Social Media Strategies Reflection

I have accomplished all of my goals at the beginning of the class. Especially through the creation of my own website and blog, I have accomplished many of these goals by learning through class requirements. My questions have been answered through course resources provided by Dr. P, as well as resources I used that were not provided by the course. I mostly used resources not provided by the course as sources for my blog posts, specifically posts that combined environmental topics and the business world. 

There are a few things I wish I would have done better on throughout this course that I think would give me a better understanding of how to implement social media strategies. These are things I find myself working on academically. I should have focused more on the hands-on learning aspects of this course and furthered my involvement in Hootsuite Academy and the resources on that site. I feel it would have helped me prepare to increase my social media presence as a venture further into social media management. I should have also done more to be active in the class forums and communicating with classmates. However, I was involved with Amanda and Catherine via Twitter, which helped me work on my own assignments, especially my blog and website. 

One major thing I wish I would have done is chosen a social media client sooner, or maybe even an entirely different client (for this class). I am personally involved in the Climate Action Collaborative, but had not committed to any major leadership positions. The collaborative is still actively looking for people to fill many leadership positions, and this resulted in the difficulty for the group to create implementation strategies (and difficulty for me to communicate implementation strategies). Most of the collaborative work is done between those leaders, as the group is currently VERY small in terms of active participants especially over the summer. The people in these leadership positions have laid out very specific visions and values, which allowed me to better understand what they envisioned for the movement itself, but communication has been limited among the horizontal leadership practiced in the collaborative because I am not currently in Boone to participate in meetings. Many events are being planned for the new school year, which gives me more options to post content to boost community involvement, however, it didn't help me with the requirements for this class. I have been in communication with mainly one member of the group about what they would like to do in terms of social media. LuAnna Nesbitt is an active leader in the collaborative, mainly focusing on community development. I have been working with her and receiving notes from meetings, but how they want to create a brand for the group is still unknown to me; because the work is collaborative it is important to meet with more that just LuAnna to be able to communicate the brand online. Not many people were interested in the social media aspect of the movement over the summer, because other than weekly meetings amongst leaders, there have been no big community gatherings to advertise. Other content, like educational resources, is being curated collaboratively by the group, but they have not shared these resources with me so posting about things like economic and political theory are tricky and require a lot of extra research I was not prepared to do on my own. I plan on continuing management of the collaborative after this class, and presenting a detailed plan with content I created for future workshops and gatherings the group has proposed. The downfall of this, though, is it really hurts my final presentation and did not align with my initial social media plan for the collaborative. I will explain more about this in detail in my final project.