Social media engagement and student innovators

Final round up for today, two sessions.

1 Using social media for engagement with students

See them as not just receiving content, but as collaborators and creation of content. Engagement is a dialogue and a conversation.
Not just engagement with students, but staff, local community, the media, prospective students, parents...


Top tips.

• Don't bark. Don't just get information out. Has to be a conversation
• Build relationships.
• Learners congregate in diverse spaces. Not just Facebook and Twitter. Snapchat, tumblr etc all popular. It's not about us. Need to be inclusive and have conversations where they want to have them.
• Provide a quick response. Turn poor customer service into bad.
• Collect data. You need metrics to inform your service and your planning.
• Take a strategic approach. Look at the different channels and how they fit together.
• Support your staff. Can't base social media strategy on one person being available.

Article from the speakers in latest JISC Inform which is worth a read.

As part of the session we used a neat little bit of software to share ideas about how we could use social media to enhance an open day. Never used todaysmeet before, but looked as if it could be useful.


2 Summer of Student Innovation

I've blogged about this before, so won't bore you again, but it was great today to meet and talk to some of the students whose ideas are being developed as part of this programme. They had stands in the exhibition, and also took part in a panel session about how the initiative had gone, and what they'd learned from it. You can see the 6 projects which have been taken into productions here.

The new programme has just launched, so if you are a student who has a great idea for how technology can enhance the student experience, and want to get £5,000 to develop it, go here and enter.


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Engagement, experience and tattoos

The final few sessions of the conference covered a variety of things. a particularly interesting one was on engagement, with our employees and customers. It looked at the different ways people like to be interacted with, and how that can change depending on whether in a work environment or a social one. For example, people who are happy to sit at a desktop computer and use email at work, can use only mobile devices and shun email for other ways of communicating in their social lives. The talk proposed establishing an "engagement initiative" within our organisations which would bring together new partnerships for IT, especially with HR and other digital initiatives such as in marketing and internal comms.

Another session looked specifically at customer engagement, and how we can improve our customers' experience, and began by asking how many of us gave our customers such a good experience that they were willing to have the company logo as a tattoo. :-)

One of the key takeaways for me from this presentation was "Don't think that the customer experience is something soft, trivial, immeasurable, another name for customer service or will go away if ignored". Interesting.  Something we're looking at at the moment is how to introduce the wow factor into our customer experience.  Maybe we'll know if we've succeed if we see some University of Sheffield tattoos appearing....

Employee engagement

Having spent lunchtime juggling plates, folks, drinks, napkins and eating whilst standing up and talking to suppliers, it's time for a session on employee engagement, as opposed to customer engagement. Something I'm really interested in, and want people to feel part of a community that they can collaborate in and influence when they come to work. Lets see if I learn anything I can put into practice.

Why is employee engagement important?
Done well, engagement promotes better business performance and work efficiencies. Better customer and partner relationships, great innovation, improved quality, quicker problem resolution, improved knowledge sharing, richer more diverse culture. And, a better place to work.

It should be based on:
Trusted relationship with manager
Opportunities for learning and growth
Understanding and sharing the organisation's mission
Understanding individual's role and responsibilities
Sense of belonging and a shared culture.

Who's usually involved in employee engagement schemes?
Executive team, HR
Who's not?
The employees, the IT department
Not only should they be, they should be synergistic partners

IT needs to partner with the business to promote engagement:
Revisit consumerisation
Reach out to shadow IT
Understand demographic shifts
Become a stakeholder in the changing nature of work
Team with leadership and HR teams on engagement efforts

IT has a lot to contribute, but it needs a new mindset. We need to rething our approach to architecture, governance, support, identity, compliance.

Need to strategically use consumer computing tools and styles for business purposes. Think about people, networks, communities.

Think about all IT projects as engagement initiatives:
Upgrade the email client --> Rethink the inbox
Deploy social networking --> Optimise engagement
Application development --> User experience design
Deploy corporate systems --> Create an App Store
Respond to BYOD --> Lead BYOD

Case study:
Auto manufacturing firm used micro blogging tool to socialise the Helpdesk
Questions posed into twitter like space, private to the company
Any employee can answer questions, not just technicians and Helpdesk staff
Data is mined by helpdesk to augment FAQs, knowledge base and their own understanding of service
Collective knowledge of community is leveraged giving better insights into problems, and to gather information and opinion on future plans

Any engagement initiative should:
• Provide a common framework for diverse IT initiatives
• Supply a common language to talk to the business
• Deliver greater ROI from existing and new IT investments
• Provide a unifying theme across IT and shadow IT
• Provide new challenges as workloads shift to the cloud
• Foster new approaches to partners and customers
• Create new partnerships with leaders and human resources

But IT itself must become more engaging ...






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Location:London,United Kingdom