Chicago Office of Tourism & Culture | Social Media Strategy
Timeline: February 27 – March 2, 2012
Team Members: Gierad Laput, Sara Steinhurst, Xiaohan Yu
Methods: Social Media Strategy, Content Development, Field Research, Marketing, Writing, Editing
Project Scope & Role
The COTC Foursquare Team: Gierad, Erin, Sara, and Xiaohan
For this week-long internship, I worked with the Chicago Office of Tourism and Culture (COTC) developing content for Foursquare and Instagram. COTC runs ExploreChicago.org and has a vast social media presence under the same name. The Explore Chicago suite of resources is geared towards tourists and residents alike, and seeks to be more inviting and locally-minded than your average tourism or city website. Our project involved gathering data and creating content for four different Chicago neighborhoods. Our aim was to bolster community engagement and to promote businesses that may not otherwise have the chance. This project involved not only research and content creation, but also gave me first-hand knowledge of how a major tourism office uses multiple social media platforms in conjunction with one another in order to create a unified user experience.
Field Work & Content Development
Each day of our project, in pairs, we visited a different Chicago neighborhood: Andersonville and Lincoln Park to the north of downtown, West Loop to the west, and Hyde Park to the south. With guidance from our mentor on the general area in which to focus, we set out to explore each neighborhood in as much depth as possible. Our primary method of gathering information was to speak with local business owners and staff. We stopped in to as many restaurants, shops, and museums as time allowed, and spoke with the people at each one about what made their business special and what types of information may get more people through their doors. We focused on getting our interviewees to speak candidly about their own unique story, and took notes and photos while we were there.
Throughout the day, we posted our photos to Instagram with pointers to the location of the business. At the end of the day, we went through our notes and wrote 190-character tips about each business, to be posted to Foursquare and promoted on Twitter by our project mentor. The purpose of these tips was to draw customers in and to give tourists and residents interesting information about the businesses that they would not otherwise know. At the end of the week, we met with COTC staff not only to debrief our project, but also to brainstorm about future strategies COTC can develop for enhancing both their website and their social media presence.
Impact & Client Feedback
Explore Chicago Shares our First Foursquare List with Twitter
The content we developed will reach Explore Chicago’s 70,000+ Foursquare followers, 20,000+ Twitter followers, and 1,000+ Instagram followers.
Because new businesses are always opening in the Chicago area, it is vital to make sure that the information on Chicago’s primary tourism site is kept up-to-date. Our work allowed new businesses to gain promotion that they may not otherwise have access to, as well as provide users with new information about established businesses.
The field work we did was outside of the normal capabilities and resources of COTC; our project mentor and the staff of COTC expressed gratitude that we were able to do important work that may not otherwise get done. Because social media platforms demand new content on a regular basis, our work helped COTC stay fresh and relevant, and ensure that their users have the most recent, accurate, and interesting information possible.
