Last week I read a magazine article, which coincidentally talked about the very activity that I, and my colleagues, had spent that day doing. The article said: ‘As the saying goes, ‘If you want to feel good, do good’. Research has proved that volunteering boosts happiness, partly by making you feel more connected with others.’

By the end of the day the team were too tired to attempt even a single 'bunny ears'.

I felt strangely pleased to read that, and could vouch for its accuracy. We, the University of Exeter Web Team, had spent that day out of the office on a Community Challenge day, a scheme whereby the University allows each department one day per year to work in the community, doing something of benefit to others.

After much discussion and Googling, we selected Moor Trees as our chosen organisation, mainly because we felt that their work – growing and planting native trees in nurseries and recreating woodlands mainly in the Dartmoor and South Hams areas, was the polar opposite of our everyday work – based at our computers, working with one of the most modern and least tangible of technologies – the internet. We felt how better to benefit the community than to contribute to our beautiful local landscape – and frankly, to benefit ourselves by getting out of the office, away from people and computers and getting our hands dirty – literally.

It was an incredible stroke of luck that our visit coincided with some of the warmest March weather on record, and the day’s early chill gave way to clear blue skies and sunshine. Having gathered at an innocuous-looking gate in a hedge in Dartington, we sat around the ash remains of previous campfires as Michelle from Moor Trees gave us a brief introduction to their work and the nursery that would be our base for the day.

A few nervous titters about the composting toilet thankfully proved unfounded (visions of ‘that’ toilet scene from Slumdog Millionaire flashed through my brain), as it was less ‘Glastonbury’ and more ‘rustic campsite’.

Moor Trees’ shed was a new, proud addition to the nursery which provided welcome shady refuge at lunchtime (yes, it was THAT hot!) and also home to the old Web Team favourites – tea and cake.

So after these introductions, ‘Team Roots’ set to work – some pollarding trees (a method of pruning), some planting out one year-old oak trees into beds (these will be planted out into woodland when they are three years old). Others began repairing the wooden beds in which the acorns and young trees are planted. The beds are frequently damaged by tree roots growing under the planks, which then break when the trees are lifted, so they need frequent repair. Other members of the team were hard at work weeding pathways between the beds and the beds themselves. We were all able to have a go at most of the jobs throughout the day, although some stayed with the manly hammering and sawing work repairing the beds, and some stayed with the humble task of weeding all day.

There was a palpable sense of achievement by the time we were slowing down at the end of the afternoon. The heat had dissipated a little as a fresh breeze picked up, and we tidied around the nursery and emptied wheelbarrowful after wheelbarrowful of weeds on to the compost heap. We could look over the site and see the difference we had made – Michelle from Moor Trees seemed genuinely pleased and impressed that we had managed to complete all the tasks around the nursery in the day, including weeding the entire site, which leaves them with a well-prepared site for the new season ahead. As their busiest season is winter when the young trees are lifted and planted out, the nursery sites suffer a little neglect and need a good dose of attention from volunteers come February/March-time.

Perhaps the most satisfying aspect of the day was the sense of teamwork. There was a pleasure in everybody working together, enjoying relaxed pockets of conversation, only bettered by the beautiful views provided by the South Hams countryside. The constant company of birds twittering and singing in the trees combined with the distant choo-choo of the Buckfastleigh to Littlehempston steam train was an enjoyable soundtrack to the day.

I think we all agreed that we couldn’t have had a more satisfying rest for our brains while enjoying physical work and fresh air, achieving something beneficial for ourselves, for Moor Trees, and for generations to come.

www.moortrees.org

We manage a university website. You may have figured this out already. You are, after all, reading a blog by the University of Exeter Web Team.

We spend quite a lot of time talking, researching, examining and generally worrying about what the users of our site want from it. We think we know quite a lot about them and what they are looking for, but we’re acutely aware that this changes and that we could always know much, much more.

We do this in several ways. Most importantly, we listen to the users of our site as often as we can. We get feedback from focus groups, we get feedback via email and social media, we go out with clipboards and ask those users who are careless enough to stray within our physical range and we sit down with them one-to-one and test how they use our site. Then we improve it.

This ongoing dialogue gives us a good sense of how well the site is working for users and how they interact with it, including where it fails them. We think it’s an invaluable part of managing and developing a large website for a diverse set of users. You might, of course, argue that this approach just gives us a collection of personal opinions from randomly selected web users. Perhaps you’re right – although we’d still insist that it’s the single most important thing you can do to ensure your site is delivering for its visitors.

But to make sure that we are taking the needs of the masses into consideration we also spend a great deal of time looking at site analytics. We know which areas of the site people are looking at and we know which keywords they are searching for, which gives us the opportunity to identify things they want which either we aren’t providing or which they can’t find.

Over the last month, the most popular areas of our site, across all user groups, have been:

1. Student portal
2. Staff homepage
3. Student homepage
4. Undergraduate courses
5. Electronic library
6. Postgraduate courses
7. Module choices
8. Our Cornwall campus
9. Phone number search
10. Jobs at the University

And our most popular searches, on site, have been:

1. Accommodation (for which the correct spelling comes in 3rd overall and ‘accomodation’ comes in 5th!)
2. Library
3. Virtual learning environment
4. Email access
5. Employability
6. Annual leave booking
7. Room booking
8. Timetables
9. Graduation
10. Psychology
11. Prospectus
12. Drama
13. Business School
14. Law
15. Jobs

We watch these lists months by month. We try hard to make sure that our site allows visitors to find the things we know they want. We really do. I know, i’m banging on now, so i’ll stop. But trust me, we worry about this stuff.

Which is why I (notice I’ve dropped the ‘we’ – I can’t speak for the rest of the team here) get so annoyed every time someone sends me a link to this cartoon.

From http://xkcd.com/773/

Now, I like a laugh as much as the next cold, embittered, prematurely balding corporate Web Editor…

I like xckd.com. It’s one of the web’s genuine success stories. Randall Munroe started scanning his old comic sketches years ago and things took off from there. He now draws them full time and they’re funny and he makes a living from the site now, which is pretty cool if you ask me.

This specific cartoon is also pretty funny. Randall was a student at Christopher Newport University before going on to work for NASA and then becoming a full-time comic artist, so he’s clearly had some exposure to university websites. The gag in this cartoon is that universities think people want one thing from their site when in fact they want different things. That’s true, to some extent. You could also apply the same joke to the websites of most large organisations.

It’s good to know that people realise that university websites are important and when they get to the stage where they are being openly lampooned well, perhaps that means they’ve arrived (after 17 years).

However… what drives me up the wall is the regularity with which I am referred to this cartoon as if it were a sacred text or Great Truth.

It’s a joke, literally. A nonsense which makes an interesting general point.

I’m sent it every couple of weeks as evidence that the work we do on our website is out of touch with what our users want and need. I’m happy to concede that we could be more in touch with our users. You may have spotted me doing that earlier in this post.

I’m sometimes sent it as a direct instruction as to how we should be structuring our homepage. I really don’t think that’s what Randall intended. I might be wrong.

If we’re sophisticated enough not to take this cartoon as a set of instructions – and i’m not sure everyone is – then there’s another more subtle point to be made. The thrust of this cartoon, and the apparent conviction of those who have carried it down from the top of the mountain to bring light into the lives of university web teams all across the world, is that websites must provide only what their users know they need.

Now, I don’t want to get all Rumsfeldian on you, but universities and other organisations need to tell their visitors stuff that they aren’t necessarily looking for, at least not in huge numbers. This stuff can reasonably include news stories about research breakthroughs, details of events they can participate in and benefit from, virtual tours of the campuses (which get around 12,000 visitors per month on our site) and photos of the university (pretty much the most popular items on our Facebook page).

Just because it may not be one of the top ten items in your site search, just because it’s designed to have an indirect impact on the perception of your organisation, just because it’s not targeted at your current staff and students and just because it doesn’t appear on the right hand of the two circles in The Cartoon does not mean that we shouldn’t give space to it on our site, so long as it doesn’t get in the way of the stuff we spend ages ascertaining that users already know that they want to find.

So, have a chuckle by all means. Then wipe that smile off your face and start taking directions from your users. Designing a university website is a serious business.

Last week saw the conclusion of this year’s Student’s Guild Sabbatical Officers election campaign at the University. Once again the Guild here broke records for the levels of participation and the campus was filled with enthusiastic students having fun boosting their favourite candidates.

The web has long had a role in student elections here – we’ve had online voting for 6 or 7 years – but this year things seem to have moved to a new level. We had a call the Friday before last to say that some of the students had staged a flash mob on the Piazza in the middle of campus, and that we had some film footage. We thought for a while about whether this was the sort of thing we should be running with, wondered whether it gave unfair promotion to one of the candidates, then stuck it on our YouTube channel and tweeted and facebooked it. By the following Monday the clip had been watched 4,000 times. A week later and it’s pushing 9,000 views.

I thought this was an example of one of the candidates stealing a march on the others, but no. It turns out that you couldn’t be a serious candidate in this year’s elections without your own campaign videos.

We had other, slightly less appropriate Flashes (Warning: Slightly Not Safe For Work).

Some managed to combine campaign messages with serious larking about:

Others seemed to be working on a more subliminal level, although quite what they were conveying wasn’t always clear:

Some of them had fantastic production values:

Some of them were creative sweeties, and even included QR codes for mobile voting:

Some came across as bizarre performance art:

And some seemed to lay their candidates open to a charge of littering:

Very few of the clips went for straight manifesto delivery. All the candidates seemed to conclude that a video could do a thousand times more than a poorly photocopied poster in terms of establishing an impression with their electorate. Even those clips which did detail a specific platform played with the format and tried also to show some personality.

And if all else failed and you couldn’t ape the established news media, you could always just co-opt them!

With one exception, each of the clips above – and these are just a selection – was watched more than 1,000 times during the campaign, that’s against a total number of votes cast of 6,501 which perhaps says something about the reach of videos like these. Of the 5 elected candidates, 4 had online video as  part of their campaign.

We may look back with regret in years to come when our candidates are running slick attack ads against each other, but for now we applaud their ingenuity, their hard work and their sense of fun.

I was asked to speak to our University’s Customer Service Network earlier this week. They are a group of colleagues who deal with staff and students all day every day and who get together every couple of months to share experiences and talk about how they might further develop.

Over the last couple of years they, like most of us, have found the phrase ’social media’ intruding into their conversations more and more. They wanted to know more about it and how it might be used to improve customer service, so they asked me along.

They claimed that they had no idea about social media so I started from first principles, even though I recognised some pretty switched-on people in the audience. As a result I talked. A lot. I think I probably ate up most of the time they had for the rest of their agenda. I’d like to think that’s because there were so many interesting things to say, but you’d have to ask them whether ‘interesting’ was applicable, and please, don’t tell me what they really thought.

Mainly what I talked was figures and examples, pulled from all over the place. I’m sure their heads were spinning with take-up rates, demographic splits and user interaction volumes and that was before I told them that 150 years of YouTube are watched every day on Facebook.

Through all my waffle, one reasonably simple set of figures seemed to cut through and make the point about social media and its impact on customers. They came from this chart:

I found the chart on Jay Baer’s Convince and Convert blog.

Put simply this piece of research shows that only 29% of users who had complained about a company via twitter had subsequently been contacted by that company.

If you shift your gaze over the right hand side of the chart, you’ll see that of those who DID receive a reply 83.5% either liked or loved being contacted and 74.4% of them were either somewhat or very satisfied with the response.

In case this isn’t clear enough, let’s put it another way.

• Your customers are out there talking about you. Some of them are complaining about your goods and services. To their friends and their friends friends and the whole world if they care to listen.
• If you care to respond to them, there’s a roughly 80% chance that they will stop being annoyed with you and start being happy with you.
• Yet still 71% of companies aren’t listening.

This is what highly paid, luxuriously upholstered social media consultants and commentators would call a NO BRAINER.

The effect of getting involved can be dramatic. What makes social media such a powerful tool is the amplification of what an individual says across their network and the networks of their connections. So, when you help someone via social media you’re doing more than just closing down a public display of dissatisfaction, you’re giving active and engaged customers something they really like and creating an impression they are very likely to pass on to their friends. And their friends’ friends.

We’ve been monitioring social media for a couple of years now and we engage whenever we can. If I haven’t argued this point sufficiently, here’s a real example from our twitter feed in 2011. I’ve tried to anonymise it, but let me tell you that the original tweet was by a student from New York State and was sent out as a general observation to her 300+ twitter friends, rather than directly to us. We picked it up and the conversation shows what happened.

Hopefully she left as one of the 80% of the 29% and who knows? Maybe one day she, or one of her friends, or one of her friends’ friends, will become a student of ours.

Keep Out - Web Team at work

This has been a week of change both on and behind our website. Hopefully you didn’t notice.

The team worked incredibly hard, along with our colleagues from IT Services, to make the changes as seamless and simple as possible for our users. What that meant, inevitably, was that the changes were as complex and disruptive as imaginable for the team themselves.

We thought long and hard about this approach and we came to the view that there are two ways to approach significant changes in services or systems.

Either you make it easy on yourself by ploughing straight into an upgrade, accepting that there will be significant glitches/problems/catastrophes and that you will be cleaning them up in full view and to the ongoing irritation of your users. This option is not all bad. Ultimately it gets the upgrade done and the new improved service in place as quickly as possible. Weighed against this, you will have frustrated – and potentially lost – a bunch of your important visitors, users and customers.

Or, you take the pain yourself.

In both cases, the team have been meticulous in their preparation over the last few months (almost 12 months in one case) fixing bugs, checking (double-checking (triple-checking)), putting themselves in the user’s shoes, smoothing wrinkles, patching gaps, chasing down fixes.

The result? Each process took around twice as long as we’d hoped and, with the odd inevitable exception, both were completed to an almost deafening silence. Our users knew what was happening, had been introduced to new systems, could see the improvements and suffered minimal disruptions.

It’s an odd scenario to be completing significant projects and judging them a success because no-one wants to lynch you. We’ll chalk them up as wins.

In case you were wondering:

We implemented a new search engine on our main site, moving from Google Search Appliance to Funnelback. We spent a long time getting the interface right, improving best bets and tweaking collections. There are still some important fixes to make but we’re delighted with the new facility.

We also completed a major version upgrade of our content management system, which involved planning and communicating carefully with 500 users across the institution. We had all sorts of problems but, as far as we can tell, our users didn’t.

I work in an almost Apple-free institution. At least, we think we’re Apple-free.

Historically Macs have not been widely supported here, although some colleagues do use them. There are good reasons for this and I’m not an IT strategist so I shall gracefully turn away from discussing them, other than to confirm that my priority is to be able to share, collaborate and work with all my colleagues, rather than to have a shiny aluminium unibody space capsule of a machine glowing elegantly on my desk. I’m happy using my PC.

Despite the fact we don’t support them, don’t purchase them, don’t install and use their devices in our offices, they are in the hands of our customers and over the last few years no company has shaped, informed, affected and attacked the way we do digital things here more than Apple.

The way our sites and services look is now challenged to live up to the grey, sleek almost Scandinavian aesthetic that Jonathan Ive and his disciples have propelled into cultural dominance.

The shift to mobile sites and services, which is finally having a real impact on what we’re doing and planning would not have happened so explosively without the iPhone.

And now the iPad, a sleek lozenge of plastic and metal which has the potential to replace a briefcase full of notes and papers, your atlas, your portable DVD player, your camera, your filing system, your bookshelves, your audio library and much more is making inroads.

"Now, can you point to the ATP molecule? (image copyright Apple 2012)

No ad for the iPad is complete without shots of schoolchildren conjuring magic from its screen and, the implication is, being changed forever. Following Apple’s announcement of textbooks for iPad yesterday it looks like we’ll soon be seeing the same shots featuring rather more grown up, perhaps slightly spottier students.

See the YouTube clip for more details (and more shots of transformed students and their grateful teachers).

Although the focus of yesterday’s announcement was on US Schools, I can see this having a direct and perhaps much more immediate impact, on the way university students are taught.

The commissioning, production, approval, adoption and distribution of school textbooks is carefully controlled and regulated. University lecturers, many of whom are at the cutting edge of the use of technology for teaching, are creating and distributing material to small groups all the time, to their own timetables and governed only by their own expectations.

If Apple have, as they claim, put the means of production of engaging, interactive, always-up-to-date learning material into the hands of teachers and academics, and if, as they claim, existing material can be iBooked and distributed in a matter of minutes, then we may well have another revolution on our hands.

There are serious challenges implicit. All universities have carefully planned and supported Virtual Learning Environments which provide a means to create educational material as well as a repository for them. They offer a rich experience, bringing together collaborative tools, mixed media teaching materials and interaction with classmates and teachers. iBooks may do none of those things as well or as coherently in the context of a large institution. But they look exciting and clearly have something to offer and, more to the point, they are about to be pushed at us from every angle by the most powerful marketing outfit of the 21 century.

Watch this shiny screen space.

As University staff we have our Annual Reviews in the Summer, setting goals for the next 12 months.

Our financial year begins on 1 August, triggering budget pruning and spending rounds.

In September the academic year begins, driving the review and improvement of everything that we do at the University.

Image from www.safety-selector.co.uk. Why not buy one for yourself?

Despite already having three annual cycles which carry our planning forward, January remains the time when we most naturally look back at what we have (and haven’t) managed to accomplish in the previous year, and resolve to get things (both new and old) done in the next year.

Blogs are buzzing with predictions for 2012, from an explosion in voice recognition to NFC finally taking off and everyone getting their own Pinterest board. Others are detailing predicted developments in web analytics, social media and mobile. Yet more experts are telling us that their ambition for 2012 is just for things to slow down a little. Some of our local influencers are happy to be cooking and getting married. And why not?

Looking at our main objectives here in the Web Team, i’m struck by how they seem full of the sort of things it’s easy to assume everyone else has had ticked off for years. We’ll be implementing the finer points of our social media strategy, working through a program of search engine optimisation, developing our support for search engine marketing, launching a much-improved search engine and using web analytics more directly. In the midst of all this, we’ll be refreshing the look and feel of our site.

It’s tempting, particularly when so many of our bulletins from the outside world come from those at the sharp edge of online communications, to feel as if you must be falling behind. I’m sure it’s not so. Who out there can honestly deny that one of the main reasons we all go to industry conferences and networking events is to reassure ourselves that everyone else is in the same boat as we are? It may feel sluggardly to be planning for 2012 goals which the big online players have been investing in for years, but in the real world, that’s how we make progress, by building expertise and making solid developments one after the other.

It’s going to be a good year and, who knows? This time next year I might be raving about our upcoming wearable devices and frictionless sharing.

We have a vacancy for a Web Officer, to replace Nick Southall who is off to join our Marketing Team. The post offers dedicated support to our Research and Knowledge Transfer service. The Web Officer manages web and social media to promote the University’s research and business-facing activity and supports the development of digital services to help our researchers.

It’s an exciting time to join the University of Exeter and this post would suit a web professional who has a passion for research or an insatiable curiosity to find out what some of the world’s leading academics are up to, and to tell that story to the public.

You can find full details of the Web Officer post here.

Me at Google HQ

When an invitation to attend a free training session at Google HQ in London landed in my inbox, I jumped at the chance.  I was lost in an Ally McBeal style fantasy daydream, where I saw myself sliding between floors on a fireman’s pole and taking the ski lift back up again.  The reality, of course, was slightly different.  The offices, spread over 3 floors, appeared to have no fireman’s poles and no ski-lifts but in true Google style did have glass walls (daubed with ‘Google’ coloured paint) separating the office space and funky furniture adorned all the communal areas.

The training room, in which I would spend the next 6 hours was called St James’s Park and was decorated (surprise, surprise) in the style of a park!  The carpet looked authentically grass-like, with a ‘stone’ pathway running through it and deck chairs and bushes flanking the floor-to-ceiling window to one side of the room.  Best of all the refreshments included cup cakes which wouldn’t be out of place at an Alice and Wonderland tea party AND they tasted divine – no need for an ‘eat me’ sign on those!

I was representing the University of Exeter Business School with the aim of improving our rankings and performance within Google.  The training was an afternoon of presentations from various members of the Google team, covering a range of topics from Google Adwords to YouTube EDU and Social Media.

Ross Cohn, Education Industry Leader from Google UK kicked-off the presentations with an overview of the major new trends within the online community.  Ross stressed the importance of every organisation having a mobile-ready website.  With two-thirds of the UK population using mobile phones, of which 20% have a smart phone, and over half of new internet connections coming from mobiles, the need to have a platform that can handle this technology is crucial.  Ross touched on the importance of social media (1 in 6 minutes spent online are on social networking sites) as well as the rise in popularity of distance/online learning and the new technologies which Google are initialising to help organisations stay ahead (or at least try to keep up) with the dynamic and ever-changing online world.

Next to take the floor was Victoria Charalambous, Inside Sales Rep for Google UK and Ireland, who sold us the benefits of Google Adwords.  Victoria started with an unsupported statement “search is still thought more useful than personal recommendation” By who?  Google? However she then went on to show us some fascinating free tools which Google offer.  Google Insights is a great piece of software which shows exactly what people are searching for in your subject area, and where these people are from, as well as the most popular times of year these searches take place.

Next up were Nicola Arnold, Google Account Manager and Eoghan Phipp, Account Strategist.  They talked about the benefits of display advertising using Google Ad Planner. Display Advertising places ads on relevant websites for your product, in the case of business schools they used the Financial Times as an example.  When setting up a campaign you can either specify the websites you want your ad to appear on or define your campaign by geographic, demographic and interest area of the vi

St James' Park

sitors. Of course Facebook have been doing this kind of targeted advertising for several years and it’s extremely competitively priced. So what makes this better?  In a word ‘Remarketing’.

Remarketing is a clever piece of software which works in tandem with your display advert campaign to reinforce your brand and sales message.  How does it work?  You put a piece of Google code on a page in which the visitor could potentially convert – for example, ‘apply for an MBA at Exeter’.  All visitors that go to this page but do not actually apply (get distracted, can’t make up their mind etc) are bundled together, and the next time they visit a website which is on the Google display ad network, lo and behold your advert appears, reminding them that they need to apply for that Exeter MBA.  The cost of this is calculated in the same way as Google Adwords on an auction basis: he who bids the most gets the most exposure but also he who has the most relevant content on their website (I think the former may be more important than the latter in Google’s eyes).

Ben Wallace, Associate Product Marketing Manager was next, giving a succinct presentation on the benefits of YouTube EDU.  YouTube EDU is exclusively for higher education establishments and by all accounts is a fantastic way of marketing your university.  Uploading lectures, promotional videos, video profiles are just some of the ways to interact with prospective students and let them know just how great your institution is.  Uploading lectures in particular is not only a good way of demonstrating the high standards of teaching, research etc but is also a way of giving back – giving less fortunate people in the world access to higher education, not to mention the practice of giving something of worth for free within social media in order to get something back.  Additional benefits also include 2GB (2/3 hours) per video upload, a custom interface and map buttons to click through to your own website.  YouTube Insights was also highlighted as good monitoring tool and is a free piece of software which will enable you to see how much of a video is being watched, when they leave, etc.

Last to present was John Ray, Senior Industry Manager for Google UK, on mobile browsing.  John described the mobile phone as the modern day equivalent to the Swiss Army Knife: a powerful ‘mini computer’ that can do near enough anything we want it to, and with a predicted 100,000,000 iPhone units to be sold in 2011, something that no business should ignore.  John was quick to dispel the myth that once you have an app you’ve cracked the market, citing the statistic that 90% of mobile apps are deleted within 30 days of downloading. We were then shared four top best practice tips on how to approach mobile browsing:

1.      Be Clear

Make sure you have a mobile strategy – is your website for recruitment, transactions, information? Once you have defined this then you can start to build for mobile browsing.

2.     Be ready

Don’t get left behind!  With 23% of time on the internet coming from mobile devices, it’s crucial that we are ready and able to meet the demands of visitors.

3.     Be found

The Google sales bit.  Google have purchased Admob, the largest mobile advertising network in the world so when planning your Adword campaigns, you can build in your mobile campaign too, all in one easy move.

4.     Be smart

Do not underestimate the power of mobile browsing – it is the technology of the future.

The session closed with a talk from Paul Harrison – CEO of Carve Consulting.  It was reassuring to hear that he echoed much of what Exeter social media guru Ally Banks told us a few weeks ago – personal recommendation is king with search becoming less important (prompting a few uncomfortable shuffles from the Google team at the front).  He cited a few interesting monitoring tools to ensure that you are on top of what is being said about you. Radion6 is the tool that Vodafone use to great success, as Ally demonstrated in his presentation.  Paul also discussed the major benefits of advertising on Facebook (more shuffles from the front) and reiterated that this is not technology to the younger audience, it’s a way of life.  Social media is just how they communicate and to ignore it would be disastrous.

All in all an informative day, even if we didn’t get to go on the ski-lift.

Michelle

We kicked off our annual series of Web Awareness Seminars this week with a visit from Alastair Banks, who graduated from the University in July 2000, having co-founded Optix Solutions during his second year!

He’s kept up that sort of pace since gaining his Computer Science degree and Optix is now one of the most successful digital agencies in the South West.

Alastair has a passion and flair for networking and it’s only natural that over the last couple of years he’s become an influentiual exponent of – and evangelist for - social media. The approach of putting yourself and your experitise out there to help and support the community in the knowledge that somewhere down the line you will reap what you sow is one we all recognise but few actually manage to put into practice.

Through his blog , his twitter feed, his youtube channel, his LinkedIn profile and his facebook page Alastair is sharing sharing his expertise with his friends, partners, customers, contacts and the world at large. And he has found that by giving freely the returns for a business like Optix are great. They have placed themselves at the centre of social media expertise in the South West, developing their sphere of influence - and ultimately their customer base – far more  widely than they ever would have been able to by mailing out flyers and cold-calling CEOs.

Perhaps it’s no surprise to learn that Alastair is a keen poker player. He certainly demonstrates the old maxim about speculating to accumulate. 

Following Alastair’s talk, ideas came quickly from the colleagues in attendance. Some were good, some were challenging, but all showed how powerful the very idea of social media can be. No-one left thinking ‘well, I can’t see the point of that’. I haven’t heard so many pens scratching at so many notebooks since Tim Smit came to the University staff conference and told us all to quit our jobs and start yoghurt-making businesses.

Alastair encouraged us to build our social media foundations by blogging. To tell the world about the things that we’ve learned, sharing our thoughts and passing on knowledge to those around us, knowing that when we needed help, they would more than likely be there for us.

This is a start.