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: Donna has over 25 years of experience in assisting brands, agencies and not-for profit organizations develop and implement a wide variety of their marketing communications needs. In 2005 she founded DDC Marketing Group which has specialized in bringing interactive promotional marketing solutions to life for many clients. Today the firm is also dedicated to helping clients integrate blogs and social media into their marketing mix. Her own blog,Donna’s Promo Talk, helps to keep marketing professionals current on today's hottest interactive promotions and trends.

Most recently Donna joined the online team at Butler Till Media Services as Emerging Online Media Supervisor. Donna is responsible for overseeing the agency’s search marketing efforts for a variety of clients as well as integrating emerging online media opportunities such as blogs, social media networks, viral marketing, mobile as well as interactive promotions.

Social Media Is A Slam Dunk With NCAA ’08 March Madness

Written on: Mar 11, 2008
Author: Donna DeClemente |
: Share; Social Media Is A Slam Dunk With NCAA ’08 March Madness

Now to get the message out about this promotion and generate buzz, Alltel reached out to the fans at several colleges that they have partnerships with such as NC State, Duke, Michigan State, Arizona, Creighton, Oklahoma, New Mexico, South Florida, Kansas State, South Dakota State and UTEP. Critical to their success was involving people in the program who are actual basketball fans, like the team from Alltel’s PR firm, Taylor, who could talk basketball with the fans and not be accused of spamming. They connected with fans at each of those schools through email, message boards, blogs and other social media outlets where those fans congregate.

Alltel also created a blog outreach program which connected with both national and local bloggers who cover college basketball, sports business and promotions/marketing (Donna’s Promo Talk was one of them). Some bloggers placed promotional widgets on their sites and some wrote posts.

Here are a few examples of some of the buzz that the promotion generated:

-Black and Green Irish Men’s Basketball Report

-College Fast Break

-The Wolf Web – North Carolina State University Student Run website

-Rush the Court – Featured widget in sidebar

-College Hoops Journal

-Smitty’s Notes_ – Guide to Goings-on in Winston-Salem, NC

-Hawgs Illustrated.com _- Forum

-Lines From Linda

Samira Zebian, director of sponsorship marketing at Alltel, spoke about why Alltel decided to conduct a program with a social media component to it. “Gone are the days where sports fans engage with their favorite teams solely at an arena or in front of their televisions. The widespread use of broadband Internet and mobile technology has helped introduce a new way to experience sports like college basketball. Today fans are multi-tasking, watching highlights and monitoring scores of several games simultaneously while at the same time sharing their opinions by blogging, instant messaging and text messaging from their laptops or wireless phones. We created our My Circle Pick & Roll Challenge on FanU.com with those fans in mind.”

Reader Comments.

March Madness is a hot bed for potential marketing success. Millions of brackets are filled out and thousands of hours are spent watching games. It is such an exciting time that I don’t see how anyone wouldn’t be excited during March Madness.

Posted by Brett Galileo | 2:23 pm on March 12, 2008.

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