As I am my own client for this project, I think one of the main challenges I may face when implementing my recommendations is shifting my mindset that social media is not a task, but a tool and community. Right now, posting weekly on my business' social media pages is something that I typically do without putting very much thought into the aspect of creating a social community. I think it's important to remember that creating a social community takes time, but once it's established it will cause your business to continue to flourish.

Another challenge I think I face is becoming more resourceful with social media. As a small business, I don't have a huge budget for advertising and the content I post is all created by me. However, it is important to remember that just because there may be less human capital or budget working on maintaining the social media, it doesn't mean that it's not possible to grow and improve. Time management is something that I will have to work on in terms of allocating time to create content and plan in advance, so during the times where I am more busy, I still have content I can regularly post.

At the end of the day, social media is a process and there's no right way to do it. I hope to use all of the tips and tricks I've learned throughout the past semester to continue to grow my business.

Effective content can be developed and shared through a purpose roadmap. A purpose roadmap is a set of related and sequenced purposes that defines how a community's collaboration can start, grow, and evolve. Through this planning tool, you can develop a guide for the development and growth of a community by curating content specific for this group. An important aspect of this roadmap is that it is not necessarily set is stone as it is a flexible plan. Specifically, this roadmap provides details regarding who the target audience is, what motivates them, how they interact, and so on. Without a roadmap, you can only discuss business value in vague terms. However, with a roadmap, you can have specific goals that can be measures, resulting in better outcomes.

This image displays an example of what a roadmap could look like. As shown, there are specific goals within categories that are displayed over the course of 2016 and 2017.

A social organization has to do with the principles of effective content development and sharing as a social organization entails relationships among groups of people. Through sharing content, a sense of community is being built as people are strenghtening relationships with each other. When a brand spends time building a community, they are fostering relationships between themselves and their audience, as well as encouraging relationships among their audience. This is something that cannot be achieved without effective content development.

When online community building, it's important to know where community collaboration is suitable. For instance, community collaboration is more appropriate in settings where large groups of people act independently to share information that contributes to a larger goal. In addition, it's important to develop an organizational vision. This sets the stage and emphasizes the focus on business value by reviewing goals and strategies. Furthermore, it's imperative to have a purpose that aligns with the general goal as that can clearly state the desired purpose of the community and the benefits it expects the community to produce. An example of a business with a good online community is Chewy, a pet supply company. Chewy prioritizes their customer satisfaction by interacting with customers on social media by answering questions, reposting pet pictures, and offering a service that allows customers to chat for free with their licensed veterinary team.

Module 4 discusses the importance of building an active community by engaging with audience members and listening to feedback. This provides you with the opportunity to humanize your band and show that there is a person behind the brand, making your brand more relatable. Other ways to build an online community could be sharing audience comments or posts, leaving comments on another community member's pages, or sharing a trending hashtag. For the client project, I am my own client for my bakery business and I can apply these principles by encouraging my customers to share pictures of their orders and interact with those posts. I can also post more content that relates to the "person behind the account" goal to show a more relatable side to my business.

In the article, Zuckerman discusses that the business model that helped Tripod.com get funded was advertising. They were able to analyze users’ personal homepages and target curated ads to them. Through that, they created what is considered to be one of the most hated tools in the advertisers toolkit which is the pop-up ad. A pop-up ad is a way to associate an ad with a user’s page without putting it directly on the page. Advertising has become the default business model on the web since it’s the easiest model for a web startup, implement, and it's the easiest to market to investors. There’s various ways to target ads such as targeting to intent which Google’s search ads does or targeting to demographics or stated interests, which is what Facebook does. It’s fairly well known to users that their internet habits are being tracked and data that is collected from them is utilized to shape what ads and content that they see. As the video also mentions, the government and businesses have big collections of personal data like radioactive waste. It's easy to generate, easy to store, but almost impossible to dispose of. Internet surveillance and tracking has come to a point where users have been so trained to expect that they are being “watched,” that even when a wide spread surveillance is revealed there is little public demand for change. This isn’t necessarily because of the users trust in the American government, rather us, users, have been taught that this is the way in which the Internet works. This is not the say that there are not benefits to advertising as the web is able to stay open to everyone, users are able to “try before they buy,” and the choice to utilize social media is within reach. In addition, advertising creates incentives to produce and share content that generated more engagement. However, the acceptance that the government and businesses are able to simply track the habits of users and create content to direct towards them is rather questionable.

I think the most important qualities for a social media consultant to have is knowledge on current social media trends, an understanding of analytics, and knowledge on social media tools. I think knowledge on social media trends is important because being able to stay up to date with trends can allow for growth within one's social media presence. In addition, being able to understand analytics can help track progress and make adjustments as needed. There are lots of resources out there to help track social media activity, and being able to have an understanding of how to utilize them can help a consultant make changes in their approach if needed. Furthermore, an in depth knowledge on social media tools can help ensure that the social media channels are performing at their best.

If I was acting as a social media consultant to myself, I would create a schedule to assist in posting consistently on social media. It would also allow me to plan my posts in advance so I have content ready. I would also brainstorm a vision for myself in terms of what I want my presence to look like so I can create goals accordingly. Like the Hootsuite Chapter mentioned, it's important to set strategic goals or SMART goals. SMART goals allows measuring the success of social media to be straightforward.  I personally have not spent much time improving my professional social media presence, however in the future I can create overarching goals for myself and then create SMART goals to help me be successful.

There's no question that private companies and public service providers benefit from big data and algorithms. It provides them with developed data analytics that can be used to identify new trends, target the perfect niche customer, and innovate products. Organizations are able to adapt to changes and stay ahead of the competition by receiving an inflow of "real-time" information. However, there are some serious dangers that can come from the use and/or abuse of big data and algorithms. Big data and algorithms allow for your online activity to be tracked and sometimes the line can become fuzzy in terms of how much a company can know about your online habits. Privacy issues can also arise in terms of who owns the data that is collected about you and who the data be shared with. In the Social Dilemma documentary, it discussed how apps and social media are designed similarly to a slot machine. This urge to constantly check for notifications results in the constant need to check your phone, which leads to hours spent clicking and scrolling. This is very damaging for one's health as it can lead to a social media addiction which makes it hard for a person to go prolonged periods without checking social media.

On a personal and professional level, I think it's important to be aware of how the algorithm works and know that majority of the content that you are viewing is being perfectly curated for you based on your previous online habits. I think it's necessary to do your own research outside of what is just shown on your feed and make sure to fact check sources rather than blindly believing it. In addition, it's important to develop healthy social media habits to protect yourself from the harmful effects of overconsumption of social media. On a societal level, it's vital to demand data privacy and more humane designs for social media that takes into consideration the user's experience and well-being.

As I clicked on the screen time section in settings to complete the first part of the experiment, I wasn't necessarily shocked to see my social media usage to be around 3 hours during the day. Theoretically, it could have been worse, however there was still room for improvement.

For part two of the experiment, I chose to be more intentional when using social media by making a conscious decision to not use social media when I had free moments during the day, in the morning, and a few hours before I planned to go to bed. On a regular basis, I often find myself scrolling on TikTok when I'm procrastinating finishing an assignment. Other times, I'm checking Instagram when I have downtime at work even though I could be doing something more productive with my time such as getting ahead on a different project. Limiting my social media usage was not easy and I had to remind myself several times throughout the day to not immediately click on a social media app, but it was rewarding experience.

As I went through the motions of the day, I realized that I was truly more at ease and relaxed since I wasn't constantly picking up my phone to consume media. Especially in the morning and before I went to bed, my mind was calmer and less stimulated. This experiment gave me the opportunity to reflect on how an excess of social media usage often leaves me feeling really mentally drained and tired. This is not to say that I think using social media is bad. Social media allows us to connect with others, stay up to date on current events, learn about others, and so much more. However, sometimes our minds need a little break to recharge and thrive on their own.

I feel like a significant amount of people perceive social media as bad and maybe even detrimental, but I think there are a lot of great parts of it. I enjoy being able to connect with the people in my life that I don't get to see everyday and get creative inspiration from pictures or videos that people post. However, I think it's important to consume social media in moderation. It can be easy to get caught up in the lives of others and compare their lives to yours. For the most part, social media is a highlight of the best parts of people's lives. It's not the full story.

For as long as I can remember, I've always had the Internet available to me during my day to day life, so it's hard to imagine what it would be like without it. I definitely think there are benefits to being able to have access to endless amounts information at your fingertips. On the other hand, it's easy to waste an immense amount of time on the Internet. Time that I could be using in more productive ways. When I traveled to Spain in 2019 and Morocco in 2022, I didn't have internet during the day since I wasn't on any international cellular plan and oftentimes the WiFi wasn't super reliable at the Airbnbs. I feel like this experience wasn't that drastic since I was vacation and sightseeing all day, but it was strange not being able to do anything on my phone throughout the day. It was honestly kind of refreshing.

One goal I have for myself in effort to be more intentional about technology use is to work on not aimlessly scrolling. I don't think there's anything wrong with scrolling on Instagram or TikTok, but when I find myself constantly refreshing and scrolling for hours, I know there's something better I could be doing with my time.

Hi everyone! My name is Fatimah Khan and I'm a sophomore majoring in Public Health Education and minoring in Entrepreneurship. I’m very passionate about public health and hope to find a career working to minimize the health disparities among underrepresented communities. While unrelated, entrepreneurship is another passion of mine as I’ve been running my own home-based bakery business since 2019. The business was something that emerged unexpectedly following a marketing assignment I did in high school, and since then I have learned a lot about what it takes to run a business and the importance of maintaining balance while working from home and being your own boss. While I'm not positive I would like to run my business full time, I love to continue to learn and grow as an entrepreneur. 

Writing a blog is something that I've never done before and I hope to learn more about how to use it effectively when growing a business. One of the great things about blogging is having the opportunity to connect with others. I look forward to connecting with all of you and learning from each of your experiences!

One company that I believe is exemplary in regard to its use of social media is Duolingo. Duolingo is a language-learning app that has increased their social media following by utilizing their company's mascot, the Duolingo Owl. More recently, Duolingo created a TikTok account with the mascot being the center of it. By staying up to date with trends on TikTok, the brand has gained a massive following and increased users. One principle that Duolingo incorporates well that the book discusses is mass collaboration in order to create new opportunities. Duolingo does this effectively by making TikToks that engages with company employees and customers.