Free stuff

Remember back to the first day of class, when I mentioned that Getty Images has free stock photos? Here’s one:

Embed from Getty Images

 

If I was writing a post about surfing, this might be perfect. Maybe I’m writing about mid-life crises. Maybe about vacations. Who knows. The point is that visual images make a big difference in blog posts, so find something and add it.

What about this one? “Bearded hipster rides blow up toy into pool”.

Embed from Getty Images

 

Surely we can think of something catchy to write about.

Here’s a photo from Unsplash:

Photo by Trust “Tru” Katsande on Unsplash

Just look at that one – it’s a musician in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe. I can think of at least 5 potential blog posts that could realistically include a photo like this one.

I hope these photos might spark some ideas of your own. Have some fun with your posts, and remember what a picture is worth.

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How Is That Even Possible? A Story of Student Loan Debt Accruement.

My journey of student loan debt accruement has been a long and difficult one. Beginning in 2005, I attended a school that pandered to the little 18-year-old me, by telling me I could graduate before all of my friends, breaking into the corporate world and making tons of money.

By the end of my 12-month program, I was about $30,000 in debt. I tried making justifications by saying things like “but it included my housing, materials, and books.” The truth is, I really didn’t do the research of what a typical degree costs. I was not aware that it was possible to get an entire bachelor’s degree for the cost of what was only considered a “diploma” at the school I attended.

Fast-forwarding to the year 2013 when I went back to school to begin my associate’s degree in photography. The job I was working at during this time, was not paying me well enough to live on the little amount that my paychecks were. I took the maximum amount I was allowed to of student loans out each semester. Luckily, that money made living on a little wage, possible. I graduated in the year 2016 with my Associate of Arts Degree in Photography.

I began my education at Metropolitan State University later that fall. I received an invaluable amount of information and knowledge from most of my professors, who many of which, worked and continue to work in the field they teach. By the end of my degree, I will be over $50,000 in debt.

The student loan company that services my loans, seems to think I can afford payments of over $600 a month. HOW IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE?

 

The Role of A.I. in Social Media

As we progress further into the technological age we are seeing inventions and innovations that are used for good and bad. Arguably one of the more prevalent topics of discussion on a daily basis is social media. The idea was to create a resource where communities can come together to share experiences, thoughts, and feelings, it has evolved into a source for advertisements where our feeds are being flooded with promotional information. As we have evolved so has the technology to the point where we have algorithms that target individuals based on their search history, likes, location among other methods.

Now we are seeing a new method to target individuals via social media, utilizing artificial intelligence. According to (Ghosh, 2018) this technology which is in the early stages is just starting to unveil and dominate the realm of social media. The more and more I think about this the scarier it is to potential this has to advance marketing in a social media construct. This article goes on to describe some of the potential pros and cons that can come from a technology of this caliber. As we progress further into the technology age.

 

References

Ghosh, D. (2018, March 26). Beware of A.I. in Social Media Advertising. Retrieved from New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/26/opinion/ai-social-media-advertising.html

Student Loan Forgiveness

Blog #1

I am taking Communicating with New Media class to innovate my self-knowledge, self-awareness and behavior. I satisfy that all students invest their time and effort in attaining high level education from an instructor who is extraordinarily supportive and encouraging. They are actively participating in the class activities. Our professor, holds a Ph.D and has excellent skills and experiences to deliver course to the class. He also has high expectation and compassion for his students.

All students are trained to conduct campaign/advocacy activities by utilizing social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter and writing blogs in which they will share and upload their perception and beliefs to the public. They are also taught to better contribute and engage with the public and become problem solvers for the betterment of society and for social change. For example, we have a work on student loan debt and this campaign will help student loans to be forgiven.

The government also offers a program called, Public Service Loan Forgiveness, but for students to be eligible, the must be repaying their loans for 10 years or 120 months. In addition, students must be working for a qualified organization such as government entity, public organizations or in the non-profit sector. On this circumstance, lawmakers must take action with the public input to pass a bill that makes the accommodation of student loan forgiveness.  
Sources:

https://www.studentdebtrelief.us/forgiveness/obama-student-loan-forgiveness/

Applying SMART to Develop Student Against Loan And Debt (SALAD)

Blog #2

SMART is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time Oriented. This is a significant tool that we can apply them to establish our project goal, outcome, output and input toward our specific advocacy. While they provide a guide to any project/campaign, for example “Student Against Loan and Debt (SALAD),” they accomplish business success and the pursuit of happiness. It means that they also help make possible changes we deliberately expect from our society change.

Likewise, they attempt to answer questions and describe our framework to support our goal, what we are going to implement. Let me get specific. They will answer various questions for instance, what are we going to accomplish for our advocacy? How will we get our project to meet our expectation? Do we have the knowledge or capability to get our job done by our deadline? Does our outcome or output align with our campaign (SALAD) implement plan? And when will it be done? Can it be potentially done by the end of June 2018?

These questions above serve to make sure we make social change to support our connection with lawmakers and potential audiences. They believe that legislative reducing the impact of student load debt is extremely important. 
Sources:
https://hr.wayne.edu/leads/phase1/smart-objectives
https://www.briantracy.com/blog/business-success/business-success-smart-goals-frugal-living/

Theory of Change Promotes the Social Change Activities

As I refer to from the Thursday, May 17 class, I moderately realized that the theory of change can help reach our advocacy and campaign to make policies change to better support the citizenship process or higher education/student loan debt. This model provides comprehensive steps that need to be done before reaching out to the audience, policy makers and local public, with proper social media channel.

The plan should begin with goal and impact, what we want to accomplish is to support our issues. For instance, we want to see more people take/pass the citizenship test, advocate and campaign for the citizenship process. The second step is outcome (behavior), what we want policy makers and the public to know is to support our current effort. The third step is output, that our audience should believe that the current system is not working well to align with the customers or client’s situation. The system isn’t solving or assisting the public, immigrants or students.  It is required to be changed.

After we have our goal, outcome and output, we will begin our communication plan and activity. The social media platforms will essentially provide online presence where we will circulate to describe our current process to our audience through links on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. In addition, we can administer to hold public events, create a competitive student and immigrants related issues and print out visual aids to our intended audience.

To make our campaign more success we should follow social marketing public relations steps to create a comprehensive awareness for our advocacy/champaign. This link offers more knowledge and perspective to communicate with our main audience. They are understanding your current scenario, establish your goals that showed above, define our audience, choose communication tactic and channels, determine measure and evaluation, and prepare for budget for the whole champaign.

Source:

http://www.prnewsonline.com/comprehensive-pr-plan

Kifahs Blog #1 Post!

According to Scott, D. M. before there was a lot of web use for marketing and advertisement there was two options that organizations used to attract there consumers. Organizations either used expensive ads that were sent to third parties to send out to the public and the other options was by putting ads on TV. I like the idea of sending out my own advertisement because I don’t trust anyone outside my organization but my consumers. Being that it takes even more time to send out the reports and you’re giving valuable information over to a third party is really risky in my opinion. Journalists or editors could twist your words and then you would have to fix there mess and I personally don’t want to have to deal with that. I and my PR team would get everything settled and sent out to the public. So I don’t really like the old rules but I do understand some companies are still using this and I have respect for peoples strategies and ways of doing PR but in all honesty the number one thing should be how the organizations themselves are going to attract not only there consumers but also to potential new consumers. Having only the Public Relations Specialists working on the campaign would create more jobs because than at the organizations they would have editors at their jobs so that they don’t have an editor from the outside to look are there personal organizational information’s. They could still send some stuff to journalists but not all and the organizations should be selective of what information they want to share with the journalists. Not all Journalists are bad, I just don’t trust them with having so much of the information of my organizational plans and ideas on how to get my consumers to keep buying my stuff and also ideas on how I will attract new consumers. That’s my job being a PR to have beneficial relationships with my consumers. There my consumers so therefore they should hear majority of my campaign and ideas from me and not from a third party. It expensive and time consuming so no I don’t want that and I believe that my future job working at and organization would have either somewhat or all tactics that I have.

References

Scott, D. M. (2017). New Rules of Marketing & PR. Hoboken, NJ: International Bestseller.

Social Media Help Better our Society

Social Media is a powerful tool that enables corporations, organizations, the government and consumers to share their insight, and comment to how to make our society better. It also helps link us up with one another and builds strong relationships between corporations and consumers. According to the Mainwaring, “the social media revolution is transforming the way business is conducted (2011). It gives the public a reliable platform to exchange information, and brings everyone into the conversation.

As we learned from the first class of MDST 485, social media could help to deliver newsworthy messages to manipulate people and enhances our targeted audience’s knowledge, attitude and behavior with different channels, including blogs, facebook, youtube and twitter. They will carry out direct information to the audiences with images, reliable links, movies and concise message.

Every organization and corporation utilizes as many of the social media platforms as they can so that they create awareness and provide information of the products and services. They help expand communication and gather the voice of the consumer. They are easily linked to one another while publishing for the public. For example, Minnesota Children’s Museum has organized an annual 21+ fundraiser that will happen on Sat. May 19, 2018 at 9-11:30 pm. They created a colorful poster, it’s shared on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. They will get responses though likes, shares and comments.

Social media can make possible changes within corporations while sharing information to its public. It can help reduce the cost because a message should not be sent via U.S mail or mass media, for instance media outlets.

~ Kawlahay Zan

First assignment/request; write something

I’m sorry that I was late to class. I need to know this stuff but because of privacy concerns I do not have an online presence. Good to meet you!

Terry A. Trobaugh

Counting Down the Days!

This semester at Metropolitan State University proves to be the most challenging one yet. PR Writing and Communicating with New Media are the last two classes necessary for me to graduate, which I’m sure one can imagine, means I’m just about burnt out. Here’s to hoping that these classes will complement one another without bringing me to the breaking point.