Kirstin:  A team of Manchester Metropolitan University First Year Advertising & Brand Management students contacted Sir Alan Sugar via Twitter (@Lord_Sugar) to see if he would Re-Tweet to his Twitter followers, all 2.8million of them) the video project they were working on for a first year unit (Digital Media and Marketing Platforms).

The task was to create an ‘Unboxing’ video which is a style of promotional video which displays the unpacking of new products by an expert, typically hi-tech consumer products such as mobile phones, tablets etc. The whole process is captured on video with a commentary and is uploaded to the Internet so that viewers can experience opening the new product for themselves.

The challenge the students were set was to create their own ‘Unboxing’ video however in a particularly sneaky fashion, the product was a Kinder Surprise Egg, meaning they had no knowledge of what was inside. The teams were then encouraged to compete with each other to get the most amount of views on their Youtube videos for which there would be a prize presented at the final lecture at the end of term. After they planned and filmed the video the next task was to set about promoting the video in any means necessary and hence we arrive at this point where Sir Alan has intervened.

What was the result?

If you consider that 2.8milllion Twitter users worldwide will have had this video posted in front of them, it soon became evident that the numbers rose dramatically. The net result is over 17,000 views within 18 hours from the Sir Alan’s tweet, some pretty impressive statistics which we have never seen the like of in past video projects like this.

Huge congratulations to our MMU first year students on meeting the project brief, and for using social media tools to produce such amazing results.  To view their youtube video click on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PI3SC0OEWI