Great Social Media Idea: Creative Campus Tour

Happy Monday, #hesm friends! Ten bucks says you won't be able to guess what my favorite Happy Mondays song is. Wait, what? How did you know it was Dennis and Lois? Oh. Right. Because it's the bast damn Happy Mondays song ever. The check is in the mail.

Campus tour videos, unless done extremely well, are often among the most boring and horrible videos that colleges have to create. There just aren't a lot of creative ways to do them, and for some reason admissions staff love the idea of simply re-creating the actual, in-person tour on video... all 45 minutes of it. (The horror... the horror.)

But they are important, so any time I see a campus tour video concept that is fun, fresh, and creative, I have to share it. So sit back and enjoy this brilliant video from Denison University:

So, what's it like to live at Denison? Theatre major Janyce Caraballo '17 walks us through it with the help of some friends. #DenisonProud #HigherEd

Posted by Denison University on Friday, April 3, 2015

Yes, yes... I realize that technically this is a video about what it's like to live at Denison and not a campus tour per se, but it accomplishes much of what's actually important about a campus tour video without actually showing a death march around campus with a pair of very well-meaning but nonetheless slightly too-chipper students.

The set-up and organization that this video required is really something to marvel at, and Denison executed it flawlessly... one take baby!

Naturally, I just breathlessly forwarded this video to my marketing compatriots at UP, and I - quite rightly, if I do say so myself... which I do - said that this video takes something that could be horribly boring and makes it way more fun than it has any right to be. 

Major props, Denison!