Throughout my years in college, I have gained experience in digital marketing. Some of it was self-taught, some of it was taught by a mentor, and some of I learned from courses.
I work for a record label, Burbank Records, based in Minneapolis and have focused my efforts on building a digital presence for an artist. The artist, former 80s superstars The Flirtations, reformed and released a new album last year. With that they wanted to create an online presence to help with digital downloads and concert tickets.
I headed up all of the social media efforts from starting the Facebook page, verifying it, working on the Instagram, creating the Twitter account along with using Google Adwords.
One of the first campaign ideas I had to build a following (without paying for followers) was to release the new album art in sections until we reached a new "like" number. It created shares which spread news that The Flirtations were back.
Since that was one of the first campaigns, it increased our follower base enough to focus on selling the album. The number of "likes" is not that high, but the target audience we aimed for is extremely specific (older generation/UK based/etc) which represents a high level of engagement. With the album released, we worked on their website and focused on selling the album digitally with the new shift in the music industry. We focused on Spotify streams, iTunes downloads and sold them physically and digitally on Amazon. With the website, we focused on SEO to get our website relevant.
In February of 2014, my boss at Burbank flew me out to London (where The Flirtations are based) to partake in radio interviews building up to their first show back together that weekend.
I also created the logo for the record label along with the album cover for The Flirtations' newest album. They are simple pieces but I worked with the CEO of Burbank through many meetings to figure out what exactly he wanted and he was more than impressed.
I also was the Public Relations Chair for my fraternity for numerous semesters. I was responsible for all of our social media platforms along with event planning and general PR management of the group.
A digital campaign I came up with to create a following and engagement was called "Meet the DUdes." My fraternity, Delta Upsilon (DU), on campus was not really that well known so I thought this would be a great way to get some nice photos out there with information for anyone to see.
Our Facebook page's engagement skyrocketed and our number of likes increased by the hundreds.
More recently, a member of our fraternity had an accident which left him in critical condition. This was a time for crisis management in which we wanted to inform the Greek community on campus as well as others about our friend along with being respectful to the family. With the approval of his parents, I created this post with the hashtag #GetWellSoonMatt which received a high level of engagement.
The hashtag was spread on Facebook and Twitter by the University of Minnesota community and the family was happy for all of the support.
The hashtag remained in circulation for weeks. Matt has been recovering from the accident and has been looking better than ever.
I also worked with the head of PR at the headquarters of Delta Upsilon and they posted this on the national Delta Upsilon Facebook page.
