BU Research Blog

Incredibly, we are very nearly at the end of the Festival of Learning. But if you’ve missed out already, fear not – there are some fantastic events that you can still come along to on Thursday. There is a really diverse selection which you can choose from, and don’t worry if you don’t have a ticket – come and see us at the welcome desk and we can point you in the right direction. So, how about your take your pick from:

But what about has already has taken place? As ever, take a look at some of the reflections from the lovers of learning, the Research and Knowledge Exchange team:

Waiting for the Monsoon: Nepal through my lens, a photo and storytelling exhibition of research fieldwork experience in rural Nepal reflections by Eva Papadopoulou

An Interactive event of photographs, artefacts and storytelling of life in rural Nepal – a fieldwork diary of an HSC PhD student, Sheetal Sharma, during the summer monsoon. The camera as a research tool is well documented in disciplines such as anthropology and sociology. The process of photography often leads to uncovering misconceptions. These photographs ‘tell a story’ of the reality of fieldwork, among holy cows, sacrificial goats and cultural practices. Nepal is an ideal setting due to its riot of colour: where the Ancient world thrives in the Modern one. There was a good turn up for this event, which took place Monday 3^rd June, with 3 one hour presentations, there was a good discussion during and after the event, with a variety of ages of attendees. Very positive feedback was received for this colourful and exiting presentation.

Social Media Monitoring – reflections from Philip Leahy-Harland

A very well presented and facilitated session with Ana Adi covering the rationale for social media and how to measure what it does. Although the social media landscape has evolved greatly over the last five years, the what, why and how questions to understand how social media can work for you and/or your business remain the same. So what are your objectives, how will you recognise success, what are your key performance indicators, what should you monitor and how frequently should you monitor it? Over the social media landscape there are recognisable and bespoke social media tools. If you are ‘expressing’ then Twitter and blogs will feature highly, if you wish to provide ‘content’ then YouTube and FlickR may be the right tools for you, what about ‘networking’, well there’s LinkedIn and Xing amongst many and if you are firmly in the ‘social’ arena then Facebook, Bebo etc. are for you. Overall, know what you want, how to measure and analyse it. There are many free analytical tools available to you. Facebook has Insight built in for example. External tools such as Google Trends look at trends in search terms (who, where from, when?). This type of analysis helps identify language used by others as well as common typos which could be used in web site optimisation and marketing. Tools such as Social Buzz and Topsy look at FB, twitter and Google+, but beware such systems are not ‘human’ and capture data based on programming, so sentiment in message analysis can be misleading So what’s good to measure? Well, that is down to you, however there are many tools and approaches, you just need to pick the ones that are right for you.

In attendance was Luke Williams, a very experienced social media ‘geek’ (to use his introduction). Luke works for the RNLI and use many social media tools and outlets covering RNLI HQ and all UK RNLI stations (200+). He spends around an hour a day on analysis and an hour responding. This is a busy role but does offer a guide to the amount of time an organisation could spend using social media effectively.