Tales From the Digital Side

If you manage college recruitment initiatives, you are probably in the midst of preparing for the fall semester. As you consider your options of how to brand yourself to the millenial generation, take a look at MentosIntern.com.

This microsite blends a lot of trends for reaching this demographic - viral marketing, community, chat, social networking, blogging, humor, live streaming video, personalization - all into one pretty cool marketing campaign. On the site, you’ll meet Trevor, an intern hired by Mentos, to work for them over the summer. But Trevor, really works for all of us. Anyone can schedule him to do something. He can order you lunch, prank call your boss, organize a party for you, proofread a paper, whatever. You can connect with him on Facebook or Myspace, play with him on Xbox live, or read his blog. You can watch what he is up to live during the hours of 9am-5pm EDT. As I was on the site, several people were chatting about him and connecting with each other - handing out their Myspace pages.

In fact, I have requested that he comment on this blog - we’ll see if my task is accepted.

What I like about this is how well the pieces fit together. In my opinion, the weaving of the video, blogging, viral elements, user generated content, etc doesn’t seem too forced for a marketing campaign. Trevor’s personality seems to come through and it seems from his Myspace and Facebook pages that site visitors are really connecting with him. The site design is well done too, all the features are available from the home page.

So imagine, borrowing this concept for college recruiting. Letting potential employees get to know one of your own, having that employee educate site visitors on many different aspects of your company, allowing a personal connection with your organization. That’s got to be a step up from advertising in another guidebook.