SMS Marketing – Instant business idea for students

Text messages are still hot. Unlimited text messaging plans are more common than ever before and the cost of sending messages has gone down. I use tatango.com to manage a list of students that want to hear about happenings on campus. The challenge here is to get students to give up their cell-phone numbers. What [...]

Offline marketing that reaches college students

Stop focusing solely on online marketing. It is true that our generation spends a lot of time online but from time to time we do leave our dorm rooms. When we do we attend events, go to bars, house parties, clubs, etc. On-campus events are the least utilized but extremely effective marketing opportunities that exist [...]

The problem with Facebook Advertising

I have not yet seen one relevant Facebook ad that seemed worthy of a click. The main problem is that applications like Mafia Wars have flooded profile pages with spammy, irrelevant ads. There is a lack of trust toward ads that will be difficult to gain back. The only ads that [...]

The ROI of Social Media

Micro-Sponsorship

How can GoDaddy be sure that the money they spend on sponsorships creates a return on investment? I’ve been struggling with this question for a while because I find the idea of sponsorship fascinating. Let’s take Diggnation, a popular technology podcast, as an example. GoDaddy has been a sponsor for years [...]

Lessons learned from marketing to college students

It still amazes me after three years of running a student organization and doing on-campus marketing for the entrepreneurship program how difficult it is to get students’ attention. Here are some things I’ve learned about college students:
Free food
Generally free food will guarantee at least a small crowd but these people will [...]

Interaction on .edu sites

I started doing pro-bono consulting for my university a couple of months ago to help with social media marketing. In the process I have learned a lot about how some colleges think about marketing. The lack of online marketing budgets is astonishing. I can’t think of any other industry where a potential sale is worth [...]