Shocker of a site: StudentRights.com.au

ByLaurel Papworth

… your right as a student during O-week to get a prepaid ANZ credit card? Welcome to Student Rights! This is Australia’s social, educational and commercial network for students only. The centre piece is this web site, which provides local and international students with a portal of information, resources and communication. For those lucky students that…

… your right as a student during O-week to get a prepaid ANZ credit card?

studentrights

Welcome to Student Rights!

This is Australia’s social, educational and commercial network for students only.

The centre piece is this web site, which provides local and international students with a portal of information, resources and communication.

For those lucky students that pick up an exclusive Student Rights card, they have the added benefits of Australia’s first and ONLY Prepaid Visa and member card. The Student Rights ANZ prepaid Visa card offers students the ability to load and reload funds for purchases anywhere Visa is accepted world-wide. It also doubles as a special member card which you can use for special access and to redeem discounts and special offers.

A shocker.There is so much they could’ve done with this site. Stuff that would’ve made it useful for new students, students connecting, students partying whatever. Instead it’s tokenism –oh, lets create a social network for a marketing campaign.

I see a mismatch in Purpose and Values – the client gets it all (advertising takes up most of the above the fold), the sponsors are plastered all over it. You see, the words (we’re here for you) don’t match the major play (buy our shit).

Over the coming weeks we’ll be opening more and more features on this web site, including:

Careers and Employment
Student Accommodation
Events & Competitions
Buy-Sell-Exchange
and announcing details on how you can activate your Student Rights prepaid Visa card!

Reeeeeally? I’m going to guess it’s a news.com.au initiative, to get back into the classifieds game (niche: students). It will also tank – bigtime – thereby “proving that social networks don’t have a business value“. Sheesh. Two hours of workshopping and they would’ve figured out exactly where to target this microcommunity and have it bubbling. But no. I can see already where it could’ve gone. But no.

Which of you bozos out there in the blogosphere is responsible? Or was this purely news.com.au selling it into ANZ, Nandos and 3 Mobile, hmmm? Tip: next time, if you are serious, get the Universities on board. There’s a bunch of things Education need sponsoring that require the Uni students to have social networking tools, but selling credit cards and chicken fast food is not one of ’em.

13 Comments

  5. Agreed that it’s all about the money, but apart from offering students a place to connect and share information what more do you think can be done?

    You mention that you can see where it could have gone, care to share?

    Brett Fyfield’s last blog post..Paul Graham

    1. I did a review of Uni services in Feb last year, and possible approaches to solving some issues using social media tools. But it’s beyond the scope of this blog sorry 🙁

      I give a way a lot for free on here, but not the whole box and dice 😛

  6. Commenting from inside my university marketing ivory tower, I can safely say that no (major, eg Go8) university would touch this in its current form. Firstly it would threaten exclusivity with the uni’s own sponsorship deals. Secondly it offers no value to the university, only to its students. Thirdly if it fails, it tanks the uni’s brand.

    Forgive me if I’m missing your point 🙂

    To get unis on board,

  7. Pingback: Laurel Papworth- Social Network Strategy » Blog Archive » Shocker … | strategicasiaonline.org
  9. Pingback: Laurel Papworth- Social Network Strategy » Blog Archive » Shocker … | strategicasiaonline.org

  10. So how are they exactly helping students? all I can see is a website encouraging students to get a credit card and spend money they don’t have….

    That is obviously a social network purely to make money of the young community. I could be wrong but I thought the idea of building social networks was for communities to share their thoughts, interests and opinions freely, people should be building social networks to help people connecting with each other and not to make money of them.

    >I’m going to guess it’s a news.com.au initiative

    They couldn’t make it more obvious right?

  11. Ok, and what exactly am I meant to be learning from this site?

    It’s sites like these that make organisations doubt the capabilities of social networking pages as knowledge management tools.

    The real tools here are the sponsors!

Comments are closed.