1. Sunburn festival social media strategy
BY: TUSHAR UPADHYAY
MIT SCHOOL OF BUSINESS

2. Introduction
 Many companies especially small firms think launching a “Facebook page” is enough to gain attention of
masses.
 Posting status updates and observing number of likes seldom helps in effective social media marketing
 Certain steps have to be followed to keep the people glued to the targeted social media service and not
letting go of the initial buzz created by the upcoming event/product.
 Selection of the right social media service is also crucial.
 It should be remembered that social media is a two way marketing communication, negative comments
and bad electronic word of mouth quickly spreads which can prove to be detrimental to the
brand/event’s reputation. On the other hand social media has an awesome ability to go viral.

3. 1) Set an objective
 For Sunburn festival it will have to be decided - why launch a social media
campaign?
 For attracting more people?
 For giving regular updates about sub-events and attractions while the festival is
in progress?
 Giving platform to people to share their experiences and make it an exclusive
community of sunburn attending audience?

4. 2) Decide theme of the campaign
 Being an electronic dance and music festival for the youth decide the voice,
tone, personality and online presence of the moderator who is directly
interacting with the people.
 Laid back, jumpy, energetic, humorous, feel good and spiritual are among the
probable options
 One of the campaign schemes can be designing an app which counts how
many times a user has visited the web page/ Facebook page of the event and
based on highest visit count, the winner gets to come and perform on stage
with DJ’s in the festival

5. 2) Decide theme of the campaign
 Decide core topics to be put up on the page
 Some of them could be
“Share your Sunburn moments with us”
“Vote for your favourite DJ and we will get him to perform for you in the next
sunburn”
 A great opening or introductory status update can be “ This year sunburn is
darker – experience the 60’s with black lights and glow in the dark paint
themed nights.

6. 3) Policy
• Respond to negative responses and bad publicity
• Notify supervisors about any spam and distrustful content
• Delete the bad post
• Decide on content rating
• Make the page public or private
Yes or No

7. 4) Staff
It is wise to use underutilized employees with less work load for the job
 A three tier team of social media experts
The totally hooked in person
probably addicted to social media
Needs to know most social
platforms their dynamics, their
user types and fitment for the
strategy
The virtual person who in most of
the cases will interact with people
and post relevant updates whilst
following a timely schedule and
controls the interaction within the
community
The Analyst will measure the
effectiveness of social media
strategy and will be bound to use
some methods to analyse the
effectiveness of the whole social
media campaign on the popularity
of the event

8. 5) Target media
 Literally thousands of social platforms.
 For Indian audiences and less tech savvy people of the sunburn(assumed to
be) Facebook, twitter and YouTube would suffice.

9. 6) Calendar and Schedule
 Although social media interaction is in the moment but a schedule of when to
post what should be decided and executed.
 It would include a list of conversation starters, content and post timings
 What to post where also to be included

10. 7) Metrics
Number of Facebook posts or tweets doesn’t matter, What matters is
everything that happens after you post /tweet/participate!
Did you grab attention? Did you deliver delight? Did you cause people
to want to share? Did you initiate a discussion? Did you cause people to
take an action? Did your participation deliver economic value?
 for Facebook
a)
Facebook has their own analytics service called Facebook insights.
Through Insights you can see which of your posts has generated the
most comments and when there is a spike in ‘shares’ to determine
which kind of posts expand your reach most effectively.
b) Google analytics package can be used to keep track of traffic on the
Facebook page

11. 7) Metrics
Google analytics- used by
major companies and
website admins.

12. 7) Metrics
 for Twitter
a)
Twitter analytics package
b) Number of followers is also crude but effective
measure
c)
On Twitter, conversation participation can be
tracked by looking at replies and direct messages.
The number and frequency of these can usually
be found by using Twitter’s search function.
Privately owned websites and blogs can be measured
by counting number of page views and referrals.