Social Media Campaign Reflection
For our social media campaign, my group decided on advocating against and raising awareness of harmful ingredients in pet foods, such as meat meals, meat by-products, preservatives, grains, and the careless inclusion of vitamins and supplements. We argued that including non-nutritious "filler" ingredients such as grains as well as the substances produced from rendering various "meats" was ultimately harmful to our canine and feline companions, and we hoped to introduce pet owners to various alternatives or means to protect their pets against the money-hungry companies that supply subpar pet food.
We utilized facebook, twitter, and pinterest for our campaign, where facebook served as our home base, twitter was for sharing links and providing info, and pinterest stored different cat and dog food recipes for our audience to make as an alternative to buying commercial pet food. I was in charge of the pinterest account, so I repinned different recipes and pins pertaining to cat or dog food, and I was also in charge of creating one of the two info graphics our group shared.
I created the first draft of our info graphic, which Dr. Haas suggested we split into two separate info graphics, and after we split it into two subjects, I focused my second info graphic on the topic of rendering in pet food and the different ingredients truly unfit for consumption that are prevalent in our pets' foods.
Just as my other group members, I contributed to creating ideas for our campaign, such as by helping to organize how we would spread out our campaign, what information we should cover for each day of the week, and the different "events" we tried to hold, such as Friday Date Night.
While we gained a decent amount of followers (70) on twitter and garnered a good amount of likes (27) on facebook, we had a difficult time getting our audience's (UCI students) attention and their participation in our poll and our events (such as sharing a photo of their dog with a meal they had created). If we had focused our attention on gaining more followers earlier in our campaign, I believe we could have been more successful in getting people to participate.
Though we linked to different articles talking about rendered ingredients and chemicals in pet foods, it may have been more effective if we took information from those articles as daily DID YOU KNOWs on twitter or facebook. Seeing that most of our audience had midterms during our campaign, I doubt many of them would have wanted to read lengthy, heavy articles detailing the horrors of pet food ingredients.
While it was not difficult to communicate with my group members, there were not many opportunities outside of class where we were all free to work on the campaign; as we had our own midterms to worry about, along with work and other responsibilities, it was difficult to dedicate a great amount of time to the campaign; as such, our posts were usually done sporadically throughout the day, so our campaign seemed to lack consistency.
We figured out early on that twitter would be beneficial for sharing links, while facebook could be made to link to our twitter articles and our pinterest boards to create awareness. Though we knew this, it was difficult to target our audience, and while we gained followers and likes, they usually were not our intended audience (UCI students).
Though we tried our best, we definitely learned that as organized as a plan can be, it may not play out as well in real life.
