Media Meditation #3 Finding Your Place on the Book

I have recently been focused on editing my resume for my Internship search. (Well search no longer since I will be interning at Brandthropology during the Spring 2010 semester. Woot woot.) But anyways, the updates to my resume included examples of the social marketing projects I have implemented for two of my employers, past and present. In this post I'll show you what I have been up too, the differences between the both pages and what I have learned from managing them.

I worked at Six Flags New England for 5 summers lastly as a Supervisor in the Rides department. The Rides department can be broken down simply by explaining that there are team members who vary in age from 16 years old to 50 who come to the park for a fun summer job with friends, then there are team leads or trainers who hold a bit more responsibility and above them come the seasonal supervisors, usually about 12 people. Then the details get murky but above the supervisors are their bosses and then their bosses and so on. The rides in the park are divided into 6 sections and each section has two supervisors, a handful of team leads and then a whole lot more team members. You work closely with this group of people and by the end of the summer, close friendships are established. 

Six Flags really depends on retention to continue staffing the numerous positions available summer after summer. Also, repeat employees are easier to train, know the ropes and often gain the skills to achieve promotions. I figured a good retention aid would be to establish a place that team members could go to during the off season and see all their friends in "one place"...

I created a Facebook account specifically for the Rides Department. I had to do this because I found out that in order to put together a "group" you needed to link the group with a specific account and I didn't want everyone to see that I was behind the group so that it would look a bit more official. Also, I knew I wouldn't be working there forever so having my own account behind the group would hinder others having the access to take over maintaining it. The group was and still is a success. It's interesting to me because the actual account has more friends than the group has followers. When I started the account and group, I would post questions to get team members talking such as....

"Who's coming back next season?"

"Did YOU get rehired yet?"

"Suggestions for a ride night?"

This past season, my old boss and good friend Jen took over maintaining the site and she did a really good job with it. She would post about different employee ride nights, award ceremonies, special events and even a wiffle ball game that was being organized between the divisions. Jen has even been using the page to promote a Rides Department Blog called All Clear, super exciting!

 

99.9 The Buzz has a website that is pretty actively being updated as promotions, events and artists are constantly changing however they didn't have an "official" Facebook page until I made one a few months ago. I am still in the process of making it concise enough to pass on for someone else to maintain post graduation but it's coming along nicely. This set up is a bit different than the Six Flags one because this one is for fans where the other one was for employees. For the Buzz Facebook, I want to let the fans know what's going on in the studio and what's going on as far as events we are putting on. For example, Matisyahu just came today  and did a private performance in the Buzz studio... a fellow employee sent a picture of him to her Facebook account right from her cell phone, I tagged it as the Buzz and through up a status update about the performance, now our fans are informed just like that!