Design and Development Inspiration
Inspiration
Making our marketing more effective with Guerilla Tactics
Aug 1st
Consumers see at least 1,600 messages a typical day according to Nielson. Think about it: between our morning TV show or newspaper, to the ad wraps on bus’ or billboards on the way to work, to the webertisements on the office computer, it’s almost impossible to unplug from the grid and escape the constant bombardment of the daily brand shouting match. Following on from my previous post identifying the 80 best guerilla marketing ideas and then yesterdays post looking at how we need to be more effective with our marketing thanks to the SUEI feedback.
Brands are finding their loud, flashy messages are falling upon deaf ears—particularly with younger generations, the generation we as a Students’ Union are trying our hardest to target. Bigger, louder, flashier is simplistic, narrow-minded and an ineffective way of delivering your message. Smart, intelligent, different, catchy and honest are adjectives to describe campaigns that grab consumers’ attention. How many used car advertisements do you remember versus GE, Apple or Volkswagen campaigns?
One way to deliver a message in a smart, impactful way is through guerilla marketing. Guerilla marketing catches the consumer off-guard. Effective campaigns are intelligent, unexpected, different, and makes the consumer smile in its brilliance. Guerilla marketing makes use of the everyday environment to convey an unexpected, intelligent message that resonates more profoundly than traditional media impressions.
To get you thinking about how your brand can incorporate guerilla marketing into the everyday environment, here are key elements to guerilla marketing:
1. Creativity
In guerilla marketing, the world is your billboard / 30-second TV spot / lower-third. Guerilla marketing begins with out-of-the-box ideation. To develop on-target, unexpected, effective guerilla campaigns, throw convention to the wind and get your creative juices boiling. The heart of every successful guerilla campaign is creativity. Without it, you’re conventional… or worse yet, annoying.
2. Unexpected
A billboard is expected. On your way to work, there are always the same billboards—with bright colors, maybe a catchy line that makes you smile. It’s expected. The German housewares manufacturer, Miele created a campaign that transformed a typically static flat billboard surface into so much more. To satirically demonstrate the power of their vacuum’s suction, they draped an actual hot air balloon over a billboard with their vacuum cleaner sucking the balloon into the the billboard.
3. More with Less
When brainstorming guerilla initiatives, it’s easy to become fantastical and impractical. If you’re a smaller company with budgetary constraints, pasting a 20-foot soccer ball to the side of a building might not be the best consideration. Being reasonable, intelligent and unexpected stretches your creativity to develop a very effective guerilla campaign without an exorbitant budget. You don’t need to be Superman to have a Superman idea. To advertise the Superman brand, small posters were pasted to lampposts to give the impression they were tied in a knot. Or, something as simple as a straw can be valuable ad real estate for a yoga company.
4. Maximize Your Surroundings
Lining the street with coffee cups does no one good. It’s not intelligent, too abstract, not relatable and a pedestrian inconvenience. But if you utilize your environment in an unexpected, intelligent way–like Folgers, when they used the steam from manhole covers to show the steam from their coffee–you’re making more meaningful impressions.
5. Interactive
Though interactivity is not a staple in all guerilla campaigns, it brings the consumer / company relationship to a more meaningful space. Take example from Swedish innovator and furniture phenomenon, Ikea . To demonstrate the appeal of an “Ikea living room,” they transformed a bus stop into a place you wouldn’t mind relaxing to enjoy a couple Swedish meatballs. They beautified a bus stop with their furniture—making it not only a interactive display, but a cozy interactive display.
Creativity in the work place
Jul 21st
UPSU is a young and vibrant organisation, but sometimes I feel that we can get into routines, as with any workplace, especially when the work load get heavy like it’s about to in the lead up to Freshers Fortnight. I’ve been trying to work out how to inspire creative talent in the workplace here at UPSU especially in our fabulous marketing department.
It’s commonly recognised that employees who work in creative environments are more likely to come up with innovative ideas – just what we need to utilise to engage with our students and stakeholders. They also develop the flexibility to adapt to changes in the marketplace; that same flexibility can make organisations such as ours more agile and better able to compete in a constantly changing competative business world.
Here are some tips I’ve collected for fostering a “culture of creativity” among your employees:
- Though some individuals are more naturally creative than others, most people are capable of some degree of creativity. An effective manager can bring together people who can contribute fresh ideas, who are not afraid to think in new ways, and who have the patience to hang in there through dry spells.
- Good communication is essential. Employees need to be aware of all aspects of a problem in order to come up with creative solutions. Make sure everyone is aware of what the group is trying to accomplish, as well as what the companys goals and expectations are.
- Don’t be elitist. It’s just plain wrong to assume that only management-level employees are capable of creative solutions. The guy in the mailroom might have some pretty terrific ideas. Find a way to solicit input from everyone in your department.
- Be careful not to be critical when employees come up with ideas that aren’t all the way there yet. It sometimes takes a lot of bad ideas to get to a good one, and if people are too afraid of ridicule to participate, you may never get there at all.
- As manager of a creative team you may have to act as referee or coach — someone who must keep people motivated to work together. Prepare to leave your own ego at the door.
- In the interest of fostering creativity, some companies offer sabbaticals or allow employees time to work on their own projects. Attending conferences outside of the normal areas of expertise, working with people from other departments, and allowing time for travel, hobbies, or classes can result in enhanced creativity and improved productivity. Every group is different — it’s up to you to figure out which strategies are realistic and productive for the people in your department.
- Allow some group time for brainstorming with no particular agenda in mind. Urge people to think about “what if” and “wish list” scenarios, and then see if you can collectively come up with ways to implement them. Nurture an environment of freedom of thought and action.
- In a creative environment the best ideas (as opposed to those promoted by the person with the highest title) should win. Everyone must be included in the process and share credit for successes. Politics should be discouraged, and it is the manager’s responsibility to keep political power plays out of the mix.
When we think about creativity in organisations, we usually focus on how to generate new ideas from as many people as possible. But that’s not all there is to it. There are lots of good ideas out there — the key is to select, encourage, and apply the best ones. Concentrate on execution as well as instigation, and make sure that company standards of excellence are upheld as creative thinking is transformed into concrete projects, programs, and products.
How the website will change thanks to your feedback
Jun 11th
Thankyou to everyone who has taken the time to fill out the 2010 Annual Survey as you will see it’s important to complete these surveys as it shapes what we’re doing. I’ve personally gone through every response on this years survey so far and here’s what I’ll be doing to resolve and develop UPSU.net for you. Obviously we can only change the negatives so that’s what’s shown below – but it’s always good to know what we’re doing right too!
Higher Education Blogs
Jun 11th
Thanks to Michael Nolan on HE Comms here’s a useful list of Blogs from Higher Education Web Teams in the UK.
Bath Web Services – http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/webservices/
City Uni Web Team – http://www.city.ac.uk/web/blog/
Imperial Web Team – http://www2.imperial.ac.uk/blog/webforum/
Scottish Uni Web Team’s – http://scottishwebfolk.wordpress.com/
St Andrews Web Team – http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/webteam/
Southampton Web Team – http://blogs.ecs.soton.ac.uk/webteam/
Bedfordshire Web Team – http://bedsmarketing.blogspot.com/
UCL Web Team – http://www.ucl.ac.uk/web-services-blog/
Birmingham City Web Team – http://mcd-web.blogspot.com/
And worth a visit is: http://collegewebeditor.com/blog/index.php/higher-ed-bloggers/
Internal Communications: Going down the toilet?
Jun 10th
I thought this was a genius idea when I saw it on the HE Comms blog – Furman University’s internal communications approach in the US is that in addition to a student-led intranet-style news service, for the 30% or so of staff who don’t have online access, they ‘launched the FUnet Flusher, a flyer – more than 200 copies – available in restrooms across campus and designed as a piece of… toilet paper.’
How many times have you wandered into a toilet with a piece of paper in hand to read, come on don’t lie we’ve all done it, some even have book shelves installed in their loos at home. It’s pure genius, instant communication with staff, who are all likely to visit the toilet at some point during the day/week.
I have to ultimately agree with Linda Doyle’s comment on the HE Comms website: “I would have thought that the idea of putting news on the inside door of the toilets might be a little more effective, and possibly less open to ridicule 
It is definitely a clever way of getting light hearted news across to use that ‘time’ – if you were to try out the toilet roll idea you would just have to avoid using photos on there, for obvious reasons ”
But in a time where the UPSU staff survey shows the internal communications aren’t as good as they could be, maybe it’s time to start thinking of some amusing and engaging communications techniques.
Facebook Symbols
Jun 9th
How often have you needed that symbol to enhance a Facebook Status or Post and make it stand out from the rest. I’ve seen Nightclub promoters doing it for a while now but couldn’t be bothered to hunt them all out – today I decided it was time to compile my list – mostly, they are Unicode-encoded special characters.
1 Website: £145,000,000 budget
Jun 8th
Imagine what you could do with £145 million to spend on a website – well that’s the kind of money the BBC are spending on theirs. I’ve just read an article on the BBC blogs talking about the 30% increase in spend on web opportunities for our glorious Beeb – no wonder the website is so cutting edge!
The approved increase is almost 42% below the £52.7m a year the BBC wanted. Regardless, cash-strapped commercial rivals will balk at the ability the BBC has to ratchet upspending in such economic conditions.
BBC Trust Chairman Sir Michael Lyons, in a letter to director general Mark Thompson, concluded that the budget increase did not require a full public value test, concluding that there was a “limited risk of the new investment, which is incremental in existing areas of BBC activity, adding materially to the market impact of BBC Online”.
Lyons said that BBC Online had to focus on “high priority” areas such as news, children’s, knowledge and better search and navigation to “deliver real value to audiences”.
“This is significantly less than BBC management originally asked for,” said the BBC Trust. “The trust considers that investment at this reduced level is appropriate. It believes that ongoing robust evaluation of the BBC’s impact on online markets will be necessary to ensure that public value is created by the investment.”
Unfortunately the UPSU budget is a little smaller with a difference of around £144,999,700 to spend on developing UPSU.net which is why we favour Open Source solutions such as Joomla.
404 Error pages
May 25th
Since launching the new website in 2009 we have not had a 404 error page that actually works or serves a purpose however now we do – woop woop – www.upsu.net/404 it’s moo-tastic!
Website Awards
May 14th
Today we’ve submitted ourselves for the NUS Awards – we’ll see what we win, and if we win, it would be nice considering the amount of hard work we put in. Here’s our nomination:
NUS Awards – Student Media category
www.upsu.netUPSU.net is the flagship media outlet of UPSU – striving to be at the cutting edge of both Student Unions and social media for young people. The website underwent a complete overhaul in October 2009 and within 6 months established itself as an active online community, engaging 25% of the Portsmouth student population and receiving the award for ‘Best Public Voted website’ in the Hampshire County Council website awards.
The website is based on strong design, intuitive navigation and embedded social media. The content is kept fresh across the website, uses striking headlines and bold imagery to actively engage the student community, with relevant documents and mini-sites to help with student life. The Union website is as much about engaging through creative content as it is about having a 24/7 pool of information for students when they need it.
Understanding the needs of Portsmouth students is key to its development –a feedback tab is constantly present in order to gain insight to their preferences. This feedback has lead to the introduction of translation tools for international students as well as the adoption of government level accessibility standards to meet the needs of our diverse community.
This year has seen a dramatic increase in participation with UPSU campaigns such as Healthy Living Week, EED Elections and One World Week. The team behind UPSU.net launched a viral video for Healthy Living Week which featured a flash mob dance off on the University campus. Within 1 week of going live on YouTube it achieved 1,200 unique views and the mini-site achieved a further 1,500 unique views that week. One World Week included a site-wide re-brand for the week, making use of the space on the edges of the screen to host a digital exhibition on ‘Diversity’. This mirrored the real exhibition that was displayed by students on campus, and drove interest to the other activities held during that period.
As part of a campaign to engage students in the democratic processes of the Students’ Union, the web team concentrated a substantial amount of time on the 2010 Elections mini-site. This resulted in a 41% increase in voter turnout as well as a huge rise in the uptake of social media such as the Twitter hash-tags (#voteupsu), Facebook groups, Flickr Galleries and Youtube. In the lead-up to the Elections campaign UPSU organised a viral video campaign based upon the Fast-show’s ‘Brilliant’ sketches, arranged live broadcasts from candidate question time and produced daily roundup podcasts, distributing them through all social networks. On results night the whole website was dominated by a live broadcast running from 7pm until 2am, featuring stock footage, live interviews from a specially made green room and the results ceremony. The broadcast was watched by over 2,000 visitors to the website as well as throughout University halls on the internal TV channel.
UPSU’s online presence extends further than just the website – it is integrated into social networking channels to match students’ usage habits. UPSU staff have completed a move to Google Mail in order to enable greater collaborative learning between UPSU Staff, students and stakeholders; this has now been adopted campus wide by the University.
The power of digital media is that the Union can instantly, whatever time of the day or night, communicate with many thousands of students wherever they are – this was best demonstrated in January 2010 during the heavy snowfalls. Having battled the weather to get the Union, the web team quickly established a snow mini-site releasing updates on building availability, local transport and course extensions for students – and even a photo gallery for snow sculptures. Our increased reach into social networks enabled us to update the site quicker and with more detail than the University, and it quickly became the principal source of information, receiving over 21,000 unique visits in that single week. The ability to run our own website integrated with mailing lists and social networks allowed instant, reliable information releases and kept the University flowing – the team received commendations from the University Vice-Chancellor for this.
Governance is key to any Students’ Union especially moving into the charity era. Portsmouth has realised the importance of this and seeks collaboration between staff and students to ensure transparency. To increase the knowledge students have of UPSU, the online team have launched a blog system for the CEO, staff and sabbatical officers, a constantly updated news stream, a FAQs mini-site and an up-to-date document warehouse all showcased directly from the UPSU homepage.
So, now you’ve read all that stuff above here’s the fun bit – I’ve been checking out what other awards are around and the one that springs to mind the most is the Webbys – international website awards for the best Ad Agencies in the world. Whilst browsing through the site (and stealing a few ideas) I came across this company: http://www.booneoakley.com who’s entire advertising agency is based through Youtube – sheer genious!
BBC Internet Blogs
May 12th
An insight into the wonderful world of the BBC webteam: www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet,then there is your geeky side www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/webdeveloper , and if you’re still looking for more then tweet this guys www.twitter.com/the_4th_floor who are the interactive team in BBC Radio One
