Chris Brims

Adam Cooke

Natalie Dent

Radleigh Tant

Daniel Titley

SoundSystemStudent

Prior to Consultancy

• No digital marketing presence

• Up to 3 bookings a term

• Limited equipment

• Very small awareness

Mission Statement

“To empower students to create their own unique events with specialised, affordable equipment that

would be otherwise unobtainable and to engage the student community by creating a friendly

atmosphere through our interactive online presence”.

Short term goals

1) Establish an online Presence for Student Sound System.Achieved this through:

FacebookPrimarily used to promote new events by inviting people within particular student networks to raise awareness.

a. Branding

b. Drive Web Traffic

c. Reputation Management

d. New Customer Acquisition

Stage one: Setup of social media touch points

a. Used to gauge new trends and level of interest in events.

b. It did not contribute greatly to brand awareness.

c. Useful research tool and networking devise to connect with similar organisations all over the world not just ones located in localised social networks.

d. Good source target audience to hit the website.

Twitter

a. To post videos of Student SoundSystem events and to reach an audience outside of the immediate loops within the social networks.

YouTube

b. Provided a cost effective, reliable method of video hosting that saved bandwidth on the website and allowed for embedding of media content.

a. Setup StudentSoundSystem.com using WordPress installation with a custom theme for fast and easy updates.

b. Acted as a central hub for our online activity.

c. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) was used to link the WordPress blog with the other social networking touch points.

StudentSoundSystem.com

a. Mass Inviting using JavaScript.

b. Forging links with other organisations through a link exchange.

c. Sought listing in search engines by applying to Google and Yahoo directly.

d. Used Word Press Plugins and advanced settings within Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

e. Used keywords, Meta tags, URL shortening and human readable URLs.

Stage two: Viral Campaigning and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

a) Google analytics was used on the blog and we requested group statistics from Facebook, twitter and YouTube regularly.

b) Important statistical information included:1. Number of Views per page.2. Average page viewing time.3. Where viewers were being directed from.4. Geographical information about users’ locations and time of viewing.

c) Found where most users were coming from and identified patterns in what the most popular content contained.

d) We then customised the content to attract more users to the site.

Stage three: Analytical Approach

Source: Facebook, 2010

Statistical Analysis

Feb 15th: Project Launch

Feb 25th: Invited friends

Feb 26th to April 2nd: Organic Growth

April 3rd: Day after Event

April 4th to Now: Continued organic growth.

Total of 350 fans to date

• 14 Followers• 58 Tweets

Source: twittercounter.com, 2010

a) 80% of visitors stay active between 0 and 30 seconds b) 5% stay for between 30 seconds and 2 minutes c) 15% stay for longer than 2 minutes.

• Google bot was the most active web crawler followed by Yahoo and MSNBot.

• The most common referrer was Facebook with Twitter a distant second. The majority of users however went directly to the site or were directed by search engines.

(Site5host Statistics, 2010)

Hits for the site

Long term goalsDiversify business into an online community

Increase frequency and diversity of blogs

Increase awareness

Increased traffic

Nielson, J. (1992)

Every day, thousands of people around the world write about music they love — and it all ends up here (HypeMachine, 2010)

Expansion of target market

• Expand focus from purely university students to other groups:

— Businesses— Colleges— Other Universities

• Possible new locations include:— Bournemouth— Portsmouth

Source: Google Maps, 2010

Paid advertising

• Facebook advert

• Google Adwords

Source: Facebook, 2010

Source: Google, 2010

Not purely an online marketing focus

‘Offline marketing boosts online marketing effect by nearly 40%’ (iProspect, 2009)

As well as the digital marketing we have engaged in, we also took an offline marketing focus:

We used a number of channels:

o Leaflet Distribution o Posterso Stickerso T-shirt give-a-ways

Teamwork Positives

o As students we are all already connected to target audience

o Utilized Google Wave to communicate ideas between all members of the group

o Radleigh was directly involved in Student SoundSystem

Teamwork Negatives

o Student SoundSystem is based on a partnership structure, therefore communication is an issue

o Radleigh’s involvement meant he was the only one capable of undertaking certain tasks, e.g. viable content for blogs

o As students we had to work around other time constraints.

Summary

Success so far;

o Events have increased from 2 – 3 a term to 2 – 3 a week

o 353 people like the Student SoundSystem page

o 61 Tweets over the project

o Total upload views 139

How to achieve this

o Seek investment to fund expansion

o To expand the company, need to enter a recruitment drive

References

Brothers, L. Hollan, J. Nielsen, J. Stornetta, S. Abney, S. Furnas, G. and Littman, M. (1992): "Supporting informal communication via ephemeral interest groups,"Proceedings of CSCW 92, the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work(Toronto, Ontario, November 1-4, 1992), pp. 84-90.

http://maps.google.co.uk/ http://econsultancy.com/blog/5416-how-offline-marketing-boosts-online-effect-by-40 http://www.Facebook.com http://www.Twitter.com http://www.Youtube.com http://www.Studentsoundsystem.com http://twittercounter.com/compare/StudentSndSys/all/mixed https://proxy-netadmin-272023.backstage.site5.com/awstats.pl?

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