Why Is Jennifer Johnson Back To The City Of Brookings

1. Today’s guest speaker was Jennifer Johnson. She is the executive director of the Brookings Convention and Visitor Bureau. She has been at this job for over six years. Before she came to Brookings she worked for an advertising company in Minneapolis. Her job is to schedule events like sports competitions, concerts, or other events to get people to come to Brookings. The most important part of her job is to market the city of Brookings. Her main audiences she focuses on our visitors and residents with visitors being the forefront. She must adjust her events based on the tier 3 status of Brookings which is based on how many hotels there are. All the events she must schedule or wants to schedule she must use the twenty event center locations

Jennifer’s presentation was informative, and the whole presentation was around tourism. Since her job is promoting Brookings and bringing events to the city than her focus is tourism. With her job revolving around tourism it works well with this course and what we have discussed in class so far. The part of her job is the most important is marketing which deals a lot with technology. Since the job uses a lot of technology her job would be very difficult if it wasn’t for the advancements that have been made in technology. As we discussed in class after World War II the advancements made in technology have been leaps and bounds from where they were before World War II. Before World War II there was hardly any technology at all, but after World War II there has been the creation of cell phones and social media. With those creations it makes Jennifer’s job so much easier, because the information gets to people quicker, and easier since all she needs to do is put on thing on Facebook or Twitter, and it gets seen by thousands to millions of people. After that besides marketing her job focuses on tourism. She looks at tourism to see how well the city is doing at attracting new people to come visit. The tourism part of her job incorporates well with what we have discussed about in commercial recreation. Commercial recreation looks at how many people are coming to a certain event or place, and how that is impacting that community. When she looks at the return on investment or the 9.6 million dollars generated last year for the city than she is looking at the tourism part of her job. The 9.6 million dollars generated last year shows that there is plenty of tourism taking place in the city. In conclusion the focus of this course is commercial recreation and tourism just like Jennifer’s job