Put Millennials on a mission

Ford has come up with a creative marketing plan to sell the new Fiesta to Millennials.  A mere 100 Millennials were chosen to borrow and drive the sleek, tiny vehicle. And there’s a catch. They have to go on a number of “Missions” in their fiesta, and post their experiences on social networking sites such as YouTube and FaceBook.

Basically, Ford has recruited Millennials to do something interesting and fun. Is there a way to apply this to your institution? Maybe.

Create a “mission” for potential applicants, ideally something that they can do in their own home town. Give them a forum to report the results online, such as a blog or a FaceBook group. Make sure the event is somehow tied in with your institution.

It’s your job to get creative with this, but here are a few mission ideas off the top of my head:

• Build a team of people with similar academic goals and challenge another team to paintball, ultimate frisbee, or some other competition (English majors vs. Business School, and so on).
• “Find the Alumni.”  Post clues on your website to help Millennials locate someone who recently graduate from your institution. Once you have people involved, your graduate could post online videos that taunt the seekers until they succeed
• Chat room record breaking.  Set a regular time for highly-publicized live chat sessions, and try to set a record for the number of attendees. You could compete with other schools for the highest number of attendees each week, and come up with creative and unusual topics.

All of these are unusual tactics, to be sure. This is thinking outside the box, and it could flop. But Ford has turned this new way of thinking into something really cool (over 3,000 applicants competed to drive the 100 Fiestas, and there were over 580,000 YouTube views of their video submissions).

If you’re willing to stretch the envelope, you may be the founder of a new tradition that will win you a lot of “cool” points.