McKenzie Herman

General Management/Leadership

[mckenzieherman]

Challenges They May Face

For my client, they are a campus based organization. They are striving to make the community of animals more safe. They are pushing their values on the basis of saving any animal from a harmful home and giving them to their forever home. This is an organization that I thought would be a great client because they are trying to reach a community of animal owners and lovers. By establishing themselves on social media I was looking to help them with expanding their brand and helping them gaining the followers ad community they are trying to reach. By doing this, I wanted them to be able to create accounts with Twitter and Instagram. They have a presence on Facebook already but it isn't the strongest. So working towards strengthening their followers and likes will help gain more traffic on their other sites. By doing this these animals will find the love they deserve within the community.

Some of the challenges I think this organization will face is being able to follow through with the amount of posts each week and being able to come up with some great posts. This organization is event based and they do most of their work through the events they hold. With Covid-19 among us, I believe being able to hold events right now is not happening. This is a major part of their branding and this might come as an obstacle they will have to try and overcome. Their posting might lag each week, which is okay, but as long as they are constantly posting each week they will be okay. While reaching out to followers and gaining more traffic for each social site, this might be tricky. They are trying to gain more followers by using certain hashtags and even their own brand hashtag. This will allow for viewers to see their material and choose to follow them if they agree. I believe this won't be a challenge for them but like I said before, the events is the biggest challenge. By holding virtual events with their community, this will allow them to be able to do what they love and reach that community they are looking for. This will allow them to be able to keep doing what they love but just in a new way. 

[mckenzieherman]

Develop & Share Content Correctly

For an organization to have the possibility to create and share their content with the world they have to focus on a few things. Your organization needs to be able to build and engage with their audience by providing this material to their target market. Once you have the content you want to share with the world and the audience you want to share too, it is time to find other content to support it. Being able to back up your content to make it real will be key in your development and success of the organization. Now with your strategy in place, we will create the content to support it. Now knowing the methods of content curation and content ideas, this will allow you to give the best content for your organization. Curated means content gathered from trusted sources that is relevant to your strategy. Created is content produces within your organization. Social media presence for your organization is usually a mix of these two things. This will also vary with your organization or business. Now this mix should be 60% curated and 40% created but also being able to make adjustments to this if needed based on your audience. Created items include blogs, white paper, infographics, guides, and visuals produced from your organization. Having created content for your organization will allow for better traffic and more driven material for your target audience. Now bring in curated content will help grow your audience and demonstrate your organizations position as a trusted advisor in your industry.

Curating content from trusted sources allows for your audience to have more diverse viewpoints, this will balance out the self promotion posts you are promoting. When choosing content for curating, make sure it’s valuable to your audience and aligns with the audience you are trying to target and your values. IT is best to share your content in different platforms to allow for others to explore your values and ideas. Knowing how to post on each platform will allow you to maximize the reach and engagement of users. There are list of best practices to follow when posting on different platforms. These are a strong headline or caption to grab the readers attention, having visual content to provide a great boost to your engagement which will boost the visual appeal to your posts, make sure to vary your content regularly to keep your audience interested by mixing in questions, graphs, or polls; now aim to end your posts with a clear call to action, there are optimal posting times that differentiations with every network, also make sure to keep self promotional content around one-third of all content your publish, and lastly, add all your social sites to a website that can post at a certain time for all your sites and be sure to address your audience at a timely manner. When becoming a social organization, these principles have a lot to do with your success and engagement of your company. These have everything to do with how you will be view by others. Being able to share yourself as professional and driven, will increase the engagement for your organization. If your organization follows everything stated above, this will allow for good and successful development of shared content for your organization.

[mckenzieherman]

When looking to build your online community, you want to be sure to do it the right way. Social organizations broaden the vision of social media and community engagement for strategic issues. When starting a bases on social media, it is hard for some to make that switch. The attitude about social media can be all over the spectrum so if you have a more negative view or neutral view, you want to be sure to start simple with your vision statement of its potential benefits for the organization. If you do the vision statement correctly, it can provide clarity, help guide strategy, and inspire participation. To start, there are four steps to go by, understand when community collaboration is appropriate, know where community collaboration is more likely to deliver value, apply an understanding of your organization’s goals and culture, and lastly, craft and distribute an organizational vision for community collaboration. You also need to know what community collaboration is appropriate. Mass collaboration is more suitable with broad observation activity and independent activity. Making sure the message and members are direct but also have the sort of wisdom you’ll need. By having goals that are diverse, innovative, and ascertain perceptions is key in the day-to-day operations. Now, like I said before your attitude about social media may be indifferent but there are six attitudes: folly, fearful, flippant, formulating, forging, and fusing. These six words can be what makes your organization successful on your collaboration efforts. You need to be sure to have purpose when creating a strategy. There is nothing more important to success of the organization. When trying to build a community for your organization, it may be difficult in the beginning but as you keep working and growing the results will show.

When going over the Hootsuite module, I realized that my client isn’t building their community as well as they could. They are just a small campus organization who isn’t taking advantage of the major audience around them. They are only present on Facebook, but I also suggested they create profiles on Twitter and Instagram. These platforms will allow for many different users to view their pages and learn about their organization. Some things I required them to do to boost their community base is help them create a brand hashtag so they can use it on each page, and this will allow for followers and viewers to either post with their hashtag or viewers who don’t yet follow them, they can see who they are coordinating with in certain events and strategies. Also, by being in person you can spread by word of mouth and offer up some kind of incentive to give to your possible follower. This will allow my client to obtain the traffic they are looking for in their future.

[mckenzieherman]

As I watched “The Legal Side of Big Data”, I realized that big data is a lot more dangerous than we all have thought. Big data is something that we all thought we didn’t have to worry about, but after watching “The Legal Side of Big Data”, I felt as if I knew nothing anymore and now im just lost in the world of no privacy.

I believe most companies should be careful when using big data because you never know what could happen to them. Many companies could get hacked very easily and this can cause companies to stress about their security protocol. For many companies, security is the top priority because they want to ensure that everyone is able to stay safe and secure. Hacking happens every day to all different people. Making sure you are aware of it is the key to fixing it. When you store all data in one place this is what can be very risky. Making sure to split up the most important data in different groups will help limit the number of breaches because the information will be scattered so there won’t be as much information being taken. Companies need to be prepared for the issues that may arise with their data. Consumers need to make sure they are aware of is who they give their information to. For instance, Home Depot and Target were both hacked, and all of their information was exposed. This would be a big issue for consumers because they trust these companies to keep their information safe. This compromises the integrity of the stores because the consumers are relying on the companies to be aware of hacking issues.

I believe each company should be aware of the people within their company. Having a good hiring process and making sure to hire the right people will help with keeping this data safe. I think companies should stop giving our information away because this is the reason we keep getting spam calls, emails, and texts. We need to make sure to have things in order to confirm confidentiality. After reading “The Internet’s Original Sin” and watching Maciej Ceglowski’s talk, they explained the internet in a different way than most. I liked how they took the less normal approach than most. In Maciej’s talk, he explains how the internet is spying on us whenever they get the chance. But this happened because the internet’s good intentions went sideways. When reading “The Internet’s Original Sin”, they describe how they invented the great tool of pop-up ads. They thought this would be a good idea because it would analyze the users’ personal homepages so they could target ads specifically for them. Now when they do this they are working towards “good intentions”, but that’s not always the case. For example, when a car company bought a banner ad on a website the promoted vulgar sexual acts, this company was freaking out. But all the coders have to say is sorry. This is something that needs to be fixed because many companies want their ads on websites that are used constantly and that aren’t vulgar. Having the tool of “pop-up ads” is a way to know everything about their users from what we looked at and searched. And the worse part about it is they are making money off of all the pop-ups that are shown. Having that access to all of this data from many users is very scary and dangerous because whatever we do they will know exactly what we are doing. It is very scary and terrifying that they have this much power.

[mckenzieherman]

Vaccine for Junk News

We have all had our fair share of junk news that pops on our pages from time to time. But what do you really know about it? Personally I hate junk news, until I see I can print my cats face on pair of socks. There are algorithms are ways to see how news and content are being absorbed by the user. They take your search history from Google, Twitter’s trending, and the newsfeed from Facebook and try to prioritize these algorithms the maximize the users’ engagement. They sort, filter, and deliver content in the manner that is designed by your content searched and read. This is personalized content from our interests, past behaviors, and even our geographical location. For example, if you are in Mount Pleasant and you are just scrolling through Facebook, an ad might pop up saying “Come to the Cabin for 50% of cabin sticks!”, this is using geographical location because it knows where you are an can show you the deals in town that might interest you because you may have even searched “The Cabin” in Google. 

When talking about advertising we mostly think about a company advertising a pair of shoes or even shirts. But in this instance we are talking about micro-targeted messages that are crafted and delivered by certain companies. So when looking at a social media app, they are all free. And this is great because you don't have to pay for anything! But in reality you are paying, just not with money. You are paying for this free app with all your personal information. And what they do with this information is figure you out and what you think. By adding in clickbait, this attracts the attention of the consumer and designs it to cause you outrage, curiosity, or both. They use key words to focus your attention on it and then it will result in you clicking on it. Most clickbait is over exaggerated false news. For example, this recent election there were loads of things to click on pertaining to each candidate. They sealed me in by showing my desired candidate and shows how the polls are leaning back and forth. This made me click on the article because I wanted to know the news. These messages can be manipulative in ways that target you strategically. Now looking at exposure, to your filtered content. One thing that uses this a lot is politics. They use your preferred candidate, and they select messages that strengthen your views of that candidate. This means they user never really changes their mind on the choice they made and never gives them the chances to look at other possible options. Most of the time we rely on selective exposure because we are scared to challenge our views and look at new information. 

When people are exposed to new information they are shocked because they weren't expecting new things to show on their page. Businesses should make sue to look out for false advertising of the product or service and make sure the facts are real and not just propaganda. Being able to distinguish what's real and what's fake is the hardest task to do when scrolling through social media. Businesses should be able to filter their information in a way that won't let others spread fake news or ideals. Everyone should always be aware of the possibility of junk news floating around the social media world and know how to react to it.

[mckenzieherman]

Social Media Consultant?

To be a social media consultant you have to be a people person. As a consultant you will be talking with many clients on what they want and need. You will have to be able to keep a conversation with them on that. Being a consultant, it's all about helping. Giving them the advice on projects for their business is key. Being able to talk to them and help them through their challenges will make you a great consultant. Helpful, understanding, and patience are a few of the most important qualities. You may get a very difficult client but you have to have the patience and understanding of the goal of the client. Always being sure to help them to their main goal of their project by being patient with them will give you a lot of brownie points.

If I were my own consultant, I would give the advice of spicing it up with graphics and more material. Having a professional page, you want to make it concise and to the point. You don't want to be adding any spring break photos, so making sure you have the right photos will grab the attention of employers. Another thing I would recommend would be to constantly post or retweet things that interest you because everyone can see what you are posting and retweeting. If an employer is looking through your profile and sees you retweet a business convention in town, they may show up and ask to speak with you. Professional pages are all about networking and getting your name out there. By being bold, this will make you stand out in the thousands on social media users.

[mckenzieherman]

Knowing right from wrong

We all know that social media is a major issue for many of us but we never see behind the scenes. There is never an outlet we go to to see what these social media sites are getting from everyone using their sites. After watching The Social Dilemma on Netflix, I was shocked and stunned.I knew that there were always places that our posts went and stayed but I never realized that they are watched constantly by people and we are all even timed when looking at posts. For instance if you are scrolling through Instagram, each picture you see, you will be timed for how long you stare at it and interact with it. That is just so mind blowing to me because now I don't ever want to go on these sites again. This documentary has made me scared to look at anything. Big data analytics examines large amounts of data to uncover patterns and insights. This can cause for unorganized data, data privacy, retentions, and this lists can go on and on. This is so dangerous because it challenges how many businesses are run and may cause them not to succeed. Having everything being tracked is a huge privacy invasions which can lead to problems and discrimination because of the constant spying. 

I believe that these issues will never go away and they will always being following us when we are online. We just have to learn to deal with the fact that someone is always “watching” us. Many of these can be dealt with limiting the use of social media because if you don't drink the poison, it won't harm you. Being able to know when to go on and when to stop is going to be that major factor is dealing with this. Limiting notifications is a big one because you won't be constantly pressured to look at your phone if you simply end the notifications. By eliminating the big issue of big data in your daily life and stop thinking about it, this will make you feel better in everyday life because you won't fall down the rabbit hole like many have already.

[mckenzieherman]

Yikes I’m scared!

So for the past 24 hours I have kept a log of all my social media use and I wasn't surprised with the results. I spent over 2 hours a day on any form of social media and I picked up my phone to look at it over 100 times each day. I know I am on my sisal media quite a bit but not as much as the average person I guess. Social media has taken over my down time and I think I have a way to figure out how to not have it take over my life. For my experiment I want to try and have my media use to a minimum. I want to stay off my phone when I wake up until 12pm and then use it for lunch until 1pm. Then stay off my phone 1pm-6pm. Those hours are usually family time and friend time for me so making sure I stick to these time restrictions will help keep those relationships I have. I will then have time on my phone 6pm-9pm and then I will keep it in a drawer for the night so I can make sure to get the sleep that is needed and make sure I reduce my blue light exposure before bed. 

I am working to try this to the best of my ability because I think it could really benefit me and my mental health. Being on my phone all the time makes me not very social and makes me feel like I'm in a whole different world. By eliminating my phone use will allow me to see the real world in real time instead of through a screen. When I was keeping the log for my social media use, I really tried to stay off it for the log purpose because I knew I was tracking it. The times I forgot about the log, I definitely was on it for it seemed like hours. My main thing I do is scroll through Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. I do it out of habit now, kind of like an addiction. When I was trying to stay off my phone, all I wanted to do was be on my phone and in the social media world. It was very difficult to pull myself away from using it but I tired. I know the log was to track it on a normal day of how much I use it but I had the voice in the back of my head saying “don’t use it!!”. Keeping this log was definitely difficult and caused me to have a lot of stress because I constantly thought about my phone and then my mind was fighting back and forth on if I should use it or not.

I am really excited to try out my experiment and see if I can stick to it. I will try it for a week to start out and see if anything changes in my relationships and experiences outside of my phone space. I think I will try my hardest but once you're addicted, its hard to stay away from the social media world.

[mckenzieherman]

Social Media is my name

When I pick up my phone, I am doing it out of boredom or response to something. Social media has become a big part of my life in many ways I never even realized. I always go on my phone for comfort or to ease the awkwardness around me. I use it to make the silence of the room louder. I always thought of myself as an outspoken social butterfly but now that I reflect back on all my social engagements, I realized it’s because I had my phone to keep me comfortable. By having that safety blanket it has made me not as social as I was. This is causing relationships to be ruined because instead of talking face-to-face, you are speaking through comments, DMs, and postings. That is not how we should be conversing with our friends. Social media has become some kind of infection that we all can't shake. 

Always having the access to internet and social media has made society more dumb and clueless, even myself. Being able to open your phone and look up the answer to something in the matter of seconds has made us people who can't think for ourselves and solve problems like we use to. Even for myself, I always look up the answer to a question just to make sure I am right. Kind of like how some people use a calculator for 2+2 (I still do it sometimes also). We use the internet to get that recognition that the answer is actually correct. 

There are times when we don't have access to our phone because there is a lack of service or Wi-Fi. For me, it was when I made a trip up to the U.P. for a weekend and we stayed in Paradise. We stayed in this tiny cabin and they had no Wi-Fi and there was no service. I felt like I couldn't breathe for the first few hours. I felt like I needed to check my Facebook or Snapchat to see if anyone responded to me.

Since no one there had service, we were able to speak like humans again. It was refreshing to not have our faces glued to our phones. The group of us were able to have campfire stories, sing songs, and play games. It ended up being one of my favorite vacations so far! Being off our phones made us have to converse with each other and be in the moment. I definitely changed after that weekend and realized there is more to life than a simple Snapchat to a friend.

I feel if I was able to stay off my phone when I first wake up in the morning until lunch, then use my phone for a couple hours and have my screen time and then be off of it from early evening until after dinner, this would make the social media brain of mine more at ease. I believe this is just one step closer to the goal of going a whole week without any social media. 

[mckenzieherman]

Hey guys! It’s me.

My name is McKenzie Herman and I am a senior at Central Michigan University. I am studying General Management and Leadership. I am hoping to receive a management role at a company located in Grand Rapids. I am not picky on what job I get, I am just ready to get started! I have always had a passion to lead others in a way no one else has. I think we've all had our fair share of bad bosses but I want to be the type of boss who engages with their employees and helps them through issues. I want to be a leader not just a boss.

I hope to accomplish an insight into the social media aspect of business and learn the ins and outs of the source! Anything to help with my professional portfolio. Here is a company I believe to have used social media in a great way, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/  This company does a great job by being the second most followed account on Instagram. This means they are being tagged and followed constantly. They are able to tell a story within their social media platforms. They also use their platforms to raise awareness for many global issues and making sure people are educated on the topics. In regards to the reading I believe National Geographic does well with their participation for themselves and for the photographers who are able to write their own posts for their pictures. They bring in the community and allow the photographers to add their own spin on their work. This company is good at bringing in new material and gives photographers the chance to get their amazing work shown. National Geographic all around is a great company who try's to help wildlife and natural disasters as well as the photographers who send in their amazing shots that take of nature. A great social organization is skilled at applying all these main principles to make sure that the community is practicing mass collaboration. 

[mckenzieherman]

I am still learning

Michelangelo