Suppose you were in the marketing department of UTEP athletics (4-5 years back). Marketing is all about targeting demographics and raising the interest level in your product amongst your target audience.
While there's lots of ways to split this up, one way to think about it is there are non-fans, lukewarm fans, and die-hard fans. Die hard fans are important because they are going to be where a lot of your season ticket sales and alumni donations come from.
Your boss tells you to focus on marketing to die hard fans. He/she has people working on other campaigns for other audiences. Obviously winning teams helps but you can't do anything about that. Thinking about it, the low hanging fruit here is sports forums. People that spend time on the forums are die-hard fans, again with a lot of overlap to donations and season tickets. You look at the existing forums and realize that they are really dead except for basketball season. The Kug years have taken their toll.
So you decide your role is to create an account and try to boost online participation by posting 25 times per day. This is pretty much going to mean starting one or two new posts every day and driving the conversation. After doing this a while you realize there just isn't a lot to talk about during the offseason. The local sports rag doesn't do much real journalism. So you walk in one morning and you've got nothing.
Screw it. You decide you're just going to post on the first random thing that comes into your head. Ding ding ding! lots of responses, mostly asking if your mama dropped you on your head, but finally action! Your plan is clear going forward. Every day post a couple random nonsense posts and the board is hopping. There are certain go-to subjects that are sure to get 5-10 people telling you you're a numbnuts but that's OK because it ups the traffic so you go back to them whenever you have nothing else.
As y'all know I spend most of my posting efforts over at the Den but I do lurk here for breaking news, a handful of posters, and a sort of amusement watching some of these conversations. No real purpose in this post, I just needed to take a break from staring at data.
While there's lots of ways to split this up, one way to think about it is there are non-fans, lukewarm fans, and die-hard fans. Die hard fans are important because they are going to be where a lot of your season ticket sales and alumni donations come from.
Your boss tells you to focus on marketing to die hard fans. He/she has people working on other campaigns for other audiences. Obviously winning teams helps but you can't do anything about that. Thinking about it, the low hanging fruit here is sports forums. People that spend time on the forums are die-hard fans, again with a lot of overlap to donations and season tickets. You look at the existing forums and realize that they are really dead except for basketball season. The Kug years have taken their toll.
So you decide your role is to create an account and try to boost online participation by posting 25 times per day. This is pretty much going to mean starting one or two new posts every day and driving the conversation. After doing this a while you realize there just isn't a lot to talk about during the offseason. The local sports rag doesn't do much real journalism. So you walk in one morning and you've got nothing.
Screw it. You decide you're just going to post on the first random thing that comes into your head. Ding ding ding! lots of responses, mostly asking if your mama dropped you on your head, but finally action! Your plan is clear going forward. Every day post a couple random nonsense posts and the board is hopping. There are certain go-to subjects that are sure to get 5-10 people telling you you're a numbnuts but that's OK because it ups the traffic so you go back to them whenever you have nothing else.
As y'all know I spend most of my posting efforts over at the Den but I do lurk here for breaking news, a handful of posters, and a sort of amusement watching some of these conversations. No real purpose in this post, I just needed to take a break from staring at data.
