The 20 Something Year Old Entrepreneur

I opened TweetDeck today to find a nice surprise from the UH Athletics Department.

For the longest time they’ve been using Twitter like an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed, pulling information off their website and placing it on Twitter.  They even had some of their Assistant Media Relation Directors tweeting live updates at various events.

Anyways, when I opened TweetDeck this is what I saw:

Here’s another good example of using social media to build relationships with you fans, followers, and the general public.  This is simple, engaging, and something different from what they’ve been doing all these years.  Most of their promotional activities were for students/faculty, military, kids, etc. and they were mainly ticket discounts.  Offering something FREE is always attractive and using Twitter to disseminate the message is great.

But why not take full advantage of the offer?  In this case, the UH Athletics Department wants to get information out to the public about all the happenings, and while asking people to reply “GO BOWS” is cute…why not make it more interractive?

What if they used this promotional tool as a way to get more people to follow them?  What is the headline read: FREE TIX to MVB this weekend to the 1st 2 people who get 10 new people to follow us.They must reply to us with your username (@_____).

This generates a little WOM (Word of Mouth) about UH Athletics and also about them being on Twitter.  If those 10 people want to try to win free tickets they’ll tell their friends and you just started something viral.

I like what they did but making it viral would have been better.

Thoughts?

Tags: Social Media, Twitter, UH