College Alumni

When Adaptive Campus approaches a marketing project, we have a template that we start with. Every project is unique, and so we use this template and adapt it to the current situation. You may find the template useful if you are developing an internal marketing arm, but keep in mind that this is just the starting point of the planning process. The model needs to be flexible to be effective. Is this designed to market one specific program, multiple programs, or an entire education program? Whatever the answers you have to those questions make a significant difference in how this plan is adjusted.

Marketing Guru Seth Godin offers his perspective on the motivations of creating a YouTube video.

Yesterday I posted a link to the Ohio State University's YouTube channel page - see this posting:

http://www.marketingineducation.org/Ohio_State_University_YouTube

Way to go Buckeyes!

Ohio State has made an admiral effort to turn YouTube into a next generation marketing channel. There are a variety of marketing elements at play here. I see PR value, alumni outreach value, student recruitment value, faculty recruitement value, and I'm sure much more.

The direct link:

http://www.youtube.com/ohiostateuniversity

But I'd also like to highlight this student testimonial so that I can point it out to some clients that are working on a project like this:

All institutions have a brand, whether they tend to it or not.  Different institutions have different approaches to brand building, others don’t have any at all.  Brand building at a strategic level is gaining traction in higher education though, as noted in this recent Newsweek article.  There is not a lot of data out there on universities using Second Life for brand building, but given that it offers a more engaging user experience than the web and the growth it has experienced, I would not be surprised if we see more institutions turning to Second Life as at least a small part of their branding strategy.  One indicator of this is that universities with well known brands, such as Harvard and Princeton (http://etc.princeton.edu/sl/), were quick to utilize this medium.  An instantly recognizable brand in the real world is likely going to be an instantly recognizable brand in the Second Life world.  What intrigues me though is the potential for some of the institutions that may only have a regional brand or smaller to extend their brand in a whole new way.  If this branding concept is extended into the classroom and the institution fully embraces Second Life, the Second Life community may very well embrace that institution.  It is possible that an institution could become a dominant brand in Second Life, even when they are only a regional or local player in the real world.  The fact that it is still relatively small in terms of traffic and student enrollment potential actually provides you with the opportunity to get in on the ground floor.