Niche Marketing to Community Portals

Mark Naples of WIT Strategy wrote:
Much has been made recently about community sites and online networking portals and tools. Friendster and LinkedIn come to mind. But, these are just the latest examples in an industry segment that continues to broaden and still has an enormous upside...

With enormous universities like Penn State crafting their own deals with music sharing services, I guess it was just a matter of time before someone took advantage of what is perhaps the greatest fallow media asset online. The best part of this might just be that college students were already there. CampusNetwork.com just gave them a reason to gather. It seems pretty simple at this point, after the fact. That's why I'd expect it to succeed. (Full article at MediaPost.)

My comment:
I agree - community sites provide an amazing opportunity for marketers to target niche audiences. I use the community portal tribe.net to market online music to various music related tribes - the ipod tribe, the music lovers tribe, the jazz tribe, the guitar players tribe...

The great potential with college community sites is that each college already has the database of potential customers to which they can market the service - including (income earning) alumni. Those prospects already have a relation with that organization, lowering the sales barrier, making them more apt to become a customer. New technologies and companies such as Loudeye are making it very easy for organizations to sell media. Imagine this scenario - colleges selling media services to alumni (for example music downloads) with a percentage of the sale going to the school. (Would that be tax deductable?)


Check it: Loudeye