Scholarships are usually awarded to students or students who have successfully created a quality essay writing, or research reports. Scholarship requirements are also usually complicated, limited, and very academic. Now, the scholarship program has turned into one of the activities in social networking. Only capital nge-tweet, a student in California obtained a scholarship from the Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) Foundation.
KFC Foundation began this program last year. This year, the event is held again. The number of scholarship applicants amounted to 2800 from all over California and they only compete via Tweet. If last year the Foundation KFC just ask the applicants to post text, this year should be supplemented with pictures or photographs. The requested theme is also not difficult, just mention college of their dreams and explain the reason through the text, and complete with a picture of the college.
Rick Maynard, KFC Public Relations Manager, said, take pictures and add text and posting it on Twitter is no longer a difficult thing among students. It’s both a good marketing strategy for KFC because the participants are also required to re-tweet to post them to blogs, Facebook and other social networks. The selected winners will receive scholarship 5000 U.S. dollars per year until his graduation from the college of their dreams.
Sree Sreenivasan, a professor of digital media who teaches classes on the use of social media at Columbia Journalism School, said he was not surprised to see a competition like this. He even once encountered a scholarship program that the winner is determined the extent to which a student can kick the ball in the SEC Championship game championship. “Is that better or worse than Twitter?” he asked. Such scholarship competition is focused on marketing the product sponsors, no longer the quality of scholarship applicants who qualify.