Reflecting on BCOM 350

 

Having the ability to generate ideas for marketing a non-profit, small business, university department, or any organization is one of the most important skills you can develop in the social media age! Having the tools at your fingertips to turn those ideas into reality and the eye and know-how to appeal to a variety of stakeholders are skills that you can take with you regardless of what path your career takes.

My Experience

The experience of creating social media content for the CEVGV gave me an opportunity to flex my creative muscles. While creating content like this is a huge portion of my current job, it is enriching to be challenged. This experience has improved my employability by demonstrating to me that I am flexible, creative, and able to take my knowledge and eye for design into any arena and create quality content. It has shown me a number of platforms I was previously unfamiliar with, that I can utilize to save time, and money. Boodlebox would be an amazing asset in my new position, as well as Hootsuite.

Collaboration

Several of the classes in my undergrad have included projects that require working with a remote team. The experiences have been hit or miss. I am almost always designated the leader despite being an introvert. My personality does not allow me to be the passive member of the team who just does enough to get by. As a result, I often end up doing a disproportionately large portion of the work.

That was the case for this class, and it’s taught me a few things. First, there must be a point where I finally decide to put my trust in people, even if they are complete strangers and younger than my own children. I’m by no means a control freak, but when it comes to my grades, I am very particular about what is representing me. Sometimes, in a team, there will be things that I won’t like but in the interest of the entire team, I am learning to work with what I have and do the best I can with what I’ve been given.

Next, I learned that setting clear guidelines and internal due dates, but being flexible when needed, helps the whole team perform better. There’s no need to put pressure on myself or others with the (sometimes) arbitrary due dates we’ve set for ourselves, when we are all in this together and can adjust to changes as they come. Being flexible but disciplined goes a long way to having a successful collaboration.

I also learned that utilizing platforms like Trello can make asynchronous collaboration a breeze. Using that in addition to sharing a Google Drive can keep everyone on the same page in real time. Had our work not been so segmented, we could have taken better advantage of the application. But I could see the Board of Directors getting a lot out of such a service. If I had more time, I would have dived into its complexities even more.

Finally, I learned how important it is to have instructions laid out systematically. Leaving room for interpretation causes confusion, frustration, and disappointment. When all members of the team go into a meeting having already done their due diligence to see what the next steps will be, and already know what questions to ask, it helps make the meetings run seamlessly, take less time, and make completing your responsibilities much more cut and dried. All of these lessons will be taken with me into grad school and my career.

Engagement with the Community

We were not given an opportunity to discover if our posts would advance the mission of the CEVGV or help them to engage with the community. However, the research we did was incorporated into our posts. We aimed them at various stakeholders, and we created items that could be interacted with and/or shared with others. I would like to think that they would increase engagement on the CEVGV’s Facebook page.

Are We Relevant?

One way that we ensured our posts would be accurate, relevant, and engaging was through research and expert advice. There is no shortage of industry experts explaining how to get more clicks, likes, and views on your content. Listening to what they have to say and following the advice helps keep you from making costly errors. Hubspot Academy was fantastic for this! Their advice is based on cold, hard data, and they guide you in being empowered to make similar decisions for yourself.

I used Boodlebox to help me create ideas for content, which led me to create a poll. I noticed that the CEVGV shares a lot of posts from other pages and has very little engagement. I wanted to create a post that would give them a reason to interact. Everyone loves giving their opinion. The open-ended question gives followers a chance to think critically about the answer to the question and then interact with each other in the comments.

The video I created was a nice change of pace for two reasons. One, it’s not static. When your followers are only used to seeing flyers, infographics, and post shares, it can be very easy to get overlooked. Creating a video that was aesthetically pleasing catches the eye and makes you want to share it, so that others can hear the positive message as well. This appeals to the survivors of gender-based violence. The second reason the video was a change of pace was because of it’s positive tone. Domestic violence is a very heavy subject. When you do a search of the term, pictures of sad, bruised women come to the surface. Yes, that is the reality, and we should acknowledge that. But survivors need to be uplifted and encouraged as well and that’s what I tried to do with that post.

Statista

With more time, Statista could have been extremely helpful. However, in an 8-week class, it was difficult to dig too far into it. The use of Statista felt like it was being shoehorned into the project. We used it to find a stat for one of our posts, but I would have loved to use it for a more explicit marketing purpose.

This depicts the reported crime rate from 1990 to 2023.