A spot of tourism

 

Our stand at the Education UK Exhibition in Athens

As predicted yesterday was a long but enjoyable day.  I had a few emails to send in the morning and then I was down at the exhibition from around noon.  The exhibition started slowly but it got busy by about 3pm and then we had a fairly constant flow of people all the way through until 7.30pm.  At the exhibition I got to meet our partners here in Athens, who support about 500 or so of the university’s students.  After the exhibition finished we were taken out for a lovely meal on the seafront in South Attica.  Over dinner we were chatting about various things.  Predictably I was lightly grilled about who was I, what was my experience, where did I think the university was headed strategically etc. (of which I’m sure there will be more today and tomorrow.   However we also ended up in a wide ranging conversation involving politics, international relations, the differences between the genders, Greek life and culture, approaches to education and the role of bodies like the QAA.  It was a really fascinating conversation.

After dinner my colleague and I took a taxi back to the hotel, getting back just before midnight.  He was shattered and went straight off to bed but I decided I had to go up and see the bar at the top of my hotel from which there are fabulous view across to the Acropolis.  The bar was heaving and there were hundreds of people crammed in trying to get a drink and something to eat.  There was also thumping music.  I took one look and decided I probably wouldn’t stay.

Instead I decided to get up early in the morning as I knew that this might be my only chance to get some sightseeing done.  So in the rain I set off up to the Acropolis.  I got there early, before the gates were opened, and took in some of the sights of Athens on the way.  There were a couple of Americans and a Greek who were there early.  The Greek guy explained that all of the archaeological sites in Athens seem to be free on Sundays (at least at this time of the year).    The three of us rushed in and made our way up to the top.  The Greek guy was talking photos of Athens on the way up.  Whilst the Americans were also sauntering a little, taking in the views.  This meant that I arrived up at the Parthenon well before them and had the entire hilltop more or less to myself.  It was humbling standing in the rain on the top of the hill admiring the amazing structures that were built nearly two and a half thousand years ago.

In the distance you could hear bells ringing.  There were all sorts of different tunes.  Unfortunately the only camera I had was my iPhone so the pictures I took aren’t that great (I still need to sort and tag these properly), nor is the recording (M4A download) I made of one of the bell chimes.

Anyway must go – nearly time to be a stand bunny again.

 

Face to face

I saw this poster at Heathrow this morning and it struck me as being quite apt (especially because when I first started in my current job a number of people referred to me as the contracts guy).

It should probably come as no surprise that I don’t think of myself in that way.  I think my role is about listening and understanding our staff, our partners, our influencers and most importantly our students and then advocating to, for and with the university’s partners. But this is probably a different story.

I sort of disagree with the statement in this advert, but I do agree with the sentiment.  I’m a great advocate for using technology to allow the face to face communication to happen where possible.  However sometimes you really do need to meet in-person.

And this is why I was quite happy to be at Heathrow this morning at silly o’clock jumping on a flight.  I love travelling as it allows me quiet relatively undisturbed thinking time.  So on the drive down and whilst waiting in the airport I got the opportunity to do a little bit of work.  However I allowed myself to be sidetracked a bit on the flight by a delightful in-flight movie, “Julie & Julia” about a blogger re-creating every recipe from a book by a cook called Julia Child (who is played by a brilliantly over the top Meryl Streep).  I wished I’d given it my full attention and watched it properly as I think it would have been the perfect way to spend  flight and unwind.

It’s going to a busy week, as it’s not just about meetings with our partners.  I’ve also got four days of being a stand bunny both here in Athens and then in Nicosia.  I was hoping to have a bit of time this afternoon to have a quick wander out to see the Acropolis.  I didn’t, as I had to set up our stand this afternoon, send a few emails (that I wrote on the plane) and then attend a British Council briefing session.  I hope I’ll get a bit of time on Sunday morning.

It has been an interesting day for me that’s been full of reflections.  I’d begun to think about a few things and make a few mental notes about the market on the subway journey in to the city centre.

Then, when I went in to the exhibition hall to prepare our stand this afternoon I saw that a Open University in Greece stand was in a prime position.  And then when I got back to my room after the British Council briefing I saw that Brenda Gourley was speaking at #educause09 (quite an interesting hashtag that I’d been following for the past couple of days).   I watched the video for a while and there was quite a lot of interesting stuff, especially I would think for an American audience, who may not be familiar with the Open University.

One of the key issues that I picked up on, was Brenda talking about the need for collaboration with partners for delivery as a survival strategy in the global context.

I’ve heard Brenda speak several times but unfortunately this time I wasn’t able to hear her finish.  It had got to about 8:30pm and neither my colleague or I had eaten since breakfast on our flight in the morning.

However interestingly at dinner my colleague raised the importance of meeting our partners face to face.  His quote was something like, “One meeting is worth a thousand exchanged emails.”  So I showed him the photo I took this morning.  He smiled, said yes that’s it, and it felt like a circle had completed.

Reflections on Exchange Rates (II)

When I was in Hong Kong earlier in the year I noticed how the changes in foreign exchange rates would have affected our business.  It has therefore been interesting for me to see the changes in the Caribbean since I was last here.

What I’ve found particularly interesting is that my last workplace priced in GBP£ whilst my new one prices in USD$.  This has advantages and disadvantages.  Across most of the English speaking Caribbean local currency is pegged to the USD$.  The exceptions are Jamaica, Trinidad and Guyana.  The table below shows the fluctuation in exchange rates over the last ten years (mid point averages have been used).

Countries	2000	2001	2002	2003	2004	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009
GYD$:US$	184.75	189.6	192.55	197.6	201.7	200.6	201.1	203.5	203.8	168.7
JMD$:US$	43.32	46.08	48.54	58.2	61.4	62.6	65.9	69.1	72.92	88.83
TND$:US$	6.3	6.23	6.25	6.26	6.3	6.3	6.3	6.33	6.2891	6.32
US$:GBP£	0.6594	0.7062	0.6524	0.6044	0.5497	0.5582	0.5446	0.498	0.5017	0.5993

The main effect here is the depreciation of the Jamaican Dollar.  Because we’ve been charging in USD$ students in Jamaica who started last year have in effect been hit by a 20% increase in the cost of their course.  If we had been charging in GBP£ it would have just been a 2% rise!

The view from Shirey Heights, Antigua

In terms of the rest of my trip I haven’t really noticed many indications of changes in economic pressures on the sectors of the population that we’re targeting however tourism seems down, which will have impacts.

One change that I have noticed is that it has been a very different type of trip to the type I would have undertaken with my previous employer.

For example on my previous trips Sundays were premium time.  They were an ideal day to meet students/potential students.  However on this trip it’s more focussed on the business connections so today I only had to meet a contact for dinner and drinks in the evening.  So having read a couple of financial reports I had a bit of a free day.  This meant I managed to get out to Nelson’s Dockyard in English Harbour in Antigua and have a look around.  It’s the only surviving Georgian dockyard in the Caribbean and is a bit special.

I then managed to get up the nearby hill, Shirley Heights (457m) where I took this photo.  It’s probably a two mile walk each way from the dockyard but it was well worth the walk.

From the stocks

I’ve mentioned before how my role seems to span a range of different areas.  I’ve also talked about how stock photography is often used by distance learning institutions as it’s easy.  This is the story of how we tried to get away from this and the side effects that this has had.

When considering the advertising approach that we wanted to take for the next few years our agency came up with a concept entitled “This is my London”. It took a very human approach – the idea being that current students would provide a short paragraph about their studies alongside artwork that showed them at their studies in a very non-London environment.

We liked the idea, especially because it was about people, and took it forward but substituted alumni for current students on the basis that this would be more aspirational.

Stupidly in this meeting I said something about UGC and got people (myself included) excited with the potential of producing something that alumni would share in both offline and online worlds.  Inevitably this lead to various discussions about using Flickr and other social media tools to collect photographs and quotes from alumni and maybe running the process as a competition, with the hope that we get the competition and the results shared.  Interestingly this sort of approach has just been tried with YouTube by DePaul.  I’ll be watching with interest to see how they do and how they encourage their entries.

We decided to get a couple of examples mocked up using a few alumni we were in contact with in Hong Kong.  We placed the quote and photo from this ad within a Ning community (with a very limited features set) along with instructions about what we wanted alumni to do.  To date we’ve invited about 7,000 selected alumni (in batches defined by specific criteria) to join – and have had 377 photos uploaded from 278 members.

Whilst most of the photos uploaded aren’t really appropriate for the advertising campaign we’ve had about a dozen that can.  One of these is shown on the right (one of our law alumni who is now a lawyer pictured outside the high court in Malaysia).  We’re getting permission to use the photos and quotes not just within our advertising campaign but also on our website, in our printed materials and elsewhere to help bring the student experience to life.

What’s more it has provided an insight in to alumni’s lives that isn’t available via our alumni databases.

My personal learnings from this have been:
1.    people use tools in ways that you don’t expect
2.    communities (no matter how rudimentary) will spring up and need managing
3.    you can’t assume anything, no matter how well you think you have explained something there are always plenty of barriers to prevent someone completing the task as you intended

Reflections on Hong Kong exchange rates

So I’m in Hong Kong this week. I came out for a UK Education Exhibition.

It’s about four or five years since I was last here. I haven’t really noticed any changes yet, the streets are still really busy, people are still going about their business. In fact all I have noticed is that it has got really expensive for me as a tourist. The last time I was here I came back loaded up with all sorts of stuff, a new digital camera, new hard drive for my computer, a few flash memory devices etc.

I went up to the Wanchai Computer Centre this evening to have a quick look around and what struck me immediately was that much of what was for sale was a similar price to back home (about 10% cheaper and probably the model that you’d see next month on TCR). I was specifically looking at net books and UMPCs.

I guessed that this might be the case as the last time I visited it was 14-15HK$ to the £, whereas I was getting closer to 10-11HK$.  Whilst this is great for business it’s a real pity for the tourist.

However it’s still a great city.

I mean where else do they put escalators to go up and down the hills? Stocksbridge town council (where my parents’ live) could learn from this.

Listening

Over ten years ago, I remember being surprised when a friend of mine who worked on advertising strategy for one of the fancy London agencies told me that rational argument isn’t that important in advertising, what’s important is pushing an emotional connection. I was reminded of this thought again at the weekend courtesy of @TobyKeeping.

What Toby’s excellent post on what defines a recruitment relationship got me thinking about was the importance of listening.

Why? Well, in order to gain that emotion connection, I need to be able to listen and understand what’s being said or communicated.

• I need to listen to know what language I should use so that potential students can easily comprehend.
• I need to know what, if anything, is likely to excite and enthuse or repel the different segments of potential students I’m working to attract.
• I need to be able to respond to potential students in a timely fashion, especially in a Web 2.0 world.
• I need to listen to know what’s being said about my brand and intervene when necessary.
• I also need to listen in order to help provide the guidance and advice that’s needed once a prospects is ready to enter that recruitment relationship.

The listening process has definitely changed over the past few years, especially for prospects. In the past I would have run surveys and held in-depth conversations, often in a face-to-face environment. Whereas today and in the future much of the listening is (will be) carried out using tools like the Social Media Firehose, through specialist Search Engines like Who’s Talkin’, Social Mention via Alerts and RSS feeds, by following people on Social Networks and utilizing existing spaces where comment and feedback happens anyway.

The tools mean that it’s easier to listen at a superficial level, but the understanding or knowledge that comes from the listening process seems to have changed.

What’s more the amount of chatter that is suddenly opened up to us by using these tools is staggering and knowing where to begin is difficult.  At the moment I’m grappling with how I monitor what’s being said and how I aggregate this, report on it and make it all actionable, which leads to questions like:

• Who should handle a comment about X
• Is it important that comment Y is floating about on website Z
• How are leads qualified, assigned and followed up
• How will any interaction be viewed by the prospect (their influencers)?

In thinking about these questions I believe that this recent Harvard Business Review Article hits the nail on the head. The listening and communicating needs to be done at the front line. Essentially what’s needed is the killer mindset rather than the killer technology.

So what does this mean for me, well I’ve got to get to grips with the tools and do what I can to change things so that the “I” becomes “we”.  What’s more in the university sector the “we” is an expanded “we” – it’s not just staff that need to be involved.

Email = one way communication (why Tracy Williams is a superstar!)

It’s been an odd day – that probably deserves half a dozen blog posts on a range of different subjects.  However I thought I’d write a quick reminder about the problems of relying on email for communication, especially in terms of process management.

The key reminder is:

You can’t assume that because you’ve sent an email that it’s been read or even received.  Silence is not an answer – it’s silence.

An open doesn’t equate to a read, a click doesn’t equate to a read.

You can’t know an email has been delivered, you can’t know an email has been read.

I think in the case below the issue is the wrong email addresses being used but there are many reasons why a correctly addressed email may not reach an email account.  I’ve written more about this here.

A side learning point for me is:

Start from the other person’s point of view, aggressive posturing won’t help forge a connection – look for solutions, life is all about win-wins.

The background story:

Every year, usually in Feb, we attend the Hong Kong Law Fair – essentially a graduate recruitment fair organised by a group of the big law firms in Hong Kong.  This year we’ve already booked non-refundable flights, arranged and paid for our freight, arranged hotels and informed potential students that we’d be there.

Unfortunately late yesterday we found out that we don’t have a space at the exhibition.

I don’t really know what has happened, some things you just have to put down to bad luck.  It looks like a couple of critical emails went to the wrong email address – at least one email went to an email address ending .ac and another went to .ac.hk instead of .ac.uk  – however there may have been other reminders.

However it meant that this year we didn’t receive any requests or reminders for payment.  Bizarrely though, by chance, the temporary member of staff we had covering our vacant Exhibitions Co-ordinator role was in communication with the organisers, again by email, asking about venue, stand furniture, dates etc.

I should at this point say that the organisers are a group of volunteers drawn from the law companies.

So lets think about what’s going on as percieved by each side.

Our point of view: everything’s fine but we’re still awaiting some information and an invoice in order to arrange payment.

The organisers point of view: these people keep making requests but aren’t committing to paying and are ignoring us – we’ve got enough attendees in any case and we don’t need a headache.

The solution: I had to handle it this morning (as no one else was in the office) and thought it best to phone someone direct and talk through what had happened but as you can probably tell from my side learning points, I didn’t handle the conversation that well.  However despite my shortcomings Tracy Williams who is Head of Graduate Recruitment at Lovells in Hong Kong was extremely understanding and is on the case to see what can be done. With luck I’ll find out tomorrow morning.

Student conversion and the role of social web

I’ve read a few recent posts that have got me thinking about the role that different tools can play in the student conversion process. My starting point is the conversion funnel and the belief that I personally am not in control of how and where conversion conversations take place, nor what is said. All I can do is to try and influence the conversion to happen. To help me do this I have a range of tools at my disposal, including social web tools that can be deployed either on our site (to create a gated community of advocates) or on external sites (to create buzz).

Thinking in this way the issue becomes one of applying the right tools in the right ways at the right times to help shape the conversion funnel in the way I would like.

In doing this I think that there are two distinct purposes:

1) to recruit directly
2) to reinforce brand values with advocates

Different tools are obviously suited for different purposes. However I’d expect the conversations for potential students to mainly start outside my direct sphere of influence, unless they are actually responding to advertising – rare I know but it does happen!

There may then be some interaction with the University (probably via the website or driven by email marketing) but I’d imagine that potential students will still go elsewhere to verify that what they have been told by the University is correct, until they’ve paid their money and made their choice.

This is why the advocates are so important and why they need to be empowered to spread the brand messages. It’s also why we need to make it easy for them to do this.

Facebook news

Great post on squared peg highlighting the importance of brand protection across external media, specifically the HE sector and Facebook. I think it also shows some lessons as to how the HE sector is going to have to behave in the future.

In this case it would seem a company is setting up groups on Facebook with the possible intent of leading potential students to their own products. I don’t buy that this is malicious or likely to be damaging for students. It does however look to be a blatant commercial move.

I guess the real lesson here is think ahead and protect your brand. I guess it also shows the importance of having groups that can speak broadly for the sector and negotiate on the sector’s behalf – to point out when lines may be about to be crossed. In the UK the group approach has worked well in the past.

After all it’s not in a commercial company’s interest to fall out with significant players in the sector that its products are reviewing. Just think how damaging or positive a few well placed press releases from a global HE community might be, especially if the HE community is working together and chooses to adopt group tactics and best social media practice.

In this case I think an approach needs to be made quickly to College Prowler to understand their intentions and to point out the sector’s expectations.  (This will be a far better use of time than filling in spreadsheets.)  A potential solution might be joint admin rights on pages (nominated University admin as well as College Prowler nominated admin).

Interestingly yesterday I found out that my University now has a network on Facebook – don’t sound shocked – we’re a bit of an oddball and we started requesting one a few years ago. So, it’s relatively new, but I have no idea how old.

I also began to set up a newsfeed on Twitter however this isn’t as easy as it sounds for a federal university with no single source of news.  I’ll post more about how I’m working around this when I get some time.

Reminder to self – go back and check Brad’s Google Docs and maybe even follow a few people on Twitter !?!

BUILA at UEL

Today was the BUILA AGM. BUILA is which is the association for international office staff from UK universities. I’m not an international officer but I obviously need to keep on top of and international trends so I like to stay in touch with this organisation.

The AGM was held at the University of East London (UEL) which has an amazingly modern campus right on the river close to City Airport.  It’s so different from the institution I work at. I think that the only things that might be common are the three shared words in their titles and the fact that they are located in the same city. I’m simply not used to having rooms called the hot hatch and the fab pad with sleek computers and bright orange furniture.

I came home from London tonight to play volleyball. We won 3-0 by the way – hurrah! However it’s back to the East End of London tomorrow for the EdUKP conference. I imagine that most of the talk this year will be related to PBS (the points based system being introduced by the UK Border Agency) which doesn’t interest me in the slightest as our students don’t need visas. The other hot topic will be crisis management, especially after the events of the past week in Bangkok and Mumbai. I have a few Facebook friends whose statuses have given an interesting take on the situation in Bangkok while a colleague of mine is currently out in Mumbai.