The digital revolution has led to a titanic shift in the landscape of the marketing communication, while also creating new opportunities for businesses to reach and engage consumers through smart, social, and mobile media technologies. In this course, you will learn about the impacts of digital technologies on marketing communication strategies and practices. By understanding the underlying processes of marketing communication and the core features of new media technologies, you can strategically select the appropriate channels to deliver the right marketing message to the right audience at the right moment.
Michelle Stenger - Illinois Athletics
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來自 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 的課程
Digital Media and Marketing Principles
1036 個評分
從本節課中
Core Strategies
In this module, the instructor will provide an overview of three widely adopted digital marketing strategies: online display advertising, search engine marketing, and social media marketing.
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Mike YaoAssociate Professor of Digital Media
Charles H. Sandage Department of Advertising
All right. We're here today to interview a very competent marketing expert,
I think from our campus and Michelle Stenger.
She's the Director of Advertising and
Digital Marketing at the Illinois athletics programs.
I will let her introduce herself,
and talk a little bit about what she does and what her role is in the organization.
Without further ado I just want to introduce Michelle here.
Thanks Mike. Yeah. So, I mean you said it pretty well,
I'm the Director of Advertising and Digital Media.
So, in a nutshell,
I run the Illinois athletic social media accounts.
So, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat,
Instagram, all that good stuff.
Just for the Illinois Athletic so all of our sports we have 19 or
21 depending on who you ask individual sports.
Those are all run by our media relations department,
because those are the people that travel with
the teams and have that relationship with the coaches.
So, then I run the overall athletics and the strategy behind that,
as well as our advertising efforts so
that's trade stuff that we do with local people in town,
as well as anything digital that we do and just I guess our online efforts in general.
Great. Can you tell me a little bit more about just how many Facebook
or how many different social media accounts that
you monitor or you run, what do you do with them?
Do you post messages?
Yeah. Absolutely. So, I started about two years ago,
and it used to so I mentioned that department that the media relations department.
So, they used to run all the different accounts and what we found was that
they have a lot of other responsibilities as well and
with the growing importance of social media,
what my role originally came in to do it was a new role,
so I kind of got to build it how I wanted.
But what the original intent was to take the athletics' accounts,
so that's final Illinois athletics on Facebook,
Illinois athletics on Twitter and Instagram,
and then same on Snapchat, Illinois athletics.
So, make sure you follow us in all of those though shameless plug,
but essentially what they wanted me to do when I came in
was really just to engage a little bit more.
So, we're doing a lot of posting and not necessarily a lot
of answering and engaging with our fans.
So, one of the main things when I came
was I wanted to really make sure that when we get Facebook messages,
we're answering them and saying "Thanks for your support.
Call this number if I can give you more information"
or "Here's your answer," or whatever it may be.
Now, certain messages that we
get it's kind of my discretion which ones I might reply to certain ones.
There fans that maybe were a little upset and decided to say something on here.
If I have something constructive that I can say back to them like "Hey,
thank you for the feedback.
Here's what we're doing to try to help," but it's sports,
people get heated about it,
sometimes people just want to use that to event so, I let that happen.
But yes, so that was sort of the main thing.
Really the goal of athletics,
for the athletics accounts is to share the word about some
of the smaller sports maybe that don't have the same following that athletics does.
So, on Facebook, there's like a little over 122,000 people that liked that page, Twitter,
there's 43,000 and some change,
Instagram somewhere around 21,000,
that was actually one of our I think athletics was
the first Instagram account that we had instead of the individual sports.
Then Snapchat unfortunately they don't have
a ton of numbers but when we post stories they
usually gets somewhere around 2,000 views or something on each snaps.
So, for something like women's track,
we try to share those stories and those student athletes
because they're equally as important
as football and men's basketball even though football and men's basketball they have,
gosh, they have way more followers than athletics does like 60,000,
80,000 or something like that.
So, that's the goal there,
so those are the four that I monitor every day.
We use Sprout Social.
I'd look at incoming messages,
people who use our hashtag,
#Illinois, like things, retweet whatever,
try to engage with fans, and like I said,
question like when we get questions especially on game days,
that's a big thing that for whatever reason people feel the need to,
if they can't find their game,
they're going Tweet at us to try to find it.
I don't really understand it but I guess I shouldn't question,
it's cute to be employed,
but so I make sure that we answer those questions.
People maybe if there's,
if we run out of hot dogs and a concession stand,
they might Tweet about it and I'll make sure that our concessionaire
knows "Hey, we've got this going on".
One thing that I noticed in your describing what you do is this,
very casual but at the same time very intense two-way communication process.
You have to constantly monitor what's being said about your brand,
what's being said about your product or team,
and then at the same time be able to respond very quickly and in an appropriate way.
Can you tell me a little bit about that process.
How do you manage that two-way communication but at the same time
keeping your brand's identity and then the overall strategy intact so without deviating?
Yeah.
From the strategy too far.
Absolutely. So, like I said,
it's sprout social is a big part of that.
We use Hootsuite previously,
and both products were pretty good.
To be honest, it was a matter of money when we switched.
So, those types of platforms I think are huge, because otherwise,
it would be nearly overwhelming for me to just go try to
find people talking about us but their technologies put it all in one place.
So, I definitely recommend if anyone's going to be
managing any type of social media accounts to use those.
Do you see a difference in strategy or
the kind of response you are going to get and the type
of do's and don'ts that you need to keep
in mind when you manage the different types of social media?
Absolutely. Yeah. So, I can just give a couple of examples.
So Instagram, it's built on pictures.
So, we try to be very picture heavy, not necessarily,
we'll use some videos sometimes and they have boomerang that's in there where they make
the quick little clip that it just looks like you're moving,
it's interesting anyways, but Instagram we try to stick to pictures.
Really cool shots that other people aren't
necessarily going to get and showing off our student athletes,
our facilities all these our alumni,
all these other things, especially if the draft come being starting it last night.
Cool pictures of when Vontae Davis used to play here,
when the Merciless was here, cool stuff like that.
Facebook, they actually boost a lot of videos,
so like when you post a video natively to Facebook,
just in Facebook's algorithm,
it's going to get a better reach and perform better.
So we try to put a lot of videos on there when we can.
We have an awesome video crew that does a lot of really good stuff.
So we try to share their content as much as we can
and Facebook's a great platform for that.
Twitter, that's where we're going to do our live endgame updates,
so if you follow Illini Football on Twitter,
any football game you can see,
live scoring updates and all that kind of stuff.
Yeah, Twitter, you can post a lot more often and it doesn't stick around as long,
were like a Facebook post will stick around longer,
and then Snapchat is one that most people know.
It's kind of dominated by the younger people.
So we like to try to use content there that's going to
resonate with our students and our student athletes and even possible recruits.
Honestly, a lot of what we do,
not necessarily directly but a lot of what we do is trying to sell these recruits, right?
We want to make Illinois look like the place to come.
So on Snapchat, specifically,
a lot of times we'll do what's called a Snapchat takeover, and we'll have,
whether it's a student athlete or one of our student groups like
we've had Block I or Marching Illini or something like that,
take over our account so that way they can show
off a football game day or a basketball game day or a video shoot,
road trip when they're maybe when softballs traveling,
we'll have a softball student athletes takeover.
It's just a lot cooler than maybe behind the camera and taking,
That's true.
Very known pictures. So trying to get them engaged with people
that they might look up to or that they can kind of identify with,
these recruits and students.
Last week we had, actually this week,
just yesterday we had a pretty big event and have we signed
a really promising young basketball player onto our team,
and for events like that,
do you have the sort of pre-planned campaign in anticipation of the sudden surge of
traffic or attention that comes from the social media space and how do you deal with it,
how do you take advantage of those moments to capture and engage audience?
Absolutely. So in the sense of what you're talking about with Mark Smith,
Illinois Mr. Basketball, it's a big deal and we're definitely a basketball school,
so people are pretty excited about it.
Recruits are sort of a different thing because there's a lot of
NCAA regulations on what we can and cannot do until someone signs.
So he made his announcement at like six O'clock on Wednesday night.
We actually got his signed letter of intent Wednesday morning,
but we can announce,
we didn't want to break the news, right?
Yeah.
Obviously, he's holding this whole thing too.
But what we did do is,
we had graphics prepared,
we had gifts ready to go,
we had a story on our website released to media.
All this stuff that the second,
I think we might have even like jumped the gun slightly because we were
ready for when he took off his jacket and it was Illinois and he put on an Illinois hat.
That's great.
So it just sort of depends for recruits on an interesting situation.
So it seems to me that this host social media you use it for,
at least we already talked about several different ways,
one is to reach and engage,
is to respond and listen to your customer feedback or
your fans feedback and then you also can work as an integrated sort of plan to,
Yeah.
To work with other media,
other marketing tactics and direct sales,
and so branding strategy,
that seems to be a very positive and powerful medium.
In your experience, did you learn anything,
sort of pitfalls of things that doesn't really work well,
things that don't work very well on social media?
Yeah, something just sort of in general.
So there are all these,
I guess tips for ways to tweet and use certain things on Facebook and whatever.
I think when you take certain messages,
certain sales messages, so at the end of the day,
all of us are in sales.
We're selling Illinois athletics and
a big part of my job that I take very
seriously is how my job can impact that bottom line.
So I think with social media people always
ask what's the ROI or what are you getting back on that.
Yeah.
What I would say to that is,
what we've done at least since I've been here
is looking at different efforts such as retargeting and all of those different things,
to be smart about when we're online and looking at search,
and what are we doing there when people are actively looking for us.
Are we there and trying to help them out?
Social media itself will put sales messages out and we use it for sponsorship a lot too.
If Nissan is one that comes a lot and we did a whole segment of
Facebook live with our athletics director and that was something big for Nissan,
and that's a way that we're able to drive that revenue through social media.
Okay.
But things that don't necessarily work well.
I haven't seen too many things just plummet necessarily but just general like I said,
with Instagram we try to stay away from super done-up graphics and whenever,
we try to stick to the really cool pictures when we can.
Tweets usually, unless they're the live end-game updates,
we're even trying to be better about using gifts and in heavy interactive media in there,
rather than just text tweets.
Because those get a lot more interaction from fans when
there's something they can look at too rather than just reading that text.
I think I've learned a lot from you today.
Just couple of key points,
I just want to quickly summarize,
I think one is how versatile social platform is.
I mean it serves multiple functions including directly communicating with your fans,
directly engage and lead to purchase, sales,
responding to needs, sort of crisis management,
and also being part of the integrated campaign in anticipation of major events
worked closely with the mainstream media and other channels of marketing.
The second thing I learned a lot about in your job is that how fun it is can be,
because it really involves
both the creative side as well as the communication and strategy,
and you mentioned that you sort of create at your job and
I think many companies are defining the role of social media manager,
digital marketing, digital media manager,
and these roles are exciting spaces to be in.
Then finally, I just wanted to just highlight another point that you brought up,
which is the differences between different type of social media platforms.
So in other words, not all social media platforms are created
equal and so very different communication functions
and reach different target audience
and then their appropriate strategy that go along with it.
So it's not just this the social media space is not a single space media channel,
and thank you very much for being here Michelle.
Yeah thanks for having me. No problem.
