As the development process went on, it was apparent that we needed to organise our many members into different roles so we could all work together to build our seminar. I adopted a leadership role in the early stages, and expressed interest in sourcing talent for our seminar. In these early stages we had to have a promotional video and posters ready to go, as well as a press release of our lineup of special guests a week prior to the actual event. We worked well as a group to realise that we all had different talents and networks, and we used this to our advantage. I had previous involvement with Uber, so I sent a few emails to try and secure a representative from their marketing and social media department to come and speak at our seminar. I drafted an email template that I shared with our seminar group, in order to make it easier for people to contact potential guests.
The email template reads as below:
Hi there,
I am a graduating student from RMIT University, finishing a Bachelor of Communications (Media) at the end of this year. We are currently in the planning stages of hosting a seminar designed to showcase some potential career pathways for students once they graduate. The seminar will be an informal discussion with some directed questions to a panel of industry representatives who we are inviting to come and share their knowledge with us. We would love a representative from (insert company name) to come and share with us some insight into what working in your specific industry and comment on some social media trends and how to effective market and promote yourself within a constantly changing social media landscape.
We would love to hear back from you at the latest by Wednesday 12th of August, if you would be interested in participating in our event. This is an opportunity for you to promote and explain the inner workings of your company to like-minded students who are interested in entering the industry within the next 6 months. You will be a special guest of RMIT University and we will promote your involvement around campus and via our social media outlets as well.
Look forward to hearing from you soon!
After sending several emails, we made sure to keep in close contact with the group every step of the way, so as not to over-book ourselves. We managed to secure one definite guest in Homeless of Melbourne, an organisation trying to raise awareness of the issue of homelessness through social media. As the booking process of our guests progressed, we also had our technical and creative team developing posters and conceptualising our promotional video content for the seminar. We were also having talks about the overall look and feel of our seminar, with props, couches and visual aids to consider. I introduced the idea of having a live twitter feed, where audience members could engage with the seminar as it was happening, and have their questions and comments displayed live on the big screen in real time. It was clear to us at this point that we would be interviewing each guest separately, as they would be all very different, and we would be requiring someone from our group to act as the host and run the seminar on the day.