I'm sure the majority of readers will have seen the University of Bedfordshire absolutely everywhere in the past few weeks.

Firstly, we actually managed to go 'viral'! Personally I don't much care for the phrase and it's definitely true that if you're trying to 'go viral' then you most likely will fall at the first hurdle. Our particular experience all started with a news story focusing on the work of one of our Applied Linguistic Professors, Stephen Bax. His research has made him the first professional linguist to crack the code of the 600 year old Voynich manuscript using an analytical approach.

The Voynich manuscript - for
years many people thought
the writing could be nonsense
Obviously, this is a pretty big deal and also has a great appeal to fans of Indiana Jones and suchlike. However, we didn't quite realise what a large impact this work would have on a worldwide scale. On Thursday 21st February, after sharing the story on our social media channels as usual my team noticed a sudden increase in the amount of social shares. We then had a look at our website analytics to discover that we were averaging new 400 visitors a second!

This was mainly due to the story being picked up in America and shared on Reddit (a site which allows users to vote the top stories to the front page). This proved to be only the beginning as Professor Bax begun his media tour by appearing everywhere from the BBC to the New Scientist and the Daily Mail.

Needless to say we sprung straight into action, posting Google Ads next to blog mentions, recording sentiment/traffic sources and ensuring we were capturing all the buzz to report back and get maximum publicity of the story. To date we have received (and still growing):
That is one MASSIVE spike in traffic!
It dwarfed our usual (quite impressive)
amount of visits in no time
  • Reddit: Over 3,000 user comments 
  • Facebook: 37,000 likes 
  • Twitter: 7538 individual mentions 
  • Unique news story page views: 363,037 
If you do a quick Google search you'll see we're still getting mentioned!

The second big event for us was being awarded with the Queen's Anniversary Prize for Research. This was presented by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh in recognition of the University's applied research into child sexual exploitation, influencing new safeguarding policy and practice. Our input into the presentation day was again monitoring social media mentions and getting the story seen by as wide an audience as possible. We also liaised with the Royal Communications team to ensure consistency of message and for supply of the footage from the prize giving. Time was of the essence here and we were able to get the video edited and online within an hour of receiving it:



Our new Luton campus library
In other news, we've been liaising with our friends in Learning Resources in order to put together an internal and external marketing plan for our new library. We have a vested interest in this as not only did I used to work in that department but it's being built on top of where our offices used to be! It's going to look pretty impressive as well and will really reinforce our current remit of improving the student experience.

I've also reinstated our Web Working Group meetings where all power users of our CMS can get together to share best practice and have their input into our web strategy. Historically I've really enjoyed these and it also gives us a chance to showcase all of our latest developments which many feed into the goals of each department.

Finally, I've been asked to present at the Inside Government 'Future of Higher Education Marketing Conference on 29th April (my youngest son's first birthday!) with my colleague Sarah from the Marketing Team. The focus of this will be our Prospects Best Website win with the title 'Enhancing Postgraduate Student Recruitment Through Developing a Digital Presence'. Definitely right up my street but I'll have to bring my 'A' Game judging by the quality of the other speakers on the agenda!
Everyone has an opinion!
In the haze of interviewing for new staff (I've been on three panels this week) I thought it was about time that I authored a new post! At the moment it seems we've got loads of mini-projects on the go and I'm trying to get these signed off so we can focus on some big web developments and improvements. A lot of the ideas for the latter have stemmed from our Web Strategy meetings. I've had to be very careful to ensure that, from now on, all decisions and developments are informed by our target audience. The last thing we want is a room full of middle aged men deciding on what's cool! That's why I've started properly organising some focus groups with our feeder colleges, some proper user testing and usage analysis. Stay tuned for the results..

Another thing the team have been working on has been data capture for our latest Postgraduate virtual event. Previously, we've helped get the the event up and running but this time we wanted to 'gate' it to ensure we had some meaningful leads afterwards. This did mean a drop in attendance (people are quite wary before giving away their contact details) but hopefully will mean we can send them some useful follow up material to show them the benefits of becoming students with us!

A campaign
skyscraper advert
Another series of mini-projects has been evidenced in our 'pre-clearing campaign' which runs until June. In the past, this has mainly been to showcase our open days but I have now put together a full plan of activity (with budget) to highlight the great reasons why students should choose us over our competitors. The bulk of this has been through Google AdWords and we have three adjacent campaigns running (branding, under recruiting courses and new courses). As I usually handle all of this myself it's been a great opportunity to get the team trained up in AdWords and share the burden courtesy of our friends at Jellyfish. One thing we do have is a generous training budget!

An example campaign landing page
We've created bespoke landing pages for every subject area and with the new addition of student blogs have plugged these in to each page using a great little RSS tool I found called Feeder Ninja.

We also have been creating the usual radio adverts, MPUs, leaderboards and skyscrapers and a full content strategy for social media. Promoted Tweets are working particularly well for us and our account managers there have been great at advising on our choice of content and ways to track our campaigns - the platform is developing daily!

There has still been time for the odd little improvement to our website though and we got the jquery accordion up and running. This is something which I've previously used on a personal project for my brother in law and already is being utilised by our power users across the University.

That's about it for now. Finally, my quest to get my professional profile seen across the entire internet was helped by Spectrecom Films, who asked if I could do an interview for their February 2014 sector report (included below!) We're also in the initial stages of another exciting new project with them so I should have something to report back on that very soon. Enjoy! ;)
Click for a larger version. From the photo it looks like I live in our student halls!
As the logo says I'm VERY 'proud
to be shortlisted!'
I launch into my second post of the year with some great news as this very blog has been shortlisted for a National Blog Award! This is as an organisation blog in the Education category. I'm particularly excited about this one as I'd put it forward a few months before Christmas and had forgotten I'd done so.

Whilst casually looking at the blog stats I then noticed I had some referral traffic from the Blog Awards website. A bit of further investigation showed that I'd made it through to the public vote - with just three days left before it closed! I sprang straight into action on a social media campaign to rally some votes which was enough to get me to the final shortlist and the judging stage.

Therefore, I'd like to say a BIG THANK YOU to all the readers who voted for me! Although it's a lot of work to keep this updated, whilst doing the day job, it's also very therapeutic. It's all too easy to think about what I don't manage to achieve at work that this is a great document of the projects which do get completed (and I like to think of myself as a 'glass half full' person!) It also is a great tool for getting some valuable internal buy in.

The awards ceremony is on Friday 25th April in London so hopefully I'll be there, in my cheap dinner suit, with a glass of champagne in my hand to do some networking (and nail biting!) I'd also like to give a quick shout out to Pure360 (our email marketing solution) for being shortlisted as an organisation blog in the Digital & Technology category. Now down to business...

Last week was a busy one as the entire team were working on the launch of the new Partnership and Community section. This has consisted on literally making something from nothing as it is all new content! Obviously, it's still a work in progress but it's great to have the skeleton now there laying a great groundwork for expanding this area. It's also been a good learning curve for the team to see how all of our skills compliment each other - I've developed the project plan and homepage visual, Graeme's built the homepage, Elisabeth and Angela have got the site structure up and running and approved the content and Lauren has designed the graphics and the right column. Some great team work!

It was great to see our students
presenting their digital marketing ideas
so eloquently
It's also been a good few weeks for gaining new knowledge. I have now seen through to completion a project I started a few months ago by grading the projects of our MSc Business Web Analytics and Management students. They came up with some great ideas to better market their course, presented them very well and I really enjoyed the opportunity to get involved in the curriculum again. Needless to say they all passed with flying colours. and I may well be using some of their ideas...

Finally, Lauren and Angela attended an internally run SEO course which was in equal parts interesting and reassuring (as these courses often are!)

To close this post I'd like to say thank you again to everyone who reads and voted for this blog and I'll try my best to ensure that I add some unique and interesting insights into what the team has been up to in the future. Above all I hope to show that work CAN be fun!
So, here it goes for another year... As an indicator of how we've had to hit the ground running it's taken me a good few weeks to get around to this blog post. Since Monday I've been on the second stage of my IDM Diploma in Teddington and am writing this from the bar of the hotel in which I'm staying in Hampton Court after just wishing my kids goodnight via Facetime - the best thing work ever did was give me this laptop!

My view as I write this post -
(The Kings Arms, Hampton Court)
It's been a good few days so far with some great lectures on brand, social media and campaign planning and I now have a big list of actions to take back to the office. We've also been informed that the qualification we've been studying for has been upgraded to a Postgraduate Digital Marketing Diploma (PG DipDigM) meaning if I pass I get an extra two letters after my name! It's all looking good so far too as I passed my first assignment with flying colours. Let's hope I can keep up the momentum...

As far as work is concerned, the team has already been busy with some new innovations. The first of these being that we are now displaying unit information on our course pages. This has been a real team effort between our ICT department, Squiz and myself and brings us up to speed with our competitors. What it means is that each course page shows the units which are currently being studied on each course. This data comes directly from our SITS database and is updated nightly so should always be completely accurate and gives a much more detailed overview of the exact content of each course.

'This page is now offline as it hasn't
been updated since 2003...'
The team also spent a day at Squiz getting some bespoke training on asset listings and their applications. It was really great stuff and has not only allowed us to better understand and automate our front end lists but also our back end reporting. The latter is evidenced by our latest report showing the most active departments in removing content from their sections (people are great at putting content online but rubbish at removing it) and who needs to try harder!

Today we've also gone live with our phase 2 of our events calendar. This allows the functionality of adding key dates and most excitingly customised embeddable calendars. The way these work is users add their events to the calendar as usual but can then apply a number of filters (e.g. location, department) and use the code it generates to embed a bespoke version into their own section of the site. Very useful for all as it allows the user to highlight just their events but also keeps everything held centrally.

In other news, I've taken part in my first set of interviews for the year for Marketing Officer which were very enjoyable (but tiring!) and have worked with our colleagues in Student Services to launch a whole new Careers section. I've also been working with our Education and Sport department to create a number of new films highlighting each of their departments (Teacher Education, Education Studies and English Language & Communication). The content of these was developed by the faculty themselves with our input in helping to select a production company, briefing them on our brand and working on a seeding strategy to ensure maximum impact. We're particularly happy with one which was produced to highlight the opportunity for students to take part in work placements at Club Le Santa in Lanzarote:



Anyway, time to sign off as my bar snacks have just arrived! It's been good to get back into my blogging groove and here's to a fantastic 2014...
And with that awful pun I launch into my last blog post of the year...

I'll start by outlining an addition to our course lists, which are now all alphabetically sorted. For a while now we've made do with these displaying as a long list which, although being dynamically updated from our course database, were pretty static with no anchor points. This is why we undertook a bit of work to make them more accessible and to include a little alphabet picker at the top. Job done and much more user friendly! We're also planning on rolling this out to our other asset lists in the near future.


New staff training opportunities
coming soon!
Other things the team have been working on of late are content updates to our Student Life, Alumni and Partnerships sections and delivering the first of many Writing for the Web training session. The latter is something which will offered to all staff in the new year - meaning that we hope for the quality of writing on our site to improve tenfold. My favourite quote from the first session has to be "This is WRITING for the web, not copying and pasting..."

Yesterday afternoon I attended the unofficial Squiz/Funnelback user group at City University. This was a great opportunity to talk to our equivalents at other universities (and beyond) who work with Matrix on a daily basis.


This is about as classy as
our decorations get
Lots of great ideas were shared and I particularly liked the demo of Trello, a fantastic free project organisation tool. We're already setting it up with the idea that this is now the go to place for all web projects and progress monitoring. We also used the meeting to talk about how we found the upgrade to Matrix version 14.8 which is something we're in the middle of having implemented right now!

In other news, it's been a week full of getting into the Christmas spirit. From spending all of the swear box money accumulated through the year on decorations from the 99p Stores (we have a LOT!), to going out for a festive pizza with the team. We also exchanged our Secret Santa presents, took part in national Christmas jumper day and 'Christmas-ified' our intranet to coincide with the launch of our digital Christmas card.


Looking back on 2013 (my first full year in the job) it's been a pretty intense but rewarding time. We've seen some team members come and go (the former mainly due to me as I've been on nine interview panels this year!) and also have had more than our fare share of accolades in the form of external awards (two golds, three silvers and five ceremonies) which have been tremendous fun. I've also learnt lots and loved the opportunity to work on the first University cinema advert which seems to have been a great success. On a personal level it's also been great as I've welcomed my third child and have started studying for a diploma (having just submitted my first assignment...)

So what do we have planned for 2014? Definitely loads of revamped website sections and we've been gearing up for these in the last month by undertaking a variety of audits. We're also working on stage two of our events calendar and are in the process of a complete homepage redesign.

I hope you all have a brilliant Christmas and new year break. My final task for 2013 is to get my 'to do' list down to double figures...

Merry Christmas from the University of Bedfordshire Digital Marketing team!


A badly Photoshopped montage of the team. I've excluded myself as there's enough
photos of me on here already!
In our team it's easy to focus on keeping the website ticking over, supporting our editors and monitoring the progress of our campaigns. This can leave little time to focus on new developments, which of course, is the fun part! Everyone loves a new toy (especially at this time of year) so we've recently set aside some time to look at some new solutions which will help us more easily monitor and communicate our vast amount of public content.

Our new social dashboard with live
updates being published to the site
every twenty minutes
The first thing we've just gone live with is our new Social Dashboard. This basically combines all of our social profiles (our Twitter, Facebook, Instagram accounts and blogs) and presents them in one regularly updated place. After some extensive research (and lots of free trials) we decided on the paid service Tint. This did everything we wanted and had the benefit of being easily customisable and responsive with some great analytics functionality.

We were also very impressed with the level of customer service we received with Tim (at Tint!) being particularly helpful and supportive of our cause. Now we're up and running we're looking for a way to further promote it on our homepage, make evidence based tweaks to the presentation and also roll out more specific 'Tints' - e.g. by creating one just for our student blogs.

We've now also gone live with with our new Belong at Bedfordshire CRM. This means that we've added all of our enquirer data and they should have received emails from us encouraging them to sign up. The benefits for them at the moment will be content (videos, blogs, subject guides and key dates) which will be tailored to their interests. The plan is that we can now communicate with them much more easily and give a great user experience to them before they even come here!

Another big development is around our brand and social monitoring. Thanks to some amazing work by Ranjit at Statistics Into Decisions we're now getting live updates of wherever we're mentioned the very second it goes online. This is from anywhere on the internet from news sites to Blogs to people's personal Facebook pages. We can then engage with them or add Google adverts to articles which mention us - it's true real time marketing! This has been a lot of work to refine and block out some of the noise around our brand (a lot of which we create) and is a bespoke fusion of two big media monitoring tools. We've already picked up some brilliant content which would have gone unnoticed otherwise and have Tweeted it out immediately!

In other news Graeme also attended the opening of our new crime scene investigation rooms with TV presenter Nick Ross and filmed the below video for our news stories:



Lauren has also been busy working with other departments to completely revamp their web sections and has this week launched both new Open Days and Part Time sections. It's been a lot of work to bring them up to speed and decide on which content to move, delete or create. Obviously, this is still a work in progress but a website's never finished right?!
It's been quite a varied week since my last blog posting and I've welcomed some changes to the usual routine. The first of these was the opportunity to get more involved in the curriculum here at Bedfordshire. This is always something I've been interested in and my previous role at a South London academy gave me lots of opportunity to make my way into the classroom or to attend residential trips.

This time I was contacted by one of our lecturers to help with a project currently being undertaken by our MSc Business Web Analytics and Management students. They have been asked to come up with a full marketing plan to promote their degree and this is where I came in! It was really great to get a chance to go along and talk to them about what we already do and how we decide which courses to push and through which channels. I particularly enjoyed going back to basics and reminding myself why I chose to work in this sector. It's always great to see that the majority of our academics are extremely conscientious and good at getting the best out of their students - sometimes that's easy to forget in the haze of emails and last minute requests. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing what the students come up with following our chat...

Following on from that, we've had our last bit of training with our friends at Azorus in Canada and I met with our partnerships office regarding a complete revamp of their web presence. As a University it's also been announced that we've been awarded the Queen's Anniversary Prize for our research which is the highest form of national recognition open to higher and further education institutions in the UK. Throw into the mix some challenging emails from one member of staff and the great buzz that our graduation ceremonies bring to social media and it's all been pretty hectic!

(L to R Graeme Stenhouse, Lauren Hague,
Me and Laurie Taylor)
The real crowning achievement this week though (from my point of view), was our WIN for Best Website at the first ever Prospects Postgraduate Awards. As previously mentioned, this was our fifth awards ceremony this year and to go out on such a high was truly amazing!

In a change of pace we made our way up to Manchester in the morning for a 12.15pm start (stopping at the Christmas market to build up an appetite on the way). We were accompanied (as usual) by Sarah from the Marketing team as they were nominated for best prospectus in a very competitive field (where they unfortunately just missed out). We then took our seats at the Radisson Blu hotel in a room full of other universities for an introduction from compère Laurie Taylor. We felt we had a pretty good chance as we were sat next to the staff from Prospects themselves (surely they wouldn't want to sit next to the losers?!)

We were so happy to win, and the trophy itself is a great example of glass design which we're now looking for somewhere to display. Bring on next year and hopefully some more ceremonies - these have been massively enjoyable and I couldn't have done it without such a dedicated and supportive team. It has been tiring at times (those award entries don't write themselves!) but it's all been worth it to get some much needed internal and external recognition (and some very delicious three course meals!)
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