Have you heard the one about the blogger, the recruiter and the geek?
It sounds like the basis of a pretty cheap gag but in fact goes some way to describe some of the participants in the inaugural Placement Chat hosted on Twitter yesterday evening. I was joined by a fellow university professional, students currently out on placement, a graduate/blogger who benefited from undertaking a placement, and a recruitment consultant/careers adviser.
Throughout the hour discussion ranged from the benefits of placements, parental influence on decision making, how students can help themselves to become more employable and even helped a student with preparation for their quarterly review.
Inspired by the brilliant Career Cam Live I wanted to use social media to create an interactive session to discuss the virtues of placement and hopefully reach an audience beyond my existing network.
The technology that powered the event was incredibly simple. Anybody with a Twitter account could interact with the conversation using the hashtag #placementchat while using an application called TweetChat made it very simple to block out the rest of the Twitter world. Copying a little bit of HTML code, I embedded a TweetChat window into my blog so that my readers could keep track of the event.
In terms of promotion, I probably need to apologise to my Twitter followers as for the last week or so I have been posting regular reminders of the time and date. I'm very grateful to those who retweeted the messages to their followers, particularly my friends at Career Geek who put out a stream of messages through their social media channels. Ahead of the next #placementchat I will look to tap into the marketing expertise of Rate My Placement to reach out to a wider student audience.
So what were the outcomes of this event? From a personal perspective, I was happy with how the session went. Whenever you try something new or innovative there is always the danger of falling flat on your face and I had worried that I would be sat at my laptop tweeting to myself for an hour. That didn't happen but I'll be the first to admit that I was hoping for a little more student engagement in the session. However, a platform has been laid for future events and any fears I held about exiting my comfort zone have been put to rest.
There were other positives too. One of the participants sent me a message afterwards to say they had been inspired and would be looking into the possibility of doing something similar. I noticed two of the participants networking outside of the main conversation and may look to collaborate together on a future project.
On reflection, I am fairly pleased with how things worked out. I'm excited at the possibilities of running similar sessions with my own students, perhaps involving placement recruiters or inviting alumni to recount their placement stories to the current class.
There will be another #placementchat in the near future. Keep your eyes open for the hashtag.
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