Sibs N Kids Promotional Project

For my Marketing 4000 class with my friends, Allison and Emily, we had to do a "Social Media Team Promotion." Our group chose to promote BGSU's Sibs N Kids Weekend.

What is Sibs N Kids? Sibs ‘n Kids is a weekend full of family friendly activities all around the BGSU campus for BGSU students, faculty, and staff to bring siblings and families for a weekend of fun.

Our Initial Plan and Objectives:

Who was our target audience? We anticipated our target audience to be BGSU students, faculty, and staff who wanted to participate in the activities, and have families who would like to come and enjoy BGSU and a weekend of fun. We were also anticipating that some siblings and younger family members would be following our social media promotions, because they would want to know what is going on.

Our Objectives: One of our objectives of this project was to answer the question, “What is there to do

during Sibs ‘n Kids weekend?” This included the times, dates, and activities going on during Sibs ‘n Kids. We would like to provide an up-to-date schedule of events available though all of our social media outlets. Another objective was to simply promote Sibs ‘n Kids and the locations and activities during Sibs ‘n Kids. We wanted to inform students and families what’s going on BEFORE the weekend starts, as well as inform students and families during the weekend.

"The Plan" and our original measures of success: We planned on using Twitter, Facebook, and a Sibs ‘n Kids blog to promote Sibs ‘n Kids through social media. We hoped to have at least 150 followers on Twitter, especially because we think that will be our most direct contact with our audience. We wanted to “tweet” a secret word (much like the company Sprinkles’ Cupcakes does) for extra prizes at the events.

On Facebook, we hoped to have at least 200+ fans of the “fan page” that we created, as well as create events for each of the individual events that are going on during the weekend. We plan on linking everything together. We also wanted to have a picture and a comment contest on facebook.

On the blog, we wanted to post full schedules of events, interviews with the event planners (some video interviews!), events updates, and pictures of past Sibs ‘n Kids events. The blog was linked to both the facebook and the twitter accounts.

One of our main objectives was to do a lot of "in the moment" updating during the weekend of Sibs 'N Kids, updating people about canceled or moved events.

What Changed After We Started:

We quickly realized that we had too high of expectations for such a short social media run. Our original objectives were to have 200 Facebook fans and 150+ twitter followers, but we quickly realized that that was shooting way too high. We ended up with 96 fans on Facebook, and 12 followers on Twitter.

Because of our smaller following, we also quickly realized that some of our original plans for contests and prizes were not going to be practical. Not only did we have a smaller following than planned, but the followers and fans that we did have were much more of the "lurking" kind--just people gathering information, rather than interacting with our facebook or twitter.

We also quickly realized how hard the "in the moment" contests were going to be, such as the "whisper a secret word," because of how many different organizations were putting on events. We would have had to do much more coordinating much sooner than we realized.

Another disappointing thing that changed was our planned interviews with event planners and "Featured Siblings." We had much fewer Featured Sibs than planned, and no interviews with event planners, for the simple reason of people not getting back to us.

Our Results:

Our Next Steps:

Since this was a yearly event, who's leadership is passed on from year to year, we will be passing on our "lessons learned" and advice to the current UAO president, and allowing her to pass the information on to the next leaders of the Sibs N Kids weekend.

Lessons Learned:

1. We were too ambitious. We expected bigger, more impressive results than were actually attainable with the time we had to work with, and our "end users" didn't react the way we were hoping. (See below for more details)
2. Social media users don't react the way we expected. We expected our followers and fans to be much more interactive than they actually were. While we had almost a 100 fans, they were more "passive"--simply taking in the information, rather than interacting with it, such as commenting back or liking posts.
3. Passion plays a huge role in social media. While we all thought Sibs N Kids is a cool thing, Allison is the only one directly involved in UAO, who puts on Sibs N Kids. We found that not having a strong "connection" to an event or cause definitely decreased our passion and willingness to promote the project or event. This can also apply to the passion that the "end user" or social media user has-- if they don't feel passionate about the event or company that you are trying to promote, they will not interact, like, friend, or follow you. We found that this especially applied with the people that did not have Siblings or Kids, or Sibs N Kids who are the age to come to these events.