Communicating with a College Audience

Communicating with a College Audience

By Christie Gunn

With each generation, young people are becoming increasingly media savvy. As the amount of messages they receive on a given day increase and the methods used to deliver these messages become more varied, college students better their ability to filter, and often ignore, these messages. So what are the best ways to reach this audience?

Some suggest what is called a “360 degree” approach. As the name suggests, it involves send the same message as many times in as many different channels as possible. These methods include print media, online advertising, social media, blogs, vlogs (video blogs such as youtube.com), and text messages to their cell phones.

Others highlight social-media communication, in particular, as the best way to influence the college audiences. This was the case when Hewlett-Packard tapped Edleman PR to handle the promotion of its personal systems group.

It is also interesting to note, using text messages to communicate with students in the event of an emergency is becoming more common on college campuses, particularly after the tragedies at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University. OU instituted this system last year, and many students received alerts on their phones last semester when the campus was briefly locked down. Though this method may not be widely used for non-emergency communication, past president indicates it is only a matter of time until it is.

Perhaps the worst method to contact a younger demographic is the landline telephone. Most students do not have landline numbers, and they are no longer readily available in dorms, apartments, and greek residences on the OU campus.

Though this research I learned just how difficult it can be to get a message to the college audience and make them remember it. Before researching this post, I also did not know how many universities are using text messages to warn students in case of emergency. The public relations value of the articles and blogs I referenced in this post is strongly related to my client, the Sooner yearbook, who is trying to reach OU students and increase the sales of the yearbook.