Learning from Interactive Doughnuts

My friend alerted me to something snazzy Dunkin’ Donuts recently did. They gave you the ability to create your own doughnut (maybe I should say ‘donut’) and if it received enough votes, it would actually be available for sale in their stores come September. You could change the shape of your donut, its dough, filling, frosting, and toppings. They announced the winner on National Doughnut Day (June 5th, 2009). The contest is over now (congratulations to Jeff Hager!), though you can still create doughnuts, which I find to be strangely entertaining. I love doughnuts and all, but how I could sit here for 10 minutes creating digital replicas of doughnuts? How unique and weird can I make them while still feeling like they’d taste great? Perhaps it’s the combination of a major, well-known brand and the feeling of experiencing something I never have before: creating doughnuts on my computer.

And very quickly, another cool idea Dunkin’ Donuts is currently employing is their Keep it Coolatta Daily Giveaway. I learned about it first from visiting the Contests and Promos portion of their website, and then interestingly, they sent me to their Facebook Fan Page to learn more about it. That’s right, I couldn’t get all the details from their actual website, I needed to visit Facebook to learn everything. To sum up the giveaway, you take a picture of yourself drinking a Coolatta and post it online, giving yourself a chance to win a prize. Click here (Facebook) for the entire scoop.

There’s absolutely no reason why Universities can’t employ these same kinds of tactics, albeit much less sweet and fattening. Doughnuts are obviously integral to the Dunkin’ Donuts brand. What things are integral to yours? Say you’ve got all these creative ideas floating around, but there’s no consistency. This is the big challenge for us all. Now how can you push, perhaps student developers, to relate a fun idea to an integral part of your brand and come up with something memorable and positive for your college or university? We looked at some decent examples of utilizing Facebook during our KnowledgeBuilder session held last month, but the bar can (and will) go much higher. While institutions of higher education generally lag a bit behind in this space, they’re certainly closing the gap. I think we’re all going to be seeing more and more fantastically creative ideas coming from higher ed institutions.

So what are the primary concepts you should explore at your college or university? Go find those sparkly ideas and mix them together!