This is part 2 of a rebranding case study of Texas A&M’s new admissions marketing strategy called Aggiebound.

Overview | SOCIAL MEDIA | Guide | Aggiebound Magazine | Response

The Voice of Aggiebound

Breaking down institutional walls & making friends with Social Media

As I traveled around Texas polling Digital Natives, overwhelmingly they had abandoned facebook as a medium. Most had a facebook profile, but it usually was used like an address book of friends more than a conversation and media sharing platform. Most usage of facebook was limited to its specific services such as facebook events or chat.

Twitter and Instagram were the main stomping grounds of this batch.

To my supperiors and other marketers around campus that I presented this to, twitter was a scary place where people spoke in unintelligible short hand and ‘#’s. This, however, was the key to reaching this audience.

Twitter — The Greatest Marketing Tool in History

I wish I could go back in time and tell the Don Drapers of the 70s that in 40 years, we would have a tool where brands could send strategic personal messages, to specific consumers vibrating pockets.

For the first time brands can stop yelling into the void hoping someone will hear. We can now find the conversation that is already happening and have meaningful interactions with people who want to listen, and more importantly, want to do marketing for us.

Twitter is marketing smarter, not harder.

@Aggie_bound

Aggiebound started on twitter. We saw that our audience was all in one place and talking about us. How we entered that conversation was critical. We knew that the last thing these Digital Natives wanted was an institutional voice spouting generic marketing crap.

In our minds, @Aggie_bound was a senior here at A&M who had been through it all but was still close enough to their age to answer questions. But we didn’t stop there. We joined their conversations about other things, made jokes, shared memes, and tried to gain credibility. We joined the social scene just like any other kid would, by slowly making a personality and finding our place in their niche.

Soon @Aggie_bound was the center of the conversation. These kids openly and honestly came to us with college related issues. We quickly became an authority on all things A&M to them since we were always on, 24–7.

Over time we identified the select few “super-fans” and conversation drivers. By creating conversation and driving traffic to our hashtag and account, they were essentially doing our job for us! So we of course started rewarding them for making our job easy and fun. Once others caught wind that we had free stuff to give away…we naturally gained followers very quickly.

I spent a lot of time monitoring hashtags. #TAMU18 organically grew from the kids who had A&M as their top choice. They created #TAMU18 follow trains and started their collegiate experience of meeting new people and sharing ideas while they were still in high school. In this new digital community, it became an honor if @Aggie_bound favorited or RTed you.

Engagement

The year before I started at Admissions, the team started a great program. In the admissions packet, they would include a “I’m going to be an Aggie” banner. Admits started taking pictures with the banner and sharing them over social media. However in the first year, that was as far as it went.

When I joined the team, we added the #TAMU18 hashtag to the back of the banner to consolidate the pictures in one searchable place. In a few months, we had thousands of photos of our admits with their “I’m going to be an Aggie” banners on twitter and instagram; all at our fingertips through the centralized hashtag.

Now what do we do with them!? Going back to the principles of Digital Natives, we knew that they loved seeing themseves. They are the “selfie” generation afterall. So we started thinking of ways to show these pictures off.

We first devoted a spread in the new Aggiebound Magazine to a collage of the #TAMU18 pictures. The admits loved knowing that if they shared their banner picture they could end up being used by our office. As word spread, the pictures they started taking got more and more creative to try and get our attention.

We also created removable wallpapers with this design for the Prospective Student Centers across Texas. That way any time a student walked in, they saw their friends in the class before them and the success they had.

Aggiebound the Tour Guide

The engagement wasn’t just online. When someone would tweet that they were coming for a campus visit, I would usually leave something at the Visitor Center with a note signed -@Aggie_bound. Once that word got out, kids made sure to tell us they were coming to Aggieland.

While engaging with #TAMU18 on twitter, I stumbled upon a girl named Reagan who was having trouble with the application process. She had been a missionary kid so she had transcripts from high schools in Thailand and other circumstances that made her case very difficult. Through a few different issues, she had slipped through the cracks of our system and her application was in limbo.

Because of twitter, I got word of her case and brought it to the attention of our admins. They used her case to fix some problems with our system. But that wasn’t the end of Reagan.

Her and her friends let me know that they were coming to campus for a visit. We had already seen that they were very influential in the #TAMU18 culture. They were big content creators and very well connected in our audience. So I decided to give Reagan and her friends the tour of a lifetime.

When they got to campus, I pulled up with a golf cart and whisked them away on the best Aggie adventure a senior in high school could ask for. Anywhere they wanted to go, we went. There were no closed doors for our #TAMU18 VIPs.

Lunch at Layne’s, Aggie shopping spree, we did it all.

Needless to say, word got around and @Aggie_bound had sealed its fame.

All of this to say, digital natives love personal interaction. Older generations look at them on their phones and assume they are distracted from actual relationship. We found the opposite. Regan and her future roommate met on twitter and made arrangements long before they actually met in person.

Social media doesn’t have to be the opposite of personal relationship. If used correctly, it can be the vehicle in which one can have deeper, richer and more frequent interaction. When a brand becomes a person and gains a personality, this generation is much more likely to listen and engage.

Next — Part 3 — The Aggiebound Guide

Overview | SOCIAL MEDIA | Guide | Aggiebound Magazine | Response