Archive for April, 2010
Its good to get out of your bubble.
April 6th, 2010
Social media and how different age groups view it can be very personal. In fact too personal and often you make decisions based upon how you view it rather than how others use it. Research can help overcome this short coming but talking to and seeing how students use it really brings it home.
In light of this I had the pleasure to judge some submissions made by cert, diploma and degree business course students from the Dublin Business School. The students were given a project brief from Repak on helping to communicate recycling to different age groups (focusing on the 18-24 segment) and to give an overview of their website properties.
8 groups presented their findings and the calibre was extremely high for students who have very little marketing training. In addition there was a strong balance of overseas students for whom English was not their first language. Some of the big takeaways were:
- All groups came back with videos ranging from themed Captain Repak style to very well thought out versions using hands with writing on them as the medium.
- Social media platforms were a strong distribution medium (Facebook primarily) but none really rated Twitter.
- Traditional media was limited to free sheets and posters primarily in addition to bin stickers.
- Reasons for returning was an observation by all. Content was useful but not compelling enough to revisit the Repak sites.
- Most groups were happy to test something out before commiting to them. i.e. pull it together, upload, see how it goes and if successful then invest later on.
- All the groups were happy to use their existing networks pointing to the importance of investing in building a wide community rather than just having the content uploaded and visible to search engines and then putting in marketing spent.
- iPhone. One of the groups went as far as designing an iPhone application and also how it would be funded. Full screen shots were provided.
- Games and quizzes were mentioned highly with some having researched rebranding existing games.
- One group built a properly functioning website with branded games reflecting how they would like to communicated with and entertained.
- Most groups were happy to take the tools that existed and to reuse existing content.
Overall there was a real sence of ease and familarlity with digital content especially video and how they are linked to social media. This is the space they all use on a daily basis and generating content for them was not seen as a major jump. They were all very comfortable with the background technical areas like hosting, editing etc and production was fairly seamless.
Here is one of the videos one of the groups produced, based on how you recycle – i.e. with your hands.
The presentations themselves were very well delivered with some groups really going a stage further in terms of the hadn out materials. Below is one folder that one group did up which had a very ecofriendly feels to it and took time to prepare.
Handouts by DBS students for Repak Presentation
Tags: DBS, judging, Repak, Social Media, students
Posted in Education, Uncategorized, social networking | Comments (1)