Just a minute... video information!

Are you looking for ways to push content to your audience? Well, our friends over in Learning Resources have come up with an idea of one minute videos.

A quick and easy way to present a lot of information in bite sized chunks. They have a series of these planned and we'll be adding them to a playlist on our YouTube channel so if they look of interest make sure you subscribe!

Easy shortening of URL's tip

If you're looking for a way of shortening your URL's for Twitter posts then why not try out the services of bit.ly

It turns URL's such as this: http://www.beds.ac.uk/courses/bysubject/artdes/ba-intarc

Into Twitter friendly URL's like this: http://bit.ly/ytTuy

Ideal if you're short on characters in a Twitter post or SMS message!

'Battle of the Brands' - Could it result in T-Orange?

So, T-Mobile and Orange have proposed a joint venture? Could this mean the appearance of a new brand in the next two years or will one of the companies come out victorious? Personally, I think the Orange name will stay and the T-Mobile client base will be absorbed to form a mobile provider with a 37% market share. This would put Orange as the largest provider in the UK, ahead of O2.

The issue of who's brand should remain when two large organisations merge can have a huge knock-on effect to the customer. Those with a loyalty to one brand may feel so disheartened by the loss of their beloved companies name that they leave all together. The management of the process and softening the blow can be crucial in ensuring that the joining of the companies keeps a significant enough proportion of the customer base to warrant the merge in the first place!

Fallon currently handle the advertising for Orange with Saatchi & Saatchi looking after T-Mobile so another battle will be on the cards for who takes over that account!

We've been shortlisted...

Great news for our new internal staff site, it's been shortlisted for a CIPR award! The new staff website was launched in August 2008 having had a complete transformation from a flat HTML website to a site sitting within our Content Management System (CMS). It was completely redesigned to match in with the new University of Bedfordshire branding and has shown some rather impressive stats for an internal site.

The awards aren't decided until the end of November so we'll be keeping our fingers crossed that we'll be able to class the staff site as award winning as well as the main site!

The joys of Google Analytics... the frustrations of reality!

Well, we are well and truly into the Clearing campaign and things are looking rather rosy... for our website traffic anyway! The initial report for August puts our overall site traffic up 31.2% on last year and the Clearing specific traffic is up an impressive 51.4% in total.

This may be down to a small, more targeted marketing campaign this year or it could be due to the increased number of Universities that potential students are looking to apply to. Unfortunately though, a large part of the increase is probably down to the media frenzy that has surrounded Clearing this year. Stories such as 'Student place scramble continues' on the BBC and 'Mad scramble for limited university places after record A-level year' on the Times Online have helped to increase a sense of panic with A-Level students.

Yes, the media have taken the opportunity to build up the story to a maddening level, it is silly season after all, but the sad reality is that available places have been capped this year and that means that some people will miss out on a place at University. If the Government want a population of well educated and skilled individuals they need to ensure that those students who have the relevant qualifications and the interest to go to University are able to secure a place!

UCAS Clearing 2009 explained by the University of Bedfordshire

As Clearing is starting up tomorrow I thought i'd add a video to the blog to show how a single source of information can be shared amongst various sites. This is running in YouTube, on our staff website and our main website and now on this Blogger page.

The wonders of having the ability to embed content from different sources! This post was actually written within YouTube and posted directly from there... yet more functionality from Google!

I have seen the future... and it's name is Media Neutral Planning!

Reading through the latest copy of Marketing Week this morning I spotted an interesting, albeit small, article on Sony Europe reviewing it's advertising plan for this year. With an estimated £50 million to spend they have decided to move away from TV advertising, which has served them well with the memorable BRAVIA adverts, towards a more media-neutral brand strategy.

Although this is far from a new idea, I think this is probably a move many large companies are looking to adopt. I have been looking at ideas around Media Neutral Planning (MNP) for the last 6 months. To help explain what MNP is Dave Chaffey has a sum-up on his blog:

"An approach to planning ad campaigns to maximize response across different media according to consumer usage of these media."

Essential, MNP is the idea of taking the bias away from your planning strategy and instead ensuring that the most used areas are maximised in the planning stage. No more "I like TV adverts so we'll spend our money there!"

With a small budget and a niche market such as ours in the HE sector it's even more important to ensure that every penny counts and MNP can certainly help with this. As mentioned in the article the internet and explosion in social media is driving the consumers behaviour and anyone working in marketing needs to ensure they're as flexible and open minded as possible!

All online advertising can be a click away from going viral or failing miserably and it's usually the things you least expect that reap the highest rewards. Keeping an open mind at the planning stage and not favouring any particular strand can mean you have the best possible chance of achieving a high return for your investment.