Role
We didn’t
allocate specific roles in our group right from the start, instead we just
started researching different areas of social media marketing and found that we
naturally gravitated towards different topics that were of personal interest to
us, and hence became ‘allocated’ to those particular categories. I initially
found that I was researching pretty much every topic across the board. When
other group members mentioned some aspect of social media marketing that I
wasn’t aware of I would go away and research it myself. Not because we
particularly needed a second person researching it for the research project,
but because I’m rather pedantic when it comes to learning about something I’m
really interested in and I like to feel fully informed. While this was really
great for my learning and I can confidently say I’m walking away from this
project with a deep understanding of all the different aspects involved in it –
even the ones I didn’t do the final write up of for the project – there did
come a point in the semester where I realised I had to choose a particular
topic or two to go with and work on researching those in depth for the final
research report. This eventually formed the Technologies and Strategy
Development sections of the final project, as well as the Future projections.
I found that as
the semester evolved my broad research, in addition to the research I was doing
at my social media internship, came in handy, and I took on a bit of a role as
‘helper’ to the other group members with their research. For example, while
Caitlin was handling a lot of the strategies tips content, I had a LOT of great
material for this from the social media marketing workshops I’d been to for my
internship, and helped integrate this material with hers to round the research
out. When Maddie had a little bit of trouble finding statistics for her History
Timeline, I sent her a google doc with a number of statistics I’d previously
compiled a couple weeks prior for ‘Number Crunch’ articles I was writing for my
internship’s social media blog. When Diana started pondering out loud during
one of our meetings wondering how Facebook’s terms and conditions work with
running competitions online, I was able to inform her of what I knew on the
subject from research I’d previously done for a white paper at my internship,
and direct her to a couple of different resources she could use for further
information. Being able to take on this role of ‘helper’ and aid my group
members in this way was really gratifying for me because it helped me feel that
I really was getting a good handle on our whole research topic.
Progress
One thing that I
did notice with my research method is that I have a tendency to go off on great
readings tangents when I’m learning about something. That is, I might start of
researching a social media platform – say, Twitter – and come across an article
talking about how Twitter recently acquired the team behind the social media
platform Summify, and then I’ll go off and start researching Summify to find
out that it was created by a start-up technology team from Europe that was
brought out to an incubator in Canada financed by angel investors to work on
the project, and then I’ll go off and start trying to figure out what angel
investors are and how that all work…and it’s only hours later that I’ll
actually get back reading the end of the original article I started with. Now,
this isn’t usually a problem because I love learning and understanding the
context of different pieces of knowledge, but I did find this particular method
to be problematic when I needed to sit down and get through some quick research
in a short period of time. I had to work on disciplining myself to stay
focused, but I found a couple of methods to help me do this. One was creating a
‘resesarch plan’ every time I sat down to do some work. This meant creating a
list of topics I wanted to research during that session, accompanied by time
limits so that I knew how much time I could allocate to each one. I also
started a Bitly account (a link shortening and bookmarking service) that
allowed me to save, categorise and annotate web links that I came across and
wanted to explore, but perhaps didn’t have the time to go off on a readings
tangent with at that point. This way, I could still keep records of additional
topics I discovered that I’d like to research further but not let them distract
while I needed to be getting on with researching topics specific to our
project. Making progress with my ability to research in an efficient and timely
manner was really beneficial for this project, and a skill I’ll take with me
into future endeavours.
Strategies
I tried a range
of different research strategies throughout the duration of our project. These
included, but are not limited to:
· reading
physical books
· reading
online journals, e-books and articles
· collecting
newspaper articles of current social media campaigns I found in the Herald Sun
and MX
· downloading
free white papers from social media marketing companies
· attending social media marketing
workshops
· following
social media related boards on Pinterest
· collecting
Infographics on social media platforms
· creating
accounts on social media platforms I’d never previously used (for instance,
Twitter, Pinterest and Bitly) to get a feel for how to use them and how they
might be of use in a marketing strategy
I found that the
research and learning strategies that worked best for me were the ones where I
was actually DOING something, and not just reading about it. For instance, the
workshops were really beneficial because I was involved in conversations with
other social media marketers on how to design a strategy. And playing with the
social media platforms myself was a lot more educational than reading about how
to use them, because I could speak about the experience first hand and evaluate
their usefulness myself without having to rely on someone else’s standards.
I found that one
of my weaknesses with the research process at first was keeping an organised
record of all the useful information I came across. I tried a few different
note-taking programs and also physically writing them out but I found that this
wasn’t very helpful with image and video content I wanted to keep tabs on. I
(appropriately) created an account with new social media platform Pinterest and
started pinning visual content onto boards I’d categorised according to
different sectors of social media information – everything from the different
platforms to particular types of campaigns to a board called ‘Marketing 101’
onto which I pinned helpful information I came across as I started learning the
art of marketing online. I actually found this method to be extremely helpful
because I’m a very visual learner and like to use graphs and images to remember
things. I’m also border on being obsessive compulsive about the way I like to
categorise and order information, and this service allowed me to appropriately
segregate bits of information into my own categories. Using Pinterest as an
organisational tool is something I’ll definitely keep on doing, in fact I’ve actually
already created a separate Pinterest account to pin items relating to my
various other areas of interest.
In hindsight,
I’m think our collaboration strategy could have used a bit of work. For the
most of it we all worked fine together, but we found that towards the end one
of our group members wasn’t quite pulling her weight and the work that she’d
claimed to have done wasn’t quite up to the standard she’d led us to believe it
was. This could have been avoided if we’d made certain checkpoints along the
research journey where we shared all our work and progress with each other,
rather than just relying on what we’d each said we’d done. However the lesson
is learnt and I will take this insight with me into my next collaborative
project to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.
Problems
Well there were
a number of problems…well not such much problems, but rather ‘learning
experiences’ I came across in my own research journey and tried to find ways to
rectify that I’ve already talked about. The only real problem I had along the
whole process was as part of the collaborative process with one of the other
group members. I have to take responsibility for some of the factors myself, as
I’m sure there were measures I could have taken to prevent this but it basically
came down to one of our group members taking advantage of the rest of us doing
all the hard work. This problem was most apparent in the last few weeks of the
project when we began to share the finished versions of our sections, and we
realised that most of her research was not really ‘research’ at all but written
from a single source. I tried to help rectify this problem at the time by
tactfully pointing this out to her and explaining why it wasn’t appropriate to
put this in a research project that was meant to be the result of a semester’s
worth of work, but unfortunately she didn’t seem to see the problem with it and
left it the way it was. Instead her excuse was that I should integrate some of
my own research with hers so that it became the result of more than one source.
While I did end up doing this, it added a great deal more work onto my workload
which was already rather large. I continued to have similar problems with the
same group member where she wouldn’t complete something that she was meant to
do properly, for example, a trailer for our website, and I would be left trying
to fix it at the last minute. I attempted to fix this problem in a number of
ways, as did my other group members by asking her nicely to finish the tasks
she’d volunteered to do properly, and highlighting the fact that we were all
doing a lot more work than she was already. Unfortunately our attempts were
largely unsuccessful and we had to rectify the mistakes ourselves, or leave
them as they were. I found that
even though I referred back to our collaborative contract a couple of times to
find new ways of approaching the situation, nothing really worked. I do believe
that in the future it would be beneficial for this particular assignment to be
tutor assessed but peer moderated, to prevent situations like this arising
where group members are taken advantage of.
Connections
& Intersections
This course has
been one of the most educational and enjoyable classes I’ve taken at RMIT thus
far. This is largely due to the fact that we were able to choose research
topics that were of interest to us, and social media is something that I’m
keenly interested in and would like to chase a career in. I learnt a lot about
solving problems that I have with learning processes by simply trying different
methods until I find the ones that work best for me. I learnt that I learn best
when I am doing something, there are visuals involved and I have control over
organising the information. I also learnt that despite one problem with the
collaboration process, I actually really enjoyed collaborating on a research
project with other people because it increased my learning and the information
I was exposed to tenfold. I learnt a few new tips and tricks on communicating
with group members online using various tools such as Facebook groups and
google docs, and I actually picked up a few new web designing skills that I’ll
be happy to put to good use when I create my own online portfolio in the coming
weeks. I honed my networking skills and discovered the most effective ways to
contact industry professionals online (mostly by tweetings at them!) when few
contacts replied to my emails, and I also discovered that workshops are great
places to network with people because they bring a large number of industry professionals
together in a casual environment where everyone wants to learn. The learnings I
have taken from this process will help me as I continue to research different
areas of social media for my internship and keep writing articles and white
papers for them. The wealth of knowledge I now possess about social media will
help me to market myself online as a media professional, and I now think that
the next step I would like to take is creating a social media marketing
strategy for my best friend’s fashion label to see how well I go putting all
this knowledge into action.
I stayed away
from blogging about my progress and learnings throughout the semester, because
I found that this wasn’t very beneficial for me. Instead I have included here
some photos of the different methods I used to document and reflect on my
process along the way. The variety of methods I used demonstrate the progress I kept making in trying different methods I learning, until I found the ones that worked for me:
· the
‘to do’ lists I started creating before every study session
· lists
of people I networked with at the workshops
· my
social media Pinterest board
· scribbled
notes from the multiple social media marketing workshops I attended
· an
example of one of the social media articles I wrote on Australian facebook
usage, and later shared the statistics with Maddie
· A
snapshot of my new Instagram account I created to get a feel for the platform
· A
snapshot of my new bitly account that I use to collate links
· A
snap of the ‘Investigation’ word document I kept to organise text information in,
complete with 16 separate tabs for all the different aspects of social media
marketing I was researching
· Structural
mind maps I scribbled to work out how to structure our website.
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