LinkedIn or other networks, or super techy maybe you can bump them. Whichever method you choose, don't let the link go cold: get in touch as soon as you can after the conference ends. Which reminds me: after four days out I've got some jobs to do...

Where am I? The missing hashtag participation mystery

This has been bugging me for a while.

For those of you who use Twitter, it's not uncommon to participate in a Twitter #tag as a back-channel to in-person conferences. For example today I was on #acssfinch whilst attending a two-day conference on open access. A few weeks ago I was participating on #solo12 whilst at the Spoton conference. And interestingly one of the sessions at Spoton was actually the value of using social media channels as part of a conference: video online here.

I find tweeting through a conference, plus following others tweeting on the hashtag, a great way to get a rounded view of the session I'm in. It also gives me a great summary of the event after I've returned home. Sometimes I've even storified the tweets from events to create a permanent summary of those tweets as a narrative.

So you can imagine my frustration, when I have been tweeting like a MACHINE through a conference, to discover that the tweets I've been tagging are not appearing in the tweet stream.

Why? Is it something I said? Where am I hiding?!

Having frustratingly been invisible on my tweet stream today, I thought it was time to get to the bottom of this. Guess what? I can't.

The Twitter help page gives some suggestions on why someone would not appear in search:

On the viewer side of things: if you're viewing only top results you will be missing some tweets. Similarly not all tweets show up on a mobile.

On the tweeter side: If you have protected tweets, again these will not show up. Apparently infrequent tweeters don't appear, and neither do people with incomplete profiles. New accounts may not show up either.

But I'm none of these things!!

So here's some more thoughts from across the blogosphere:

• I'm a spammer? If twitter sees you tweeting the same links or tweeting the same content across multiple accounts they can mistake you for a spammer. Hmm, I do tweet on the company accounts, but is that really it?
• I'm using too many third party services: Quora reckons if you use a number of third party tweet apps, you'll also get blocked. Great, I'm definitely in that category, but that sounds plain crazy.

I love using Twitter to participate in live dialogue at events, and even though I'm not appearing in results, people who follow me can still see what I'm tweeting. It does however prevent me from really engaging with the other conference participants, and inevitably also means I'm not contributing to the discussion. I'm not alone: other colleagues have experienced the same issue, and there's a lot of internet forum discussions on this topic. If it's a problem for you too, send Twitter a complaint here!

What does your online presence say about your personal brand?

So I wouldn't describe myself as vain, but from time to time, I do check out my Google ranking. I found myself doing this today.

Flickr: Aray Chen

Firstly because I've just spent most of the last week out at meetings and conferences, which provide an amazing opportunity to meet new people who share the same fields and passions as me. Several people I met at a conference at the weekend are now connections on Twitter. Assuming they do the same thing I do when I am about to make a new connection, they would have checked out my online presence by either looking at my Twitter feed or blog.

Secondly because I just realised today, when I was researching some potential interview candidates for a job opening at SAGE, that you can no longer (could you ever?) view third-degree connections on LinkedIn unless you have a premium account. I'm not sure how long ago LinkedIn introduced premium accounts, or whether this has always been the case, but it was news to me. It made me wonder what the real value of a service like LinkedIn has for me, when what I really want to do is be able to quickly look up people that I've met at an event (or in this case that I'm about to meet), remind myself of who they are, then connect with them. So if someone is looking for that information about me, if they can't check me out on LinkedIn, where are they looking?

And thirdly because the topic of personal brand has been playing on my mind over the past few days. It started at home when Dan and I were chatting about the rise of the individual employee brand. This is a particularly hot issue in organizations driven by experts, like tech guys in start ups. They each have a personal brand tied to their expertise, which makes them credible within the tech community. But they can also use this brand to enhance that of their companies by leveraging that personal brand. As this article points out, this can be taken even further if you use the voice of your employees to create a personality for your business brand. Blog networks have been a great way to show the people behind a brand, build trust and advocacy. This in turn was fed on by conversations I had with fellow PRs up in Newcastle last Friday. We were talking about the rise of the 'CEO brand', and the power that good management of that voice can have on the broader business brand. I'm not even really talking about the much discussed 'Celebrity CEO', aka the Steve Jobs character. Rather, there are very charismatic figures at the head of organizations who use their social profiles to humanise their corporate brands. Now not everyone believes it's a good thing for CEOs to be building their social media profile, and I would agree it isn't right for every business or every industry. This Forbes post goes as far as to claim CEOs don't need to be strong communicators at all. I'm more inclined to agree with George Anders, who posts on what has worked successfully for CEOs on Twitter.

Somewhere between these three strands, I found myself wondering how sound my own personal brand is right now online. As the above shows, people are looking at your online profile. So do you know how yours looks? This Mashable article reminds us to apply what we know to be effective in PR and Marketing to our own personal identities. Here are just a few ideas:

• Be consistent.  I have to say, in the last three years having a strong online brand has been significantly easier than it had been prior to July 2009 for me, simply because I now have a much more unique name. I'm almost 100% certain that I am the only Mithu Lucraft in the world. That makes my search ranking almost immediately more likely to be accurate. But it isn't just about a name: having a clear naming convention across social channels helps too.
• Keep an active public profile. Regardless of whether it's just on Twitter, or using a variety of mediums, keep an active channel publicly available. Not only does this benefit search rankings but it also helps to clarify what your area of expertise and interest is. For a PR professional, being active on social media feels like a must: how can we advocate for social media if we don't understand how to use it ourselves?
• Be thematic. The best blogs I read have one consistent thread that runs through all posts. Readers then know what to expect from that blog. As this post sets out, an online presence should clarify who you are, what drives you, what your strengths are, how you're unique, and what value you bring.
• Be engaged. Don't just put messages out. Engage. Listen. Join in. Again, Twitter is such an easy channel to use for engagement: follow people that you relate to, respond to what they have to say, and have a conversation. Similarly, comment on the blogs that you rate. Build some connections, and in turn you'll find the same happens in return.