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.

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.

It’s so incredibly simple let this guy below explain:

A friend of mine at Brighton-based web agency Message circulated the results of a study in web typography on her Facebook feed.

I’m always interested in improving typography and accessibility, and this seemed to go deeper than most, and result in a very clean, easy-to-follow recipe to maximise on-screen readability.

And the answer is…? Well, you’ll have to read their results.

So the following feeds will be populating our social networks with different feeds.

• News Feed items will be prefixed with News: and pull information from http://twitterfeed.com/feeds/696285/detail
• Event listing items will be prefixed with Events: and pull information from http://twitterfeed.com/feeds/1524243/detail
• Document uploaded items will be prefixed with Docs: and pull information from http://twitterfeed.com/feeds/1524247/detail
• FAQ items will be prefixed with FAQs: and pull information from http://twitterfeed.com/feeds/1524253/detail
• Staff blog items will be prefixed with Staff Blog: and pull information from http://twitterfeed.com/feeds/1524278/detail
• Marketing blog items will be prefixed with Marketing Blog: and pull information from http://twitterfeed.com/feeds/1524278/detail

It referenced the ‘Best Fonts of 2009‘ so I had a look and was impressed. A lot of new fonts I see seem to be re-makes of the classics, but some of these are really useful. I particularly like the decorative flourishes of Champion Script Pro and the Facebook-ish appeal of Geogrotesque.

See the whole list (if you like that sort of thing) or check out their excellent ‘What the Font‘ identification service. And yes – I’m staying subscribed.

THIS IS WHAT YOU SAID ABOUT OUR CONTENT:

Updated more often

Content needs to be updated more often

More often than not the information is too late

More information stored on it [the website]

More interaction through Student Polls and Message Boards

Union shop should include real pictures of apparel

Link UPSU to Lookup

Information about student rep meetings

More obvious how to book function rooms

More details on Societies

Contact numbers for finance department

More interactivity on Society/Sports Pages

A more detailed specific area for sports clubs

Too many typos and grammar errors

Update events more regularly, advertise society and sports activities

More up to date info about events

More advertised events

Better calendar of events

Make the site more content focused rather than graphic design

More interesting in terms of features

More on Elections, News Update, Socialisation, Cooperation, Leadership and Updates

Get all the old news back, there used to be loads on there and it’s all gone

How about a ‘very’ mature section- with issues such as mortgages while studying, kids, making career plans, and how to keep in the loop if you don’t live in halls.

More opportunities for Student for breaks, especially summer.

THIS IS WHAT WE’RE GOING TO DO TO MAKE IT BETTER

1. Provide training to UPSU staff to allow them to update the website
2. Hand over power to student contributors to keep the website updated with more student views, opinions and content.
3. Increase the amount of content contained in the FAQ’s section
4. Make the content relevant to the needs of our students
5. Increase the amount of opinion gathering polls available to you
6. Encourage Sabbatical Officers to engage with you for your opinions through the message boards
7. Utilise the new Photographic Studio and encourage the shop staff to keep the Shop website updated with new photographs
8. Integrate Lookup feeds onto the UPSU website and encourage the University to do similar
9. Develop a policy to ensure Course Reps are updating the Forums with what was raised at their meetings
10. Create a webpage detailing how to book a function room at the Union
11. Re-develop the Societies website
12. Increase awareness of the finance page
13. Re-write the content and navigation for the Sports website
14. Undertake a grammar and language check throughout the website
15. Integrate a Google Calendar of UPSU events that can be linked to the University Google Accounts
16. Launch a student-led aspect of the website featuring Gadget reviews, student life, news, opinions, games, videos etc.
17. Increase the social integration opportunities through the website.
18. Increase links to Student created news from Pugwash News
19. Develop support pages with real life situations

THIS IS WHAT YOU SAID ABOUT THE UNION RELATED WEBPAGES

Easier to find more important information about the Union

Easier to find things

More transparency in the way the Union works, accessible via the website.

More info on the background of the Union, i.e. finances, reports etc.

Clearer pages on the governance of the Union

More clarity on our links with NUS; what do they do for us and who do you work with

Actually show thing that are going on around the Uni such as Student council

More information on how the UPSU attempts to provide a green service

THIS IS WHAT WE’RE GOING TO DO TO MAKE IT BETTER

1. Re-develop the Union web pages on the website
2. Assess the usability needs of users in relation to accessing content through our navigation system and implement actions to resolve any issues.
3. Recommend a meeting minute’s policy to ensure all minutes for meetings are made available to Students.
4. Train Staff and Sabbatical officers to update the document warehouse to ensure all documents are up to date.
5. Re-develop the democracy pages within the UPSU website
6. Launch an NUS affiliation section for the UPSU website which gives a balanced view of the ways we interact with the National Union of Students
7. Increase the visibility of the environmental pages and content

THIS IS WHAT YOU SAID ABOUT JOBS AND VOLUNTEERING OPPORTUNITIES ONLINE

Career opportunities such as internships

Jobs online

More volunteering opportunities

Jobs for Alumni students; volunteering

JOB SEARCH

Jobs after graduation

Less volunteering and more paid work/internships

Possibly something like internships and volunteering opportunities that would help us improve our CV’s as well as paid work.

Jobs

THIS IS WHAT WE’RE GOING TO DO TO MAKE IT BETTER

1. Promote Purple Door through UPSU.net
2. Develop a volunteering opportunities mini-site, just like a job search website but for Volunteering opportunities
3. Consider integrating a search function into UPSU.net that crawls the Purple Door website for Jobs

THIS IS WHAT YOU SAID ABOUT THE FUNCTIONALITY OF UPSU.NET

Integrate a Pure FM player

Integration with every form of media e.g. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube

Encourage people to bookmark the website

Online payment for trips and facilities for activities

Live links to the media site

THIS IS WHAT WE’RE GOING TO DO TO MAKE IT BETTER

1. Assess the possibility of having a Pure FM player launching through our website
2. Increase our interactivity with Student Media
3. Encourage Staff and Sabbatical Officers to update the Facebook Fan page and Twitter feeds
4. Link our Facebook Fan page to our Twitter Feed
5. Integrate more RSS Feeds to Twitter
6. Increase usage of Youtube
7. Add a ‘Make this your homepage’ button
8. Develop group administration facilities
9. Develop payment systems for UPSU activities

THIS IS WHAT YOU SAID ABOUT EVERYTHING ELSE

More Publicity – easy to forget about the website

Don’t know there’s a website

Link to website from Victory and Lookup

Be more creative

Remembering to go on it

THIS IS WHAT WE’RE GOING TO DO TO MAKE IT BETTER

1. Launch a UPSU.net promotional campaign
2. Encourage the University to link to our website from Victory and Lookup
3. Add links to the UPSU website for Victory and Lookup
4. Research and utilise more cutting edge technology
5. Identify a strategy that will ensure students are visiting the website on a daily basis

WE’VE DONE THIS ALREADY TO MAKE IT BETTER

1. Linked our news RSS feed to Twitter

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/

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.