Ypulse Guest Post: How Campus Marketers Can Win Students Over Through Ownership
Posted by meredith on 04-22-2009
Today’s Ypulse Guest Post is from Cameron Parkins of Creative Commons, a very cool non-profit org that provides free copyright licenses to content owners. Cameron spoke a while back at our College Mashup event and I thought I’d reach out to see his more recent thoughts on campus marketing. If you work in youth media or marketing and have an idea for a Ypulse Guest Post, feel free to email me.
How Campus Marketers Can Win Students Over Through Ownership
Typically, young adults are neck-deep in communities that champion a sense of skepticism of the world around them, using critical thinking to unravel opaque motivations and structures they have previously left unexplored. Marketing, in general, is seen through a lens of apprehension, and as students work to define themselves intellectually and socially, they grow wary of external forces that, no matter what the context, are attempting to push a product, brand or idea. While this has traditionally been seen as a challenge to campus marketers, it is a mindset that can be embraced in order to grow an organization’s community and brand.
It’s important to directly engage university students in a way that is legitimately equitable and allows them the ability to personally participate with what is being marketed. It is also important to afford students the respect that their opinions and thoughts are valued by giving them a sense of ownership of your organization and the message you are publicizing. Too often this notion of ownership is understood too broadly as an attempt to include new members into a pre-existing community or too literally by giving physical goods that lack meaningful value. The ideal participation isn’t a fleeting feeling gained from participating in Q&A sessions or filling out feedback forms, but rather an ownership of interactions that allow students to see their own contributions grow, spread, and receive feedback on their own merit and in their own communities.
Marketers should look for ways to harness the creativity of students in a way that interacts with their organization and brand. While remix contests, calls for videos, and essay competitions are tried-and-true methods for inviting students to participate in brands, there are even greater opportunities in building this kind of integration into a business plan. In other words, campaigns shouldn’t be merely one-off nods to notions of openness and cooperative ownership but rather a long-term goal that continuously keeps students engaged in new projects, products and communities. By allowing students to create content while interacting with your brand, and by affording them the ability to do so without massive or unfair legal barriers, marketers can encourage communities of content from future consumers. It should be their content and creations, not just that of your organization, that have value and are shared.
While this may initially seem difficult to accomplish and financially counter-intuitive, you needn’t relinquish all rights to your content. Rather, by borrowing from the Free Software Movement and looking towards flexible licensing schemes you can allow students the legal rights to play, experiment and build upon your organization’s content. Creative Commons, a nonprofit I work for, provides free copyright licenses that allow content owners to distribute their works in ways that are more flexible than traditional, All Rights Reserved, copyright. While openly licensing content may not provide solutions for every situation, this strategy can provide flexibility to you and your organization when reaching out for students’ direct participation. For students, this level of respect is not only encouraging, but becoming par for the course. Across the social and cultural spectrum we are observing more and more organizations and individuals turning to open-licensing for a better way to interact with their target demographic. These community-driven contributions have already proven themselves as viable avenues for exposing the content and ultimately, the identities of many brands and organizations.
Check out these case studies and interviews with individuals and organizations using Creative Commons licensing.
About Cameron
Cameron Parkins is a Cultural Program Assistant at Creative Commons, where he works on cultural projects and community outreach. A graduate of USC (B.A., International Relations), he founded the school’s Students for Free Culture chapter and took an active interest in issues of copyright and content ownership through his enrollment at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. Outside of his work at CC, Cameron enjoys writing music, sleeping, eating, and playing basketball.
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Categorized under: Collegians