Jun 10

Background The Nanyang Business School (NBS), part of Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU), is a leading business school committed to educating tomorrow’s strategic leaders, through cutting-edge rigorous curricula that are relevant to business practice. NBS provides an outstanding learning environment, with the full range of undergraduate and graduate programmes, state-of-the-art facilities and world-class research centres. The Nanyang MBA is ranked 25th in world and one of the best in Asia that offers that offers global perspective with an Asian focus. NBS wanted to differentiate itself and connect with its web-savvy audience worldwide, leveraging on the power of social media. Aim In line with the Nanyang Business School’s (NBS) and NTU’s strategic directions to reach out and stay connected to its external community, it was thought that a rich and an attractive social extranet will act as a common portal across the school for interaction, knowledge dissemination, and engagement with relevant external stakeholders. The social extranet would support the NBS functions of marketing, careers and alumni. The extranet was to be designed and built such that it could be easily extended to the careers and alumni functions in subsequent phases. Effective marketing would also require that the design of the interface and context be attractive and appealing to the target audience. Also, it would require engaging this tech-savvy audience by moving to a more interactive mode of communicating via blogs, videos (e.g. showcasing a day in the life of student or graduates in a variety of industries) and having a presence in common social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, YouTube, LinkedIn, social bookmarking, RSS, Flickr, etc. An integrated marketing campaign was required that could create a buzz around the social extranet in the target markets in Asia, Europe, North and South America. The primary goal of this campaign was to create awareness and generate leads for the undergraduate and MBA programmes. Execution At the core of this project were two micro-sites, one each for the MBA and Undergraduate programme. The micro-sites were designed around the “mash-up” concept such that they not only reflected the “feel” of the target audience but also cleverly integrated all the social media elements within the site. For example, the videos from NTU’s YouTube channel were streamed to the microsite and “Wall” posts on Facebook were updated on the site in real-time. From the technological perspective, an Admin and Reporting interface was developed that facilitated management of the various social media elements from a single dashboard. NTU administrators could, for example, manage user account, moderate forum post and generate analytics via this interface. All of these elements were interlinked to ensure that there was seamless integration across the multiple touch-points.