By Clare Lanning Associate, AVW Productions account
Upon starting spring quarter, our goal for AVW Productions was to continue generating ways to extend their network using social media. Since Greek Week is one of the most anticipated weeks of the year for Greek life on campus, with around 10 percent of the student body participating, our ImPRessions team thought that there would be no better event to cover to bring more publicity and awareness to AVW, particularly Ohio Sports Zone (OSZ).
Eager and excited to participate in the annual Greek activities, we began to brainstorm how OSZ could be incorporated into the events and get the student body involved and intrigued by AVW. After discussing it with the AVW productions team, we decided to dedicate a whole OSZ show to Greek Week that would capture all the events of the week.
The most popular event of Greek Week is Air Bands. We aimed to capture the spirit of the event and create a competition. Starting April 17, anyone who “liked” the AVW Productions Facebook page could participate in the Greek Week Competition and vote for their favorite air band team by “liking” the team’s album cover. The winning team who had the most “likes” by April 28, would receive a professionally made DVD of their Air Band performance.
Members of the AVW ImPRessions team spread the word about the competition and it started off very successful with hundreds of students liking the page. OSZ was filming throughout the entire Greek Week and had planned on putting clips of the highlights on the AVW Facebook page daily to generate more interest for the show. Also, the producer of OSZ, Mike Zorbas, was going to select his favorite team from each event and that team will be featured in a segment called “Producer’s Pick.”
Everything was executed and planned to perfection until the middle of the competition when we were informed that the Greeks were no longer willing to cooperate. Our efforts to generate positive publicity for OSZ and AVW were not appreciated by the Greek committee. They viewed the competition as becoming “too competitive” and as an event that was taking the spirit out of Greek Week. This was no our intention as we were trying to work with the Greek organization in a positive way. As an account in ImPRessions, we would like to see this competition possibly continue in the upcoming years, but it is obvious that better communication must take place. It was obvious, from the student body responses and reactions to the competition, that contact with the Greek committee must start at the beginning of the year in order for everything to run smoothly.
Although our plan and creativity was extremely beneficial, we could have used a back-up plan and done further research with the Greek committee to prevent the unfortunate series of events that occurred. Overall this was a major learning experience for our account and something we hope other ImPRessions teams can learn from as well.
