On Friday, March 31st, Misha Collins did a presentation at Western Washington University on the subject of social media marketing. You may recognize Misha from his famous role in the CW’s "Supernatural," which he so modestly kept out of his presentation as much as possible. The Student Marketing Association (SMA for short, which I have been a member of for three years) put on this whole event, and I have to congratulate each and every person who helped out, because, in my opinion, this event was a huge success. The turnout was amazing, we had to fill up an entirely different lecture hall with overflow viewers because the first lecture hall filled up so fast.

Now, you must be wondering, “But Courtney, I thought you didn’t like Misha Collin’s lecture?!”

I’m getting to that part.

At first, yes, I was very unimpressed with Mr. Collins' presentation. I came to learn about the Do’s and Don’ts of creating your own social media brand, as per advertised by SMA. Not gawk at some TV personality or watch him do prop jokes, like a certain stand-up comedian with red hair. Collins started off by talking about his new beta technology for Twitter called “Chirp,” which involved a fax machine, rotary phone, wooden stake, and a delivery messenger planted in the audience.

Collins then moved on to mentioning his “robust following” on Twitter and how he will only be speaking about himself and not drawing from any professional examples or data. This immediately turned me off to this entire presentation and his credibility.

It wasn’t until about 10 minutes after the lecture whilst walking home that I was thinking about writing this article and then it clicked. Misha Collins did actually know what he was talking about, he just fashioned it in such a way that I almost didn’t notice the brilliance behind it. Much like most marketing campaigns, they never outright ask the consumer to engage for personal gain; they attempt to engage the consumer first and almost trick you into what we as consumers will naturally do… CONSUME.

Through this entire presentation, Collins touched base on many different subjects within social media platforms. His love of click-bait and promise to always switch up the conversation inspired me to make a negative article title. Which brings me to “negativity bias,” another topic Collins touched base on. Humans are always subconsciously scanning over the positive and focusing in on the negatives.

Overall, I gained a lot more marketing knowledge then I originally thought. Misha Collins presented in such a fantastic way, I hope my article contains half the marketing strategies that he presented, and that you all had the chance to view the live Facebook feed while it was still available (which gained more than 100,000 viewers!).

You can find the lecture on YouTube here: