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Challenges In Implementation

My client will certainly have challenges in implementing his social media strategy. One of the most difficult components of the social media strategy, was adapting it to a business that is run by one individual. To make this successful, the majority of the work must be done upfront with content creation, making calendars, and having enough evergreen content available as it will not detract from day to day activates during busy times of the year. Overall I believe consistency may present another challenge as he is a sole proprietor. I also think DEI may be difficult in this geographic area due to the nature of his clientele. Many are older, and may not understand posting awareness about 'national coming out day' or a trans unity type of post. Balancing that inclusion may also be a difficult part of implementation.

Each plan is going to have challenges. Having an agile organization with a social media plan that allows you to pivot quickly will hopefully mitigate any major challenges that arise.

[jeffhulswit]

Week 7 Blog Post

Effective content can often mean different things when discussing many different platforms. One form of effective content for Facebook may not be the same for LinkedIn or TikTok. Careful consideration must be made when considering what platform to share on. For example in may be more appropriate to share a meme or funny video on Instagram, but not appropriate on a more professional platform like LinkedIn. Creating an inclusive and user friendly social organization will be key to its success. In my client project we had a discussion involving this as many of my clients demographics were elderly. It was important to make considerations on contact to make sure they could see by using contrasting colors. Another feature was making sure we had subtitles on all of our videos for those that may be hearing impaired. We also made sure the video content we are sharing has adequate descriptions. All of these examples together will help the inclusivity of our brand recognition. One great brand and content creator I admire is the Scratch Golf Academy. The creator shares content that is inclusive and well produced. His tutorials are well received from experts to novice golfers. It feel all inclusive.

Becoming recognized as a social organization you must implement the principals of effective content. When you have the reach that is possible through the web you do not alienate any potential customer. Using these principals will promote an atmosphere of inclusivity.

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Building The Community - Week 6

Chapter 4 and 5 touched on principle based themes of building your online community. At the cornerstone of a strategy that is going to build growth in your online community is providing value. Participants are going to ask, 'what's in it for me?'. If the participants general response is that they information may be favorable for them to share, and it benefits the organization - this is a great way to begin building a grass roots online community. Unlike opportunity statements, purpose statements should be considered to reflect on an actual business possibility. I found this perspective helpful when continuing to develop my client project, that ultimately is a business possibility for them to grow through increased social media presence. Assessing the value of these purpose statements is an important tool. Deciding, is our goal through a social media strategy magnetic enough to attract an audience? Does the community, if they do engage, align with the business goals of the company. What risk is there within the community? Perhaps a flaw is pointed out that gets overshared and abruptly disrupts your brand image. That can take a lot of cost to recover. The initiatives should be measurable and also facilitate product or service evolution through the conversation. Using the "No, Go, Grow" step tool in the text is a useful tool in determining a path forward for particular social media strategies. One source of community collaboration I use is Food Production Professional Of American. Through LinkedIn they have collaborative posts that have aided in problem solving at my work. It is a nice tool for problem solving, and marketing with peers as well. https://www.linkedin.com/groups/2403930/

After completing the Hootsuite modules some principals stood out that is going to aide in my final client memo. My client runs a service industry that has a growing aging population. Many of his clients are hearing or visually impaired. Keeping this in mind will be critical when making posts his audience will need to view, or hear. Engaging with his community through posts, but also physically asking for participation will need to happen. My client is also partnering with a local influencer who would be considered an industry expert for creating content. My client will also need to carefully consider how they are growing across channels. While a good portion of his audience resides on Facebook, many are also on LinkedIn. Those posts will need to be different in order to be affective. Overall my client has a much better roadmap to building an online presence than they had previously.

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Model of Surveillance

Reading the article in the Atlantic, 'Advertising - The Internets Original Sin', it was interesting to hear about the days when tech based businesses were struggling to find a sound business model. I remember using tripod.com as a hosting site, and the hey-day of pop up advertising. It certainly made the internet a less effective tool. But this advertising allowed hundreds of thousands of companies who could come up with a site that would attract attention, a guaranteed revenue stream.

Now, it is not only on the website to generate a following, but also convince their advertising investors that they will deliver the best ROI on their views. It was interesting to note that newspaper ad's generate a higher return, although much less volume, than web based advertising. For web based advertising to be effective you need a lot of data , and surveillance of users. It was interesting, as Ceglowski explained, that we've come to accept our skewed version of the internet as an aggregation of our surveilled tendencies. While a ad based web can be good as it is open to everyone, and often free - it does have its downfalls. 1. Surveillance 2. Clickbait - adverting not as genuine. 3. Centralization, echo chamber effect. 4. Freely giving our information at the expense of a more personalized experience. It is these reasons cited in the article they believe the model is broken.

In Ceglowski's talk he starts by drawing parallels between American car culture and the internet. When car's came out many families only had one. Then as the suburbs grew, and people migrated out of cities it became necessary to have. A very similar progression as the internet. Ceglowski also gives a story of negative aspect of surveillance when the mayor of Peoria, IL. They mayor used data to track and arrest someone that was making fun of him online.

Data surveillance has gotten out of hand. it sounds like self governance and VPN's are the best ways to navigate this issue.

[jeffhulswit]

Week 4 - Blog Post 2 - Junk News

We are just at the beginning of a time where we have some hindsight into the flaws of internet, although little has been done to mitigate this. Almost everyone has had an example in their life of a relative, or friend claiming something outrageous that they were certain was true. Almost always the question comes back to, 'Where did you read that'? Having a good understanding of how to navigate true information is an essential skill in today's technological age.

I believe algorithms are the biggest purveyor of promoting junk news in today's society. Many folks, especially elderly, have fallen victims to extreme disinformation campaigns. This is largely do the data being tracked by our activity. This can cause an avalanche affect that puts the user in an echo chamber of disinformation that can be difficult to escape. My mom, for example, highlighted an article to me about how a popular golfer was refusing to participate in PGA Tour events as of late. A deliberate campaign from a rival Saudi golf league that is competing against the PGA. It turned out, the season ended, and the entire league doesn't play much Thanksgiving through Christmas. I took the opportunity to have a talk with her about where she was getting he information.

Advertising can also lead users down an echo chamber that can become confusing. I heard recently that its easier and more profitable to sell fear rather than hope. If your anxious about something in the news, you would tend to stay with a media outlet and constantly refresh the feed. This is turn means big ad dollars from the content producers. I see a lot of guys at my work fall for this as they have one news outlet stories constantly playing on their computer ALL day.

Since 2016 I believe the exposure landscape has changed a lot. Many people 'unfriended', or unfollowed people that they disagreed with. This aligned people with similar belief and increased the problems associated with these echo chambers. I am guilty of deleting those people I disagree with as well.

I think the only remedy for these situations is self governing. Not deleting someone because you disagree with one thing they post. Being very careful what media you consume will also help.

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Week 4 - Blog 1 - Social Media Cons.

After completing the Hootsuite material it became apparent that a social media consultant must wear a ton of hats. I think in order to be a great social media consultant you have to have a very analytical mind. You have to be able to go and be able to learn a great deal about someone's industry in short time. You have to be able to set up relevant metrics and understand how the nuances of their business influence that. The ideal social media consultant to me is part business data analyst, part marketing guru, part sales professional, and part content creation. Having at least a decent proficiency at all of them would be essential to helping companies realize the value in their service.

After completing some of the business program at central, previous courses have addressed improving social media presence. I paid to have an updated head shot, and cleaned up my LinkedIn profile. It is my for my profile to be a hub for my customers to view featured products, case studies of solutions, and information about emerging market trends. The one area I need help in is posting consistency. One time a week would be sufficient to make a significant impact. Also continuing to connect with people I meet in the field will be imperative.

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Week 3 Blog - The Social Dilemma

Big data algorithms are extremely powerful tools as depicted in the documentary 'The Social Dilemma'. The use of these by tech giants allows through the use of massive data gathering, allows for the most extreme and targeted advertising ever. Prior to viewing the documentary I had a somewhat naïve attitude toward this practice. What was so wrong about being targeted for a specific product that I was going to tend to like anyway? I had not considered how deep those implications would run.

Some of the examples I found most interesting from the documentary was the anecdote that essentially what these companies were doing was tilting the floor in the direction where they wanted you to stay, within their app. The precise way they can make that happen, through 'lab rat' experiments where tiny rollout changes within the app to target exactly what works was mind blowing. The documentary stated at one point, these tech companies product is the inperceptual change of users behavior. Maybe this doesn't matter so much when the advertiser is a local restaurant, but we need to consider who is behind the messaging.

Another part of the documentary that was eye opening was the suicide and hospitalization rate, especially for young women. As a father of a young daughter, it certainly has me thinking how I can address this appropriately. The dopamine induced from posting a picture and getting likes, has many psychological implications at that age.

I think these problems should be dealt with at a personal level similar to Week 2 of this class. Mindfulness, changing your habits, changing your phone settings are all things we can do to alleviate the pull of endless scrolling. Professionally I think we need to be transparent with customers. Sometimes I post to linkdin of interactions I have at work. I always check with the customer prior to doing so. At a societal level, I think we need some type of regulation. I don't know what that would look like. I do believe in 100 years when they look back, one of the biggest societal mistakes will be giving people, especially teenagers, raw unfiltered internet without regard.

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Social Media Experiment - Blog Post 2

For my social media experiment, I have decided to eliminate all my social media intake for 1 day. I decided to restrict all the apps that have a negative impact on my daily productivity and my mental health. I am aware that at time, when I have feelings of anxiety, it is easy to open an app and check out instead of dealing with the source of the anxiety. The specific apps that I eliminated from my phone for 24 hours are, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and Instagram. I also silenced my notification for my messages and emails in which I checked at scheduled times at 10 am, noon, and 3 pm to stay on top of work-related activities.

My first test came early in the day. I usually get my daughter up for the day and put on some cartoons and I’ll flip through me phone and get caught up on news. Not having that was a big eye opener. My daughter noticed immediately that I was more present and asked to come sit with me while she watched her morning show and sipped her milk. It was a great moment in my day, that, without eliminating my phone may have never happened.

Throughout my workday I find myself often sitting at businesses waiting for people to meet with me. These waits can be from 10 to 45 minutes. When I arrived at my first stop for the day, I had to wait about 30 minutes for my contact to meet me. During this time, I would usually be looking at my phone, wasting time essentially. Instead of being buried in my phone, I interacted with two people who saw me sitting there waiting. From these two interactions I gained some valuable new contacts that discussed new opportunities at that facility. Usually if I was sitting there staring at my phone, this interaction would not have happened. Finally, when my workday was done, I put my phone away in the bedroom until 9 pm. My wife and I talked more, and I got a lot more done around the house without the distraction. It was remarkable to experience the effects of limiting technology use for one day. I am going to continue to implement these small restrictions for a month and see what the results yield. If my production increases at the rate it did over this one day experiment, I cant imagine what the results will yield after one month

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Week 2 - Blog Post 1. I started with Max Stossel's lecture on how specifically social media is engineered to influence our activity. One anecdote that was fascinating was it seems to be the only business where the goals of the people providing the product does not align with goals of the user. In manufacturing, for example, the business's sole purpose of existing is meeting the goals of its consumers. As Max mentioned, we do not wake up every day and say, how much time can I spend on a specific app? Yet, that is the developers goal, to get you to stay as long as possible, and drive ad revenue. I also enjoyed the short piece by Emma Rathbone detailing exactly what life was like prior to the internet. At 35 years old I feel like I was the last generation to truly experience that in childhood, and it was quite accurate.

It is no doubt social media has a profound affect on my daily life. The most positive social media app I use would be LinkdIn. I find it helpful as my network of peers often post helpful industry technology, articles, and various local business news. This tool continually provides me relevant information for my work. The social media apps that have the most negative affect on my life are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Reddit. I don't tend to post often, but rather use them to check out for a period of time. I feel at times it is a crutch for when I have anxiety about an issue. Its easier to hop on an app ,and devour 'digital marshmallows' than deal with problem at hand.

Having access to the internet is an absolute lifesaver for me. For the areas it hurts as mentioned above, it makes my job a lot easier. Being able to text, get maps, have whatever music I want, answer emails on demand, and access customer records is essential when driving up to 50,000 miles per year. I can't imagine performing my job without a smart phone. Having that on demand access, also means people expect answers now. This can get stressful.

Many times on the weekend when I play golf I leave my phone in the bag throughout the round. Roughly 4-5 hours. I always leave with a sense of relaxation from being able to unplug for a few hours and do something I enjoy. And majority of the time, I didn't miss anything important.

Going forward I'd like to implement two strategies to limit my social media time. Study with it out of the room, and eliminate using it from when I get home from work until 9 pm.

Thanks for reading!

jh

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Introduction - Jeff Hulswit

Hello all in BIS315. My name is Jeff Hulswit and I am excited to learn more about social media in business. I recently returned to school at 35 after learning about a tuition reimbursement program from my employer that would allow me to graduate with little to no debt. I had a couple career opportunities that I was passed up for, and received the feedback that not having the degree was a deciding factor. Having that information was the final piece that propelled me on this journey.

I am 35 years old and live in the metro Detroit area with my wife and 2 year old daughter Ellie. The last 7 years I have been in sales, servicing large commercial food and beverage manufactures - primarily in Ohio. Think Campbell's Soup, Kraft Heinz, Pillsbury etc... I really enjoy my job - and if your reading this and think you may be fit for a career in sales, please reach out. I am always interested in mentoring. I hope to use this blog as a hub for educating my customers in both social media techniques and market related technology that may solve problems. I'd like this blog to be considered a hub people can visit to solve issues.

I recently made a purchase based off social media presence. https://pitbarrelcooker.com/ is a type a smoker for cooking I recently purchased. Its online video tutorials within there website are awesome. Within there website I believe they use persistence very well. It is continually updated with participant anecdotes of successful recipes and cooks. They also have a a great facebook presence that drives the principals of participation and collective. If I have a certain question about a recipe, or cook - I can post there and within minutes have several high quality responses. It is quite remarkable! And the food is delicious.

Thanks for reading and look forward to interacting with you all.

Jeff