I’ve been following Times Higher Education (THE) on Twitter for a bit now. It gives me something to read in TweetDeck when I drink my morning coffee (as it’s on London time) and provides an interesting window on higher ed issues in the UK and the rest of Europe.
Since I started to follow THE, I’ve noticed something very different on the way this higher ed weekly magazine handles its Twitter communications. Last week when I saw this tweet and the related video referring to a contest THE ran on Twitter, I thought it would be interesting to learn a bit more on how this is done behind the scene.
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Sarah Cunnane, the person behind THE Twitter account, was kind enough to answer a few of my questions via email.
1) Can you please tell us a bit more about Times Higher Education (THE)?
Certainly. Times Higher Education is a weekly magazine based in Britain reporting on global higher education issues. We started off as the Times Higher Education Supplement in 1971 and we were originally a newspaper published alongside the Times of London. We relaunched in our current format in January 2008 and in June 2010 we launched an online-only international edition. Since 2005 we have had no affiliation to the Times or News International.
We’re probably best known internationally for our World University Rankings, which we’ve published for the last seven years. We relaunched those last year in partnership with Thomson Reuters.
2) THE has developed a very distinctive and personal voice on Twitter (compared to the Chronicle of Higher Ed or even Inside Higher Ed). Why did you choose to adopt this distinctive tone on Twitter?
The reasoning behind that is very simple: when we joined Twitter, the slogan was “Join the conversation.†I’m sure lots of your readers have been to soirees where they’ve talked to people who never discuss anything apart from themselves. And I’m equally sure that they probably found those people to be incredibly dull company. To have an interesting and engaging conversation, you need to be listening, reacting and responding, and that’s what we wanted to do on Twitter. We figured that if people just wanted an RSS feed of our stories, they would subscribe to our RSS feed.
In print we’re very serious and that’s absolutely the right thing to be in print. But what gets lost in that is that higher education – and particularly higher education online – is an extremely vibrant, fun community and if we behaved in a very serious manner online I don’t feel it would be an accurate reflection of the sector we represent. Our attitude has always been that we want to be part of the community and not just outsiders reporting on a sector we don’t really interact with and our Twitter feed is part of that.
If you look at the way social media is used a lot of it is to do with sharing content. We tweet our stories but we also try to highlight blogs or comments that we feel would provoke discussion or that are well written. It would be slightly hypocritical of us to expect it of others to share our content without being willing to share content ourselves that has not necessarily been written for the magazine.
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Our style isn’t for everyone and we’ve had our detractors (my personal favourite was the Twitterer who asked: “can you sink to any greater vapid depths?â€) but on the whole the response has been overwhelmingly positive and so we’ve stuck with it. People feel comfortable talking to us and asking us questions and know that there is a strong likelihood that if they do so we will talk back to them. It’s paid off in ways we couldn’t have imagined: we’ve got news stories and features from our interactions, we’ve organised debates and, most importantly, we’ve met a lot of new people who we may not have been able to reach otherwise.
3) I noticed that you don’t include social media icons on your magazine website homepage. Is the social media department not fully integrated with the editorial team?
All our social media bits and bobs are run by members of the editorial team. When I’m not on Twitter (which my news editor would probably say is not very often!) I’m a reporter writing news and features. Phil Baty, who runs the @THEworldunirank feed, is actually the editor of the World University Rankings and deputy editor of the magazine. Our Facebook pages are looked after by our editorial assistant, John Elmes. We’re also just about to set up a books and culture Twitter feed that will be written and run by our books editor Karen Shook and culture reporter Matthew Reisz.
We think it’s very important that our social media is controlled by our editorial team and I don’t think our social media would work if it wasn’t. It gives us the freedom to have that instant interaction with other people because we know the magazine, we know the people and (hopefully!) we know what’s going on in the sector. It also means that we can respond instantly to breaking news and events.
Every single reporter has the login details to the Twitter feed, which allows them to tweet updates from any conferences they may be at, which can have interesting results. At one of the student protests in London last year, one of our reporters tweeted while being kettled (police containment of a crowd within a limited area) on Westminster Bridge. That’s something we wouldn’t have been able to bring to our readers if our social media was owned by our web team (although they are all lovely and excellent and would probably do a marvellous job!)
4) Last year you ran the #LoveHE campaign prompting organizations and individuals to post videos on YouTube to support HE in a time of budget woes in the UK. How successful was this campaign?
The joy of the #loveHE campaign was that it didn’t have any particular aims. Instead, what we were trying to do was influence the way people thought about the way they promoted higher education to those outside the academy. In addition, we wanted the UK sector to work together towards a common aim of promoting universities, rather than splitting into mission groups.
We had videos featuring students, academics and administrators, all of whom had the same message of how university education can transform lives. What’s really nice to see now is that the government and higher education leaders are starting to use the same sort of language and arguments that we used to promote higher education as a public good.
I was actually at a conference last week where Sir Martin Harris, who is the head of the Office for Fair Access said: “We must not cease to be a sector even though there are competitive pressures on us,†and, as that’s the message we were hoping to get people to listen to, it’s fantastic to hear other people repeat it independently of us.
In terms of social media, what’s happened is exactly what we wanted to happen. If you search for the hashtag #loveHE, you’ll find articles, comments and discussions from a variety of people about the sector. We use the hashtag sometimes now but it’s really been adopted by those working in the sector as a go-to phrase to describe brilliant things happening in higher education and not necessarily just those things reported in THE.
5) You run Twitter contests on a regular basis. Any lessons learned or tips you can share with us?
People love free stuff! We’ve found the more creative the competition, the more willing people are to get involved. The higher education sector is full of fantastically creative people and we’ve found that, in some cases, the prizes take a back seat to the unparalleled joy of creating a fantastic pun or two. We’ve benefited as well from having a lot of prizes already in the office, which means we don’t have to be strict about planning competitions in advance. The best competitions we’ve run, without a doubt, have been the ones we have decided to run spontaneously in response to something happening at the time.
