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>> 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 Athletics social media accounts.
So Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, all that good stuff.
Just for the Illini athletics.
So all of our sports, we have 19 or 21,
depending on who you ask, individual sports.
Those are all ran by our media relations departments, 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.
[COUGH] 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 and?
>> Yeah, absolutely.
So, I started about two years ago.
And it used to, so I mentioned the the Media Relations Department.
So they used to run all of 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 Fighting Illini Athletics on Facebook, Illini Athletics on Twitter and
Instagram, and then same on Snapchat, Illini Athletics.
So make sure you follow us on all of those.
A little 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 were 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't give you more information.
Or here's your answer, whatever it may be.
Now certain messages that we get,
it's kind of my discretion which ones I might reply to.
Certain ones, they're just 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 will just want to use that to vent.
So I let that happen [LAUGH].
But yes, so that was sort of the main thing.
And really the goal of Athletics for
the Athletics accounts is to share the word about some of the smaller sports,
that maybe don't have the same following that Athletics does.
So on Facebook there's a little over 122,000 people that like 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.
And then Snapchat, unfortunately they don't have a ton of numbers,
but when we post stories they usually get somewhere around 2,000 views or
something like that, on each snap.
>> Okay. >> 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 and 80,000 or something like that, so.
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So that's sort of the goal there.
So those are the four that I monitor everyday.
We use Sprout Social, and I look at incoming messages,
people who use our hashtag #Illini, like things,
retweet whatever, try to engage with fans.
And like I said, when we get questions especially on game days,
that's a big thing, that for whatever reason people will feel the need to if
they can't find their gate they're going to tweet at us to try to find it.
[LAUGH] I don't really understand it but
I guess I shouldn't question it since it keeps me employed.
But so I make sure that we answer those questions and people maybe if we run out
of hot dogs in a concession stand, they might tweet about it, and
I'll make sure that our concessionaire knows that hey we've got this going on.
>> One thing that I notice in your describing what you do is this very
casual, but at the same time very intense, kind of two-way communication process.
That you have to constantly monitor what's being said about your brand,
what's being said about your product or team.
And at the same time, be able to respond very quickly in an appropriate way.
Can you tell me a little bit about that process?
I mean, 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 from the strategy too far.
>> Absolutely.
So like I said, Sprout Social is a big part of that, we use that,
we used Who Tweet 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 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're going to get in the type of dos 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, right?
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 looks like you're moving.
I don't know, it's interesting.
Anyways, but Instagram, we try to stick to pictures.
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Yeah, Twitter, you can post a lot more often.
And it's not going to get as,
it doesn't stick around as long where like a Facebook post would 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 like on Snapchat's 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 group 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, a basketball game day, a video shoot, a road trip.
Maybe when softball's traveling, we'll have a softball student athlete take over,
and it's just a lot cooler than me being behind the camera and
taking random pictures.
>> That's true. >> 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 a, or actually this week, just yesterday,
we had a pretty big event.
And 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 then how do you deal with it, and
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 is a lot of NCAA
regulations on what we can and cannot do until someone signs.
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So, that, it just sort of depends, recruits are an interesting situation.
>> So it seems to me that this whole 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 the customer or feedback or fan's feedback.
And then, you also can work as an integrated, sort of, plan to work with
other media, other marketing tactics and direct sales and so branding strategy.
That seems to be a very positive and powerful kind of a medium.
In your experience did you learn anything, sort of pitfalls or
things that doesn't really work well?
Things that don't work very well on social media?
>> Yeah.
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Something just sort of in general.
So there are all these 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?
And 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.
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And we use it for sponsorship a lot, 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.
But things that don't necessarily work well.
I haven't seen too many things just plummet necessarily.
[LAUGH] But just general, like I said with Instagram we
try to stay away from super done up graphics and whatever.
We try to stick to the really cool pictures when we can.
Tweets usually, unless they're the live in-game updates but
we're even trying to be better about using GIFs and
having interactive media in there rather than just text tweets.
>> because those get a lot more interaction from fans when there is
something they can look at too rather than just reading that text
>> I think I've learned a lot from you
today.
Just a couple of key points I just want to quickly summarize I think.
One is how versatile social platform is.
It serves multiple functions including directly communicating with your fans,
directly engage, and lead to purchase, sales.
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Responding to needs, sort of crisis management, and
also being part of the integrated campaign in anticipation of major events.
Work closely with the mainstream media and other channels of marketing.
And the second thing I learned a lot about your job is that how fun it is can be,
because it really involves both the creative side as well as
the communication strategy.
And you mentioned that you sort of created 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.
And 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
they serve very different communication functions and
reach different target audience.
And then there are appropriate strategies that go along with it, so
it's not just the social media space, it's not a single space media channel.
And thank you very much for being here, Michelle.
>> Yeah, thanks for having me, no problem.
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