Social Media Campaign
The Objectives
The SMC was a project that meant to advocate and raise awareness about a certain topic in animal science to the students at UC Irvine and the millennial generation in general. USing a variety of social media platforms, including Instagram, Twitter, and website builders such as Wix and Weebly. These posts would allow information to be provided to the audience in a efficient manner and quick to spread the message because of social media's prevalence in everyday life. The project was also aimed at being able able to write in different media contexts in orer to open our minds to different methods of communication.
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Our project focused on advocating the loss of bee colonies and how their dissappearance was starting to severly affect the economic and environmental aspects of the world industries all over the world, including the United States, much of South America, all the way to Eastern Asia.
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My Contributions
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Everyone in my group had roughly equal contributions and no one was a real leader of section because whenever one of us felt the need to lead something for the day of the campaign, we would all message each other and work something out for the entire day. I helped create the first few das of the seven day plan and helped my group come up with ideas to post about for the entire week. I also was in charge of the "About the CCD" and updated the information inside the tab. I also helped introduce the project presentation for the SMC PowerPoint Presentation. I also help kickstart the campaign by asking about thrity people I knew personally on my own social media and to follow my accounts and asked them to share the site on their own social media accounts as well.
Getting Started with the Campaign: 7 Day Plan
In order to begin the actual campaign, our group was required to create an outline of the posts that we were going to be posting for the entire week. We recorded the images and links that we were going to post on Twitter or Instagram and explain why we chose the pieces of information that we selected and what rhetorical forms of appeal were utilized. Each post cenetered around for the theme that we came up for the entire day. The first three days were focused on awareness while the remainder of the week was focused on taking action. To the right is an example of the plan that we created for one particular day. We also updated the outline onto our webbsite so that viewers could see our general outline.
Creating and Using the Social Media Platforms
The next important step was to create our social media websites. First, we created a website using the website creator Weebly. This was where we organized a more condensed version of all of our posts and plans in one place so that it was easy to see our way of thinking. and how we organized our important bulk of information. We then created our Twitter and Instagram accounts. So mainly posted images of visually appealing flowers and landscapes on our Instagram, which made us get a large following. Our twitter was mainly used for information and statistics or more logistical things because Twitter was a mroe appropriate platform for such things. On the left are pictures of our websites and accounts.
Bringing it Back to the Objectives
The posts on the Twitter an Instagram successfully fulfilled the objectives of this project. We had to modify our posts and texts in the posts accordingly to the nature of the website. We had to think creatively and condense our posts into something short but memorable. Thus, we fulfilled one part of the objectives, which was knowing how to compose texts in different media settings. We also managed to get our message across to UCI students because many of the universiy's official social media accounts for UCI Housing, UCI Libraries, and UCI Hospitality and Dining, as well as many other like-minded invidividuals who cared about saving the bee colonies.
