video marketing

I spent a good part of the day today working on the video that will be my calendar year end electronic effort. It is a song parody and we are producing it using student performers and labor such that we can claim substantial student input and effort in the creation of the piece. It is a soft ask - uses the song I need a Dollar by Aloe Blacc as the base so makes a really clear point without needing much case for support in other communications.

We are printing up a bunch of t-shirts that the students in the video will wear at points and we will give away to the students. The shirts will ask folks to scan them and will include a QR code leading to the short string for texting a gift.

The biggest portion of this though is going to be the marketing plan we are putting together. The key to this is to roll it out in a way that will generate social media and viral buzz. Our current plan is to roll it out via a google beta style campaign where we share it with a small number of folks close to us and ask them to share it with their friends. We are going to create a contest to recognize/track the alum who has the greatest impact and are looking at offering them some form of special access to the men's basketball program (our biggest draw.) 10 days after the intial "soft" launch, we will do a social media and email blitz - putting up ads on facebook, emailing the link out to folks and sharing it via the e-digest, internal web digest and creating a second competion using the "forward to a friend" tool for a similar prize.

At the heart of these efforts is the realization that the conversation has moved. It is no longer driven exclusively by the 1.5 way communication that email provides but begins with the 2.0 access of social media which can and needs to be reinforced with email. The video will be loaded to a youtube channel and folks will be encouraged to add their own videos to the channel (subject to our approval/review) and in January a direct mail campaign may also be implemented if success is either huge or minimal.