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Implementation Challenges

Client implementation can be tricky. With the many variables that come with marketing restructure, we have to be careful that we do not over promise anything to our client that can displease them. Yes, I know we are doing our best to give them the best service, but we have to make sure we are putting our client first.

One of the challenges I see arising would be communications break down. Aggressive deadlines will make the client happy at the moment that you present them, but if you have over-promised and you can’t deliver, that happiness shifts to disappointment really quickly. If we are not realistic about how long task can take, we can set ourselves up for failure.

Another problem I see arising would be funding. Whether that be technological or human resources, a client can be wary about spending money and taking a chance on whether our marketing plan can work or not. It can be particularly difficult to generate enough start-up funds to sustain the program as it begins. Having a network of stakeholders and partners in the community may be beneficial for providing resources and support for a program.

Lastly, our client is taking a big risk to try to get more followers and clients so making sure we have a clear plan and clear goals would be their worries at ease. My client wanted to have a clear plan written down on paper. They wanted to see goals in a span of 3, 6, and 12 months. Of course, putting realistic goals was key. Here is a video I found on client implementation.

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Effective Content Development

Content marketing strategy can also be referred to as a content marketing plan. It's a businesses strategic approach to creating, managing and distributing all content assets, including reporting and documenting success metrics. A content strategy typically involves a content calendar that will help you execute your content plan, broken down into deliverables on a yearly or quarterly basis. 

Understanding effective content development is essential to any business. You can’t just create a blog post, publish it, and expect it to drive results in your company. You need to distribute that content to the right people at the right time to have the most impact on your target audience. Excellent content marketing has to provide value for your audience, and if it doesn't, it won't be very effective. Well-crafted content can place our company in the position of a thought leader, where you can inform and educate potential buyers. Providing valuable content can form a strong bond between our brand and customers that grows and strengthens over time. Take this blog post, they're an excellent way to inform, educate, and build your audience. 

Brand consistency is critical in content marketing. We have to make sure our content is published regularly so that your audience knows when to come back. With a content calendar, we can better picture what content you will publish and when. A calendar also ensures that more strategic about the content. We publish our content and make sure that our response is just as quick with our audience.

Becoming a social organization is important for content strategy and effectively sharing that content with a particular audience. As more customers increasingly interact with each other in the social sphere, often the topic of those conversations is the companies they do business with, the experiences they have with those organizations, and the pros and cons of using their products and services. Whether their comments are positive or negative, companies have no choice but to interact with their customers online, or risk appearing indifferent. So, transforming from a company that simply responds to the occasional tweet from an irate customer or posts the occasional coupon on Facebook to a truly social organization requires a multi-pronged approach that will ingrain social elements within the company's overall business strategy. Which in my case worked with a plastic surgery center that I was working with.

Check out this video on importance of brand strategy.

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Effective Principles of Online Building

Social Media can be an asset to any business when used correctly. Building a community around a brand or business can be tricky especially when other professionals are doing the same. Of course though, Social media users today can be fickle and lost interest in a heartbeat. A true community appreciates knowledge and offerings that no one else can offer. And if they can't find an offering that is different, that business needs to take it a notch up by adding incentives to use their product or do business with. Building an online community is founded on the basis that relationships are what sustain it. Meaning, there needs to be a continuous effort to build and feed relationships between numbers and organizations.

When we allow a community that follows our brand, we allow them to be members of our organization. Customers want to be heard and need a voice of direction. Building trust is crucial. The most powerful way of engaging your community is to invite its members to address and answer their questions by working towards and finding their own answers and courses of action. 

Which brings us to deploy different forms of engagement. Their are many platforms in regards to social media. So content needs to be both entertaining and educational for your target audience. This can be in terms of a collaboration with an influencer, company, or providing videos of what you can offer. Sometimes doing videos and getting personal, helps with brand awareness.

After completing Module 4, I learned that growing an online community is not straight forward. It can be time consuming, but the reward is greater. My client is in the beauty industry and its an industry that is compacting in terms of offerings. I've also learned through one of their nurses that getting to know their patients has been key. Making them feel welcomed and understanding their needs, is essential for community building. It makes patients feel welcomed and not just another number in their books.

Check out this video on how social media is influencing people.

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The Legal Side of Big Data

What is big data? Big data is a combination of structured and unstructured data collected by businesses to that can be mined for information to use in advance analytical applications. Although big data is important and useful, it does comes with some negatives and one of the big negatives is computer hacking. Sustaining the growth and performance of business while simultaneously protecting sensitive information has become increasingly difficult thanks to the continual rise of cybersecurity threats. Therefore, it’s clear that preventing data breaches is one of the biggest challenges of big data. It is on the company to prevent these hacks and protect their customers while they are at it. If sensitive information gets into the wrong hands, that can be disastrous.

The internet is evolving and what that means is understanding that anything we put on the internet can be found and saved. Anything we put out there can be found, saved, used, and potentially be used against us in the long run. As consumers, we need to take this into consideration when we put anything on the internet. Privacy is an issue when it comes to big data. When dealing with big data, the industry needs to respect and protect privacy by design.

We then comes to our next questions, "What is the best way to balance the opportunities and threats presented by the development of big data?" As mentioned before, big data can serve a purpose, but also pose a threat. Reason for that is lack of proper understanding of massive data. Companies fail in their Big Data initiatives, all thanks to insufficient understanding. Employees might not know what data is, its storage, processing, importance, and sources. Data professionals may know what's happening, but others might not have a transparent picture. So you then address the challenge by taking classes, taking workshops, learning about big data and ways to make it useful. Another issue that can be worked on is storing huge amounts of data in a system application. As data grows, it gets challenging to store and save these amounts of data. Companies choose modern techniques to handle these large data sets, like compression, tiering, and deduplication. Compression is employed to reduce the number of bits within the data, thus reducing its overall size. The two main internet models: advertising and investor story time. Both methods involve large amount of surveillance on people as they use this data for big data.

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Reasons Junk News Spread so Quickly

After reading the article "Three reasons junk news spreads so quickly" I came to understand that the internet is a powerful tool. With the rise of misinformation on the news as some would like to say and the narratives that play in spreading misinformation, we understand now how important it is to research topics with clarity and understanding. Reason number 1 as to why we get junk news is Algorithms. Internet algorithms determine what news and how news is delivered to us. The problem with that is it selects and suggest information that fits our search history. Meaning, if we agree on a topic, that topic and other sources will be filtered for just us. Even if that topic we are reading is misinformation. Algorithms filter news and can have consequences on how we understand topics with a one track mindset. Second, advertising plays a role into how we get our news. Social media platforms sell our information and data to companies to enable them to filter out ads that we can only see. Meaning, we get a ton of "clickbait" links that sometimes hold no credible sources. Lastly, exposure to what news we want to be exposed too. As we all know, we can filter our internet and social media platforms to fit us. Meaning, we can only see things that we believe in and what ideologies we believe in. Therefore, we get exposed to news or ads or companies that we believe in. Leading us back to our one track mindset of not getting the full story on why we believe in certain things in the first place. Understanding these reasons will better prepare us to keep an open mind to things we see on the internet.

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Social Media Consultant

When it comes to marketing, we have many different avenues to choose from. Social Media plays a big part on marketing and has an enormous influence on our culture today. Companies though still have a hard time understanding social media and the algorithms associated with it. They then turn to hiring a social media consultant. The qualities that I see a social media consultant having would be project management, sales, public speaking, content creation, advanced analytics, and most important algorithms. If I was a social media consultant myself, I would learn the algorithms, the times to post my content and importantly, I would understand the content and music being watched during the time I post my content on social media. Meaning, I have to understand what my crowd is watching, what is working, what they are listening to and so on. I would also have clear and measurable goals. Not get to ahead of myself and understand what goals I can attain and where I want to take my social media presence. What I do now that works, is understanding the different platforms that I post my content. We have to know the platforms that we use and how different they can be. Take Tik-Tok and Instagram. One platform is only videos and the other is pictures and videos. So knowing that can help us plan our content moving forward. Moving forward, with different platforms coming out (threads) it is important we understand these tools at hand to be successful at our marketing.

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Algorithms of Social Media

Who doesn't use Social Media? I mean, as I am writing this, I am using social media. After watching "The Social Dilemma" I came to a conclusion that there are pros and cons to using social media, considering that those applications use algorithms. For those that don't know, algorithms are aimed at optimizing everything that we do on our phone. But how much is too much control on the population? We are sometimes at the hands of big corporations and governments that can perpetuate bias and create these filter bubbles for the ordinary user. Algorithmic categorizations deepens the divide that we sometimes face. Dealing with these problems on a personal, professional, and societal levels can be challenging. Having someone be responsible to deal with adverse individual or societal effects of AI would be a start. Understanding when algorithmic makes mistakes is essential as well as we can make our own opinions about certain topics and discuss issues on any level with accuracy about certain information. Dealing with algorithms does not have to be hard. We can use algorithms though to solve everyday problems. Second, help the algorithm. Or game it. Change your settings to allow some randomized recommendations. Deliberately follow people with contrarian views. Proactively explore your chosen social media platforms rather than just passively consuming the content meted out; such exploration will be picked up by the algorithm and reflected in future recommendations. The influence of algorithms is double-edged and although have toxic effects, it also has substantial benefits. Check out this documentary below:

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24 Hour ban from Technology

6:30am, I woke up, had my cup of coffee, and proceeded to hit the gym bright and early. First, I am never at the gym this early, but I decided to switch my day up considering I was trying something new (not technology).

8:00am, I get home, shower, and change, eat breakfast, and do some light book reading. A book that I haven’t finished in like 3 months.

9:30am, after I settled in, I took my dogs for a walk at the dog beach. I decided to take the day off work as I knew that going into work, I had to use technology, so I wanted to make sure that I was doing this experiment correctly with no distractions.

11:45 after spending an hour at the dog beach and playing with my dogs, I decided to have lunch with a friend. I called him and told him to meet me at 12:30 at a place in Huntington Beach, California so that we can catch up and grab some lunch. Told him about my experiment about not using my phone and social media and he agreed to do the same during our lunch hour.

1:45 Around this time, we finished lunch, had a great conversation about life, business goals, family and it was great that both of us were not totally distracted by our phones during that time. We were able to really get into our conversation.

2:30, I decided to take my dogs home, since they had lunch with us, and hit up a local batting cage and take a few swings on some softballs.

4:00, I drove to the grocery store as I wanted to make dinner. I specially made a Peruvian dish that I have been wanting to try for years. It was called Lomo Saltado. I am not Peruvian, but I love their food.

5:30 I start making dinner for my wife and me. As I was cooking, I remembered I had an old radio that I had kept stored that I decided would not interfere with my technology as it only used antenna and had like 4 basic radio stations.

7:30 we eat dinner, I talk to my wife about my day, what I liked about not using my phone and the pros and cons of this experiment.

9:00 we finish dinner, we clean, and get ready for bed. I shower and relax and call it a night.

To be honest, the whole experience was an eye opener for me. I understood that my life can live without the use of technology. I was able to get out in the open and experience the world without my face being on my phone all day. The cons, unfortunately, is that I go to school online and my job is a tech business working with websites, so having to stray away from technology in total would not be possible at all for me. I will continue to monitor my time spent away from my phone in the mornings and right before bed as I think those benefits will outweigh the negatives. Not to say that I cannot be focused with technology, but my focus was strictly on the task at hand, and it made me aware of how distracted we can be using our phone. I would recommend everyone trying it out for at least a day. #nosocialmedia #nointernet #onlyphonecalls

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Impacts of Social Media

After reading the article, "Before the Internet" and watching Max Stossels Talk, “We’ve Been Sneaking into Your Brain” I realize how much social media or technology has impacted our daily lives. “Before the Internet” article was a blast from the past. That is not to say that I am extremely old or extremely young, but I do remember a time when the only form of communication was a pager and I had to run over to a payphone and call whoever was trying to reach me. I remember those days where the only worry was what type of “POG” was I going to use or where I was going to ride my bike. BTW look up “POGS and Slammers”. Social Media influence in my life has consumed about half my day. I am a photographer on the side and a lot of my marketing goes into marketing my photos that I take of unique landmarks in Los Angeles. With that being said, I am constantly checking for notifications, emails, comments, likes and much more. Social Media to me is more than just social media and checking up on the latest, it’s a business for me that has helped me grow my portfolio. When Max Stossel was explaining the impacts on how certain apps have algorithms to grab our focus, I immediately started thinking of all the times I have lost focus because I got caught up on my phone. Then I tried to remember what I was thinking about, and I couldn’t for the life of me remember what task I was doing. When you think about how our brains are wired and the more, we fall down this technology rabbit hole, the more our brains are getting used to these apps and the more addicting it can be, just like the “slot machine” story in the video. One I think about the affects of social media in my life, I weight the pros and cons of everything. I do not believe that I will ever live my life without social media, but I do believe that taking steps back would help not only with focus, but with clarity and sleep. The “red” notifications that pop up on our phone gives me anxiety, but then I must ask myself why? Why does it bug me that much? You concluded missing out on something important, at least that’s how I feel about it. There were times when I had no internet and I think it was when I went camping with my family in the Bay area of California. It was a 4-day trip without any access to phone or internet. Might have been the best time of life to disconnect and enjoy the moment with my family. I remember everything vividly.  I came back refreshed; I was able to sleep a full eight hours and I had no worries about what I was missing in the tech world. We have an assignment coming up and I am going to experiment a 24-hour day without the use of the internet or phone (minus important calls) to see how that would improve my lifestyle in terms of reducing my use of technology. I will then proceed to continue to not use my phone or any tech for the first hour I wake up and the last hour I go to sleep. My next blog will document everything. Stay Tuned! #socialmedia #Beforetheinternet #We'vebeensneakingintoyourbrain #technology

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Introductory Post

My name is Edward De Leon. This is my last semester at CMU, so I am excited for what the future holds. I currently reside in Southern California. I am engaged, I have two dogs, own a house and looking forward to finishing up my degree. After I graduate, I plan on getting into the Commercial Appraisal business. Using my photography skills, especially aerial photography, I hope to expand on the Commercial Appraisal business. I hope that this blog can bring awareness to tech, photography, social media applications and more. When it comes to social media, I believe that it is important now. Technology is changing daily and using social media is a great tool not only for business purposes, but personal use. One company who uses social media well is Chipotle. They interact with their customers on every post and can generate unique ideas to keep the audience engaged. Whether it be a funny post or customer interaction, they set the bar on how to use social media well. The mass collaboration is key for Chipotle. They use a combination of Community, Social Media, Purpose and Mass collaboration with their audience. They pursuit a common purpose and that is to bring fresh ideas to their Social Media post.