Great Social Media Idea: Campus Style Video

Not sure if the silicon chip inside my head is switched to overload, but consider me Team Boomtown Rats - I don't like Mondays. I do like that song though. Like, a lot.

My feelings on days of the week and Irish rock bands aside, I'm still working on clearing out my suggestion box (THANK YOU!!! to everyone who has submitted ideas to me!), so today I'm going to feature this fun video from the Dallas County Community College District that highlights the different styles and thoughts on style of its students. Check it out:

If you pay attention to Pinterest, Instagram, and/or blogs, you likely have noticed that fashion (and "lifestyle" in general) is some of the most popular content on the web these days. One of the most enduringly popular social media initiatives I've done at the University of Portland is a series of campus fashion photos, which always get 100,000+ photo views and thousands of likes/comments/shares.

What's fun about this DCCCD video is that it gives voice to the students and provides an opportunity to hear from them about their own personal style, what inspires them, and how they incorporate it into different settings like school and work. I've said it a million times on this blog before (possibly an exaggeration), but it fulfills one of my cardinal rules for social media success in higher ed - highlighting students in a high-quality way! Be it professional photos or professional video - you can tell this was shot with a nice camera, not just an iPhone - students LOVE to be featured in things like this, and they will tag themselves (and their friends) and share with abandon. 

If I do have one minor quibble, it would be that the whole outfit isn't shown... if DCCCD does another one of these videos, it might be fun to see the styles from the waist down too!

I don't have experience working at a community college so I can't say this for sure, but I would imagine that the great variety of students - everything from fresh out of high school to older "lifelong learners" - provides a unique challenge. Ideally, you want to create marketing content that people can identify with and see themselves as being a part of, which is easier to do with the more homogeneous population of a traditional college.

So a video like this can accomplish a lot of things. Not only can it provide some fun and fresh content for social media, but it can showcase a wide variety of people from different backgrounds and tie them together with something that we all can relate to - style and fashion.

Many thanks to DCCCD for sending in this sample... this is absolutely something many colleges could emulate and have a lot of social media success with!