Grown Up Thinking

If I were in the sports marketing department at Northern Iowa, I’d be working overtime (no pun intended) to get my basketball coach on Facebook and Twitter by, like, yesterday. Your school just knocked off a giant in the NCAA Tourney and now you’re the trending topic of the week. Embrace it.

How many opportunities does a small school such as Northern Iowa get to have millions of people reading, watching and talking about them? Schools are businesses, and businesses need to build their brand in order to attract new customers (or in this case, students).

A school and coach that’s doing it right? Check out Kentucky’s Coach Cal. He has over 138k fans on Facebook and over 1.1 million Twitter followers…WOW. I imagine there are a couple brands that would pay good money for that type of online community.

How many of those Facebook fans are high school students still deciding on which school they will attend? How about potential basketball recruits looking to get to know the coach? He even goes on to promote a Nike contest that the University of Kentucky is participating in to help rally votes and get the University more exposure.

So, Ben, even though your Panthers crushed my dreams of bracket supremacy by defeating Kansas, I forgive you and would like to offer you a bit of advice if I may:

Please, speak to your marketing department and ask that they set you up with some social media networks pronto. The world is listening and you’ve just signed a big ol’ 10-year contract extension to stay at Northern Iowa (congrats BTW) – better start building that brand while you have our attention.

Tags: facebook, march madness, marketing, social media, Twitter, web 2.0

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 25th, 2010 at 12:25 pm and is filed under social media, Word of Mouth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.