Love is in the Cloud
Valentine’s Day 2014 gave us the opportunity to take a snap-shot of social media activity across education in both the UK and US and we were impressed. Not only were institutions embracing the idea of news-jacking something topical, but many did so with a strong grasp of what works so well now – real-time, photos, videos, and simply great creative ideas. Here’s a dozen red roses for you.
Real World Love
We’re not sure of the story behind this, but it’s great to see Middlesex University doing something intriguing in the real world and then share further in social media. An excellent way of showing love for their students.
Campus Love
We saw lots of examples of campuses featuring in social media Valentine’s stories. Roehampton University took the chance to show off its beautifully green South West London campus with a love-heart view. Not a bad idea considering that creative photos hold powerful stock in social media.
Stanford were sharing photos too – highlighting the love of tradition on their campus.
Loving Courses
Another bastion of US tradition, Harvard, reminded us all of its love of heritage with some insight into its library and arts courses. We’re not sure what Ms Woodhouse would have made of being part of a Twitter news-jack though!
Meanwhile, the University of Nottingham have been very creative with subject imagery to remind everyone that despite all the ’employability’ pressures out there it is important to choose a course you truly love.
Loving Feedback
Leeds Metropolitan University undertook a real-world exercise to understand what their students really loved, or didn’t! Universities need to do more of this and sharing the output through social media is a good way of opening up the conversation.
We also saw a hashtag sweeping our feet away on Valentine’s Day, this time in FE, with more feedback being sought via #sweptoffmyFE – after all, a good relationship needs input from both partners.
Sharing the Love
We enjoyed the Higher Education collaboration taking place at 3pm (EST) via #strategycar with institutions sharing some great ideas, mainly with a Valentine’s theme. They helped us to identify a few of the examples on here so thanks @alainawiens and friends!
Love and Money
A great example of mixing the best in social media technology with Valentine’s Day was this from #OSWEGOlove as their fundraising efforts reminded them to ‘love a donor’, all hosted on their Tagboard.
Love Takeover
Many of the best Higher Education websites now are content-led, with home pages regularly taken over by the latest news. You have to love this home page on February 14th. More websites need to be this striking, relevant and simple.
Love Source
It’s so easy now to source some volunteers, grab a camera and do something refreshing. Social Media provides a simple way of then sharing. We loved how Western Washington students gave out both hugs and shrugs, and filmed it all for us. It’s always good to see the human face of a campus. Click the video here to see the results:
Loving Creativity
Finally, we have to acknowledge the creative genius of the #MinerNation representing over 50,000 alumni, some of whom fell in love with each other whilst at college. Never has a B minor been so positive!
To find out much more about The Future Index, the HE marketing inspiration we are collecting and how it could be of use to you, please have a look at our main site, complete with lots more samples for you to take away and use. Simply click here.
And, if you have your own work of inspiration then please do share it with us. We’re often on the conference stage and we’d love to show off all the brilliant work out there! Simply email jim.tudor@thefutureink.com
You can now stay ahead and follow this blog to receive the latest posts immediately by email. Simply scroll down a little and click on ‘follow this blog’.
