The Chameleon Net blog

Enhancing Student Experience via Twitter

surajs@chameleonnet.co.uk (Suraj Shah) — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 15:27:42 GMT

In the city of San Francisco, "citizens can send direct messages 24 hours a day to the sf311 Twitter account to report standard non-emergency city-related sightings (like pot holes), request street cleanings, and any other service already supported by the phone or website." This was reported by the Mashable article San Francisco First City to Instate City-Wide 311 Twitter Program.

It goes on to say: "Of course the real beauty of enabling 311 support through Twitter is that residents can now have the convenience of sending in their requests on their terms, include photos, relevant links, and do so while on the go."

If a whole city can offer this service to enhance the experience for citizens, what are the possibilities for enhancing the student experience on a university campus?

Potential notifications include:

lifts not working
computer room out of operation
security gates rusty and need oiling
high-demand library books not available
paths and rooms requiring cleaning
lecturers inaccessible
issues regarding transport into university - e.g. extending what University of Bath did on Twitter when the snow in Feb 2009 had a big impact on transport in Bath.

Could you think of other non-emergency issues that students could report? Add your thoughts in the comments below.

Using notifications received from students and academic staff, the university's student relations and administration teams could raise the issue with the relevant parties to get it resolved, and report back to the person who sent through the notification. Where appropriate, messages could be tweeted and blog posts published to inform many more people about developments.

A service like this set up at the university could have a major impact, not only on how it serves current students and academic staff, but also on prospective students who take the university's online reputation into account when considering their university choices.

Afterall, the lines between student relations and public relations is blurring, and a disgruntled student being transformed into a content or happy student has a direct impact on way the institution is perceived on the web and therefore on student intake.

The Chameleon Net strategy-oriented technology trends seminar covers some of the latest mobile and web technologies including geo-tagging & geo-location. Other topics covered include augmented reality, social software, content moderation, web analytics & conversion.

Our Online Technology Update seminar is taking place on Thursday 18th June in London and you can read more about it and register at www.chameleonnet.co.uk/seminar

International Student Recruitment for HEIs

surajs@chameleonnet.co.uk (Suraj Shah) — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 15:23:14 GMT

How to digitally attract, engage with and recruit international students, while mobilising your existing students to help with language translation, to overcome cultural barriers and give them valuable online marketing work experience.

There are websites, blogs & social networks such as facebook and twitter, all crying out for your prospective students' attention. I'm sure you'll agree that there is simply a lot of noise that they are exposed to. For prospective international students, that noise online is amplified, as you are competing not just with other UK Higher Education Institutions, but also the hundreds of institutions around the world.

Play this slidecast (7 mins 37 seconds) to get an insight into the 3 stage process to run an international Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaign at your university that spans across 12 to 24 months. The campaign involves forming a team of International Student Ambassadors, the creation of an optimised online destination, and digital community engagement to attract visitors to your new online destination and raise it's profile in search engines.

The slidecast also touches on a handful of tips to run a successful campaign and gives you a glimpse into what's involed in a 3-month international Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign if you want more rapid results.

International Student Recruitment for HEIs

View more presentations from Suraj Shah.

Twitter For B2B Websites

richardk@chameleonnet.co.uk (Rich Kirk) — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 11:27:39 GMT

Like everyone in the digital marketing space, here at Chameleon Net we are twitter junkies. Even our table football has its own feed! The phenomenal growth the service has enjoyed over the last 5 – 6 months means that Twitter is the platform switched-on marketers are buzzing about right now. However, as with any service growing at an exponential rate, there are problems. This recent article warning of a “Twitter bubble” summed up some of our fears about the service and the industry springing up around it. The challenge Chameleon faces is to make Twitter part of the range of e-marketing services we offer to clients, in a way that can best guarantee a good ROI for both our clients and ourselves.

Many of our more forward thinking clients have expressed an interest in developing a Twitter account, and as a result this week we launched Drivers Jonas on Twitter. DJ is a commercial property consultancy turning over nearly £100m per year and employing over 700 staff, yet they remain remarkably agile when it comes to marketing their website. We're excited about this project because we feel that with the right aims and expectations, a B2B Twitter feed can easily harness all the best aspects of Micro-blogging.

As a B2B company Drivers Jonas is using Twitter to provide the company with a more human face than their corporate website can, as well as develop their reputation as a ‘thought leader’ within the property industry. We believe that in time, being active on Twitter will help Drivers Jonas unearth business leads, connect and interact with potential new recruits (especially undergraduates), as well as doing more routine things like publicising DJ events. One thing Drivers Jonas recognises is that Twitter isn’t a marketplace in which to sell, it’s a watering hole at which they can meet their stakeholders; something I believe is vital to good big-business tweeting.

We’ve also envisaged that in the absence of a DJ blog (which would be time consuming and difficult to operate in line with internal compliance procedures) the Twitter feed could be used as a rapid response in the case of a major PR event. This flexibility is something many B2B companies would love to have; for some blogging is the answer, but for marketers at larger companies getting sign-off for a controversial blog post is ‘worst nightmare’ territory. Twitter restricts you to 140 characters, and at the same time, restricts the barriers to getting a message out into the public domain.

I hope to blog again with more on this project as it develops, as I think it will provide some interesting insights into ‘corporate tweeting’. In the meantime, if your company thinks they could benefit from being on Twitter, but want a helping hand building a business case and launching an account, get in touch.

Seminar on Digital Student Recruitment - an overview

surajs@chameleonnet.co.uk (Suraj Shah) — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 11:36:38 GMT

Chameleon Net held a seminar on Digital Student Recruitment for the higher education sector yesterday, Tuesday 24th February 2009.

Drew Davies, Head of Online Marketing at Chameleon Net spoke about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategies for student recruitment.

Helen Aspell, Head of Digital at the Equality and Human Rights Commission and former Head of Digital Marketing at University of Southampton, spoke about User Experience, the heart of an engaging digital presence.

Drew Davies then spoke about Protecting Your Online Brand, where he shared a case study of the work Chameleon Net has done with Barnardo's UK on their opinion-polarising "Break the Cycle" campaign.

> > >

The seminar was well-received with feedback such as "Very useful & thought provoking", "Excellent - one of the best I've been to", "Impressive venue and tasty danish pastries in the break!", "Stimulating & Exciting", "Very well organised & professional", "Engaging & felt very current" and "Very interesting, frightening & enlightening!"

More on Chameleon Net's work in the higher education sector can be found at www.chameleonnet.co.uk/education

The Rise of Twitter

rossm@chameleonnet.co.uk (Ross Miles) — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 15:22:22 GMT

Social Media is a fast-growing and rapidly evolving beast, and the latest website to be the darling of the Google Generation is micro-blogging site Twitter. The idea is simple, you have 140 characters, including spaces, to answer the question- What are you doing now? This however, as with all things Web 2.0, doesn’t tell the full story. Twitter acts as a bulletin board as well, where titbits of information, via links, can be shared between users. UK Celebrities such as Jonathon Ross, Stephen Fry and John Cleese are all advocates, and Barack Obama used it during his election campaign to motivate the masses (he has over 144,000 followers). Twitter has seen its popularity grow 10-fold in the UK in the past year and traffic rise 750% in the US where it is know a more visited site than Digg. As I write this blog post just under 2 million tweets are being submitted worldwide every day!

Whilst to ‘outsiders’ it might seem a trivial and almost pointless service, only for users with high levels of deluded self-importance, but Twitter played notable roles during a several significant events in the past 4 months. The part Twitter played in providing break-neck speed updates on the Mumbai terror attacks in November led Forbes Magazine to write Mumbai: Twitter’s Moment. Before News services had broken the event on television Tweeps such as @rakesh314 posted “I'm hearing news of gun-firing in Mumbai. Can anyone confirm?”. Updates from people involved even led to an internet myth that the terrorists themselves were following events on Twitter itself to counter the actions of the forces sent in to stop them.

The much more recent plane crash into the Hudson River was another example of Tweeps providing a rapid reaction. One Twitterer, @jkrums, took a picture of the half-submerged aircraft with passengers standing on the wing from a passing-by ferry which quickly went viral and eventually landed him an interview on CNBC. Others tweeted about how they stood watching the drama from their office blocks. What was the most notable though was the integrity of the tweet-reporting which cited accurate numbers and stories relating to the event as information about what had happened disseminated among users.

As great as all this impartiality and interactivity sounds, how can Twitter serve the business community? And that’s exactly the point, this notion of impartial interactivity. Twitter provides a transparent window into an organisation for the consumer, a portal in which to directly interact. Several brands are using it as such a device to. @ScottMonty is the face of car manufacturer, Ford, on Twitter (who have multiple employee accounts) and says “It’s part of a larger social media strategy to humanize the Ford brand and put consumers in touch with Ford employees”. Lisa Kim @AmericanApparel is the Website Manager for American Apparel and is another advocate of Twitter as a way of increasing customer care, “We saw a tweet from someone who received less than stellar customer service at a store in Canada & we got in touch with them to sort it out.” Children’s Charity Barnardo’s used Twitter alongside their blog to engage the media storm around their controversial ‘Break the cycle’ ad campaign (managed by Chameleon Net) so successfully that Barnardo’s own staff kept abreast of the situation by following the charity’s own Twitter feed. Higher Education Institutions are now looking at using Twitter as a Personal Learning Network in which students can ask questions of their peers and teachers in order to increase feedback and accessibility.

Twitter is quickly evolving to become fundamental in the development of any digital strategy and with its thrust into the UK lime-light thanks to varying celebrity endorsements, its popularity is only set to grow. Businesses need to educate themselves and start twittering soon or risk being left behind by more media-savvy rivals.

CREDIT TO:

http://www.brandrepublic.com/Revolution/News/875017/Celebs-start-tweeting-Twitters-UK-popularity-rises-10-fold-year/

http://nielsen-online.com/blog/2009/01/16/tweeting-the-us-airways-flight-1549-plane-crash/

http://popacular.com/gigatweet/analytics.php

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/magazine/07awareness-t.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2008/12/twitter_the_mumbai_myths.html

The Blogosphere: Friend and Foe

lucie@actualmarketing.co.uk (Lucie Bickerdike) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 10:57:30 GMT

Like Suraj, I’ve been thinking a lot about online PR recently.

Public Relations traditionally holds a reputation management role, making sure its organisation is kept in the public eye, regarded positively and protected from the damage caused by public criticism. Crucially, the internet offers companies the opportunity to engage with their target audiences in new and exciting, more productive ways – but it also gives consumers a platform from which to vent about poor experiences, and negative reports can spread like wildfire. I need say no more than ‘Dell Hell’.

This topic was touched upon by one of the speakers at a CIPR conference I attended this week, and the Q&A session was indicative of how wary much of the PR industry still is on the subject of online PR. One exec said that her company had so far omitted any online activity from their communications strategies, but that they had realised they really should get involved. However, her particular organisation was subject to a certain amount of public criticism. Her question was this: if we begin communicating with our audience online, will we be opening ourselves up to more criticism and will we in fact be focusing people on the negative story?

Of course, the answer was this. People are talking about you online, positively or negatively, anyway – would you rather stick your head in the sand and let the conversation go on without you, or engage in it and take some control of the messages being circulated?

I think an important point to make about PR is that it’s not always just about the protection and management of company reputation. Yes, a company’s reputation is arguably its most valuable asset – after all, consumers listen to each other and if they’re all slagging you off you’re unlikely to make enough money to survive. But PR can also be used to communicate with customers on a more equal level, where you’re not trying to impose your own interpretation of their needs upon them, but really listening to them and building their feedback into your product or service.

The internet offers some exciting possibilities for companies wanting to place customer requirements at the centre of their business. If you do it right, you can get valuable feedback from your target audience that would cost you thousands in focus groups and surveys. Perhaps this is the most valuable PR opportunity presented by new media at the moment.

The fact remains that organisations can no longer hide from the fact that the web now has the power to make or break them. The ‘blogosphere’ should be ignored at their peril.