Speakers

Dr Lizzie Jackson

Head of Learning Innovation
Ravensbourne College

Lizzie is responsible for the development of online and blended learning, and enhancing the student experience at Ravensbourne. Her main research interests are participatory media, social media, new forms of public service media and collaborative innovation.

Lizzie launched and managed the BBC's social media for its website from 1997-2002. She then co-ordinated the BBC’s internet safety initiatives for children, parents and schools and was also a member of the Home Office taskforce for internet safety. Lizzie was a senior research fellow at the University of Westminster (2007-2009), working on a BBC/AHRC funded project exploring virtual worlds for children.

Lizzie was named 'One of the 100 Innovators of the UK Internet Decade' by NOP World and e-consultancy.com in October 2004. She is currently one of eight experts advising the Council of Europe on the governance of public service media. Lizzie was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) in 2007. 

Stuart Brown

Business Manager: Community and Developments
The Open University

Stuart is responsible for the formation and implementation of social media policy at the OU and also manages a variety of the OU's social media channels including Facebook and Twitter. 

Stuart also has experience of application development across a variety of platforms and operating systems for the purpose of engaging students and wider communities; these include the course profiles and My OU Story Facebook applications and iPhone apps such as Study at The OU.

Stuart also has technical responsibility for the OU’s student and alumni community site, Platform, that incorporates web2 philosophies and is integrated with external networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

Graham Copekoga

Web Manager
De Montfort University, Leicester

Graham has spent the last 11 years working in higher education. He started using computers professionally in 1987 and began creating websites in 1995, before the profession of web developer even existed. In 1997, Graham invented the 'Solar Garment' that powers mobile devices. While working at Nottingham Trent University he developed the first imode mobile phone website for a UK university and in 2003 won a HEIST award for a multi-language website.

Graham is an associate lecturer at De Montfort and teaches website design. He is also a visiting professor at Fukuoka University in Japan. He believes in best practice and web standards. In his spare time he works as a staff photographer for the Japanese fashion culture website SCRAPTURE and is busy setting up his own book publishing company Wabi Sabi Press.

Sarah-Jane Doherty

International Manager
Educate

Sarah-Jane Doherty works on the global arm of Educate and manages the online social network campaigns across the organisation. She assists educational institutions in recruiting international students with tailored, innovative and cost-effective solutions across a wide range of digital media options including mobile, online social networks, apps, etc.

Sarah started her career at Associated Newspapers before becoming an account manager for Educate. It was in this role that Sarah’s online knowledge and experience grew rapidly. Educate is now appointed to sell and manage the educational campaigns on behalf of several world renowned media organisations such as Facebook, The Times Newspapers, BBC.com, Friendster, Microsoft, Orange, AIESEC, and the ACCA.

Robyn Hicks

Marketing Manager
South Street Accommodation Services

Robyn is a marketing manager with 11 years experience in youth marketing gained in the music, events and student accommodation industries.

Having worked for both Unite and Mainstay Student she brings extensive knowledge of property management in the student accommodation sector, particularly in strategic sales and marketing, social media marketing, brand development, reputation monitoring and PR.

Robyn joined South Street in December 2008 and her development of the Digs Student brand has ensured a strong reputation amongst students and a level of advocacy that consistently delivers outstanding occupancy and rebooking rates.

Robyn also ensured South Street was the first student accommodation provider in the UK to fully embrace social media using Facebook, Twitter, You Tube and blogs. She ensures they also continue to be the most innovative having moved social media from a marketing tool to a customer service tool and now into the area of facilities management. This is always done with the enhancement of the student experience being the primary focus.

Bo Kristiensen

Chief Consultant, Marketing
University of Southern Denmark

At the University of Southern Denmark, Bo has been responsible for national and international marketing for a decade. Bo’s marketing communication ideas rely heavily on being an early adopter of new marketing platforms and this approach has shown to be very advantageous; except for one year, the number of new students has risen every year at the USD for the last ten years.

Bo has held senior posts in advertising, publishing, communications, and teaching, and in the distant past he also carried out research in to linguistics. For the past three to four years Bo has turned his interests towards social media in student recruitment. He is an expert in involving student ambassadors and professors alike in creating traffic and useful communication on Facebook, where the University of Southern Denmark is a key player among European universities.

Bo has learned some tricks of the trade the hard way and would like to share his experiences with you too.

Alicia Liu

Account Manager
93½ Communications

As part of the 93½ team, Alicia specialises in developing effective marketing and branding strategies for the Chinese market, particularly in relation to higher education institutions.

In early 2011 she has successful led the social media strategy for Nido Student Living on engaging with Chinese students looking to study in the UK.

Alicia’s previous experience includes coordinating the educational, cultural and creative links between London, Beijing and Shanghai during the Mayor of London’s trip to China in 2006 and advising ’London Higher’ on building a bank of international study case studies in 2007. Further, in 2008 Alicia initiated and co-organised the Creative China: Visual culture, Architecture and Design conference between King’s College London and the V&A Museum, as part of King’s College London’s China strategy. She graduated from King’s College London with an MA with distinction in cultural and creative industries.

93½ is the UK’s only PR agency to specialise in delivering communications programmes to the British Chinese community and delivering PR campaigns in China.

Claire Lupton

Alumni Relations Manager
University for the Creative Arts

Claire has worked in marketing for over ten years, and is a relative newcomer to higher education alumni relations at the University for the Creative Arts.

UCA’s alumni association has over 23,000 members and the university maintains contact with them by post, email and via social media.

UCA was formed from the merger of five colleges and one of the challenges of the alumni strategy is to re-engage with them and also to encourage them to be involved in the UCA alumni association. This has re-engagement has been achieved through a series of alumni events, and since 2009, when the association was re-launched, in 2009, over 8,000 additional alumni have been recruited.

After the successful re-engagement programme, Claire focused the strategy towards communication via social media. The Facebook page was launched in spring 2009 and the fanbase has grown to over 2,000 fans. Following this success Claire wotked on the launch of the Twitter page in May 2010, and this now has over 400 followers.

Ian Morgan

Education Marketing Consultant
Discovering Futures

A graduate of the University of Leeds, Ian worked in business planning roles for three of the ‘big four’ UK banks before joining the world of recruitment communications in 1997. Since then he has worked with a wide-range of clients, from Coors Brewers and Arriva in the private sector to large, complex public sector organisations such as Kirklees MBC and Birmingham City Council, before discovering an interest in working with HE clients and becoming Head of Education at Barkers, where he was responsible for over 60 HE client accounts including Cranfield, Hull, Portsmouth, Salford and Sheffield Hallam.

Combining his HE experience with an interest in digital media, Ian is a regular contributor to CASE, the FE Marketing Network, UCAS and Postgraduate Forum events, speaking enthusiastically about digital techniques for domestic and international student recruitment and reputation management.

Jamie O’Connell

Director of Marketing
TheStudentRoom.com

In the past four years, marketing director Jamie O’Connell has helped grow The Student Room (TSR) to become the world’s largest student website receiving over 3.5 million unique users per month.

He has fostered close working relationships with universities and key government departments, which has enabled him to provide opportunities for students to engage directly with policy makers such as Lord Browne and David Willetts on TSR.

The site offers a social platform for students to discuss important issues and decisions. Through helping run TSR, Jamie and his team have developed a better understanding of students - an insight they openly share with the HE community in their monthly e-newsletter.

Previously Jamie worked as science web manager at Cancer Research UK helping formulate their web strategy. He has also worked as a web manager at Botanical Gardens Conservation International (bgci.org), and as a content manager at jobsite.co.uk.

Jamie lives in east London and commutes most days to The Student Room HQ in Brighton. He feels passionately about the role peer-to-peer support can play in education and the importance of shared opinions when making HE decisions – positive peer pressure.

Alan Parry

Director of Marketing and Communications
Bangor University

Alan Parry has over 20 years experience of communications and marketing in a variety of large public sector organisations. In addition, he is a trustee and non-executive director of Gisda, a charity that supports young homeless people in north west Wales, and a director of Arwain Ltd, a company specialising in improving the performance of individuals and organisations. A fellow of the Institute of Sales and Marketing Management, he is a qualified journalist and marketer and holds an MSc in Management.

Ken Punter

Digital and Online Communications Manager
University of Warwick

Ken manages the digital & online communications team at the University of Warwick and is responsible for guiding and managing digital corporate communications, the corporate elements of the main website, the digital corporate identity, mobile app development and social media engagement. The team produces both text and video/audio content and distributes these through various channels including YouTube EDU and iTunesU.

Ken’s background in communications technologies goes back to the mobile-comms market of the mid 1990s, working with such pioneers of the day as Psion, Palm, Handspring, Ericsson and Palmtop (the forerunner of TomTom).

Surviving the dotcom boom and bust, Ken moved agency-side managing and growing the online business for Graymatter. While with the agency Ken delivered several web development projects and successfully launched some of the first PPC campaigns. Ken moved client-side with international development NGO, World Vision UK. His stint at World Vision involved the creation of several websites, the instigation of a social media monitoring programme and growing the digital capability and capacity of the organisation, he also worked as a strategist within the wider international organisation, speaking at several conferences and advising on many things ‘digital’.

Ken is currently studying towards an MSc in Digital Marketing and Communications collaboration between Econsultancy and Manchester Metropolitan University.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/kenpunter

@kenpunter

Peter Reader

Director of Marketing and Communications
University of Portsmouth

One of the most experienced HE marketing and communication professionals working in UK higher education, Peter joined the University of Portsmouth in 2008.

Having cut his teeth on student newspapers in Leeds, Peter has worked in five other UK universities –Sheffield Hallam, Plymouth, Loughborough, Southampton and Bath –mainly in external-facing roles from fundraising and marketing to communications and government and community relations.

Peter has contributed substantially to his profession both nationally and internationally: he is a past president of the European Universities Public Relations and Information Officers (EUPRIO) and has stood down recently as   chair of the steering committee of the Association of Commonwealth Universities' PR, Marketing and Communications Network. He is a member of CASE and of the CIPR, and a Fellow of the RSA.

He has given numerous presentations in the UK and Europe, and also in Barbados, Canada and Japan, and has had a number of articles published in the professional media.

Peter's professional interests include social media, crisis management and reputation management.

David Reilly

PR Officer
University for the Creative Arts

David is a Press & PR Officer at the University for the Creative Arts (UCA). He was a television reporter at ITN and ITV Meridian before moving into marketing and communications in January 2010.

Having worked in the media for nearly a decade, he has vast experience in what journalists’ and producers’ are looking for in a story, and how best to execute and maximise their potential.

David has been an avid social media consumer since signing up for a Myspace account in 2005, less than a year after the pioneering network was launched, which makes him a veteran user in online terms. He went on to start using Facebook just six months after it was made available to users outside of educational institutions.

In his new marketing role, David has relished the opportunity to use social networks to deliver UCA’s press and PR opportunities to a worldwide audience, while also providing new methods of communication for interested parties.

After helping with the alumni association’s first foray into social networking, he is now working on ways to maximise UCA’s online profile in more general terms.

You can follow David on Twitter: @DavidReillyUK or the new UCA account: @UCA_creative

Steve Swain

Digital Attraction Manager
TMP

Steve manages TMP's government, health and education digital attraction team, ensuring that clients make best use of their marketing budgets. The team looks after the search engine marketing, SEO, campaign management and campaign planning/execution for the agency.

Steve’s responsibilities include supporting clients who don’t use digital media regularly, strategising for and presenting at new business pitches, further developing clients who use digital exclusively and managing the team’s output. In addition, he is responsible for ensuring that TMP's client managers and directors are kept up-to-date with developments in digital media.

Over the past ten years, Steve has been instrumental in moving client ad spends online and has won awards for innovation and creative campaigns.