Northern Lights Social Media Day

Last week Northern Lights, the business incubation arm of UCLan, held a social media day and we were kindly asked to exhibit, present and take part in a Q&A panel. It was well attended and we were able to make use of Sandbox, Preston’s most tech laden conference space and innovation lab. Rather than go down the traditional exhibition route of a pop up display banner and selection of flyers we decided to stick to what we know and concentrate on communicating and interacting with people in unusual and creative ways. To give people a chance to unleash their creative juices we put together a real life Facebook Wall for attendees to graffiti their Twitter handles, LinkedIn urls, Facebook usernames and anything else that they wanted to share.

Myself and Tom gave a short presentation on making the social web a “home from home” looking at branding across social media. Just as it is important to maintain a continuous brand image spanning both print and web based design it is now becoming as important to ensure that any social web profiles also fit with your brand image. We were able to take advantage of Sandbox’s fantastic oversized projector screens which meant life size Tom and Nathaniel images accompanied our real selves, other than that highlights included:

• making your Facebook page profile image 180 pixels wide x 540 long to take advantage of as much space as possible
• the header images on your Facebook page are randomly taken from your photo albums but by hovering over a thumbnail you can remove it from the header bar without actually deleting it
• you can customise a Twitter background but just be aware that the amount of space that people actually see is quite small and ensuring a complete bio, web address and good profile image is much more important
• although LinkedIn is more focused around the individual than the brand you can still tweak a few areas, one of which is editing your websites by selecting other from the drop down box and adding your own descriptive text – we will be uploading a how-to via our YouTube channel later today

The event finished off with a panel Q&A with myself, Tom and a host of other local social media obsessives; there were some excellent questions and some insightful answers. To stay in the loop with future Northern Lights events why not follow them on Twitter?