HootSuite have finally caught up with me

Since blogging about our post-HootSuite options back in August I've been keeping a low profile on the subject.  That's because, admittedly rather sneakily, I realised that if I neither up-graded not went free then when I exceeded the 7 days grace period colleagues I'd registered as administrators for the accounts could still access it. I couldn't access it but that didn't matter because I'd devolved responsibility for the updates (although, rather pleasingly I was still able to access it via the iPhone ap). Anyway, as of 15 March Hootsuite are, quite rightly, closing that particular loop hole. My email from them read...

Hello Stuart Johnson,

We have you listed as the account owner of the "uolsd" profile on TWITTER on HootSuite. To ensure continued service, we require you to migrate to a current HootSuite plan. We're here to help and are emailing you to encourage you to take action and migrate your account.

For some background, since the new HootSuite plans were announced in August of last year, we grandfathered your account until November 2010, then provided a 7-day grace period to ensure time to decide on how you'd like to proceed. Further, our business sales team unsuccessfully attempted to contact your organization to provide assistance in choosing a plan. To continue using HootSuite, the listed owner of uolsd needs to sign-in to HootSuite [...] then migrate the account to a Pro plan or downgrade to the Basic (free) plan. Otherwise, we will disable HootSuite access to your social networks on March 15th.

Which is completely fair enough. So currently I've downgraded and have simply shared the password with colleagues. But this is very limited as it provides no workflow - which is the most useful aspect for us as it enables us to see who has replied to what. Also there are no analytics on the free account and they're useful too. So I need to think about whether we want to pay for their pro-plan - $5.99 per month for pro and then $15 per month per additional team member. Which is a considerable improvement on their original price plan - I wish I'd taken a screenshot at the time but I'm sure we were going to have to pay $99 per month which was simply prohibitive. Maybe they've listened to feedback from customers and come up with something more reasonable - or am I not remembering that correctly?

HootSuite certainly seem to have cornered the market. Of the options I blogged about back in August only MediaFunnel seemed like a goer for us but when we experimented with it we found it quite slow and limited (although it may have improved since then). With an reliable platform rich in useful features HootSuite have done an excellent job. What do you think? Should I upgrade? Or are there any other platforms out there that I don't know about?

Update on developments for tagginganna

Apparently someone suggested on twitter last week that Alex, Mark and I might be keeping our tagginganna project secret. I just checked my blog and the last time I blogged about it was on 7 September when Alex presented at ALTC and before that it was July so I can quite understand why it might be thought we were being secretive. Unfortunately the reason is much more mundane; we've just been busy. The autumn term was a bit of a write-off for me because of the acting-up, but we did make some progress using a new tool from Birmingham City University's Research and Development Unit for English Studies (RDUES). This is how they describe the tool.

The wiki interface supports the collaborative close reading and analysis of texts, by allowing researchers, teachers and students to attach comments to individual words or phrases within these texts or to whole texts. These comments take the form of analyses or interpretations, and can generate intra- and inter-textual links.

The 'Wiki without a name' from RDEUS has been an exciting development and one we'll be reporting on when we have more data - but feedback from students so far has been very positive and we're looking forward to testing it further.

Meanwhile, we commissioned Eddie Tejeda, the creator of Digress.it to do some development work on the site to make it more suitable for our needs. We are in the process of testing the developments but the items we requested were as follows:

• tag comments
• search comments
• layered tables of contents

Which seem to be nearly there. More to follow...

MailChimp ‘opened’ stats and MS Outlook reading pane - update

Not entirely sure why I didn't do this earlier but I asked MailChimp yesterday about a problem I blogged about a few months ago regarding their very useful 'opened' stats not taking into account Outlooks default reading pane. Here's their response.

Hi Stuart!

Thanks for posting that article. ;) I'm afraid there isn't anything we can do because this is an Outlook security setting that we don't have control over. Basically, Outlook doesn't like the fact that we send from different domains - so it won't remember who you are and just download the images. Other email clients like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. will learn based on the reply to/from email and once you approve that the images can be downloaded, it will continue to do so for all newsletters.

You can read a bit more about this at http://eepurl.com/hcKv

Thank you,

Bob

MailChimp.com / Client Services

So, unfortunately it's a Microsoft issue that they can't do anything about. But I'm very impressed with MailChimp's customer support - so far I've tweeted, web chatted and emailed him and had very rapid responses in each case :)

Six month acting-up-iversary

By 3liz4

Today, I noticed, is my six month acting-up-iversary. Six months since I started my role as Acting Head of Student Development (I blogged about the start of it here). So, some quick reflections.

• I have less time to blog :(
• I have less things I can blog about because they are either a) confidential or b) boring
• I have grown an acting-up-beard (see)
• The staff management stuff (of which there is a lot) I enjoy, on the whole
• The strategic planning and finance stuff I'm sl-ow-ly getting the hang of
• I miss the direct student contact, especially the teaching
• It's difficult to manage a team of 35 people in an acting up capacity whilst carrying a number of vacant posts and the service being under review and the expectations of what is to be delivered to remain unchanged (I'm just sayin')
• Whilst I'm tweeting less (for the same reasons that I'm blogging less) my Twitter network remains invaluable as a means of support and to provide an alternative view

It's looking like I'll remain acting-up for another six months, which on the upside means I'll have a whole year of the experience under my belt. Depending on when I'm asked I waiver as to whether or not I'm interested in the substansive post (whether or not senior management would be interested in me is a different question).

I'm particularly interested to hear your suggestions for how to keep up the blogging (which I find incredibly useful as a means of reflection and recording as well as potential discussion) - especially with regard to blogging when in a more management, as opposed to practitioner, position.

Who gets the best jobs

I've just been sent a link to a programme that was on BBC 2 last night - Who Gets the Best Jobs? (Broadcast on BBC Two, 9:00 PM Wed, 2 Feb 2011 available until 1:09AM Wed, 16 Feb 2011). I was aware of Alan Milburn's Unleashing Aspiration report but this programme makes it much more of a prominent issue (and only last week was Andrew Neil's programme Posh and Posher: Why Public School Boys Run Britain).

Here's the blurb on the programme from the iPlayer.

Britain is a less equal society than at any time since World War One. In Who Gets the Best Jobs, Richard Bilton investigates access to the professions - and finds that the best jobs are being snapped up by an increasingly small gene pool of privileged, well-connected families.

Getting a good degree matters more than ever - and those from low income families can no longer easily work their way up from the bottom without the qualifications, contacts and social skills that their more fortunate counterparts make full use of.

One of the University of Leicester's stated values is having an inclusive and accessible culture, specifically

Our commitment to an inclusive and accessible culture not only opens the doors to the very best, no matter their background, it even shapes the very way we look at and discover the world around us.

Leicester is the most inclusive of Britain's top-20 leading universities with the greatest proportions of students from under-represented groups.

So whilst the programme is more than a little depressing, our task is to think about how our inclusive and accessible culture can contribute to fairer access and who gets the best jobs. Not least given this comment by Dr Lee Elliott Major (presumably he uses the middle name so not to be confused with Lee Majors) from The Sutton Trust (confirming what we already knew):

We know that many of the big companies or big recruiters have increasingly small lists of universities from whom they pick ... there are some signs that in the current recession that recruiters are actually shortening their lists. So for this particular generation coming out of university now it's an even bigger issue.

So, what to do. Any suggestions?