Engaging with students in The Student Room

There's been a lot of talk recently about departments setting up Facebook and Twitter accounts, and I'm really pleased to see new accounts being created by colleagues in Art and Design, Warrington School of Management and others. As I mentioned in my previous blog, these are great platforms to communicate specific information about your courses and departments, in a way that we just can't manage on our general accounts.

However, another popular platform that you might not be aware of is The Student Room, a community of over 1.2 million students who visit to discuss all sorts of topics ranging from study, to current affairs, sport, health and relationships.

Tips for setting up departmental Facebook and Twitter pages

I've recently been getting a lot of requests for advice about setting up departmental Facebook and Twitter accounts. I think this is a great idea, because it gives you the opportunity to engage with prospects, applicants and students of your course in more detail than the main University ones, which, by design, has to be more general.

Rather than emailing everyone individually, here are a few general tips for setting up these various pages, which I hope will get you up and running. Of course, if there is something specific you'd like to ask me, or I've forgotten to include anything, feel free to get in touch with me by email.

Identity Crisis: Football, Branding and Cardiff City

Identity Crisis: Football,
Branding and Cardiff City

In this blog, rather than focusing on marketing in the Higher Education sector, I thought it would be interesting to focus on another services sector that, like Higher Education, can be subjected to some resistance when the marketers take hold.  It is well known, of course, that football is now more than just a sport.  And over the last few decades we've seen many examples of how to, and how not to, run a football club as a business.

Of course, given my location, the natural thing to have done here would have been to write a blog on Chester Football Club.  It’s certainly had its fair share of turmoil over the last decade or so and would have made for an interesting case study.  However, given my sense of national pride, it’s only natural that I would look to focus my attention on the industry in the ‘land of my fathers’.

In particular, I thought we’d turn our attention to the topic of branding and whether it is possible, or even ethical, to re-brand a football club.  In one form or another, this is a matter most followers of Cardiff City have been debating about over the last 12 months.