Mary Curnock Cook
This chapter is mainly about Twitter. I signed up in 2010, shortly after being appointed CEO of UCAS, the UK’s centralized admissions service for higher education. As my first summer at ‘mission control’ for the university clearing system1 got under way, the head of communications told me proudly that we were trending on Twitter. I decided to sign up, using my full name (@MaryCurnockCook) as my Twitter handle.
For several months I ‘lurked’, only browsing my feed infrequently, but getting into the habit of checking what students were saying about UCAS as one of my weekend tasks. It was a revelation. I had what felt like a finger on the pulse of student sentiment throughout the agonies and ecstasies of the university application cycle. It was a huge help in an organization which wasn’t then used to thinking of students as customers.
Then a few things happened which drew me in.
First, I was at a National Union of Students (NUS) event and, on the train home, my email lit up with notifications from Twitter. I was getting virtually live feedback on the speech I had given earlier in the day. I opened my feed with some trepidation, only to find mostly positive comments and a bunch of new followers.
Next was a nerve-wracking moment on the evening before clearing opened in 2013. I was briefing the then universities minister, David Willetts, on the statistics for entry that year and he was nervously hoping for news that applications had bounced back following the dip that had accompanied the rise in tuition fees the previous year (they had). Midway through the briefing, someone came in to tell me the devastating news that the UCAS website was down following a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack. My calm response of ‘Please let me know as soon as service is restored’ belied my sense of impending doom.
The next day, as universities confirmed students’ places, we needed to be ready for a spike in traffic to our website, which could get up to five or six hundred hits per second at its peak. This was the worst possible moment for our website to be down. Happily, the service was restored in a little over an hour. As I got back to my flat, tired and relieved, I tweeted: ‘Denial of service attack on ucas website this evening. Service back on. Hackers 0, UCAS 1’. This was not popular with the tech teams back at UCAS who felt I was inciting the hackers to try harder. But I was rewarded with retweets and outraged support on Twitter – and that felt good.
The third and still the best thing to happen to me on Twitter occurred as I unwound from a busy week after clearing in 2014. It was a Friday evening and I was playing tennis when my phone starting pinging almost continuously. A poor signal at the tennis club meant that I couldn’t check what was going on until I got home. A sense of dread spoiled my game as I wondered what I might have done or said to enrage the Twitter community.
It turned out to be the now-legendary letter turning down an application to study at ‘Hogwarts University’. ‘We regret to inform you that your application cannot be processed at this time due to the fact that it does not exist’, it said, continuing that ‘your handwritten grade sheet claiming top marks in “waving a stick about”, “wearing a pointy hat” and “watching Paul Daniels2 TV specials” sadly is not suitable for submission.’ The image showed a convincing image of the UCAS letterhead with my recognizable signature at the bottom. Brilliant! And it was being shared by hundreds of people.
Among the Twitter responses were several journalists and commentators trying to find out whether it really was written by me. I sat at home in my tennis kit wondering how to respond. I wanted to join in with what was, after all, a very funny prank while also acknowledging that it wasn’t me who’d written it. Eventually I came up with: ‘Of course it’s genuine – silly muggles. In fact it’s magic....’
Cue hundreds more shares, including a few rather po-faced ones from people who clearly hadn’t read Harry Potter and thought I was trying to claim credit. In one weekend my followers climbed from about 300 to over 650 and the press picked up the story as well. I loved it.
These three incidents taught me a lot about Twitter. First, with social media, ‘public speaking’ means speaking to the public rather than just the audience – and that sets a much higher self-censoring bar when extemporizing and answering questions. Second, sharing operational pain and challenges can draw people into your world in a positive way. Third, a bit of humour is never a bad thing.
The Hogwarts letter now does the rounds on social media every summer in clearing season and the reputational afterglow that UCAS got from it was almost entirely positive. As one Twitterer put it: ‘Brilliant letter from UCAS @QuantumPirate > haha! UCAS have a sense of humour! Who knew :-).’
As my confidence and understanding of Twitter grew, so did my tweeting, retweeting, commenting – and followers. Twitter became my early-morning newsfeed – the quickest and best way of finding out what was going on in education and what was in the headlines. Gradually increasing the number of journalists, wonks and commentators that I followed gave me a good sweep of my sector. There wasn’t much that I missed.
Engaging with Twitter in this way also helped me work out how to increase my own presence by watching what worked for others. Timing is important and it seems that most people hit their Twitter feeds at about 8 o’ clock in the morning. However, now that Twitter has introduced the ‘in case you missed it’ feature, getting active early in the morning is less vital, but you can still see a pattern of retweeting as people visit their feeds at the beginning and end of the working day.
On social media, as in other areas of life, you reap what you sow. Being generous with your ‘likes’ and retweets is often repaid by people who appreciate the signal that you have noticed their contribution.
A couple of times I used Twitter to combat negative press stories, getting my rebuttal out before most people had even seen the relevant article. Contacting sympathetic supporters via direct messages on Twitter and asking them to retweet helped build momentum for the response too.
It’s important to clarify that I always composed my own tweets. My emerging Twitter voice was definitely me, not my corporate communications team. I never put ‘views my own’ on my profile as many do in what seems to me to be a fairly meaningless way. I was scrupulously careful, however, because while I was tweeting under my own name, I clearly had a responsibility to my organization and our customers as the CEO.
Although UCAS is not a government organization as some people think, it does run a public service and therefore has a role in the national infrastructure of the education system, including working with government and sector agencies. I therefore avoided any party-political stances on Twitter and still like to think that my politics are opaque to my followers. Neither would I have ever overtly criticized government policy or shown any preference to a particular university or course. This might sound obvious, but I am still surprised by prominent players in the education sector seemingly willing to display their political leanings. I prefer to keep that to myself to ensure that I don’t colour future dealings with government when elections change the scenery.
And it goes without saying that tweeting while even slightly under the influence of alcohol is not a good idea. Taking care over what you say and how you write it is a must, especially if, like me, you cringe at the typos that stay on the record long after you touched the wrong key. For this reason, I’ve given up on live tweeting at events. Perhaps I’m getting old, but I find I’m just not good at getting the tweet spot on in the heat of the moment and often end up missing the event or speech in question while trying to perfect the message. Better to take a few photographs that you can use after the event to accompany better thought through messaging.
There is also a lesson for over-hasty tweeters to learn from Toby Young’s3 evisceration by Twitter when he was announced as a board member for the new higher education regulator. What you say on social media platforms is public, and almost impossible to remove from the record.
There is a lot of quite mundane stuff shared among professional communities on Twitter and I am still learning how to stand out among the thousands of tweets landing on everyone’s feeds. Using original language helps. Retweeting an article with a ‘this is interesting’ comment usually doesn’t get much traction. My preferred approach is to shorten the URL of an article or report, and then to copy and paste a pithy quote from it.
I’m a fan of the Mark Twain quote: ‘Sorry this is such a long letter; I didn’t have time to write a short one’, and I enjoy the challenge of fitting everything I want to say into the character limit. I don’t like shortening words in 1990s text/SMS style; this might have been a pragmatic approach when we all had phones where the numbers had to be pressed the requisite number of times to type a letter of the alphabet, but there’s no excuse today – it just looks unprofessional. That said, I occasionally allow myself to slip in an ampersand when searching for a couple of characters to bring a message in under the limit.
Twitter’s new functionality to develop threads is helpful too, allowing you to comment in more depth and add images. A snipping tool is a must for energetic tweeters, allowing you to quickly copy and paste bits of text, interesting graphics or charts to enliven your tweets. These appear as images on your tweet and therefore don’t eat into your character count.
Occasionally I ‘bleet’ something. This is a cross between a blog and a tweet. You type a longer comment in Word, use the snipping tool to turn it into an image and then tweet it, adding logos or images to make it more visually appealing. It’s not quite as perfect as a corporate tweet template but has an ever-so-slightly home-made feel to it which I like to think adds to the authenticity.
Alongside education-related tweeting, I occasionally drop in something personal. It’s good sometimes to show some personality and to be prepared to reveal something of the real you behind the professional image. My banner photograph is of my three children and I change my profile picture reasonably frequently. Sadly, it’s a fact of life that including photographs of my dog (especially when he was a cute puppy) often gets more shares than messages I have worked hard on to put across an interesting stance on something to do with higher education.
Adding some warmth to your social media presence takes little effort and is often repaid with returned warmth in your community. I was overwhelmed with kind messages when I announced my resignation from UCAS on Twitter at the end of 2016. I also had a similarly warm response to quite a personal and reflective thread that I tweeted on my sixtieth birthday – alongside a triumphant photograph of my 60+ Oyster card4 for free London travel.
Now that I have stepped down from executive life and have a portfolio of non-executive roles, the Twitter community has become even more important to me. Without the platform that a national CEO role gives you, without an office and colleagues and without a treadmill of meetings and events to attend, it is easy to feel out of touch and isolated. I have a little more freedom to state my views now that I’m not the CEO of a national organization, but I continue to tread carefully in political waters, especially as I am on the boards of a public sector organization, a university and several charities that work in the public sphere.
Without the public interest that comes from a high-profile role, I have to work harder to stay current and relevant on Twitter. A busy week can leave me absent from the platform and it shows in the statistics. There is also a circular relationship between the time I am able to give to reading articles and reports and the quality of my tweeting. The two go hand-in-hand – you have to have something to say, after all.
Since stepping down from an executive role I have also paid more attention to LinkedIn where, despite having thousands of links, I have never been particularly active. Now I have to keep an eye on it for messages from people who don’t know how to reach me at my kitchen table office. I’m beginning to see the benefits of sharing and blogging there too.
But, in the end, I’m definitely a Twitter person. It’s part of my professional life and I treat it with respect while also recognizing tha t having a few thousand followers does not mean that anyone’s that interested in my views. It can be something of an echo chamber and I’m often reminded that many people in the education community see my tweets without commenting publicly. All the more reason not to get too obsessed with the online response and remember always that it’s a very public forum.