Friends are very precious, but iPods can be ferocious. Even if a 99-cent song doesn’t seem to be such a big deal, feeding the small digital beast can become a costly habit, especially on a college student’s budget.
The people in charge of student recruitment at the University of Alabama have not only realized it but decided to use it to help with their marketing efforts.
According to “UA gives away iTunes in recruitment effort,” an article published in The White Crimson Online, “the University is giving away iTunes in exchange for the contact information of prospective students.
[…]
On a new Web site, go.ua.edu, high school students can get a free iTune download by giving their e-mail addresses and other information, and UA students can get up to five iTunes for submitting the e-mail addresses of their friends who are high school students.”
Out of the 2,000 downloads the university bought, more than 1,500 have already been given away – which means the admission office got at least as many email addresses from prospective students.
Not bad.
The only catch is that the online application used to close the deal might not have been set up as it should have:
“The site says, “prospective students only please,” but seems to accept any e-mail address a high school student’s, even a BamaMail address. Some UA students have taken advantage of the Web site by providing e-mail addresses of non-high school students – even those of current UA students.”
I don’t know if this has been fixed since the article was published, but this would just require a rather simple validation process denying the offer to any email addresses with the university domain name.
And, because we’re talking about email validation, it would probably be a good idea to test that the submitted email addresses do exist (which can again be done easily, just ask your favorite programmer) and haven’t been already used for this offer (since all email addresses are probably stored in a database, this would just require a simple database check – again, see your favorite programmer or database administrator)
Beyond these small technical glitches, this successful campaign shouldn’t be difficult to replicate by other institutions.
“the university is giving away iTunes?” iTunes is free software. I believe they meant to say they are giving away free SONGS from the iTunes music store, or free CREDITS from same. And no, you can’t use “iTune” as a non-plural.
Thanks for the comment and the precision. It seems it went through the newspaper copy editor (if they have one). Fortunately, I have thousands of copy editors — i.e. readers — that help make this blog as accurate as possible.