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Wednesday, 18 June 2014

Sharing, swapping and renting personal items and services is as easy as logging on to a new iPhone app - and UWA Business School Marketing students want you to get on board.

The postgraduate students have been marketing the new Shneebs app to the Perth community as part of an assignment for their Electronic Marketing unit, taught by Associate Professor Paul Harrigan.

"Over the 13 weeks, the students were exposed to the latest ideas in email, web, search and social media marketing. Social is the one most in demand at the moment, so I thought it was important that students were able to have a go at running their own social media marketing campaigns," Associate Professor Harrigan explained.

That's where the launch of new Perth-based smartphone app Shneebs came in, with the app's co-creator briefing the class to run a social media campaign-a difficult task for a start-up business with a low budget.

"In their teams, students had to first identify target markets for Shneebs and then understand that their marketing efforts would only succeed if they provided value to these consumers," Associate Professor Harrigan said.

"The different teams of students got busy creating educational and entertaining content and posting it on social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr and Sina Weibo."

The assignment was turned into a competition and the winning team-Muhamad Amin Bin Ahmad Sapon, Wei Wei Kong, Bing Shan, Meil Uh , Juanhong Wang, and Xufa Yao-embraced the challenge.

Choosing to target international students and Perth mothers, the winning group took a playful approach to the creation of content, while also drawing on the team members' backgrounds in areas including finance, economics and business information systems.

"We leveraged the diversified backgrounds of members to research areas they are familiar with (such as statistical data or social media information) and had frequent group meetings for every important step of the campaign and report," Master of Commerce student Wei Wei explained.

"The opportunity to execute a real marketing campaign during our university studies was a valuable experience and we gained a deeper understanding of what social media or e-marketing can do for a business in brand awareness and engagement levels," she said.

Shneebs co-creator Mike Kneebone was impressed by the students' campaigns for the app, which was released in June 2014 but which he has been developing since 2012, when he was inspired to make better use of his own collection of items.

"I have a lot of personal items that I have built up from participating in many activities and hobbies which I don't want to sell, but figured I could earn some part-time money by renting these items out to others in my community," Mr Kneebone said.

From this, Shneebs became a ‘library of everything.' "Shneebs has four main functions - it allows members to rent out their own personal items and services, swap items with others, give items away (freecycle), and track the whereabouts of items they have lent to friends," Mr Kneebone explained.

Over the last Semester, the app grew even more popular thanks to the social media marketing campaigns run by the Electronic Marketing students.

"I found this group of students to be very enthusiastic and creative thinkers. They were tasked with developing a low cost marketing release plan for a new product that hasn't been released and to do this using social media tools," Mr Kneebone said.

"The groups just set about their task, after an initial briefing session where they asked a range of questions they were off and came up with real practical methods of communication that will be very useful for me in promoting Shneebs."

Media references

Verity Chia (UWA Business School)                 (+61 8) 6488 1346

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