Diary of Volunteer Michael Willis

As I began my sixth semester at Southeast Missouri State University, I had no idea what the semester had in-store for me. I had just finished up an 18-hour, stressful, fall semester and was ready to have a more relaxing semester. I had hoped to go to class every day, but not spend so much time outside of the Lambda Chi Alpha house as I did the semester before.
Little did I know that this semester was going to give me an opportunity to use my marketing skills in a real-world, business-like environment.

One afternoon in Dr. Sandipan Sen’s Consumer Behavior class, he talked about another option that the class can do instead of doing an individual project for the end of the semester. He mentioned working with the Cape Girardeau Convention and Visitors Bureau with their April event, the 3rd annual Cape Girardeau Storytelling Festival. Dr. Sen talked about how our big role in this viral campaign would be to network through Facebook and Twitter. Immediately I made a note to e-mail the Cape CVB.

After e-mailing Stephanie Lynch at the Cape CVB, my viral marketing campaign began. I began to invite my friends to the Facebook fan page and I thought I was on-route to an “A” at the end of the semester. After inviting my friends to the event, I posted my progress to the progress log using DropBox software, and sent an e-mail to Stephanie stating that I’d be willing to do any additional work that she may need me to do.

I can honestly say that e-mail was the best and most important e-mail that I have ever sent out.

Stephanie contacted me about becoming the project leader for the viral campaign. Being a project leader meant that I was the “go-to” guy for the other marketing students if they had any questions or concerns with the project. Stephanie would send me information, and I would pass it along to the other virtual volunteers through e-mail.

My Facebook campaign grew spontaneously. After a week’s time I had joined over 40 Facebook fan pages and had sent out numerous links to these fan pages promoting the Cape Girardeau Storytelling Festival. In the weeks following, I noticed the fan base on the storytelling festival Facebook page grew past 500 and is currently approaching 700. It was at this point that I truly learned the power of internet in today’s business world.

With the viral marketing campaign going strong, I truly feel that this year’s storytelling festival will be a great time for everyone. I think the popularity will grow more as the festival approaches. I hope the biggest change in this year’s storytelling festival is more attendance from the college crowd and more people from bigger metropolitan cities (Saint Louis, Kansas City, etc.). All the work that is being put into the preparation for this year’s festival will help make future festivals bigger and better.

I think it is a great idea by the Cape CVB to let the Southeast business students take part in this experience. I can testify that the work I put into the festival has shown me that what we as business students study in the classroom really does apply to the business world. Being able to take what we learn in class and immediately apply it to the storytelling festival has made the classroom material really stick in my mind.