social media

So you're a brand that wants to reach college kids and you heard we like social media. You're not alone. Every marketer wants students like us to fall in love with their brand and buy it for the rest of our lives. But from our standpoint, many brands may know a lot about what we want, but not about how we use social media to answer questions and identify the products and services we need. If you think we are just waiting around for you to put up a Facebook fan page or find you on Twitter, then I will tell you what one of my professors once said to me: "Why don't you drop the class or take the F right now and save us all a lot of pain." 

Co-author Chris Lesinski is a blogger at HackCollege.

So, what should marketers do then? First, let's talk about how we identify and build brand affinity as college students. We are not stupid; yes, we drop everything to watch the ad with the incredibly hot girl in a bikini or (for the ladies) the ripped guy. But from there, we still research just about everything before buying (except of course beer and food -- this is done via extensive field testing).

Since we usually are on a very tight budget, we need a product or service that lasts and is worth the money. Social media helps us quickly identify other college students with similar needs who have tried and used a brand. By reading about their experiences and polling people in the same boat via Twitter or Facebook, we get the answers we need. And, hopefully we avoid costly mistakes with brands that don't live up to the hype or don't meet our needs. In essence, we are looking for students just like us who have gone down this road before to help us make the right buying choice. 

From blogs to friends online to flash polls via Twitter or other social media sites, we can quickly identify the brands that solve the problems we have. In fact, we needed tax software (since we were lucky enough to have income to report this year), and a quick poll on Twitter followed by reading a few reviews by students on blogs got the job done. This is very typical approach for students to use, and you may have noticed we did not mention any brand sites, fan pages, or corporate-owned properties.
 
So how can you as a brand manager hack the college market?  Here are the seven key rules to live by as you market to us:  

1. Embrace the fact that social media is replacing our search engines. Given that your typical student lives and breathes online, it's no surprise that we are giving a greater emphasis to what our friends and trusted sources are saying. Students trust each other, not brands. If the product is good enough, we'll share it with each other.
   
   
2. Know that we live for instant information. You may be shocked to know, we ask the internet first and parents second. A strange thing is happening: Rather than phoning home for laundry detergent recommendations (or just why all of our socks are pink), we Google before we call home. For you as a marketer, this means we better be able to find third-party recommendations (usually blog posts) for your brand in the first two or three pages of Google or Bing. If not, you don't exist. 
   
   
3. Understand brand loyalty is a shared experience. Knowing that we can find honest reviews on the web means that students build brand loyalty quickly when we start discussing something good. If the brand lives up to the promise given to us, we'll switch in a heartbeat over something that doesn't.
   
   
4. Remember we identify with other college students first and foremost. Broad reach sites don't speak to us. As soon as we read "workplace" or something else non-college in a review, ad or webpage, we tune out and move on.
   
   
5. Learn that we are consistent value buyers. We save and scrimp where we can. But, students are almost always ready and willing to pay more to get something that lasts and meets our needs.
   
   
6. Dishonesty and trickery in marketing will cost you. Just as we help each other find the right brands, we also help steer each other away from brands that try to game the system. Buying blog posts (yes, we are talking to you IZEA marketing and all other pay-for-post shops) is not only insulting, it is dishonest in our opinion. How bad is your product and/or marketing, if you have to pay someone to write positively about it?
   
   
7. Never try to half-ass us. If the college market is worth something to you, do it right. Show up, be genuine, and work with student influencers to get your message out credibly, transparently, and honestly. Ivy Worldwide as an agency has done this right time and time again, and the results they have gotten with students speak for themselves.

Marketing to the college market through their peers
When HackCollege.com was founded, its audience didn't exist. There was no early-adopter, tech-minded college student audience waiting to be tapped. The entire web ecosystem can be described similarly. We see the effects of audience finding becoming confusing among writers and advertisers. What is all of it really worth? Because of the advent of Apple's successful student-focused campaigns, we are seeing the trickle-down from other companies. It's for this reason that the student market is hot right now. Red hot. And this market is still largely untapped.

Although our diets may consist entirely of ramen, marketers should still be aware that we've got editorial standards, and that there are a few secrets to appeasing the college market. Recently, a federation of student blogs I represent was approached by IZEA Marketing with a student-related product. Excited, I hopped on the phone unaware of IZEA's standard practices. I ended the call disappointed. The terms of the campaign were simple: Each blog would receive $400 in return for a favorable (and unethical) review of said product.

Each of our blogs could honestly use the money. Loans don't pay for themselves. Textbooks are expensive. Beer is cheap, but not free. Our dignity -- however -- cannot be bought. While the Student Bloggers network has one of the tightest grips on the early-adopter student demographic, we still get bullied. A marketer wouldn't approach The New York Times with such a proposal, or even a local paper, so what makes us so much different? Practices like this hurt both the brands and the content producers. The college generation has grown up with the web and can detect disingenuousness easily. Paid content is obviously paid content, and it's a great way to destroy a brand in the eyes of the college demographic. The uptake of this fact has been slow on the marketer's part.

We have accidentally become stewards of our audiences. My regular interactions via Twitter or Facebook could be considered "market research" by some, but to us it's just chatting with like-minded folks. After nearly four years of interacting with the college audience, the above concepts make the current college generation different from any other before us, and offer some valuable hints for approaching us in the best way to get results.

Kelly Sutton and Chris Lesinski are bloggers at HackCollege. 

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