Awards season begins! After a busy week finally locking the edit of our new corporate film, Hannah and I headed up to Bristol for the CIPR Local Public Services Awards. Joining us were Sarah, Lauren and Caroline representing the Postgraduate Marketing team. We were short listed in the 'Digital Excellence' category whilst they were hoping to bag the 'PR on a shoestring' trophy.

We set off from Luton at lunchtime for our trek out west, making sure that we stuck to the timings dictated by our pre-booked train tickets. It soon became apparent that wheelie suitcases were not a good idea through London (handle down, steps, handle up, steps...) but we arrived in good time nonetheless and headed to our rooms to get ready. The walk to the venue was only about 200 yards and I was very glad to be wearing comfortable shoes (unlike the girls) as again, the steps (and cobbled streets) were their worst enemy!

The venue was the absolutely brilliant 'At-Bristol'. A Science Museum definitely worth checking out, and we particularly enjoyed the interactive exhibits. My personal fave was one which measured the height of your jump from standing and played it back in slow motion. For some reason no-one else wanted a go...?!

We then headed upstairs for a lovely three course meal, some great conversation and, of course, plenty of wine. At around 9.30pm it was time for the awards to begin with our categories up fourth and sixth...

There were around six short listed entries for each category, with the runners up getting 'Highly Commended' and an overall winner. Our category came around before we knew it and being the only university there we felt the pressure on us immediately. Our entry had focussed on all of the work which we had done during Clearing in 2012 to help recruit to target, which was no mean feat in the current climate. After reading out all six nominees then came the announcement: "The University of Bedfordshire: Highly Commended!" - which to me is the same as silver... ;) Both Hannah and I were really pleased as between us this is the third silver award we've won in as many years (and still leaves us hungry to get that elusive gold award...)

Of our campaign they said:
"The university needed to recruit students and online is cost effective. The strategy was heavily focussed on search and social channels. The light-footedness of this campaign made it stand out. Day by day evaluation of metrics enabling modification was a clear indication of the benefits of new media. Clear and measurable objectives were set, assessed and achieved. The campaign added real value to student experiences as well as meeting the university’s objectives".

The big success story of the night though was our very own Postgraduate Marketing Team, who swept the board to beat their four competitors and WIN for 'PR on a shoestring!' A truly amazing effort ladies! This was totally deserved and was for their Postgraduate Life E-Zine of which the judges said: 'the objectives were strong and the evaluation showed they were more than met'.

(Left to right) Caroline Jacobi, Sarah Hampton, Paul Fryer,
Hannah Park, Lauren Hague

So there you have it, all in all a great night and we all came away from Bristol with something to show for it - two certificates and a trophy for the University of Bedfordshire! It's really great for all five of us to be formally recognised for the work we do and just getting short listed was an achievement. We were also happy that the three hour train journey was worth it, as it was a bit more heavy going on the way home :-& Now bring on the CIM Awards at the Grosvenor on 6th March...

It's upgrade time here at the University of Bedfordshire! This week we'll be upgrading both Matrix and Funnelback to the latest versions on our servers. This will give us lots of new features to experiment with and also should make all of our sites run a bit faster.

While this takes place we'll need to have a short content freeze which we've been communicating to staff for the last few weeks. We're also using this opportunity to make one particularly significant upgrade to our system - Edit+!

Currently, we have an excellent editing platform for staff to amend their own pages (Easy Edit Suite) but we're going to be one of the first of Squiz's clients to upgrade to the latest version and make web editing even easier for our staff! Some of these new features will include:

• A much simpler way to add images and link to pages
• No need to run an HTML clean up when copying text from Microsoft Word
• editing can now be done on tablet devices (e.g. ipad)
• Much more sophisticated table creating and editing tools

In the Digital Marketing Team we are constantly striving to offer as good a service as possible. So, for the past week, we've been running demo sessions to staff and the feedback has been great! Hopefully, all this will mean a much more efficient product for us to support as well as greatly improved webpages.

We'll also be making use of the brilliant Accessibility Auditor which detects any issues on the page (relevant to WCAG 2.0 A, AA, or AAA standards), the exact location of each detected issue, advice for how to correct it and even automatic correction of the content. This will give our editors the ability to help us achieve a compliant and accessible website.

So, exciting times and another example of us trying our best to keep up with the latest developments and engage our users. According to our account manager at Squiz they have our work order for this framed as the first client to roll this out on a large scale!

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).