A new Home for the Arts in Sheffield

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Early last year, Sheffield Hallam announced a long-term lease on Sheffield’s former Head Post Office, a Grade II listed building that held many memories for local people. The building had sadly fallen out of use for some years, and was now in need of some serious work.

The renovated building would be home to students from the University’s Institute of Arts, and they would be making and doing loads of creative and interesting projects in the space. The move was clearly a great opportunity to use our communications work to raise Sheffield Hallam’s profile and engage members of the public.

Sheffield's old Head Post Office

Sheffield’s old Head Post Office

We started the planning process by identifying some key aims that would drive our approach. They were:

“Communicate Sheffield Hallam’s sympathy for the heritage of the building and surrounding area, and highlight our sustainable approach to our presence in the city region.”

“Celebrate the Sheffield Institute of Arts and promote the outstanding teaching that is currently delivered by the Institute.”

And the move into the space would clearly have a positive impact on the student experience, helping to create a sense of community cohesion among our art and design students.

So, with some objectives in place, we started to throw ideas around for a social media campaign. The concept that really stuck with us was the idea of the University creating a new home for the arts in the city – a space that wasn’t just for students but, taking into account the public gallery and café, would be for the people of Sheffield.

And that’s why we settled on #HomeForTheArts as a way of aggregating social content. We knew that we wanted lots of visual content, and that Instagram would play an important role for us.

We were fortunate enough to have a brilliant photographer working with us, documenting the whole process. India Hobson, who we’d worked with on other projects, was commissioned to photograph the restoration process at regular intervals, gaining access to all areas of the building.

The Head Post Office interior, by India Hobson

The Head Post Office interior, by India Hobson

The next thing we did was seek out a few Instagrammers who were interested in architecture in the Sheffield area. We found a few, and messaged them to invite them to our very first Instameet. In the end, we took around 12 Instagrammers on a tour of the building, co-ordinated with our partners M3, who were overseeing the restoration.

Well in advance of the tour, we sent them a brief, which included when and where to meet,  what to expect, what they would and wouldn’t be able to get access to, and what the hashtag for the restoration was. This ensured that we’d be able to aggregate their content, share it and help develop a narrative about the building’s restoration.

https://twitter.com/tashbright/status/647305870871785472

We also did our first Periscope, broadcasting from inside the building and the rooftop, which has incredible views of the city.

By inviting a group of enthusiastic photographers on a tour of our building, we reached new audiences, and our Instagrammers helped us communicate our key messages about the building.

The Instameet (and subsequent tours for other groups) allowed us to:

  • announce the restoration project to new audiences
  • develop a bit of a buzz online about the building
  • create a feeling of goodwill towards our sympathetic treatment of the building
  • give local people a sense of ownership of the space

https://twitter.com/faveplaces/status/652567620219215873

It also created an opportunity to talk longer-term about heritage: for the building, and for the Institute of Arts. Again, we had a narrative, and we used behind-the-scenes photos of the restoration and archive shots of the building to talk about our resurrection of the building for arts and culture in the city.

And, in terms of measurement and evaluation, engagement was the key metric. We were looking for shares, likes and replies – and hopefully those replies would be opportunities to further develop the narrative around our role in the city.

Outcomes for the campaign? Well, we have social media users acting as advocates for the University, talking about us restoring an iconic building to create a home for arts and culture in the city. But the real impact will be felt once we start to use the building for public events like the degree show and Catalyst Festival.

I hope the groundwork that was done with the #HomeForTheArts campaign means that people still feel a connection with the building, albeit one that’s shaped as much by the work our art and design students do in the building as it is the rich heritage of the building, and the people who used to work there.

Joe Field, social media manager
@joemcafield

 

#SocMedHE15: starting the conversation about social media for learning

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Long post alert! This post originally appeared in the University’s showcase magazine, Review, as a full-length feature of about 800 words. But it’s a really interesting piece about a fantastic social media conference, and it’s worth sharing here.

In December, a team of educational developers from Sheffield Hallam organised the first ever conference on the use of social media for learning in higher education.

The Social Media for Learning in Higher Education 2015 Conference featured over 60 speakers from eight different countries, and from 35 different higher education institutions, and other digital learning organisations.

Helen Rodger, senior lecturer in digital capability, was part of the conference organising committee. She says there was a clear need for a sector-wide conversation about the impact and application of social media on the global learning landscape. And the team were confident that Sheffield Hallam was the right institution to start this conversation.

She says: “The boundaries of social media are changing all the time. More tools and opportunities are emerging, and behaviours are adapting. It’s important that educators recognise and engage with the impact that social literacies have on business and society, learn to harness the power of social media, while remaining mindful of the wider challenges.

“We had three major themes for the conference: the changing learning landscape, the applied use of social media in teaching and learning, and the challenges faced by individuals and institutions in responding to changes. But, in the end, what really mattered was that people, who were all desperate to talk about it, came together to share their experiences of social media in learning, to become a community and begin the conversation.”

Education consultant and Inside Higher Ed blogger Eric Stoller delivered the opening keynote, offering his predictions for ways that UK universities could harness the power of social media tools.

A conference visitor using virtual reality technology

A conference visitor trying out Samsung’s virtual reality technology

Eric says: “Social media will continue to be used by universities for marketing and communications in 2016. However, an emphasis on the student experience will drive more use of social media by areas like student services, academic advising, career development, financial literacy, and mental health.

“The greatest areas of impact will be in career development – using social media to enhance employability – and as part of a digital identity component of a university’s digital capability scheme.

“I think there are going to be more individual administrators who start to use social media for student success and engagement. Marketing, communications, and PR are already using digital channels, but the real breakthrough will be when student services operations work in tandem via social media to support the student journey once on campus.

“In the US, there are scores of institutions using social media to enhance teaching and learning. In the UK, it’s a bit less consistent. I know that Sue Beckingham at Sheffield Hallam has done a lot of work with digital identity and LinkedIn for teaching and learning.

“Social media adoption in higher education has been much slower than in the business world. When universities realised that social media could be used for engagement, support, teaching, learning, and community-building, that’s when things started to change. Digital channels enhance the work of academics and educators, and in 2015 and beyond, today’s student needs to be fluent in using social media for the purposes of employability and career development.”

Helen agrees that things are moving quickly for higher education institutions, and that staff also need to be digitally fluent, but also to be flexible and responsive.

She says: “As practitioners, we’re surfing a very large wave at the moment, and it’s one that can change direction at any time. Sharing best practice and learning from each other are central to us adapting to the opportunity.

“The thing that really came across from the 2015 conference was the focus on the development of digital capabilities, particularly in the area of managing professional identities in digital spaces.”

Based on last year’s success, and the need to keep up with the constantly changing landscapes of education and social media, the 2016 conference is already shaping up to be bigger and more focused, to pick up on the significant related issues faced by higher education.

“We’ve had a huge amount of positive feedback from presenters and delegates,” Helen says. “Including lots of feedback from Sheffield Hallam staff who were involved. Overwhelmingly, the message was how great it was to be a part of this leading edge discussion, and how it made them feel proud to be a part of this University. The next step for us is to evaluate the conference to understand more about what why social media for learning is important, and this focus informs our strategies for the future.

“The conference had a huge impact in terms of reputation. Sheffield Hallam University is beginning to be known internationally for leading a critical discourse about the use of social media for learning in higher education. And that’s something everyone at Sheffield Hallam can have a role in.”

Want to get involved in #SocMedHE16? Submissions are now being accepted for the 2016 Social Media for Learning in Higher Education conference. And you can follow @SocMedHE on Twitter for more information.

Joe Field, social media manager

Graduation 2015: a strategic approach to social

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People sometimes ask me about our ‘social media strategy’. The truth is that we don’t have one – nor do we need one.

We do have a communications strategy which covers the strategic use of social media to raise profile and manage reputation.

And that’s the right approach. We don’t have a ‘telephone strategy’, or an ’email strategy’. When it comes to social media, we have content strategies, guidelines and a range of different functions that we provide with social media tools.

What we do with social media directly supports our communications strategy. I’ll use the example of our Graduation 2015 campaign to illustrate how.

For two weeks in November, our students took to the stage in Sheffield’s City Hall, shaking hands with Professor Robert Winston and picking up their certificates.

#throwback #graduation #shugrad #proud #sheffield #sheffieldhallam

A photo posted by Camille (@camilleb236) on

It’s a key milestone in the student experience, and a real opportunity to demonstrate the sense of belonging – or brand affinity – among our student and alumni communities. And, by involving those communities in our social media campaign, we had the opportunity to show how vibrant the sense of belonging among students and alumni is to a range of external audiences.

We also wanted to use social media to enhance the experience of graduates during the fortnight of celebrations. So, working with graduate Tom Stayte and his innovative SquareShare social printing service, we gave them a reason to engage with it. By posting their photos to Twitter or Instagram, and tagging them ‘#SHUgrad’, they could get free printed copies, with details of our Alumni Connect service on each print.

On our own channels, we focused on the graduates themselves, ‘doorstepping’ them at the City Hall, and asking them what they loved most about their time at Sheffield Hallam.

As well as promoting engagement with #SHUgrad at the City Hall, we interacted with social media users in real time, offering personalised responses with a view to deepening engagement as conversations developed.

One of the key themes in our communications strategy is our role in the city region. We hold our graduation ceremonies in Sheffield’s City Hall, right in the heart of the city centre. By focusing on visual, student-led content, in and around the City Hall, we demonstrated our civic pride, and our role in providing education, skills and employability in the region.

Liam and my graduation on Friday the 20th! Had such an amazing day and we were so proud of one another 🙂 #shugrad

A photo posted by Kirsty O'Brien (@obrien_marie) on

Lastly, we communicated the University’s values around equality, diversity, and inclusion, by including a diverse range of students – from a range of backgrounds and academic areas – in the campaign.

The #SHUgrad campaign is a great example of a university using social media for community management. Teams from the university’s marketing, communications and alumni functions worked with students from the start, involving them in the campaign (by getting them to create the graduation video) and interacting with them throughout graduation fortnight.

That approach is fundamental to social media at Hallam: we want to show our audiences that we use social media to talk to, listen to, and get feedback from, student and alumni communities. And, by encouraging social media users to post about graduation from their own accounts (and share our posts) we reached new audiences.

Here are the stats: conversations about#SHUgrad led to 6,871,453 brand impressions, and 11,339 engagements with the @sheffhallamuni Twitter account alone. And the #SHUgrad hashtag trended in Sheffield every day for the whole two weeks.

On a personal level, it was also a really good example of teams from across the University working together, with students, on a key bit of University business. And it’s opened the door to even more collaborative, engaging approaches to social media at Hallam.

Joe Field, social media manager

Content Content Content

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A few months ago I read an article by the economist Will Hutton about people in the west reaching the point of ‘peak stuff’. In the article he described how consumer demand for shiny new things seemed to be losing its appeal as we’ve all accumulated so much stuff in recent years that we’re unlikely to ever be able to use. Our kitchen drawers, cupboards, wardrobes, cellars and attics are bulging with stuff that we either bought for ourselves somewhere or perhaps were given at Christmas. Or maybe it was a birthday. Actually, I’m not really sure, it’s just there, unused, in a drawer…

peak stuff (Photograph Paper Boat CreativeGetty Images)

It hit home for me. I recently moved house and had a significant clear-out which involved no less than five trips to the local recycling centre in which I experienced the catharsis that can only be achieved when launching the disembodied parts of a knackered but well-used bed-frame into a huge skip. Western society has finally reached a point where we have admitted we have no room for any more stuff.

More recently, many online experts have begun to agree that we are approaching ‘peak content.’ There is now so much content online, it’s almost impossible to gauge the sheer magnitude of what’s available. The ITunes App Store now has 1.5million apps, and there are about 4billion YouTube video views every day.  Companies are creating and publishing thousands of pieces of content every year, and it’s increasing.

But as more and more content is produced, there remains only a finite amount that we can watch, process, and share. A recent Trackmaven research study from February shows that as content creation has increased, our engagement levels have dropped. As content competes for our attention, demand for better quality content increases. There’s too much to consume.

audience-with-3d-glasses

Getting someone to watch a 20 second film on Twitter from start to finish is tough and in this highly competitive market it means that brands can no longer get away with using social just to post a few words about their products or services. Changes to Twitter and Facebook have allowed embedded video, and the surge in popularity of visual media enabled social channels like Instagram and Snapchat have created new opportunities for brand advertising that in the past only television and cinema could provide, but with the added ability to measure engagement through comments, shares and likes.

So, as content creators, what can we do in this competitive environment to make sure we’re creating the kinds of content that people want to see? There are four things that stand out for me. There are more of course, and you may disagree, but I think they’re a good starting point for thinking about a strategy for creating content

  • Planning – create a content plan, an editorial calendar (or both)
  • Focus on quality not quantity
  • People like stories – create content that tells a story about you, your brand or product
  • Think about your audience – take time to understand who they are and what they want

And finally, the bit that people sometimes forget before moving onto the next thing – evaluation. Evaluate and measure whether content worked. Did you want your content to do something, change a behaviour, influence thinking, or just encourage traffic to a website? Did it do what you wanted? If not, why not?

skip-hire-malton

If you don’t take this simple step, you might as well just take your shiny new content down to your local recycling centre and launch it into a huge skip.

Ally Mogg, head of news and PR
@allymogg

Instagram takeover: letting students do the work

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For a week in March 2016, we gave control of Sheffield Hallam’s Instagram account to the SHUinsiders – a team of seven students who blog and post about student life in Sheffield. This post is about how we did it, what happened as a result, and what we learned from doing it.

I’d been thinking about doing a student takeover of the University’s Instagram account for a while, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, our follower growth had plateaued at two or three new followers per day. Secondly, putting students in the frame is at the heart of our approach to Instagram, and giving them the reins seemed like a great way of extending that. The challenge was finding the right students to do it.

Having worked with the SHUinsiders for a few months, and having got to know them as individuals, it felt like the time was right to take the plunge. I work with Helen Horton in student marketing on everything to do with the Insiders, so we got our heads together and made plans for a week-long takeover.

We started by floating the idea with the students, asking them how comfortable they felt with it. Overwhelmingly, they were very keen. We discussed the kind of content they might post, and the logistics of making it work. And we picked a week that worked for them, and for our social media content plans.

I put together a brief, and posted it in our private Facebook group – we use the group to manage and plan all of our activity with them. They had time to ask questions, and talk things through with each other, before we started the takeover. This was really important: if they hadn’t had time to chew things over and kick ideas around together, it would have been a different experience for them, and for our audience on Instagram.

The plan was very simple: a different student would post from the account each day. They would post a student’s-eye-view of life in Sheffield, and show what it’s like to be a student at Sheffield Hallam.

The takeover coincided with an open day, so we got Clarissa, Saturday’s SHUinsider, to post updates from the open day, as well as her own insights into life in the Steel City. Another SHUinsider, Jamilya, was on Erasmus exchange in Austria – a great bit of fortuity that we incorporated into the takeover.

This week, Hallam's Instagram account has been taken over by the #SHUinsiders – a team of student bloggers from the uni. Today, it's Jamilya (@jama_aa) a second year Events Management student! At the moment I'm on Erasmus exchange program in Austria at Kufstein University of applied science. Didn't really know what my first post should be about, so decided to go with the first thing that we explored in Kufstein. On our second day here we decided to walk to that beautiful lake with other Erasmus students. Most of them are from Europe: Netherlands, Slovakia, Lithuania, Turkey, England, Germany, but there are also some from Mexico and Morocco. I always enjoyed travelling and meeting new people from different countries and Erasmus exchange is a perfect opportunity to do so. Not sure if every Hallam student can apply for it, but if you study at SBS you definitely can! #shuinsiders #loveshu #erasmus #fhkufstein

A photo posted by #WeAreHallam (@sheffhallamuni) on

I changed the account password every night, in preparation for the next day (we briefed them in advance about what it would be on their day), and I changed the account bio to explain what was going on. The Insiders had some boilerplate text to paste at the beginning of each post, so it was clear who they were, and they included the #SHUinsiders tag in every post.

Most of them tagged their own accounts in each post as well. We didn’t ask them to do that, but it was really nice that they did. Generally, people are interested in other people, and making social content about people is always good.

This week, Hallam's Instagram account has been taken over by the #SHUinsiders – a team of student bloggers from the uni. Today, it's John, a first year Film Production Student! It's no secret that Sheffield has an exciting and varied musical history, as well as being home to a myriad of interesting people. Pictured above are newly wedded couple Alan and Donna Smyth, outside their studio, '2Fly'. As part of a uni project, I recently got to meet them, subsequently making a documentary about what they do. Alan is an accomplished music producer, with quite an impressive portfolio of artists under his belt. He is the man responsible for producing the Arctic Monkeys first album, "Whatever People Say I Am, That's what I'm not", as well as lending his hand to Pulp, Milburn and Reverend and the Makers alongside countless others. His passion for the Sheffield music industry is certainly palpable, and I'd encourage any aspiring local musicians and bands to get in touch with him via their Facebook page, as he is still producing to this day. His tip for who to keep an eye on this year are local band " I Set the Sea on Fire", and I have to agree, they're amazing, check them out!

A photo posted by #WeAreHallam (@sheffhallamuni) on

So, to recap, we wanted to increase the number of followers on our Instagram account. We did that. Our followers grew from 2,747 to 2,833 over the seven days of the takeover. We also wanted to raise the profile of the #SHUinsiders campaign. Although we don’t have stats on reach, the hashtag ‘#SHUinsiders’ was engaged with 819 times over the week. This suggests that users were clicking on the tag to explore other content.

And all of the students reported a small increase in followers on their own accounts, along with lots of new likes to their existing content. Finally, we wanted to demonstrate our willingness to talk to, listen to, and work with, our student community. It was really important to us that the takeover showed this, because so much of the work we do on social media is about developing and enhancing a sense of belonging among our student audiences.

The fact that there were 1,706 engagements (and counting) with the takeover posts, along with the growth in followers, shows the positivity that people responded with. And, anecdotally, all of the feedback we’ve had to the takeover has been really positive.

Is there anything I’d do differently? Possibly, but not because anything went badly. Giving the students the confidence to go out and be themselves was key. They needed a little bit of encouragement at first, but that’s completely understandable – it’s a big responsibility.

Instagram is the perfect channel for a student takeover, but I’m not sure I’d ever hand over a corporate Twitter account in the same way. There’s too much customer service happening in that space.

Lastly, the important question now (and maybe one which you’d be willing to answer in the comments) is ‘what next’?

Joe Field, social media manager

TL;DR version:

  • takeovers on Instagram are fun
  • planning is critical
  • so’s talking it over face-to-face, before you take the plunge
  • keep it unfiltered and authentic

 

What’s this blog for?

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When I first started in the role of social media manager at Sheffield Hallam last summer, I was overwhelmed by the positive responses I had from colleagues. The creation of the role demonstrated that this was a university that was taking social seriously and, for colleagues in the organisation, there was someone they could call on for help and advice.

And that’s what my role is about: helping people around the University do social well. Similarly, that’s what this blog is for. It’s somewhere that, as a University community, we can share thoughts, ideas, experiences and resources, so that we can learn from each other.

So it makes sense that posts won’t just come from me. Posts on this blog will come from a wide range of contributors: academics who are using social platforms for research, support teams who are using them to engage with students and provide services, and students who are using social tools to publish their own work and develop their own networks. We’ll share case studies of community management projects, promotional campaigns and approaches to teaching and learning.

This blog is also intended to be a useful resource. There will be guidelines, practical how-to guides, and links to other useful resources. If there’s something you’d like to see here, or if you’d like to contribute, get in touch.

Another important question is: who is this blog for? It’s primarily for Sheffield Hallam staff, in support of their work. But – in the interests of being social and sharing – all of the content on this blog is accessible to everyone. It’s important that we contribute to the knowledge economy, and show the world how committed we are to using social media to do good things.

Joe Field, social media manager
@joemcafield

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