College Sports Programs: Create Social Media Interns

With the exception of top tier universities, college athletic and sports marketing departments are notoriously lean operations with everyone wearing many hats. But they have access to help. Universities have a stable of willing and able resources right at their fingertips: the student intern. But like any other business bringing on an intern, the question becomes how best to use their time; not only to benefit the school, but the student as well.

Social media marketing, including blogging, user generated video, Twitter, Facebook and other online awareness techniques, has become a key consideration for marketing and promotional campaigns both small and large. It can drive online awareness, build brand/team advocates, spike ticket sales, create fan engagement and more. However, the challenge in executing these programs is creating the content required to sustain relevancy in the crowded social media space.

Interns are nothing new for college athletic departments. But how they should be used is changing. While attending the NACDA conference recently, the social media marketing and technology tracks were packed with assistant athletic directors eager to learn social media tricks-of-the-trade. And that's part of the problem: there are no "tricks" or magical shortcuts to social media. If anything, it's just the opposite. It is a time consuming commitment that requires dedicated resources and planning. Specifically, a content strategy and a resource to produce/gather/organize the content. It may be cheap, but it's by no means free.

Here's an example of a current Internship description for Auburn University. Not to pick on Auburn, but I'm a Gator, so it's understandable. You can see it has no mention of social media. This is typical of what I found with most other universities.

Comparing the overwhelming interest in social media I found at the NACDA conference with the fact that very few university athletic department internships are focused on social media, I discovered a gap. University athletic departments want to use social media, but don't fully understand how to do it themselves, much less teach a student intern how to do it.

The reality, however, is many students today are very media savvy. They understand the technology; the content creation process; the conversational marketing style. What they need is someone to channel that activity towards established branding goals and defined marketing objectives -- something assistant athletic directors are especially good at.

So here are a few suggestions to all you college athletic department internship description writers out there. Start including these activities:

Title: Social Media Marketing Intern

Description:

• Grab your digital video camera and laptop, bring your passion for your school, and start building an online audience for your content.
• Plan and schedule interviews with coaches, alumni, students, student athletes, local community businesses.
• Create a content deliverables schedule including blog posts, twitter updates, Facebook updates and video posts.
• Comment and engage with existing fans online, bring them into conversations, promotions and niche content on the university's web properties.
• Coordinate with ticket sales and events group to drive core business goals through the use of social media techniques.
• Establish method for measuring social media campaign effectiveness.

They great thing about this kind of internship is the department will learn as much from the intern as the intern does from the department.

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