Looking for new ways to connect with prospective students and "gen-y", we looked to social media to help us connect with our audiences in a real and authentic way.
31. WA Web Awards (2010) Education standard of excellence (Winner) Australian Institute of Marketing (2010) Social Marketing (State winner, National Finalist) Association of Commonwealth Universities PR, Marketing and Communication Awards (2010) (Winner for ‘Websites’ category)
brand proposition is unique compared with other universities in WA authentic and meaningful way.
Our goal Gen Y – marketing savvy - beyond our usual marketing materials – to provide prospective students with real advice from real students.
- encourage direct conversations between our students and prospective students. help prospective students to find the answers they were looking for deepen our understanding of current and prospective students (behaviours)
challenged our student community to blog about Murdoch. invited to share their Murdoch experience win an internship with our partners at Sunset Events and eventually a paid blogger role.
long term view (2yr period) competition helped us find our good, trusted bloggers. develop a pool of bloggers we could feature/use from time to time.
blogger competition 3 month campaign Blogger prove their blogging abilities
The only exception to this rule is if someone posted content that we felt is illegal or offensive. As with many other websites (e.g. Flickr and Facebook), this type of content would be reported and removed.
Rule 2 Sometimes we might ask them to share their thoughts on a particular issue or event We encouraged students to blog about life at Murdoch in a completely honest way. We wanted them to share positive and negative experiences, not contrived marketing messages.
Stakeholder buy-in: encouraged people to read ‘Groundswell’ what is groundswell how it helped them understand why we were doing this also did a large amount of social media training (crisis management) SM guidelines.
Promotion Online press releases Open and transparent around censoring and how bloggers would be chosen. incentives
Assignements What why
How we judged the bloggers The content score was based on: • Audience engagement • Match with the Murdoch personality • Enthusiastic use of social media • Effort and commitment
Content agregated into campaign site 14 students entered the blogging competition produced more than 389 pieces of published content. cross section of our student community Badges for their blog
contributed to increasing chatter online about Murdoch University. in-bound links to our public website, which helped to boost SEO Explored different ways to comm with pros students
The advice the bloggers shared was real, honest and allowed them to reveal their personalities. Videos
What types of media they used for what Embraced different mediums Used Facebook to promote – targeted audiences Excellent ROI Our limited budget for traffic gen made the results even more rewarding. top traffic generators (Facebook, search and blogs) were free, and required no effort on our behalf.
Traffic and engagement stats were extremely positive During the competition period, we received a vast amount of traffic from promotional placements on Murdoch website, including our public website and student portal. The popularity of the student blogs showed a high level of interaction with blog visitors. We also had 48,292 impressions of an online press release about the competition (or 549 reads) from education and social media industry websites online, which demonstrated the level of online ‘buzz’ the competition attracted.
strong brand ambassadors, who continue to spread the brand message long after the campaign has ended. Better understanding of their online behaviours Crowned 2 bloggers
put in an effort way beyond our expectations.
great advice to share open and honest use their own social networks.
