Imagine you are hired as SMM manager for the Stephen Foster State Park. Part of your goals are to generate SMM ideas and new SMM practices for the SMM Plan to increase SM engagement and event attendance for the FLORIDA FOLK FESTIVAL (FFF) hosted on the Park’s grounds in May.
You want to make a good first impression on the job. Your realize your first task is to research the Festival for background info. You remember from class how helpful it was to research other similar organizations like you did in your PowerPoint project at DSC. You Google other Festivals to visit their SM sites. From your text and project you saw both best practices and things that didn’t work. You make a note of both the pros and cons of the SMM practices from your research.
You learn from your research that the Florida Folk Festival (FFF), to some, sounds like it is only a folk music event when it is actually a celebration of Florida Folklife. Yes, there is some folk music but they are so much more. Just about every genre of music and great food are represented, they are family friendly with tons of fun activities. You realize that ‘Folk’ is anything that is not classically trained, whether it be music, food, art, tradition, or story telling.
Your next ‘to do’ item is to select one of the suggested target markets to research for the FOLK Festival. The Festival would like you to target young professionals and/or families with school age children. You ask yourself: “How do you reach either of these target markets through Social Media Marketing? What about this event would be a draw to the target market?”
You gather info from your research of the target market(s) to answer the questions, where are they and how do you reach them? What SM platforms does the Festival already use. What frequency of posting? How can they improve what they are already doing? What marketing techniques should they use, (for example: what tone in posts, slogans and so on.)
Your supervisors tells you that the Park isn’t able to post directly themselves; needing to go through the State of Florida’s SM department). She asks you to come up with ideas. How else they can generate the buzz needed to build their reach and engagement frequency? Then create a your discussion post as a report that you would give to your supervisor. (Give lots of specifics, examples, details, suggestions.)
Complete this discussion as a capstone assignment. Your discussion post report should talk about the key points learned from your research for background information and you should answer all of the questions posed in the above description along with your ideas for the new SMM plan.
You should apply all the core concepts you’ve learned from your textbook, as well as, the marketing applications you learned by studying your project companies and from our discussions. (Reports have at a minimum 3 sections – Introduction, Body and Conclusion/ Recommendations.)
