Nelson Croom's Blog

London 2012 is missing a social media trick

Anna Faherty, author of 5 Nelson Croom courses, explains why the London Olympic Games Organising Committee are missing out on the opportunity that Social Media presents.

by Anna Faherty

For most people, their social media strategy is either non-existent or based on strict rules about what their organisation says they can or can’t say. But if you’re organising one of the biggest sporting events in the world, you need to think more creatively than that. You also need a lot of people and a lot of time to make the most of social media around your event.

Almost a year before last weekend’s US Super Bowl XLVI in Indianapolis, marketing company Raidious set-up a city-centre office to manage the event’s social-media strategy. Packed with 50 employees and student volunteers working around the clock, they then got blogging, tweeting and Facebooking.

Of course the social media command centre was sure to be sending out messages to market both the Super Bowl and the city in which it is taking place. But it also monitored the use of 300 keywords across different social media. If someone spotted a question or concern they could respond to, or a fun experience they could share, they got to work. Plus they also created new content – sourcing photos, videos and stories to share on their Highlights blog.

With our own major sporting event just around the corner, perhaps London 2012 can learn a thing or two from Super Bowl XLVI. So far, we’re not doing so well. Despite encouraging competitors to make this the ‘Twitter games’, the London Olympic Games Organising Committee (LOGOC) didn’t win itself any favours when it recently announced that anybody volunteering at the games would be banned from using social media – hardly the way to get people talking, sharing and promoting the games online.

LOGOC’s approach might not be so surprising if you take a look back at the 2010 Winter Olympics. In an article for Mashable, blogger and social media marketer Teresa Basich says most of the Twitter action for Vancouver 2010 was ‘pushing’ agreed messages out, rather than engaging with audiences in any real sense. Perhaps if LOGOC heeded Basich’s advice to listen to people, connect with them and foster links between people with shared passions things might be different. Because, as a recent article in Forbes magazine confirms, social media today isn’t about broadcasting, it’s about meeting like-minded individuals, participating in meaningful conversations and collaborating to make a difference. That’s true for LOGOC. And it’s true for you. Don’t miss the trick…

A big change for Imago

by Andrew Turner

 

Everything thing we do at Nelson Croom is based in our technology system Imago. Imago is constantly working to ensure every course is accessible, every report works and every learner can get the most from each course.

On the 13th of January Imago got a facelift and we have to say we are very happy with the results, she has never looked fresher or younger.

All in all we there are four great things to come out of this facelift, three which are immediately visible to all, and one, perhaps the most important, which is not:

1. A fresher more intuitive navigation panel– You will notice the menu on the left hand navigation panel has changed., In response to user feedback we’ve made the menu more intuitive and modern looking
2. A new Imago Manager – We have fundamentally redesigned Imago ManagerDon’t panic though, every report or tool  is still there, they are just presented in a different way. Instead of one long list down the page, the headings are attractive tabs across the top. When you click on them the list of headings appear in a left hand column. Select the appropriate heading and the reports and tools will appear. (See below)



3. A more attractive out of the box gateway page – So if clients don’t want to customise their gateway page we’ve made the out of the box version nicer to look at.
4. HTM5 – this is the change you won’t see but it is a major step to ensure continued compatibility with all browsers, the possibility of more exciting interactive design (without resorting to flash) and easier implementation of accessible features.

These are all important steps in keeping our technology current and up to date. If you have any questions or would like any more information, we’d love to hear from you.

SYP – An opportunity through social media

by Andrew Turner

 

A friend who I met whilst doing my Masters in Publishing at Kingston University recently contacted me about the opportunity to join the committee of the Society of Young Publishers (SYP). The SYP was established in 1949 and is open to anyone in publishing or a related trade – or who is hoping to be soon, catering especially for those with fewer than ten years experience.

The opening was to join this friend, Tina Mories, on the committee as an Events Coordinator. The SYP hold monthly events, for members and non members, which aim to focus on interesting topics from the world of publishing which can help those in, and looking to get in to, the industry.

I am extremely happy to be on the committee and with the opportunity it gives me to help those looking to get in to publishing and also expand my own network. This put me in mind of our recently launched course Social Media for Professionals which stresses the importance of social media as a way of maintaining your network as a whole. Not only is this new role a great way for me to network, I wouldn’t have known about it if it wasn’t for the network I already had. This network is one which I maintain primarily through facebook and twitter. I did meet Tina through my Masters but we maintained our friendship online, speaking through facebook and twitter, as everyone from the course does. In fact even when we do meet for a drink and a catch up, we organise it through our facebook group.

This group does more than just enable us to organise a drunken catch up. We tell each other about job opportunities ask advice on things in our work life and discuss books, films and the publishing world in general. Not once did we sit down and plan this group, or plan to communicate so frequently through social media, rather it was just the natural way to maintain contact with a like minded group of individuals. Without it I do wonder how many of us would have stayed in contact with each other, and how I would have maintained my knowledge of the broader publishing world rather than just having a focus on my interests and my job. In fact, I wonder how these relationships were maintained before Social Media.

You may shout out - through phone calls, emails and ACTUALLY meeting people. I still do these things but, for me, they do not offer the same constant access to my network, and potential network, as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn do. And it isn’t just the young workforce either; recent Nielson figures reveal that the 50+ demographic are driving the growth of Facebook and Twitter.

For me this is a realisation that whilst networking is possible without an online presence, your network isn’t complete until you have one.

Social Media: the Golden Goose

With the launch of our new course, Social Media for Professionals, David Croom takes a look at how the financial world values the world of social media.

 

by David Croom

 

Social media is the new Golden Goose of Wall Street. Witness the crazy performance of LinkedIn’s stock market debut last week. Launched at $45, the shares more than doubled in the first day’s trading, valuing the business at $8.8 billion or about 23 times the 2011 revenue, assuming first quarter sales are maintained through the rest of the year.

Last year the business did grow briskly, doubling its revenue to $243.1 million, but it makes very little profit: $3.4 million last year and it does not expect to make any money this year.

Facebook Inc., the world’s largest social network, would be valued at about $94 billion using LinkedIn’s multiple. Is it all mad or is there some logic to these extraordinary valuations?

LinkedIn is actually valued quite conservatively when viewed on a value per user basis, according to a PwC report, with a multiple below that of Virgin Media, Facebook and ITV.

However, value is notoriously difficult to extract from users. Murdoch paid $580m for MySpace in 2005 and grew its user base about 500% but he could not get sufficient value from it. By April this year he was looking to sell it for about $100m.

So how do investors approach valuing an internet company? A successful track record of monetization, either at the company or in its management, is helpful.  But investors also need to dig deeper into how the business works.

How much time do people spend on the website? Many people use Facebook as an entry point for the internet, in much the same way they use Google. They spend almost as much time on Facebook as they do watching TV and advertisers want exposure to that user base.

Does that support a value of close to $9 billion for LinkedIn? Let’s watch over the next year. The Golden Goose needs to lay a lot of eggs.

Create more than a splash

by Hamish Long

 

Until a few years ago, if a client had more than one or two courses, we would usually create within our Imago system, a customised splashpage where learners could find out how the courses work and login to the gateway of courses. Once logged in they would be taken to the customised gateway page where they could find out about the content of the courses and access them.

Following development, clients can now have a website template built in Imago and they can add pages and content themselves - the website structure automatically updates. There are hardly any restrictions to template design and layout. We are finding that these websites are being used in all sorts of ways - from elearning intranets, to direct selling.

 

 
 

We also now offer a more personalised experience for the learner - encouraging them to come back often. The above prototype example shows a "my account" area where users can update their details, and a "my courses" area which gives details of the courses the learner has already registered for. There is also a "Top 5 courses" panel which shows what's popular with other learners. The number of these types of features is growing all the time.

So, what are you waiting for? Don't just make a splash - take a bomb dive from the top board!

Selling the Benefits of Online Content

by Alan Nelson

 

I read with interest this week that medical students at the University of Leeds are being given i-phones, providing access to medical textbooks online. The idea is that as they work away from the campus, in hospitals and GP surgeries, they will be able to access reference material online.

There has been much comment recently about professionals increasingly defining themselves by their competencies rather than their extensive knowledge, and this seems to chime with that trend. The i-phone won’t help them develop skills and judgement but it will enable them to work effectively without having yet learnt the vast array of facts that doctors end up storing in their heads.

This will be watched carefully by content providers. Textbook publishers have struggled over the last 15 years to develop significant revenue streams from their online content. Indeed Thomson sold its textbook business, Thomson Learning, because it had not been able to migrate towards the online renewable revenues that its parent company valued.

The main obstacle to this is the absence of a marketplace. Selling access to online content to students has been problematic. If a textbook is adopted as required reading on a course, a fairly high percentage of students will buy it. Ten years ago, the take up was as high as 60% for students on business, economics, science and engineering courses and just over 40% for humanities courses. These numbers have been hit as the web has provided a marketplace for students to trade their second hand books. Publishers have responded to this by jacking up their prices and that has created a vicious circle. So you can understand why the publishers are so keen to grow their online revenues.

However, with a growing belief among people of student age that content should be free, it has not proved possible to create a model where each student buys content and doesn’t immediately share it with their peers. Universities buy online research content centrally for their library, but all attempts to persuade them to foot the bill for online textbooks have been stone-walled – they see it as an attempt to transfer a student cost to them.

So this move by Leeds University may be more significant than it at first seems. Perhaps if publishers can persuade the academics of the reason why mobile content is required – students being off in GP practices and hospitals – they will have more luck.

That said, perhaps if they had spent more time thinking through their benefit statements rather than showing off about how clever their technology was, they would have got there sooner, or perhaps they just had to wait until Apple invented the i-phone!    

Internet Explorer 9 today

by Jacqui Nelson

You may already have read that today Microsoft release the BETA version of IE9. It probably won’t affect many of you for a while yet but at Nelson Croom it’s really important that we are ready when IE9 released fully.

Because our technology, Imago, is a hosted solution we’re updating it all the time, and when a new browser is released we are interested for two reasons. 1. We need to make sure that Imago, all its features (and there are 1,000s) and all the courses built upon it, work with the new software and 2. We want to explore what new possibilities the new browser presents for our learners.

IE9, we are pleased to hear, is likely to be about faster speeds, better graphics and being more social. Our online learning’s always been about learning from each other, as much as it is about learning from the experts, so ‘more social’ suits us.

We love the idea that new browsers will play video and animations without the use of flash, because we know that so many of our learners can’t see flash based content, and that’s only getting worse with the ever increasing popularity of our itoys. 

We’ll have to wait for further information about the full extent of the new functionality but the word is that IE9 is going to be major step forward for Microsoft.  We’ll be ready for it when it comes and we’ll monitor closely what proportion of our over 100,000 learners turn to it, and when...but realistically we don’t expect to see vast usage for a couple of years.

The end of University as we know it?

by Andrew Turner

I’ve spent 4 of the past 5 years in higher education and I’m a real advocate, so you can imagine how dismayed I was to read in The Guardian that universities are “Full” and will “turn away record number of students”.  This shortage of places is before clearing has even opened and means that many people will be disappointed and miss out on the University experience. 

However Bill Gates may have the answer. Unsurprisingly it is in technology that the Microsoft mogul see’s the saviour of higher education, but despite his bias the option does seem viable.  By moving more material online and offering it through e-learning more students can access course material and Universities can become more flexible.   He’s billing it as a way of reducing university bills – a big issue in the US also, but it could also increase the number of university places. For Bill Gates, “College, except for the parties, needs to be less place-based”. This may be true but we’re really going to need to work on the parties’ angle.

Disruptive technology that benefits everyone

by Alan Nelson

I read with interest last week that in the US sales of ebooks on Amazon have outstripped those of hardbacks, with the online retailer now selling 180 ebooks for every 100 hardbacks. This scares the hell out of publishers who have never been good at reacting positively to new innovations.

What is today termed disruptive technology has echoes in the past. The reaction 75 years ago to Penguin releasing the first paperbacks was equally hostile. So it’s appropriate that the Penguin boss, John Makinson, should be one the few publishing luminaries who is reacting positively.

Ebooks have been around for a while but the success of the Kindle reader has led to take off. The new iPad, with its superior ibooks app looks set to be an even greater catalyst.

In our world of online professional development, there are parallels too. Many of our clients and partners are concerned about the impact of online courses on existing face to face provision. Will people still come? I have to admit that I am never very sympathetic for two reasons:

1. I don’t really care much - in the end people will get what they want. If they find it more convenient to study for qualifications and stay up to date once qualified, by engaging with well prepared online material then that is what should be provided.
2. It doesn’t happen – our experience is that attendance at face to face events is not affected at all by online provision. Those that enjoy physical events where they can meet and interact with their peers, continue to attend, but others, who never went in the first place, start to engage online. Overall participation goes up.

So I was interested to read the detail of the story about Amazon sales of ebooks. Have they cannibalised sales of hardbacks? Is it the end for printed novels. No - far from it. Sale of hardbacks in the US – where these statistic comes from – are up 22%.

Disciples of Sisyphus or 21st Century Professionals?

by Alan Nelson

I read with interest Charles Jennings’ recent article, Less is more: A different approach to L&D in a world awash with information. I had been alerted to this author a while back when Jacqui returned from an e-Learning Network Event enthusing about his presentation.

Jennings central theme then as now is that the way professionals operate is changing. He highlights the remarkable rate of expansion of stuff you might expect a professional to know, citing as evidence the work of Andreas Weigend, former chief scientist at Amazon.com, who in May 2009 wrote in the Harvard Business Review,

“In 2009, more data will be generated by individuals than in the entire history of mankind through 2008.”

Getting professionally trained and then staying up to date is an increasingly Sisyphean challenge. Our expectations are changing though. Whereas it used to be the case that a professional could be expected to know most of what was needed to work in their chosen field, we now realise that in many areas that has become nigh on impossible and so a greater emphasis is being placed on having the information available: knowing where to find the answer, rather than just knowing it.

How much of this is driven by the expansion of knowledge and how much is due to the role technology has played in putting the answers within easy reach, I don’t know, but I am sure that Jennings is right to argue that it has significant implications for professional education, and of course for online learning providers.

This idea appeals to me instinctively – I’ve never much liked the anorak approach to professionalism. Most of the time we don’t need the world’s expert in any case, but we do expect a basic level of competence. And that requires more than just knowledge and information. If you put me in a doctor’s surgery and gave me access to the most extensive and user friendly reference resource imaginable, I’d still be a rubbish doctor. I’d be no better in a local authority benefits office. I agree that I wouldn’t need to know every detail of the benefits system, but I don’t know how it works at all, so I’d be no good at all.

I agree with Jennings that there must surely be a need to move the focus away from teaching facts and towards enabling people to assemble the core skills they need for their professional life. It chimes with our philosophy of putting the learner in charge. Put another way, perhaps we should see our purpose as educating people to understand how something works – the principles - and how to use them to make good judgements.

Jennings suggests some core skills that people will need – search and find skills, critical thinking etc – and these are useful. However his focus is primarily on the role of the L&D function within organisations, whereas ours is more on individual professionals – both their initial professional development and qualification, and their continuing professional development. So how does the change potentially affect the different types of learning resource that we create at Nelson Croom.

We claim four capabilities:

1. Distance Learning
2. General Professional Development
3. Formal CPD
4. Compliance

Let’s look at them in turn.

 

Distance Learning

Our distance learning projects are focused on preparing students to take their professional exams. The students do not get to decide what they would like to learn; they just want to ensure that they have reached the point where they have the requisite knowledge and skills to pass the exam.

This places an emphasis on the Examiner who sets the syllabus. They are in an invidious position. If they keep the syllabus as it is they will be accused of teaching and testing an increasingly small subset of the relevant information. On the other hand, senior professionals had to study hard to qualify and are likely to resist any initiatives to change the nature of the qualification to focus more on skills and judgement, on the grounds that it is lowering the hurdle and downgrading entry to the profession. If this conjures up stereotypical images of the oldest, most traditional professions, ask yourself why new taxi drivers still have to pass The Knowledge. I’d frankly rather they used a Sat. Nav.

So for these reasons I suspect that our distance learning resources may be slowest to change, but we will continue to push from our end.

General professional development

Our work in this area is more and more focused on professional conduct and ethics. In this area we have already taken huge steps forwards. Whereas five years ago we might have created a course to explain the ethical code in place in a particular profession and thought we had done our job, we are now focusing more on the application of the principles in practice.

Our course for Resolution, designed to encourage family lawyers to take a less combative approach to their work, encourages learners to reflect throughout on a real case they are working on. A range of case studies for STEP (Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners) present complex scenarios and ask the users to make judgements based on the ethical code. The concepts are simple but in practice it isn’t as easy as you’d think. And our own Ethical Issues for Accountants is a vast array of case studies that the user can comment on and read the views of other professionals.

CPD

Our approach to CPD has always been pretty flexible and so it is easier for us to change than it may be for others. From our origins in 2000 we have always argued that we should look to facilitate learning rather than attempting to teach remotely. Professionals all come to a course with different perspectives. They operate in different specialist areas and have different levels of experience. So any course that tries to make them all learn a set bunch of facts is going to alienate most of them. The idea of taking someone through the basic principles, getting them to engage and think and offering them access to more information for reference where they are interested, has always been central to our approach, and so we have been well placed to embrace these new ideas.

Over the last eighteen months, we have taken a further step forwards with the launch of our peer enriched learning courses. These tend to deal with an issue or debate. The learning takes place in a series of three-step activities. Firstly the learner is asked a question which they consider and construct a reply to. Next, they read an expert summary of the key issues. Finally they read their peers’ contributions. While this may be an inefficient way to teach lots of facts, it is a excellent way to change attitudes and broaden horizons.

Compliance

This is the area of our work where we have the most challenging conversations with our partners. Whether we are talking to an organisation that is concerned to make sure their employees understand the ins and outs of competition law, or to an individual professional signing up for a course to make sure they understand how to avoid a malpractice case, their instinct is to focus on what they need to know.

Although this makes intuitive sense, I think it is often misleading. I’m pretty convinced that you could write down what most people need to know about competition law on two sides of A4. When we teach them more, I wonder whether they remember it for much longer than it takes to pass the assessment. What matters is not whether they become expert, but whether we really succeed in changing their behaviour. So recently we have started to work on more and more case study based approaches to compliance. This seems to me to be a massive step forward. If we can focus more on whether people understand the limits of acceptable behaviour and less on their ability to commit a series of facts to their short term memory, we will be doing a great job.

So how does this all fit together? It seems to me that it continues to be the case that professionals in any particular sector need to learn some principles and how to interpret them and put them into practice. Add to that some more generic information management and retrieval skills and we will start to turn out some real 21st Century professionals and not just an army of Sisyphean disciples.