Bianca's Blog

Hi, my name is Bianca and I'm a student at Central Michigan University. I hope you enjoy the content that I create in this blog!

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Personal Reflecting and Implementing Guidance

From this class, I have learned how to create a strong social media presence to conduct myself in a professional manner for the greater good of a company. Finding ways to influence my organization is going to have a great effect on others and it will bring value to the organization. Some challenges my client may face when implementing my recommendations would be my emphasis to really focus on building a focus less on technology as more people depend on it and more on achieving a purpose through collective behaviors. This is important because behind technology, there needs to be a collective and empowerment as we are collectively working to meet the needs of people, and this can only be done with human connection on an emotional level. A client can have the latest and fastest technology to help with analyzing social media efficiency, but if theres no strong sentiment or incentive to relate to the people that you are trying to target, then there is no point since the main incentive goes beyond being a technical expertise. 

Another challenge In see is that its going to be hard to take the strategy into effect, as I feel that it takes a lot of dedication and time to see results. Building a social media profile when not well known is hard from the ground up and if its a smaller company in particular, its gonna be hard to find time as there are fewer people with more positions held in the organization. 

From both this course and the client project, I have learned that the most important skill set to have for implementing a strong social media strategy is being personal. Many people have a great knowledge of the business aspect but to be in social media, it is needed to acquire that skill in addition to having creativity and passion. People always sense when you’re being genuine and being honest with the audience establishes trust. I have also learned that I need to be more careful of what I post because people look at social media profiles to determine who you are. I started watching what I post after this class, and really try and regulate my usage especially after doing the social media experiment. 

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Developing a Content Strategy

Your social media content strategy should align with the organization’s content strategy. The four key components to a successful content strategy are research and analysis of current content reception, your target audience that is identified by the platform, a list of content specific goals and objectives, and plans for the distribution of your content. You must do this through research such as conducting a social media audit. Next, analyze the reception of the previously posted content in order to identify what the top performing content. Tailoring your content strategy to what is successful on each network is essential, meaning that you need to figure out what will work best to drive interest. For example, every Tuesday MP Nutrition posts on their profile and tells their followers to repost a screenshot on their story for the chance of winning a free shake. People love to have free things, so this is a really effective marketing strategy as it spreads the word about their company to their follower’s followers, and these people will check out their company and a percentage of them will follow. 

Being a social organization correlates to the principles of effective content development and sharing because the content development and sharing because the content that is put out there represents the business and what it stands for. Looking at the content that an organization puts tells you a lot about the business and what they emphasize in as a company. The principles of potent content development needs to align with the strategic goals of an organization. 

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The Social Organization

From reading chapters 4 and 5 in the book, I had learned there are many parts of building an online community with social media development. Social media is essential in getting to consumers in ways that other methods of communication aren’t able to reach. It takes a lot of work and strategy in order to grab the attention of the consumers. Timing is an important part of building an online community, one must plan ahead and post the right thing at the right time. Using certain tools, such as calendars is something that will help companies. You also need to have knowledge of your target audience and what they would lean towards so that you can cater to them specifically in order to add value. Having value is something to keep in mind because quality matters over the quantity, you must always try and reach them as effectively as possible.

Module 4 in Hootsuite had taught me that you should develop relationships with influencers and research candidates that would build importance to your community. Once armed with knowledge, reach out to them for collaboration and credibility for your brand. The goal of these partnerships are to contribute trust of insight to your community. You can do this by inviting them to private events, early access to new releases, and really meeting up with them to get them connected in order to give feedback to your target audience. Participating in an advocacy program is essential and will grow your profile, this should include a mission, executive buy in, identifying internal influencers, plan for rewards, and data tracking method.  This should outline goals, benefits to the organization, benefits to the employees, and steps to get there. Your advocacy mission should align with your organization’s business objectives. The organization’s team leadership do a lot to set the tone for the advocacy program. These principles apply to my client project by helping me build and set up brand advocacy programs and connect with influencers. Ayele and Co reaches out to many influencers, but they have not hosted events and they would benefit from that.

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The Legal Side of Big Data

It is common that the United States uses big data for their everyday routines from manufacturing to selling. Big data has information that has personal information such as social security information, email, addresses, and more. Companies should be aware when they are using this big data such as the purpose of the data, the probability amount of the data being hacked, then how to fix it if it does. If they know the purpose of the data then it will benefit them to use it in a beneficial way. It is very common now a days for people to hack companies in order to obtain this so they need to know how likely it is to get an attack and how to prevent it using the metrics or operations that is needed to stop it. 

Consumers should be aware that personally identifiable information is recorded whenever they complete a transaction so that they can store it. This is why they need to be careful what they give out, because once its put out there then its going to be hard to keep it private. If they are doing this, they need to make sure that the company can be trusted with the information they provided. 

In order for a business to balance opportunities and threats, they should share the information only to those who need it and have certain guidelines to this. There should also be more thorough privacy policies to make sure that they are doing this in an ethical manner and if not then legal actions would be required. If this is all being followed, then it is possible that the businesses can do this in a ethical and safe way while also doing whats necessary to run the operation.

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Companies with great social media strategies

Dunkin Donuts and Fashion Nova in my perspective does a really great job to implement social media strategies in different ways. The consistency of the timing of posts are perfect because they do it enough to update their followers but not too often to flood their feed and annoy them. They also use emojis that reflect the culture of the social media language. Emojis represent emotion that users use when trying to express certain emotions towards their audience. For example, Dunkin Donuts used the heart eye emoji when trying to tweet about their new expresso drink and how they are obsessed with it. The heart eye emoji is generally an expression of love, and they had displayed to the customers how much that drink is worth having, and their excitement to express it.The timing and quality of the joke of the post was also great because it was the morning of Thanksgiving as they stated that they had used it for the Thanksgiving Turkey.  Although it would be odd to use it for the Turkey, it had got the audience to laugh and engage with them back and direct more attention to their profile.  Fashion Nova uses emojis to express their emotions and also uses social media influencers to model their clothes. This is a good strategy as people are looking to people who they can relate to, as they are more likely to give their honest reviews. The amount of gifs they use to try and be relatable and engaging is consistent as well. They tweeted on the Friday after thanksgiving a funny gif about the amount of leftovers they had taken home, which is true especially for the college aged audience. https://twitter.com/dunkindonuts/status/1065659789290684416 

https://twitter.com/FashionNova/status/1066157099636453382 

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Being a social media consultant to Myself & Others: A guide

In my perspective social media consultants should always have detail oriented, creative, analytical, leadership, and communication skills. The work that they do is for the greater purpose of building their clients a bigger network in order to expand on their number of customers. In order to do this, social media consultants must really look into how they can achieve this and strategize to create a plan. If their client is doing something wrong, then they must figure out why and look into every little thing that they could do better. The direction on which a brand markets themselves matters down to the very details, in order to figure out how exactly to improve one must be detail oriented and analytical. They would also need to use their creativity skills to set themselves apart. A social media consultant must involve their client in every single aspect of the process and communicate with them, meaning that the clients need to know what is going on at all times.

If I was acting as a social media consultant to myself, I would advise to be more careful of what I post. Sometimes, I have to remind myself that future employers are going to look at your profile one day and that I need to take some steps back. I would also tell myself to start building a professional brand sooner, to use social media for business or for ways to make money is a privilege that previous generations have. The actions that I had done to improve this were that I have started a LinkedIn page for myself to grow my professional brand as well as a beauty related page on Instagram to grow my passions into something further. In the future, I would like to connect with more people and message them on LinkedIn and post more consistent on my Instagram to increase interest.

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How big data causes harm

Information privacy is essential for an individual. For a company, it can have a huge impact on the trust from the customer’s standpoint and can have a huge impact on short-term profits and long-term liabilities. This can even be an issue from a business to a business standpoint. Big data is the storage and analysis of large and/or complex data sets. Since the data is large, we can connect many pieces of data and create a larger picture. The data comes from us and can be used to be analyzed about us ranging from where we live, what we eat, family medical history, and sexual orientation to companies who are trying to advertise. It is the consumers who browse the internet who become the product. This is beneficial for the companies trying to make profits, but not good for the public. People deserve every right to be able to browse the internet without being watched. This is dangerous because the data is permanent and beyond our control, we cannot ask if it can be deleted either. If someone wants a job, then it is hard to remove the information that is put out there. Some ways on how to limit harm would be to watch what you post and use social media effectively to provide real value and strengthen trust. If you do this, then it would be hard for your social media to be used against you at any point in time. With this, you can easily control your target audience and have more privacy if you post in a useful manner. 

The internet business models influence surveillance and data gathering on the internet for the sole purpose of receiving funding. According to “The Internet’s Original Sin”, by Ethan Zuckerman, before the internet became mainstream, they had intended to architect, design, and implement a website that marketed content to college graduates. Doing this over the period of five years, they had attempted many revenue models, but the advertising business plan was the one that had gotten funding. At the end of the day, business people are going to do what will make them a profit. Although that is the unfortunate reality, there needs to be a better way to generate revenue without invading people’s privacy. 

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Social Media Experiment

During this experiment, I had altered my use of social media significantly. The purpose of doing this involvement was to measure what would happen. Since I had tracked my use and overall time of social media during a school day, I had decided to complete my alteration experiment also on a weekday, where I have classes and work. I had done three eight hour periods which had added up to 24 hours in total. My first set of eight hours had occurred from the time that I woke up which was at 9 am to 5 pm, which is a whole school/work day. I woke up and instead of being in bed for an extra ten minutes, I went to make breakfast and get ready for the day. As a result of this, because I did not have any distractions this caused me to be ready with extra time on my hands. I already get to my class early on Fridays but I had arrived with more time than anticipated, and because I didn’t have social media to distract me I was forced to do my assignments. With no time being wasted, I had completed all of my homework for the weekend for one of my classes which had resulted in having more time to myself the next day. I was also more productive at work, in which instead of checking my phone when bored, I was able to get forms completed faster and entered into the system. With the extra time I had at work, I had sent out some emails on behalf of the club that I am actively involved in. This was overall a successful work and school day. 

The next day was on a Saturday, which I had arranged a time period from 4 pm to 12 am to be free of social media. During the evening, I had dedicated two hours to studying for my test on Monday, the rest of the time I had spent time with my roommates and we went to the movies then to our friend’s gathering afterwards. It was nice because I was able to get out of the house, review material for school, and clean my room a day earlier than I habitually do. 

During the next 8 hour period, I wanted to see what it would be like on a Sunday morning/ afternoon social media free. Since I had completed most of my assignments, I had went shopping, which could actually be dangerous to some. I went to Kroger as well as Goodwill, and I bought more things than anticipated. This took about three hours in total, after that I had spent an hour at the gym. This is really huge for me since I am usually so busy in my day to day life that I never have time to workout. After my shower, I had figured that I could meal prep for the rest of the week, since I never have time to cook and am always buying at restaurants. Meal prepping took a total of about an hour and a half, in which the rest of the time I took a nap to balance out my sleeping schedule. 

Getting rid of social media was a huge impact for me and cut out so many distractions. I was able to be more productive, went to the gym, saved money by meal prepping, got a significant amount of studying accomplished, and was more efficient at work. I would recommend anyone to do this experiment and see how this will change your lifestyle. 

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Social Media: The Influences

Social media is a huge part of our daily routine. It is in our lives everyday and influences the method of how people think. It has been that way for about a decade, and for many of us we have grown up with this. Having the internet constantly available, is very convenient and serves well for entertainment purposes, but sometimes it is draining. I log into these sites to scroll my timeline, while I’m doing this I see a lot of posts about relatable content, which I appreciate. However, for every few of these posts occurring there are hurtful posts that make me upset and ruin my overall mood. These posts are toxic and many of them are telling a certain demographics how they should dress, act, and be as a person. Many of the time people try and match this criteria only for the approval of others. It gets very competitive and triggers people’s mental state in a negative way. Whenever I don’t have the internet access for an extended period of time, I feel happier, that I don’t have to compare my life to others. I think that people should sometimes take a social media break to find out who they truly are and want for themselves instead of society’s wishes.

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Social Media: How often?

During the past 24 hours, I have spent a lot of time on social media more than I anticipate. I use Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram as my platforms. I wake up in the morning and the first thing I do is check Twitter. I spend about ten minutes on it, trying to really figure out what is going on from my timeline. I feel as if Twitter is the best way to start my day because out of all of the platforms, there are many users who put jokes on their profile while also giving insight to followers on current events. I also check these various forms of social media when I get home from my classes. I navigate back and forth, I feel as though my generation has a low attention span and always wants information retrieved faster than the previous generations that we feel the need to never miss out on what is occurring with the world at every second of the day.  To be honest, I browse each site for about twenty minutes and rotate about three times. That is about eighty minutes on the internet. I do this about 4 times a day which would be 320 minutes in total. This is a lot of time spend consecutively and I am currently trying to work on this so that I don’t waste my day. In addition to this, I check my phone every 10 minutes whether I’m at work or school, even if I don’t receive any texts. Since this is common with our generation, I feel as if we need to work on interacting with each other less from our phones and more from our face to increase meaningful relations, 

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My name is Bianca Allen. I grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a beautiful town in East Michigan. My major is finance and I am minoring in information systems. After I graduate, I aspire to be a financial analyst and work in fashion. In my blog I aspire to accomplish expressing myself through my posts and have good content that people will want to stay updated as I think thats essential to be connected with your audience in the business world. I want to use social media in connecting with my audience and being able for them to relate to me. One company that I find is exemplary is Anastasia Beverly Hills. They have amazing products and show how great they are on their social media platforms. They market to their consumers well and the beauty community and use their platforms to really get input from their consumers, with this strategy they have a high demand when they release a new product. . https://www.anastasiabeverlyhills.com/