Saturday afternoon saw me and James head down to the London Television Centre at Southbank.

No, StudentBeans.com wasn’t about to make its TV debut! We were there to be part of the studio audience for ITV’s latest game show ‘Who Dares, Sings’, presented by Denise Van Outen and Ben Shepherd.

To put it simply the game show was a glamourised karaoke competition, where, instead of a free round at a hotel bar in Benidorm, the prize was £50,000.

I wish I could say that ITV requested the presence of the UK’s leading student website but I’d be lying. James applied for tickets like everyone else through ApplauseStore.com after the website had been posted on the Bean Board.

There was plenty of audience participation, where we sang along to karaoke classics like Chain Reaction, Winner Takes It All and air-guitared to Bohemian Rhapsody.

We were kept entertained in-between takes by Andy, our warm-up guy who ensured that everyone he talked to was left red-cheeked by the end of the conversation (much to the audience’s comedic delight!).

Though we were let in thirty minutes late and left with sore throats (we had to clap/cheer/wave madly on cue) we had a fantastic evening. The fact that it was totally free was even better!

If you’re in the London area or don’t mind travelling, then keep your eye on the Bean Board for shows like Big Brother, Top Gear and The Lily Allen Show wanting you to be a part of their audience!

The tickets are always completely free, and there are loads of shows that want glamourous, fun and outrageously noisy studio audiences. In exchange you get B-List celeb sightings and the chance to wave madly saying ‘Hi Mum!’ on Prime-Time TV.

We hope you’re enjoying your winter break…

We’ve been working hard over this year so you can use studentbeans.com at home as well as when you’re at uni and thought we’d remind you

Simply click here or click on the change area tab and select your home city - even if it’s not listed you can still take advantage of our national offers, like 2 for 1 cinema tickets at Cineworld or ODEON and meal deals at places like Nandos.

Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Looking forward to a bigger and better 2008 filled with lots of offers and more

The Bean Team

As I have been travelling up and down the country attending several different careers fairs for students I have been amazed and intrigued by the power and draw that our free sample packs of jelly belly beans have had on attracting students to our stand and website.

It is a well know fact that students love most things free, cheap or at discounted prices, all of which fall nicely under the umbrella of studentbeans.com. With this I new our jelly beans would go down well with the students, just how well I wasn’t quite prepared for. Whilst most other stands were offering freebies in the form of pencils, rubbers and if you were lucky a stress ball or chocolate nothing drew in the masses like our jelly beans! Students would try all different tricks and tactics to get there hands on one extra pack, pretending they hadn’t already been to our stand or signed up to the website earlier.

As the day drew on and our supply of jelly beans shortened there demand became greater. It wouldn’t just be the students who had caught wind that we were distributing jelly beans, now other graduate recruiters were trying to trade off their freebies for a pack of jelly beans. I was more than happy to supply them with there share of beans along with many organisers of the event who were easily “paid off” to help me out in return for the odd bag or two! Little did I know just how useful the jelly beans would be to me. I started to wonder where it would leave me once my supplies had run out, luckily we had some great voucher flyers to also offer the students and quell the demand for beans. Most importantly many of the students seemed extremely excited and interested by a number of the offers on our website so were more than happy to sign up, with or without there jelly beans!

If you have missed out on getting a pack of jelly beans don’t worry you can win a years supply of jelly belly beans in our competitions section and I still have a couple more fairs to attend across the country! Just need to make sure I don’t eat them all when I’m stuck in traffic on the M1 coming home to London.

Following a ground breaking nationwide recruitment drive, for campus brand managers, which involved students submitting video applications on youtube (for more info see this blog entry: http://www.blogging4business.info/B4B/2791), 60 successful students from across the UK descended on Birmingham for a 2 day conference, run by the studentbeans.com team and our national partner Procter & Gamble. The conference provided training sessions on personal leadership, communication skills, persuasive selling techniques and interactive viral marketing.

The studentbeans.com campus brand manager programme is the UK’s largest campaign of its kind and provides students from across the UK with a unique opportunity to explore a wide range of grass-root consumer marketing activities, learn tangible skills and gain an insight into the UK’s fastest growing student website. The programme culminates in June 08 where successful brand managers can receive a higher sought after Chartered Institute of Marketing Career Development award.

I’m not normally a fan of online games but Desktop Tower Defense is awesome. It’s free and Flash based, and very simple. Bad guys come at you in a highly predictable way. You build defenses that take them out. If any get through, you lose a life. I’ve gotten to level 83. Can’t get past it. In the run up to coursework deadlines and exams it should provide a healthy distraction. Be warned it is highly addictive – if you do get hooked and want some strategy advice – send us an email or check out this youtube video

Back to the beans, studentbeans.com continues to source an unbelievable selection of offers. Recently our national/online offers have been beefed up with offers from: Tesco, Waterstone’s, La Fitness, The Body Shop® and more…

In the coming days we will be unveiling some great new offers to coincide with the start of the summer term. To tickle your fancy, wagamama will relaunch their 2 for 1 on main meals across most of the UK. Stay tuned for more details.