Swindon College regional meeting report

Our Swindon College regional meeting was a great success, with around 40 people attending and some travelling considerable distances to discuss aspects of digital marketing.

Mark Knight came from South & City College Birmingham to talk about the digital comms campaign he ran to raise awareness of the new college created by a merger last year. The campaign referenced the TV programme “The Only Way is Essex” to catch attention, and Mark candidly discussed the pros and cons of this approach as well as the outcomes of the college’s social media campaigns. Alongside a huge amount of interest and trending, some of the notoriously negative aspects of social media were also experienced, and the college had to find ways of dealing with these.

Lee Parker, from Bedford College, gave a good overview of the college’s digital comms campaign last year, looking at the challenges and targets of each platform. He talked us through the college’s analysis of each platform, the targets set and how far they were met, with a focus on making good use of web data and Google Analytics.

Exeter College’s website needed a radical overhaul when Roselle Brenchley started at the college in 2009. As she explained, it’s been quite a long process developing the new site, but the planning and research involved was vital to give the college the site it wanted, which launched in November 2011 but is continually being evaluated and developed.

All our speakers won FE First Awards in 2012 and their presentations gave rise to lots of discussion and questions on resources for digital marketing, the pitfalls and opportunities it offers, and working with staff and SLT on developing good practice in social media.

Thanks to SwindonCollege for providing the venue and lunch: we are really grateful for the college’s support.

Feedback to the day included:

• Extremely interesting content and very relevant as a result of being specifically for colleges. We have lots of jumping-off points for discussion back at our own college now!
•  Interesting to find out abut other colleges’ resources/staffing especially for digital marketing.
•  As always, a very informative and well organised event which confirmed ideas already discussed that I would like to implement.
•  Location good, parking great, discussion and presentations very good.
•  Really good inspirational speakers, good content and ides to take away.