Enabling Communication

If you ever have doubts about whether the importance of social media in college marketing is overhyped, you should read this great post over at Radical Trust:

Some anecdotal research overheard from Guy Kawasaki on Marketing Voices, a podcast hosted by Jennifer Jones, is very revealing. Kawasaki asked a panel of five teenagers about their media consumption habits and learned: They don’t like direct advertising because they know they’re targeted for everything by everybody; They watch 1-2 hours of TV a week and that’s TiVo’ed; They rarely click on banner ads, as they’ve learned to tune them out; They tend to be more influenced by product placement than by an ad; They send 1400 text messages a month!

This is a demographic nearly unreachable by traditional media. Yet how to reach them through social media, with out, you know, being "the man"?

Simple.

Enable communication rather than create it. That is the message.

It's a great post with a lot more in it than I am presenting here, and I highly recommend it.