Tapping ASU for Marketing Help

It seems that the more time I spend on looking at the marketing plan, the bigger the task grows. Sure, marketing is only a piece of the business plan, but if there isn't a market or if one doesn't know how to engage this market, the business will go nowhere. With that in mind, I've decided to be a little unorthodox and have made the following decisions.

a) Focus on the marketing plan/strategy, before getting the business entity done.
b)Engage ASU's student population to help with the marketing plan.

To help meet this objective, I went to ASU last week and met with a business planning coach about on-campus contacts who could help us in marketing. The POC he gave me works in the Dean's Office of the Business School; she never replied to my email, even with me name-dropping the business coach :-) I'll try again in a couple of weeks.

Today, I met with a person in ASU's Community & Entrepreneurial Liaison's office -- match students interested in entrepreneurialism with local ventures. My objective to meeting with them is to find students to help us with our marketing section. I think it behooves us to tap into the 18-30 year old demographic and why not use the collective intelligence of these students to solidify our marketing plan.

So, we talked about our venture's needs and what/how these ASU students may be able to help. The school has had a huge response to their solicitation for businesses in the community that want to tap into this group of interested students -- some 600+ businesses responded for 25 or so interested students. He mentioned that if it wasn't for my connection to the LPEC class then he wouldn't set aside time to help a non-ASU affiliated ventures. We talked some more and it was apparent that he understood the opportunity that we could offer his students; he will be pitching Marketing 300-level students in a couple of weeks to find more candidates. So we'll see where this leads us, perhaps with a good team of energetic students to work alongside us to meet a big goal.

As for next week, I have another meeting planned with the director of career services. Which may well allow us some recruiting ops for a different set of students, my guess are students not necessarily in business school. I'm not going to leave any stone unturned while at ASU's campus, this is one of the biggest student populations in the nation, so there is bound to be some interested students.

Actually, I did see a flyer posted in the engineering building's men's room -- ASU Facebook Application Club, join and learn how to make money with Facebook apps. Hmmm, I may have to pay them a visit because it would be foolish to ignore Facebook's built-in user base. Think, engaging Facebook's users as a part of a larger marketing strategy.

Alright, about to start my business class tonight. I need to get a Ning site setup in 30 minutes so that I can hand out the url to partipants -- in case the class doesn't have a good way to communicate with the group.

-john