Love, RIPPLE100

Challenge: How do you create fresh opportunities to reach out to alums? Note: you’re seven mailers, untold emails, and a fledgling social media campaign down.

Insight: Many of our earliest adopters for Ripple100’s micromarketing app have been colleges. (Disclaimer: Yale is not one of them). Few places are as obvious a fit for the unlimited micromarketing capabilities that our app provides as the collegiate market. We’re shamelessly plugging here, but on point. When we say unlimited micromarketing, we mean you can create as many viral microsites as you want – every day or several times a day – and to that extreme no one can do it like colleges can, and should. Every event, lecture, course, program, major, minor, professor, student, athlete, game, alum, fundraiser, and so on is an opportunity for focused and frequent micromarketing campaigns, each a stand-alone pitch to as targeted a segment as needs to be reached from among every school’s endless constituencies, from students past, present, and prospective, to faculty and staff, to donors, investors, and the broader community. Let’s just say if I died and went to micromarketing heaven, I’d be a campus CMO.

On the downside, the sheer volume of campus outreach creates horrific signal-to-noise ratio. If you’re on the receiving end, say as an alum, what of all these messages should you be paying attention to? How does a college keep its marketing fresh and at the same time ubiquitous?

Focus: In this Ripplecast, we come up with one technique. Instead of one-way press-releases touting your next event, do this: 1) have people from your target audience/s in attendance; 2) have them give their own take; and 3) help them distribute to their peers. That’s exactly what I did with this Ripplecast about the welcome address of the Yale School of Management’s New Dean Ted Snyder. I gave my take as an alum, from where I was sitting, and in fact from my own camera angle. Compared to Yale’s official press release, I definitely saw different things, was looking for different things, and resonated with different things. As, I’m supposing, my fellow alums would too.

See it live: Ripplecast 2010: Yale B-School Welcomes New Dean

So what: It doesn’t matter what kind of business, politics, or nonprofit you have. This is stuff you can do yourself, now, at your next click.  Here are 3 options:

• Tune into Ripplecast 2010 for more ideas how to start micromarketing now.
• Get started with your own micromarketing kit at www.ripple100.com.
• Other ways we can help? Email andre@ripple100.com.