We’ve come across a fun study from Alloy Marketing revealing that the college class of 2112 is increasingly, well, green.  In more ways than one.  According to Allow, the 2112 class, now the largest in history with 13.6 million college students (18-30), has at its disposal a record $237 billion in consumer spending.   What’s fun about the dollars and cents you might ask?  Well, it seems an overwhelming proportion of those budgets are socially conscience, with a growing 41% (net) of respondents preferring socially responsible brands and opportunities.

Still missing the fun?  Perhaps ‘excitement’ is a better word; I don’t mean to imply we’re personally excited by the data, rather, that as college students settle into classes and prepare for the new school year, we’re pleased to have mtvU bringing local events and promotions to those college students with Zvents.  mtvU, which owns and operates the College Media Network, the largest interactive network of online college newspapers in the US (itself owned by MTV Networks and Viacom), has joined the Zvents network, adding 25 college Campus Daily Guides to the network of sites through which your events and local businesses can be promoted with a single listing.  The partnership makes it easy for students to discover what’s going on, where to go, and where to spend those disposable dollars around campus, connecting local and national merchants with those college consumers.

Coincidentally, Alloy Marketing specializes in marketing to college students through events, targeted placements, and specialized research.  The similarity between the study and our partnership was too great to ignore so we took a moment to find a few local businesses promoting socially conscience events to college students:

• Budding, Tempe, AZ ASU k-12 teachers can visit EarthFest Educator’s Night at the Phoenix Zoo
• Ann Arbor U of M students can catch a nearby Solar Presentation as a part of an environmental lecture series
• The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology hosts countless special events regarding the community and world in which we live
• We’ve even discovered commercial success with students’ most socially responsible apparel brand hosting runs at NikeWomen near Northwestern

Local merchants and event marketers can submit listings to the network from any Campus Daily Guide, benefiting from highly targeted, relevant marketing to this appealing demographic.

By the end of the year, mtvU will launch 50 campuses. For the initial phase, 25 universities across the country have joined the network:

• Ohio State University
• Arizona State University Main
• University of Maryland College Park
• University of Texas at Austin
• University of Central Florida
• University of South Florida
• University of Washington
• University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
• Florida State University
• University of Arizona
• University of Cincinnati Main Campus
• University of Houston
• North Carolina State University
• University of Colorado at Boulder
• University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
• University of South Carolina
• Columbia University of Pittsburgh
• University of Kentucky
• University of New Mexico Main Campus
• George Washington University
• Northeastern University
• University of Nebraska – Lincoln
• University of Pennsylvania
• Northwestern University
• Emory University

To advertise on the Campus Daily Guides, contact mtvU directly or simply add an event!

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Most event marketers overlook the tremendous potential their website has to promote events. Search engines, the overwhelming primary source of traffic to your site, depend on structured, exposed content yet event calendars are oftn the worst examples of this ideal (read: search friendly) format. Search engine optimization, the practice of improving the quality and design of content so that the engines index more than just your homepage, is easier than people think.

Think of a search engine as a library. Each page on your company’s website is a book in that library: some of the books are good, others popular, some miss covers or have been misplaced never again to be found by the librarian. Users are more likely to use a library if it is well organized and promotes the most popular books and greatest variety of books so they can easily be found. Obviously search engines want to promote you, your job is to ensure that your books, the event pages of your website, don’t have torn or missing pages and that the material is accessible, valuable and popular.

Unfortunately for you, search marketers and in all likelihood the SEOs (the person who provides suggestions to the web developers to ensure content is search friendly) at your company typically focus on improving the most important content on your site: the homepage, product or services information, and categories. In doing so, they quickly dismiss promotional content like online coupons, store event calendars, and store locators; namely, the content that draws foot traffic through the door of your local business.

Far too often, websites make an easy mistake by presenting in-store event calendars in a javascript application that allows them to easily update the content (just ask the developers if they use ‘Javascript’). Doing so ensures that search engines, the library, can’t index those pages; users will never find those pages and you miss out on the most significant source of traffic. Sure, customers who arrive at the homepage will see your prominent link to a “store event calendar” but most customers arriving online are there because they intend to interact online. You want to reach the offline customers using search engines to find your business.

To ensure that search engines such as Zvents and Google can index and promote your event details; forward this list of priorities to your in-house search marketing manager, the SEO, or take them directly to the web developers. Getting your event content designed and exposed with the following in mind helps helps your reach our millions of unique users searching for local things to do, in-store events, and sales:

• Most importantly, and to reiterate what we’ve just explained, do not use Javascript!
  • In fact, your developers should never use Javascript; tell them to avoid it like the plague
    • Are there uses for Javascript? Sure there are, but the lost search traffic outweigh any benefits you get from a feature that can be created in some other language (code)
  • Also avoid Flash and do not present the event details in an image or banner
  • Use text in simple HTML, dhtml, or CSS.
• Do not move your event calendar.
  • We should be able to find it at the same URL today and six months from now.Ensure a consistent layout of the event calendar and refrain from changing that design
• Design a simple template for the event calendar, use it to promote all events, and refrain from changing that design
• Clearly identify event details
  • Event name (just the event name, not your business)
  • Start time (with AM or PM)
  • Date
  • Short description and a link for more details
    • By the way, a link and short description aren’t necessary but they really help - the name, time, and date are critical (but that should be obvious)
• Location should be displayed separately and consistently
  • Business name (your event name is not Spring Sale at Macy’s Palo Alto - The business name is Macy’s Palo Alto and the event is the Spring Sale)
  • Address including city/state (it doesn’t hurt to use the abbreviation of the state and the full name)
  • Zip code

Think your calendar is ready to be crawled? Submit it to us and we’ll unleash the search bots to index the content. Know though that submission to a search crawler is no guarantee that you’ll get indexed. Engines may find problems with the calendar that prevent us from promoting it. To ensure you get indexed add your business listing directly then tell us about the events.

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