Initially I thought I’d give blogging a go because it’s being used by an increasing number of companies as a marketing tool and I thought it would only be a matter of time before the university I work for decided it wanted one/some. Since there was a high probability that I would be asked to help the chosen blogger/s to get it going I figured I should probably know what the hell all the fuss was about and how the blogosphere worked.
I was wanting to go to the full three days of the conference in Blackpool, but the first two days clashed with the North Wales HE Fairs. I just went as a day delegate for the final day, today instead. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting (I’ve never been before). It was definitely more relaxed than conferences I’ve been to in the past - or perhaps I was just more relaxed. I’ve only really been to science conferences before, where I always felt very self-conscious just in case I upset, offended or made an idiot of myself in front of a big load of professors who I then might want to work for one day. Since Admissions/Recruitment staff aren’t quite so mobile (they don’t move from university to university and country to country to find work) I think the pressure was off.
Well, the two North Wales HE Fairs pretty much demonstrated the best and the worst of what HE Fairs can be like. On Tuesday I went to the North East Wales fair in Wrexham. The organisers were really friendly and helpful, all the information I received in advance was complete and well-organised, on the day the flow of potential applicants was steady so they had plenty of time to chat with university reps if they wanted, they stopped for lunch to give us all a rest, they fed us a fantastic buffet meal and there was an unlimited flow of free tea and coffee. Just brilliant.
On Wednesday, I went to the North West Wales HE Fair in Llandudno. The information they sent in advance was incomplete so I didn’t know what times the fair would be open, nor did I have any contact details so that I could find out. At least finding the place and parking was easy, but I had to hike all the way in to the building and back to get the free parking permit which added 10 minutes to my set up time. The flow of students was all over the place so stands were mobbed for half an hour, then there’d be no-one for ages so it can’t have been a very useful experience for the students. Then there was no-one after about 1pm so we all had to sit like lemons for an hour until the organisers would let us pack up. Worst of all they didn’t close for lunch. I think the idea was that you would grab a quick buttie from the coffee bar, but having tasted their foul and disgusting coffee I decided to give it a miss. We were given two free coffee tickets (which is really stingy) but I doubt if anyone used both.
The students themselves though were quite well informed which is always good to see.
I went to an e-PR (that’s electronic public relations) seminar with a colleague last night. It was very interesting although it perhaps didn’t go into as much detail as we’d have liked - pretty much it just gave an overview of the basic purpose and pitfalls of corporate blogging and podcasting. It did, however, gave us quite a few ideas for how we might use these things at work, starting with simple activities and building on them. It was also apparent that these things require rather a lot of preparation and we’ll need to train our colleagues before letting them loose on the digital world. Obviously, we’ll need to get the hang of it ourselves first!
The best bit of the night though was popping out for a quick drink afterwards in a little tiny pub just off Portland Street in Manchester. I can’t remember the name of it but it was very old-fashioned (no music) and had waitress service plus a free bowl of crisps - how good is that?
Phew, just got back from day 1 of the Manchester HE Fair. I reckon we gave out about 900 prospectuses so far, which isn’t bad going. That’s a lot of saying ‘Are there any particular subjects you’re interested in?’. As usual the most popular were Psychology, Law, Sports Science, Accountancy, Nursing, and Teaching with a good measure of Games and Computing, Life Sciences, History, Business. There were a larger than usual number of requests for Engineering as well which is great. Strangely, I don’t remember as many Social Work requests as normal - perhaps it’s popularity is waning.
Got soaked to the skin walking back fom the Metro station though - uggh. I really hope it’s not raining tomorrow.
Hmm, struggled a bit today with the admin training. I don’t think I’ll be called up on to look after that side of things for the new website anyway, but I still hate discovering that I have limitations. I got the hang of the basic things - adding new users, adding new groups, adding users to groups but after that it all got a bit complicated. Think I’ll stick to writing content and adding pretty pictures.
Work have purchased a new content management system to look after their website. It’s called Contensis and will replace our current reliance on Dreamweaver and the handful of people trained/trusted to use it. We had the user training today - it’s really simple to use. Probably just about as simple as using Wordpress to write this blog in many ways. Really intuitive.