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Digital Media Professional Q/A

I was able to have the wonderful experience of speaking with RaShonda Rosier Riddle, MBA about her work experience as a digital media professional. 

She currently works as the Marketing Lead for a nonprofit called National Association for Home Care & Hospice. She has experience in strengthening brand awareness and engagement and has proven success in developing cross-platform plans. 

She was very knowledgeable and able to answer all of my questions. I asked her what she finds to be the most challenging when working with digital media. To this she responded “Engagement. Depending on the subject oftentimes, I have trouble connecting with our audience whether it's via email, social media, or using video content. In my current role, our members (mostly older and not very diverse) are most active on LinkedIn so it's hard to be as creative in the content I produce. I have to be careful not to cross the line and post anything that could be deemed unprofessional.” I also asked her what her favorite thing about working with digital media is, to which she responded “My favorite part of digital media is that it is fluid. If there's something important I need to get out to our members or followers, it takes a few minutes to produce the content and create a compelling image, versus having to rely on print media, which often would take weeks and would involve several people.” When I asked her what platform she prefers to work with the most she shared with me “Social media is my favorite source of digital media. I manage professional accounts using Hootsuite. The Hootsuite dashboard allows me to easily send out messages on several channels at once or schedule them out a week or even a month from now. I love the calendar feature because you can move messages around so your followers are seeing a variety of messages throughout the day. Also being able to monitor replies and direct messages all in one place is extremely helpful.” Another thing I asked her was to share a successful campaign of hers with me and what made It successful. She told me “Most of the campaigns I work on are surrounding membership recruitment, promotion of events and conferences, and advocacy. Last spring when COVID hit, we had to pivot and change our July conference from in-person to digital. This required me to update all of the content on our website and microsite, rewrite emails and social media posts, and work with our graphic designer on updating the branding. I had to come up with compelling messaging and visuals to help our members understand they would receive the same content as they would have at the in-person event. In a normal year, we have 400-500 attendees at this particular event, we ended up having over 700 registrants, which meant record-breaking attendance for us.” The last question I asked her to share with me was any advice she would give to someone starting out working with digital media. She advised “It's essential to be a mix of creative and analytical. When talking to management and other stakeholders, it may require you to be able to present analytics like KPIs (key performance indicators) to help them discover how email click-throughs turn into conversions, how increasing awareness of your brand on social media drives more people to your website, and once they're on your website knowing what actions they take. Saying you did something because you liked it or thought it looked good won't fly, you need to be able to provide specific, concrete data. Realize that mistakes will happen, but unlike print media, you can usually edit a post or can take immediate action to address an issue. Through analyzing your data, you can also quickly see if a particular campaign is working, or not, and reassess if needed.” 

I learned a lot from speaking with her and it was an amazing experience. if you want to know more about her and her amazing work here is her LinkedIn profile:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/rashondariddle/ 

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Seoul Secret’s controversial ad

In 2016 Thai beauty company Seoul Secret launched an ad for a king whitening cream that caused a lot of backlash. The ad featured a pale skinned Asian woman who's skin became very dark and she was unhappy. She then used the cream and became pale again and promoted their tagline “Just being white, you will win”. Social media bashed the company calling them racist. In response to the ad, many offended and outraged people tagged the company in their tweets and Facebook posts expressing their opinions on the ad. This strategy was effective as the company removed their ad from all platforms. In response to the backlash the company issued a “heartfelt apology” on their Facebook page expressing their remorse for the ad while also accepting responsibility for the incident. This strategy was not extremely effective as the damage was already done, however, taking responsibility and apologizing was a step in the right direction. More careful planning and approval should have been implemented before the ad was ever released.

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Twitter Article

I read an article about Twitter the online microblogging platform. it can be accessed using a computer or a smartphone. Twitter incorporates social networking aspects with instant messaging technologies to create brief communication outlets called “tweets”. users can also track certain topics which I have done on my personal Twitter account to follow things such as current news. This has been extremely helpful to follow things such as the Black Lives Matter movement and other pressing topics in society. 

Tweets can only be 140 characters or less which I have found to be both helpful and frustrating. it is helpful because it keeps information concise and to the point. I prefer to read smaller amounts of words than full on paragraphs. However, this is frustrating when I am very passionate about what I am talking about and cannot fit it into one tweet. this is also frustrating when I am trying to follow a story and have to unravel the entire thread and weave between others comments as well. 

Instead of banner type advertisements, Twitter uses “Promoted Tweets” which I find interesting and look like normal Twitter feed. I like this method of advertisements as I feel it does not interrupt my use of the app. it is very easy to keep scrolling past the ads that do not interest me. I also like how you can watch the ad if it has a video without being taken to an entirely different site. 

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This article was mainly about the history of Facebook and how it came to be. It also talked about what it is now and how successful it has become.

the first section talks about how Facebook works. I already knew most of this information as if works very similarly to other social media platforms. They are free and earn their money from adds, users can post, like, comment, and share, and send private messages. However, I did not know that Mark Zuckerberg heavily insisted that users used their real identities and heavily forbids fake accounts. His reasoning for this being that transparency helps to build relationships really stood out to me and I agree. 

I also found out that it was originally called Facemash and was used to rate the attractiveness of the students at the college they went to. I think it is ironic how it changed from that but people still use social media as a way to receive validation from other people. a “like” or “dislike” can impact a person way more than I think it should. 

Facebook is still leading in the social media industry after all this time and continues to grow as a company. It surprised me that they have been able to maintain this position when so many new social media platforms exist. Some platforms such as myspace and vine have gone extinct and others like Tik Tok have blown up. I am curious to see over the next decade if any other platforms will give Facebook some competition.  

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CM 270

    What interests me me the most about social media is how it can be just as equally harmful as it is helpful. The media can be very informative and spread awareness about topics very quickly. But it also can be a place where hate and negativity are spread quickly also. Things like body shaming and hate comments have emerged with the growth of social media. However, times like during the peak of the Black Lives Matter movement, many people turned to media platforms like Twitter to get current and honest information about what was actually happening at protests that the news was not covering. 

     My objectives for this class are to learn as much as I can about how the media operates. I plan on working in Public Relations upon graduation, so having an in depth understanding of social media will benefit me when developing social media campaigns, assessing engagement, knowing how to reach a bigger audience, etc.