Corporate America Crowds My Space

The new trend in reaching young adults is through social networks. The social networks most often used to target these audiences are MySpace and Facebook. Companies are creating entire campaign based off these social networks. Another popular trend in reaching these younger markets are using student ambassadors to help their campaign.

Companies such as Burger King, JP Morgan, Chase have begun to capitalize on the accessibility to their target audiences through these social networks. Burger King created a profile on MySpace for their infamous King character. The King that is featured in Burger King commercials has a profile that represents his and the company. Members of MySpace are able to friend the King. Burger King admits to winning over its 120,000 friends with free episodes of 24 and American Dad. Chase chooses Facebook as an alternative online advertising location.

JP Morgan along with other companies have begun to realize how effective student ambassadors are. Student Ambassadors help companies to promote and bring excitement to their campaign among their younger markets. Over 300 student ambassadors were hired by JP Morgan that helped create events that featured food and game to create a buzz for their company.

Over the summer I worked for a marketing firm and helped them develop a campaign for ESPN GameDay. They were creating Hometown Heroes events in locations of large college football schools. To help promote these events we showed ESPN how they could use Facebook to advertise, but most importantly how they could use student ambassadors and their access to Facebook to advertise at a low cost. We showed them how to create groups and events. All they would need are student ambassadors at each respective school with a lot of friends on the social network to create the buzz.

Social Networks have been growing in effectiveness and companies are just realizing the potential on these sites. MySpace has over 100 million members most of them under the age of 30. With these numbers at the marketers fingertips companies need to learn how to use these networks at their advantage.

Information for this post provided by Marketing to Kids Where They Live