Social Media Campaign

Not many people know what cryotherapy is. I created a short video to give people a general idea of what happens at Cool It. I uploaded this video on Cool It's YouTube channel, and then promoted it on Facebook. When I originally posted the video on Facebook, Jody Wright, the owner, agreed to do a giveaway. The contest was that everyone who shared the video post would have a chance to win one free cryotherapy session. After we had announced the winner of the contest, I changed the wording of the post to still attract the audience. Here's how it turned out:

It reached about 2,000 people organically, then I boosted the post after the contest was over. The second wave with the boost didn't do much. I still received 25 shares organically, which was awesome.

Here is the layout of the page. Right when I took over the page, I changed the profile picture and the cover photo. Jody wants his brand image to have a good balance of professionalism and "fun-loving". It's easy to tell this by the logo and name of the company itself. With this Facebook campaign, I want to reflect how he wants his image to be. I used a good mix of fun posts as well as some professional/educational posts about cryotherapy throughout the semester.

These were a couple examples of the old profile pictures Jody had up for his page. Definitely looks more professional with the logo now.

Advertisement 

1) I really wanted to utilize my advertisement to reach a new audience. I wanted to target more people who are into athletics. So, my ad was a DSU Men's Basketball ticket giveaway. With this, I was hoping to target some families in St. George who are interested in athletics, obviously targeting the mom and dad, and then some college students who might be active and interested in cryotherapy. Jody's primary personas are elderly couples, so I thought this could possibly open the door for some new clients. Here is the ad: 

2) I chose to boost one simple post. This post didn't target anyone specifically, other than people in the St. George area. I added a smiley face in the post to keep balance the professionalism with fun-loving, just like Jody wants his brand image to be. Simple, yet effective. Here is the ad:

Other Marketing

I sent an email to The Spectrum, hoping to get Jody's company in the local newspaper. Casie Forbes, a writer for the newspaper responded with the best news ever. She replied, "It's funny that you sent this email yesterday because we have a reporter who is at the Cool It Cryotherapy right now experiencing what they have to offer. We have a story planned for Sunday's edition of The Spectrum. If there's anything else I can do for you, please don't hesitate to ask." This was HUGE for Cool It. Jody received a ton of new clients from this feature in the newspaper. Nick, (the bald guy in the video I made), is one of Jody's best clients now and comes in almost every day. 

Steve Cook came to visit Cool It this semester as well. While I had nothing to do with getting him here for a cryo session, I made sure to take advantage of his visit and make a post with a link to his awesome video. Here is the post:

This didn't get much action as I would have liked. Though it reached 488 people, I it would have been cool to get more likes/shares. I think Steve Cook is a guy on the rise of fame, so people didn't recognize him or know who he was. The wording of the post could have appeared a little spammy as well. Nonetheless, I learned from it. 

Insights

I began my Facebook campaign with a page I created called The Baseball Motivation Team. I couldn't quite get this page going. I took over the Cool It page on February 11th, and all of my data will reflect this as the starting point. 

Likes:

In about two months, I was about to generate 41 page likes. This is a little disappointing, and I know I could have generated more. People just kind of randomly liked it throughout the semester. What I should've done is used the big posts I made that drove a lot of traffic to generate page likes. Instead, I asked for Shares in the contests/advertisements. I think if I included that you must like the page in order to win, that would have generated more likes. 

Reach:

Here, I started the date in December, to show Jody didn't really have much going on before I took over in February. You can see some of the ads I posted reached a ton of people. These are the random, huge jumps in reach. If I was more consistent with significant post through the entire semester, the reach would probably be a little more steady. Instead I had some random posts throughout the semester that didn't really get any likes or reach, so I ended up deleting a couple. I figured I would focus on having some really cool posts, boost them and blow them up, and use other smaller posts to try to keep users engaged. I am very pleased overall with the amount of people I was able to reach throughout the semester.

 Post Types:

Links really generated most of the data for us this semester. I provided links to the Steve Cook video, The Spectrum post, links to the Cool It website blog page, and multiple others. They were very effective in keeping viewers interested to see what's going on with the company. Photos were decently beneficial. I posted several photos throughout, but none of them were very significant. The one meme that we had generated most of the data for the photo's section. The status updates were okay too, but not really that important. Nobody really cared that we were "feeling refreshed" at Cool It Cryotherapy and massage. The videos used through this semester were linked through YouTube. Jody had posted some of his home videos before I took over. Linking the Cool It video with the YouTube channel also helped out Cool It's YouTube channel authority, and I was happy about that.   

People:

Surprising!! Most of Jody's clients are elderly couples. Most of the traffic on the Facebook was from middle aged women and men. My ads worked! I wanted to reach this target audience through a couple posts, and it seems to have worked out. I think it's also people there are a lot more moms on Facebook nowadays. And there aren't as many old people on Facebook. As you can see, most of the people who like the page are from St. George. That is good news, considering the business is in St. George. It's nice to see fans from around other areas too, including Vegas and SLC. I think it's important to continue to reach out to these people with an active lifestyle, who might want to stop at Cool It for a nice recovery session after a hike at Angel's Landing. A few of the posts throughout this semester definitely related to these active lifestyle-type people. 

Views:

The highest page views in a day was 26, pretty decent! I think about this time was when I invited about 15 of my friends to like the page. This probably caused that huge jump. April 7th was the day that I posted the video with the share contest, which caused a jump in page views as well; looks like about 17. I wasn't about to tell how many total views the page accumulated throughout the semester, but it's nice to see a little consistency with about 2-9 page views per day.  

Summary:

As you've seen throughout this blog post, I pretty much executed everything I wanted to do with this campaign plan. The video really was the highlight of the entire campaign, and I am really glad I followed through with that. I know it will do nothing but help Jody's business. Getting Jody in The Spectrum was huge! I cannot express that enough. He probably doubled his clients after that editorial came out. Steve Cook's video, where he featured Cool It in his daily routine, has 263,353 views on YouTube. That is just ridiculous! And totally helps out Jody's company with exposure. I increased traffic by targeting a newer audience with the DSU Basketball Ticket giveaway. I know that one of the three people who won the contest is now a client of Jody's. Cross-promoting the campaign through YouTube, and with The Spectrum pay it's dividends to Cool It.

Self-Reflection:

I think this was successful overall. I am pleased with the results, and especially how they impacted Jody's business. He has become a good friend of mine, and was a fun guy to work with all semester. There are a few things I would've done differently. I think I should have invested more time into making more meaningful posts, instead of having small, "filler" type posts that felt forced. While creating content is no easy task, if I was doing this for a job, I would focus on having 1-3 significant posts per week. While it's important to keep the brand image updated and keep viewers interested, if the posts suck, it looks bad on your company. It's important to draw the line between posting useless content, or posting meaningful content perhaps less frequently. In a perfect world, it would be ideal to have a meaningful post every single day, and that varies depending on what company you have. Nobody wants to hear me tell them to go try cryotherapy everyday when they don't even know what it is. With that being said, I should have created the promotional video earlier on in the semester. This would have engaged a larger audience from the very beginning. I would have had them "hooked" with the rest of my content. This was a fantastic learning experience, and I am already searching for jobs as a social media manager.  

-Jeremy Alderman

Automatic Attitudinal Response

The Automatic Attitudinal Response is a real issue I have come to find with myself. As I have just finished dissecting all of the information I have posted about throughout the semester on my blog, there have been several occasions where I found obvious barriers within my own thought. It’s really weird to think of actually, and it has definitely opened my eyes.

The example I would like to present is with my Racism 2.0 post. While I didn’t make a very good argument for myself to begin with, I found multiple barriers to my thinking. The argument I made in this post was basically explaining how “people aren’t as racist as we think” and that we perceive people more based on how they represent themselves (ie. “thugs”, “hippies”, etc.).

I wrote, “Self-presentation is probably more of an influential "quick-to-judge" feature than the color of someone's skin in today's society… We may be far past being an anti-racist society, which is likely an impossible Utopia, but we certainly have made strides in a more reasonable direction toward equality”.

I now see this entire post as a hidden assumption. When I first thought about writing about racism, the first thing that came across my mind was, “I’m not a racist”. I wrote my entire post on the hidden assumption that that is how I felt; that I believe all people are equal and racism doesn’t exist in my eyes. This was my perception growing up in a middle-class, white, Christian family in a small farming community. I expected everyone would have this same perception as me and I made my argument with the hidden assumption that this was the case. The truth is, because of how I was raised, ethnocentrism is a part of who I am. I went to high school with as many African-American kids as I can count on one hand. I know nothing about racism. I saw them as equal. They were treated like every other white kid in my school. It was part of the culture I grew up with and that yields my ethnocentric behavior and feelings about how I perceive my life; this making my post about racism entirely flawed.

 Another example throughout my writing was an automatic attitudinal response I had with my OTM- Zika Virus post. I wrote, ”Every time I see news of some sort of virus coming to America, it seems as though it is a blown out-of-proportion frenzy by the media to "warn" us;  just like Ebola. Once I saw that this was about yet another virus, I immediately stereotyped it, just like I'm sure others have. It's a taboo really; I know of zero people personally who had any sort of connection with Ebola, just as this is the first time I've even heard about the Zika Virus”.

I think in this situation I already recognized the automatic attitudinal response that I held. I judged the Zika Virus and was immediately skeptical when I first even saw the word “virus”. What made me think this? Why was I conditioned to think like this? I think the primary reason I was skeptical is obviously from the Ebola issue in America. But furthermore, I think it’s because I didn’t really think twice about it. What I mean by that is I was more skeptical of me ever getting the virus than the virus actually existing itself. From the egocentric culture I have been around my entire life, there was no way I could get the “Zika Virus”. I have been conditioned my entire life to not worry about anything like this; to the point where the virus seems fake to me. It is not surprising to me that I had this immediate reaction towards the Zika Virus, and I certainly recognize it now. 

Well Informed 2.0 Learning

"We are at the Death of Education Right Now"

The United States is behind in many categories. Education is a combination of all of the tools humanity has to offer. Math, science, art, literature, technology, and so on. It teaches us the value of responsibility from as early as age 5. Education is one of the most significant assets to any country; and the US simply can't stack up. 

"By 2100, more than half the world’s population will live in India, China, or Africa. Global policy leadership and sales of education goods and services will be shaped less by issues and needs in the U.S., and more by the issues and needs of Africa, South Asia, and China" (Cole, 2015) 

China will continue to be a world leader in education. But what's really interesting is how Africa will be affected in the future. It's no secret that Africa has been relying on foreign aid for quite some time now. Mission trips to build schools, finance children to go to school, and so on. How will this progress over the next hundred years? How will these technological advances in the world be able to influence places like Africa? 

The article, "The Flat World and Education: How America's Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future" by Linda Darling-Hammond had some significant points about the future of education. 

She states, 

"In the United States, our college participation rates have slipped from 1st in the world to 16th and only about one-third of our young people receive a college degree. At a time when high school dropouts are unlikely to be able to secure any job at all, our high school graduation rates—stuck at about 70%—have dropped from first in the world to the bottom half of individualized nations" (Darling-Hammond, 2012). 

She goes on to say, 

"Whether investments in better teaching, curriculum, and schooling will follow the press for new standards or whether standards build upon a foundation of continued inequality in education will simply certify student failure with greater certainty and reduce access to future education and employment" (Darling-Hammond, 2012). 

The main point of her argument is that if we do not change our "factory system" students will continue to fail at getting jobs, and in turn, succeeding in the future. 

I couldn't agree more. 

To read more, check out these links:

http://aasa.org/uploadedFiles/Publications/Journals/AASA_Journal_of_Scholarship_and_Practice/Summer2012_JSPFINAL_v2.pdf#page=33

http://www.fastcompany.com/3043387/sector-forecasting/5-big-ways-education-will-change-by-2020