For aasignmen four I wanted to find someone who I found to be interesting to me personally. Thinking this I went out and found someone who had a relation to me and my life in general. I reached out to the MArquette athletics social media guy Scott Kuykendall.
Scott Kuykendall has been a Senior Associate Athletic Director for Communications here at Marquette for over 15 years. Kuykendall oversees the publicity efforts for each of the athletic department's 16 NCAA Division I programs, while serving as the primary contact for the men's basketball, women's soccer and men's and women's tennis teams. Scott did a lot to earn his title here at MArquette from being a 1997 graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Platteville with a degree in broadcast technology management and a minor in journalism, Kuykendall also completed one-year internships in media relations at the University of Cincinnati (1997-98) and Mississippi State University (1998-99) to then earning his master's degree in leadership studies, with a specialization in sports leadership, from Marquette University in 2013.
Scott has many helpers along the way who help make his efforts reality. His everyday life is very interesting, he gets the say in what each team posts for their accounts, he goes around and visits his teams and sees how everyone is doing, he has been part of the redesign of the Marquette website and this is on a boring day. On an interesting day Scott is traveling the country with the men's basketball team to big easy games and NCAA march madness games as well. Scott values and loves his job very much. He finds being the athletic director of communications to be an amazing opportunity for him to help the teams promote their brand and events much more.
While talking to Scott he explained all the different things and ideas that go into a social media platform and post for each team. He started explaining things that we talked about in class like using pictures of particular people to boost the post and allow for more people to see it, to time and how often they are posting. He explained to me the best platform for Men's Basketball was Intsagram while for women's soccer it was Twitter. It depends on the team and the follower amount on all accounts.
I asked Scott if they have endured a crisis while he was working here and he obviously said he has. From Covid happening and having to take full advantage of social media to little things like game cancellations and postponed games. He said when the crisis happens we are prepared and ready to take on anything that is thrown at me and my team.
Scott also talked a little about the audience he is reaching. The main audience that they are reaching for most of the sports teams are the fans, whether that's parents, students, coaches or anyone else following the account like other teams. His overall goal is to engage the follower. He says he knows most of them are students and promoting student affiliated things has been most successful. Whether that's telling the fans there will be free shoka shirts or a free Shake Shack gift card to a lucky student for making a half court shot.
Overall Scott has been a great person to get to know and he has shown me a lot about what it's like to have his job and i've been extremely interested and compelled to learn more thanks to him.
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