Last week we held our Annual Conference at King’s College London. In spite of a clash with the AMSU conference (which we also attended on the Monday), we had a good turnout with 60 delegates from around 80% of our partner Student Organisations. I must say a big ‘Thank you’ to Endsleigh Insurance http://www.endsleigh.co.uk for sponsoring the event and Carol Thompson Ellis from ELSA for helping us sort out the venue at the last minute.
Hopefully we got our vision of how we see the market developing across and how we will be evolving our software this year. Without going into too much detail here, we want to provide something which is different from the existing social media sites which our audience (students) are arriving at University with. We firmly believe that the whole web will continue to become more social and providing contextually relevant, niche networks to existing communities (in this case student organizations) will have a firm place alongside the current guerillas in the room like Facebook, Myspace, Bebo.
The trend for companies in this sector seems to be, to look at what the organization needs to ‘tick a box’ in terms of providing a web presence and not looking at what will get their students actually interacting with their Union or College each day. Student media is in real danger of being lost in the considerable noise around the web unless it starts to differentiate and offer a new experience to what students are getting from news and social media sites. Interaction and engagement is the key. So, that is what we will be focusing on alongside our ‘core’ publishing, e-commerce and membership management tools. For those of you who were at the conference, you will know what we mean when we say we are trying to build a purple cow! For those that weren’t there, please have a look at this video from Seth Godin – http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/seth_godin_on_sliced_bread.html
We will be working closely with our current partners over the coming weeks to ensure there is a smooth handover to the incoming student staff and we are all geared up for the new year.
We are very excited about the coming year and as part of our new communications strategy, we will be blogging here much more regularly. A different member of the team will be posting each week with an overview of what they have been working on…or maybe just to have a rant!
See you all soon.
