This week has been a bit of a learning experience for me, so I thought I'd share my findings with you. As mentioned in a previous post by Hannah she's been working flat out on a new University film with our chosen agency Spectrecom. We received the first edit of this last week and are both very excited by how it's all looking. Early on, we decided that using a music track would really improve the overall quality and production values and here's where my input came in. I had some suggestions on the use of music and thought we easily secure usage rights through one of my connections. How naive I was...

I won't mention here the track we're hoping to get clearance to use (in case we don't get it!) but thought I'd go through our process of securing a music synchronization licence.

To licence a commercial track, you have to licence two separate parts:

1. a copyright in the actual sound recording (to use that exact rendition of it)
2. a separate copyright in the musical and lyrical composition (if you were wanting to do a cover version this would be all you need)

It seems the process is completely unregulated, so the record company can set the price for these at whatever they choose (anything from free, to tens of thousands of pounds) depending on usage.

So firstly, I got in contact with the band, who put me in contact with their management. They said we could have the rights to use the actual sound recording and were happy to match whatever price we agreed with the record label. So far so good...

None shall pass!

However, the record label was a lot more complicated. After being passed around about twenty different contacts we eventually got in touch with the relevant person and are in the process of some lengthy negotiations on price and usage.

The good thing is we're clear on our budget and the usage we want (the length of the licence, screenings at open days, embedding on our website and Facebook page and hosting on our YouTube channel). The latter of these is the sticking point as YouTube is a notoriously difficult thing to regulate and publishers know this.

What this also shows is that artists have very little or no control over where their music is used. They also have no control over how much they would like to charge for it! I guess this is something you sign away once the record label signs you and pays to produce your album.

At the moment we're waiting to hear if they're happy with our latest offer - we really hope they are as we'd love to use the track. Watch this space for a future post from Hannah with the full video (if we get the rights to embed it on blogs!)

The onslaught of our busy January continues... Therefore, I'm just snatching five minutes to update this blog with details of a new project which we supported last week.

"Our operators are standing by..."

Before Christmas, our Postgraduate Marketing team came up with the idea of running two Virtual Open Days for prospective students. This would involve them logging on to our website at specified times and then taking part in a selection of activities/virtual tours - and this is where we came in! We offered up some initial ideas of how we could support this, both in the lead up and on the days. To begin, we went about building a landing page for all attendees which gave answers to all of the basic questions we expected them to ask.

We then recommeded that we make use of our current live text chat service but take it to the next level by enlisting the expertise of our academics. This took a lot of organising - particularly from the PG team who had to ensure that each hour of the event was covered by a member of staff from each subject. Our job was to install the software and train over 30 staff in the space of a week! Thankfully, we have a great service which we currently use called ISL Pronto which has no limit on the amount of user accounts we can create!

Once everyone was suitibly happy with the software, it was time to help in promoting the event both on our Facebook pages, Twitter and via Google AdWords. This proved quite successful as over 150 people registered for the two afternoons it was running. Then the event began...

The PG team were excellent as the first port of call for all enquires, and the academics, support services and admissions teams were all ready to be transferred their relevant queries. Then people logged on! The first and second hours of the events were hectic, before a steady flow of enquires and finally a flurry of activity at the end. Even we were impressed by the knowledge and helpfulness of our staff, and the PG team are now preparing a detailed report on how it all went (with statistics provided by us) to help inform any similar events in the future.

Just spoke to one of your advisors, they were incredibly helpful. Great way to get information, just need to write my proposal!
— James Simpson (@JamesISimpson) January 16, 2013

Overall, these events were a great success and we've already got some very exciting ideas on how to ramp it up a gear when we run something similar again...!

PS. if you attended the events then please fill out our survey for a chance to win a £50 Amazon voucher.

Happy new year to all readers of this Blog - I hope that you all had a great Christmas break. We have some great news to start 2013 in that we've just advertised for two brand new roles within the team!

Both of these jobs are one year fixed term contracts and here are the details:

• Marketing, Admissions, Recruitment and Communications (MARC)
• Grade 6, £24,766 per annum
• 37 hours per week

Digital Marketing Officer 
We are looking for an experienced Digital Marketing Officer to develop the University’s web content and day-to-day management and analysis. The post holder will be expected to implement innovative consumer focused digital marketing projects in relation to corporate strategic objectives. They will also be experienced in the use of Social Media, CMS, Analytics tools, Design (e.g. Photoshop) and HTML email software.

Web Content Officer
We are looking for a Web Content Officer to be responsible for developing and maintaining the structure and copy of the University’s web pages. The role holder will be required to oversee the content for all University websites and to deliver writing for the web training to various departments.

So if you're interested in joining our award winning team then it would be great to hear from you. To apply and for more details just following the links above through to our website.

For an informal discussion about either of these roles, please contact me on 01582 743987 or email: paul.fryer@beds.ac.uk

I thought I'd take this opportunity to wish everyone a very Happy Christmas! Today is our last day before the holidays and we're working on tying up lots of loose ends and making sure we're fully planned on our priorities for when we get back.

We've got some really exciting projects coming up in the new year (January is going to be VERY busy) so watch this space for regular updates.

To spread a bit of Christmas cheer here's a clip from my favourite Christmas film 'Scrooged' with a very interesting take on Marketing!

Exciting news here at Bedfordshire towers. We've been shortlisted for not one, but two Digital Marketing awards!

The first of these is at the CIM Marketing Excellence Awards 2012. We've been shortlisted in the Education category for our 2012 Digital Marketing Clearing campaign, which was managed in partnership with agency Statistics into Decisions. The award winner will be announced at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London on 6 March 2013.

We've also just had some more good news (especially for a Monday morning) that we've been shortlisted in the CIPR LPS Awards 2012. This is also for our Digital Clearing campaign and is in the Digital Excellence category. The awards ceremony for this will be held in Bristol on 7 February 2013 (admittedly a bit further to travel!)

I was really pleased with all the work and achievements of my team during Clearing and this is testament to the fact that we're ahead of the game and are really at the forefront of Digital Marketing. I'm sure we can keep up the momentum and continue to provide an excellent service and hopefully take home some awards!

Now I have two excuses to dust off the dinner suit...

(Also, a shout out to the Postgraduate Marketing Team and their shortlisted entry at the CIPR awards for their brilliant Postgraduate Life e-zine - we're all looking to a well deserved night out at the ceremony).

December is here so it's now fine to start decorating your house, office or children - well, that's my opinion anyway. SOME have started the Christmas celebrations much earlier... (you know who you are... ;))

The bespoke design off trophy -
actual size!

One responsibility that usually rests with my team is the design of the yearly University Christmas card. This is then signed off by the Vice Chancellor before thousands of copies are printed and sent to all of our many stakeholders, partners and friends. We also build an eCard version of it for staff to send out. We've had some great designs over the past years and we were determined that 2012 wouldn't be any different.

Therefore, we came up with the idea of a healthy in-team compeition - the  Christmas Card Design Off 2012. This involved Mick, Hannah, myself and our other best friend (namely Photoshop...) The winner would then be decided by a democratic 'first past the post' system (i.e. the rest of the MARC office voted for their favourite and whoever got the most votes won).

Despite a bit of cheating on my part (loose deadlines and submitting two designs instead of one) the votes were cast and the winner was Hannah with this brilliant design:

Hannah's winning design showing our Putteridge Bury campus in the snow and some subtle
footprints leading up to it (which are actually the University of Bedfordshire logo)

Hannah was rewarded with the above trophy (which in no way is second hand...)

So, if you've worked with us over the last year or more you'll be getting a lovely printed copy of Hannah's design through the post in the next few weeks. I won't showcase the losing entries here yet - who knows, we might try re-submitting them next year?!

We're always looking at ways of making our site easier to navigate and from looking at our statistics it's clear we get a lot of traffic from our red bar navigation. Therefore, we thought it was time for a reappraisal of this to help our users navigate quickly and effectively.

After lots of trials we settled on completely rebuilding our drop downs. These drop downs enable users to take a shortcut to the page or sub-page they are looking for, while also giving us a chance to link to key documents and events which we feel need highlighting.
 
From a design perspective, we felt a drop-down menu allows a ‘busy’ layout to be tidied up (and our site is over 11,000 pages!), with all of the sub-categories hidden away awaiting a mouse-over. Firstly, we needed to think about the action that users need to take to activate drop-down menus and decided that they would only show when clicked. The advantage of this is that the menu remains in place whether the cursor remains in the area or not. This therefore removes one potential source of frustration.

The 'mega-menu' on our new
International landing page

The next stage was to focus on the content and this was the most time consuming part of the process (which it should be!) We ran an audit of our most searched for/visited pages and cross referenced this with our key messages to ensure that we are guiding our users both where they want to go and to what we want them to see. This gave us our large range of links in related groups. We then authored a number of headings to group them together and put them into relevant column layouts.

The important thing here was to not offer too many options, save extra clicks where we could, and make sure we did plenty of testing (both with users and with different browsers). From this we also decided that our 'mega menu' would span the entire width of the page allowing it to be much more tidy and easy to read.

Our final big consideration was how this would work on a mobile device. As our site is responsive (and after lots of testing) we decided to avoid clutter and to focus on keeping it simple. We felt it would be easier if these long menus did not display at all on the smaller devices (i.e. smartphones) as too much content on smaller screen sizes regulated our main content.

So there we have it! The 'mega-menu' is now live and we'll be continuing to monitor the stats very closely to see if they've had the desired effect before developing them yet further...