Well peeps finals are officially next week and the semester is coming to an end so this is my final blog post for the class!! This is more of a reflection on the class itself than on a chapter, so I hope you enjoy reading my opinion of what we've done throughout the semester.
For this class the textbook definitely helped supply us with the basic knowledge we needed to do well, having a good foundation of information broken down into segments was also a good approach to explaining the different parts of social media marketing.
It was more interesting to see real life examples of how social media is becoming a major component of marketing in a wide variety of companies. Having to do the small assignments such as, the infographic, was an important tool to have learned so that we can use this to present information to consumers in a fun way. I also really liked learning about layer, the augmented reality app, with the expansion of technology in the business world and our everyday lives, I see the importance for students to be aware of up and coming technologies. Even though our degree is business based, having classes that foster our creativity is an important part of being a merchandising student. If more classes could integrate technology into the curriculum to compliment the coursework it would give merchandising students another advantage over their competition in the job market.
The design process helped us understand how to problem solve by breaking down what the problem was, researching for information, coming up with ideas for solutions, narrowing down those ideas, and finally testing them. This process is the basis for how we were going to begin to formulate a definition of what needed to be addressed for the social media marketing plan project. Before we could really start working on the steps in the plan itself we needed to know how to effectively look at what we were being presented to work on. So I think spending class time learning this process was very helpful to how we would be approaching each step in developing our final project plan for the department.
Of course I was partial to the brainstorming part of the design process because I really like bouncing ideas off others and building more expansive ideas from what was original mentioned. It helps to have a small class size of students that are open to all possibilities; and I also founding it very encouraging to have the teachers make comments/suggestions to guide and shift the conversation into a particular direction. The part I’m not too fond of is research because I need an extremely detailed explanation of what to look for; otherwise I end up feeling overwhelmed and wasting time on areas that are not helpful to the progress of the project.
I was most surprised by how much terminology has already been developed on all the different aspects of social media marketing. There were some terms that I knew already but didn’t know had an official name, and there were others that were really helpful to understanding the psychology behind what goes into any social media marketing plan. Learning about all the different social media terms, zones, target audiences, types of users, and technologies was very important to prepare us for the professional aspects that will likely be a part of many of our jobs. I really think that teaching this information is an important experience for students to have, so that if we have the opportunity to get a job that handles social media we are able to understand the method behind managing a companies’ social media presence.
In learning about social media you begin to understand that this online extension of a company is responsible for connecting the company with their customers, making a more personal connection and experience for the customer so that they feel like they can easily interact with the brand. Its also helpful to the brand to have the customer openly communicate their honest opinion to help the company improve customer service and relations in a way that they haven’t previously been able to do.
If I had a do over for the class I would keep the blog posts, small assignments about augmented reality, infographics, and website tools such as Jing and Diigo, the design process workshop, and the social media marketing plan. I would eliminate the chapter quizzes because I feel like the blog posts help with retention of information of each chapter and more time could be spent in class on discussing the parts of the chapter that we will be using in the final project.
Thanks for visiting my blog, I've enjoyed all the comments, and want to wish everyone good luck on their finals!!
