Facebook Campaign: Objective 7 Self Evaluation

This opportunity to create a self-promotion page on Facebook has given me more confidence in my ability to showcase my sports broadcasting skills, but I am in no way satisfied with how many people I reached.  There is a lot of room  for improvement there especially when it comes to attract potential employers. If I were to do it differently I would cross-promote with Twitter, SoundCloud to get more sports fans attention, and I would reach out more to potential employers with LinkedIn. I also would have planned to make more audio recordings to showcase what I would sound like on the radio or on a sports podcast. Doing that would have showcased more of my ability to operate as a sports talk radio personality.

Facebook Campaign: Objective 6

I have tried a bunch of different things to improve my post reach and engagement. None of the tactics I used significantly improved the engagement on my posts, but as far as my post reach is concerned I found that if I shared each of my posts on my own timeline they reached more people. After the first month I started focusing in on gaining fans because I couldn't figure out how to attract potential employers to my page. After focusing in on sports fans I began cross-promoting with soundcloud.com and I've seen my likes steadily increase there, but no significant change on FB.

Facebook Campaign Objective 5

I started out mostly making and posting videos, but other than on the first one I wasn't getting much engagement so I started posting pictures instead. I discovered that by sharing each post on my own timeline my posts reached more people.  I also tried making audio recordings and posting them. I still didn't get much engagement on the audio recording posts on Facebook, but on my SoundCloud account the likes have steadily increased with each recording.

Facebook Campaign: Objective 4

With my Facebook campaign I planned to get my feet wet in promoting myself as a sports talk radio personality. I intended to post at least twice a week, but most often I only was able to post content once a week. My original goal was to attract the attention of potential employers fans. I have not heard from any potential employers as of yet, but I have gained a small following from this by sports fans.

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Facebook campaign insights

Recognizing Default Responses

As I read through my On The Media blog posts I noticed that I have a positive default response about anything that I can personally relate to whereas my default response to things that I can't relate to is to disregard them. Disregarding them usually comes in one of two forms. One is I don't believe it's true or two I  acknowledge it's true but it's not that important.
All three of my OTM posts were about topics that care about. For example, I chose to write about media portrayal of millennials because I identify as one and I agree that there are too many negative stereotypes about millennials in the media. I chose to write about the poverty tour for a couple of reasons. First is because I have been homeless before. It wasn't for very long and luckily I still was able to live in motel at the time with a roof over my head, but I was homeless nonetheless. I did not experience the same things that the poor Ohioans they focused on in the OTM story experienced, but being homeless for a short period of time has enabled me to have more empathy for anyone in that situation. Second is I'm taking a sociology class and I much more informed about society's role in perpetuating the unfortunate situations that poor people are living in. I chose to write about ISIS' weakened state because I'm passionate about America and our allies defeating terrorist organizations including ISIS.
There were many others I could have written about, but chose not to because I could not relate to them. For example in September I could have written about the OTM story on safe places on college campuses. One reason I didn't is because I never had to think about the need for safe places. I am a white, straight, Mormon male in southern Utah. Why would I ever feel that I needed a place to go to feel safe talking about my experiences? Everywhere I look is a safe place for me. Because of that I didn't feel the need to step outside myself to find the merits of other people living here having that safe place to go to and talk about their experiences on DSU's campus.
I have made an effort to change and be more empathetic of others that may or may not be in very different situations than me because of their race, gender, sexuality, religious beliefs or lack thereof, or whatever context it may be. One of the ways I am doing that is by taking more time to consider things that I see on social media or hear and see on the news before I form an opinion about it. For example I initially had a negative attitudinal response to Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the playing of the national anthem. I thought it was totally disrespectful and as a result I decided to lose respect for his character. Then as I took the time to consider his cause and how he was going about promoting it, my respect for him and what he was doing grew. I no longer make any negative judgment about Kaepernick or the Black Lives Matter movement. I disagree with kneeling during the anthem, but I am tolerant and respectful of those that choose to do so. And I am respectful of any peaceful form of protest regarding our country's handling of social issues.
Before this semester I would have disregarded Kaepernick and black people's cause and their peaceful forms of protest because I could not relate to it. Now I admire the actions he and others have taken and I am much more tolerant and respectful of them. I hope to continue to change for the better in that regard.

WI: Syria and Immagration

For this Well Informed post I decided to do a search on Facebook instead of google to see what I would find on a social media platform about Syria and immigration. Before I started the search I guessed that I would find a lot of posts about ISIS and terrorism, however when I typed "Syria immigration" in the Facebook search box I mostly found reports about politicians' and political comentators' reaction to mass immigration from Syria. 

Seriously though I shouldn't be all that surprised about the search results. Given that we are in the middle of election season here in the US if you search for anything controversial, be it on google or social media, you will probably find that the majority of links, like this one, are about something a politician said on the topic or some kind of political commentary. Honestly, I don't think that is the best thing for Americans that are trying to be well informed. We would be much better served if when we searched these topics, more links were dedicated to investigative journalism pieces or feature stories like this. For example Americans would be much more well informed about Syria and immigration if the stories we searched for tell us more facts about the refugees and their reasons for immigrating, instead of political rhetoric about why we should or shouldn't accept Syrian refugees into our country. This is simply another example the politics of a situation taking precedence over the substance of it in social media.

OTM 3: Collapse of ISIS propaganda machine

Bob Garfield interviewed Charlie Winter a researcher at the International Center for the study of radicalization and political violence about the recent decline of ISIS propaganda. Winter claims that ISIS propaganda is declining and that the decline can be contributed to a couple of things. First social media sites are being more vigilant at identifying accounts that may be linked to terrorists and/or ISIS and shutting them down. Second the US military has successfully killed or captured much of ISIS' leadership in the past year this has caused disarray in ISIS.
My thoughts as I listened to this is if ISIS is weakening, then why is there still so much debate on how to defeat them? It seems to me like our strategy of cutting them off on social media and targeted drone attacks is working. The memory of 9/11 and the psychological context of the entire "war on terror" might be what is driving that feeling that we aren't doing enough to defeat ISIS and/or that what we are doing isn't working. It could just be Trump constantly talking about ISIS that is causing the misperception. In my opinion both the memory of 9/11 and the recent ISIS attacks as well as Trump's nonstop rhetoric evoke a psychological response within us that makes us feel like whatever we do to combat terrorist organizations is not enough. The fear of the next attack makes us disregard whatever real progress we are making in this fight against terrorism.

OTM 2: The Poverty Tour

Brooke Gladstone went on a poverty tour in Ohio and interviewed welfare advocate Jack Frech. Frech suggests that the poverty crisis in America has less to do with liberal or conservative politics and more to do with the American popluation that does not want to change their mind about poor people. For so long many people including myself have been indoctrinated in the idea that poor people are poor because they are lazy or stupid. If they only were willing to work hard or if only they were capable of making smarter decisions they wouldn't be poor. Frech says this those are the misperceptions that Americans deal in all the time when it comes to poor people.
I am taking a sociology class this semester and in that class we talk about what things in our society are contributing influences to human behavior. This OTM illuminated the social context in which Frech and Gladstone were speaking about America's poverty problem. If we're seeing the poor as products of their own poor choices or as products of their unintelligence than we're not seeing a bigger problem which is the lack of support these the poor receives in our country. The true solution to this problem will be found after we as an American society understand that it may not be the poor that need to change as much as the wealthier middle and upper class does.

WI: Politics and Campaigning

For this Politics and Campaigning post I decided to focus on online campaigning. In my research I was directed to an article from the guardian called Avaaz: can online campaigning reinvent politics. The article focuses on Avaaz an online campaigning site and how effecitive it has been in influencing international politics. Avaaz creates petitions to protest various global issues and gets as many people as they can to sign them. Basically getting a petition considered by world governments is a numbers game. For example in the UK there's a law that says Parliament will respond to every petition that meets or exceeds 100,000 signatures. In the U.S. it only takes 25,000 signatures. Avaaz takes knows these laws so they pick an issue to tackle and they work on gathering the required amout of signatures to get these governments' attention.

There are many who say petitions don't really make much of difference in politics and that Avaaz produces nothing more than clicktivism. However activist Noami Colvin said "An Azaaz petition at the right time does swing the balance on a lot of issues." This happened in cases of the Bradley Manning support network and the Occupy movement.

These online campaigns really do seem to have their place and they provide a convenient way to get involved in world politics. I feel like it fits in well with today's age where narcotizing disfunction runs rampant. Avaaz makes activism just as easy and clicking like on Facebook or using a hashtag to promote a cause. And since they have made a difference in many cases I think they do a have significant role to play in the future of politics. 

WI: Learning and thinking

The video post on the class blog brought to light some interesting issues the current education system. One that I thought was particularly interesting was how they compared American K-12 education to a factory, training students to fit a certain mold and punishing those that don't fit. While I don't completely agree with that, I do see that many students that need more help than the current system offers. There is definitely a need for more non-linear learning methods if you will. I really liked the Knewton software that they talked about in the video. It basically designs a ciriculum for each individual, instead of asking every student to conform to learning the same material at the same pace.
A Huffington post article from 2014 written by Sramana Mitra says that our system could benefit from teaching the principles of entrepreneurship more. I full-heartedly agree. Every student studying any subject would be much more prepared to enter the workforce if they not only understand their craft, but also understood the business of the industry they wish to enter. I would also argue that critical thinking is glaringly missing from American high school education. Teaching and compelling students to think critically about the subjects their learning would prepare students for college more than probably anything else. I know I would have benefited from it.

Sources:

• http://comm3480.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-future-of-learning.html
• http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sramana-mitra/the-future-of-education-1_b_4617335.html

OTM 1: Kids These Days

This week on On The Media they covered a variety of topics including one debunking the myth about millennials as cultural rebels. This topic really resonated with me because I am a millennial. There are many stereotypes about millennials that are not necessarily true. A few that they mentioned on OTM were millennials are killing the housing market because they'd rather not own a house, millennials are killing the napkin industry because paper towels better suit their lifestyle, and millennials are not buying cereal because they don't like to do dishes. When you examine these stereotypes closer you can definitely see that there is an attempt by news media to prompt people to understand the psyche of millenials. A news consumer hears that information and make a conclusion about the way millenials think based on what they heard. That kind of media framing lends itself to older generations negatively criticizing younger generations. This has been happening for decades we just happen to be living in a time where baby boomers are criticizing millenials. In past decades it was traditionalists criticizing generation x-ers.
There is a social impact as well. I have heard baby boomers carry on entire conversations about how millenials are destroying all the values they hold dear. And they do it because they just want to be rebels. Millennials have legitimate reasons for the decisions they make just like baby boomers have reasons for the decisions they make. Of course these baby boomers would never lump their grandchildren in with those destructive deviants. But those conversations negatively affect the way millennials are perceived in a social context. The narrative about millennials in the news media seems to be that millennials make life decisions based on how they feel in the moment and they hardly ever consider the long-term consequences for their decisions. So the social perception is that they don't buy houses because right now owning a home doesn't suit them. They would rather shy away from that commitment because that suits their lifestyle. That is simply not true there are reasons for millennials not owning homes for example many millenials can't afford a mortgage. And perhaps because of budgeting apps and other technologies they are being more cautious with their money.
These narratives have created a perceived culture that millennials reject everything that past generations built society on. That is simply not true. I am a millennial and I value many social institutions that many people believe millennials have rejected. For example I am married. I grew up wanting to make that commitment and when I moved away from my parents I got married. I know many other millennials in our community that have done the same thing. Another thing is my wife and I own our car. As soon as we could afford it we got a car loan and starting paying off our car. We do not own our home but we have been saving money and building our credit in an effort to become homeowners in the future. My wife and I are not alone in this, there is a countless number of millennials that value these same commitments and institutions.
If we are to continue judging people based on the generation they're born into,  I would propose that we consider other factors as well. For example narrowing our scope of judgement by saying millennials of a particular local culture value these things and behave this way. For example I have observed that millennial Utahns are the exception to many of these stereotypes. A large number of millennials from Utah marry in their early 20s or late teens and a large number are home and/or car owners or at least have that as their goal. You could narrow it down even further by considering millennials' religion and the culture built around that. For example mormon millennials in Utah. Because like millennials from Utah could behave differently from other millennials, mormon millenials also could behave differently from other millennials.

                                                                   Facebook campaign plan

Persona 1 is a radio station manager and/or executive looking for new on-air talent.
Persona 2 is a marketing executive looking for new talent to sponsor.
Persona 3 is a sports fan that enjoys talk radio.

For my Facebook campaign I wanted to promote myself as a talk radio personality. That is what I hope to be my future career and it is a goal I work towards on a regular basis. I plan to cross-promote through twitter as well. I hope to attract radio station managers and executives, as well as potential sponsors, and fans. I believe those three personas present the best financial opportunity for me. I plan to attract those personas by posting content on my page that demonstrates my ability to perform as a sports talk radio personality, and that asserts a social media presence that shows I can be successful in that role.