MCC Social Media For Business Wrap up

I wanted to thank my two Professors from my Social Media for Business class for presenting a very comprehensive review of some of the most prominent social media tools available online, as well as showing us how we can analyze and use them for developing a Strategic Social Marketing Plan. 

For my class project (in my mind) the results of my social media efforts are still not out, and they will be ongoing. I just started to work on the marketing needs for The Sabrina Keller Foundation (SKF) recently, and I am still in the middle of climbing the learning curve for developing their social marketing strategies. 

Since I started working on the SKF Facebook Page – I have seen an increase in Reach because I have been more active with making postings on the page. So has the Foundation President – it seems to me prior to my volunteering to help, the page was not very active, although it had garnered about 143 followers when I started working on it. That number has now moved up to 170 “Likes” over the past three months. Which is good, but we need to have an official staff meeting, so that I can be on the same page (no pun intended) with the President and the other staff members with SKF’s overall Marketing plans and our Social Media Goals. 

For me right now the real task to achieve for SKF is to gain more engagement with these Facebook followers, as well as still grow more awareness online overall for the Foundation. I think Twitter should also become more important for us, as I am going to try to use it more; not only for making more tweets, but also as a research tool (along with Facebook Insights) to study our target markets better over the coming months. 

I took a class on Social Media previously last year at CSUSM, and we had covered the many types of social tools available for business very quickly. The focus in that class was to be sure to tie our online marketing strategies with real-world-goals the business needs to achieve offline. Not just to join with social media for social media’s sake and because everyone else has been going there.  

We worked individually and in groups to assess what social tools we wanted to utilize. And each social tool and their marketing strategies were divided into individual projects per person for our group presentations. So in short for my part I only concentrated on developing a social marketing plan for LinkedIn and Yelp.

I learned a lot about LinkedIn for my class business project (A Craft Brewery called Stumblefoot) at CSUSM. And I also have developed an extensive LinkedIn page for my personal career profile recently. So I hope to take some of that knowledge combined with my strategic lessons learned from this MCC class, and apply it to a Nonprofit LinkedIn Page for the SKF Foundation soon.  

With this Social Media class this semester, I enjoyed the fact I needed to learn more about all the social media and analytical tools for a business by myself, and I had not just concentrated on two or three of them. Before this class I still was not very educated about Facebook, Twitter, or any of the visual platforms available. I am now. 

Frankly I was a little afraid of Facebook for personal use as I didn’t want to plaster my life online for everyone to see. But these social media classes have made me realize it is a valuable tool to further my career in marketing; as well as a good way to reach out personally to my old school friends. I knew it was a bit of an oxymoron when I decided to go back to school to study marketing in late 2006; yet I was still reluctant to join the social media revolution.  Now I am plastering my vacation pictures to everyone on Facebook. Go figure!   

I decided I needed to embrace it, especially since I am now looking for work, and I know HR managers are looking for social and professional profiles online. I figured I better have something there for them to see. With the help of this class I do now. And I am doing it in a controlled and smart fashion to preserve my personal and professional Brand.  

And finally to those readers who have been reading my class blog; “A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to My Marketing Career” over these past three months – I say Thank You again and stay tuned. – as I do plan to keep my friends and business colleagues informed with this Blog or another about my career and other possible endeavors in the Future -Merry Christmas – DH