OTM #3 - 1957 Fidel Castro & Cuba

There were several rumors about Fidel Castro being dead for a long time. To be honest, I don't know a whole lot about this subject other than what I heard on the On the Media audio recording the week of Nov, 23rd. But what I did find was that the press censored a lot of papers including information about what was actually happening in Cuba, and we were wrong about a lot of things that we thought. What they revealed in this segment was that many important and key factor specifics from these stories were actually clipped right out of articles before they were sent out to the US and other places. A lot of effort was put into the hiding of these secrets. The thing that never ceases to surprise me about these things though, is how surprised other people are at the skewed stories that we get from newspapers, politicians, television, and more. Money runs the world. And without money, companies fail. That being said, stories are given that will keep audiences reading. Whether they are completely true, or skewed is not as of an importance as just if it will keep people reading and interested. If people aren't intrigued to read or watch stories, they won't keep reading or watching. If this happens, advertisements won't be seen, funding will go down, and companies will fail. This is what leads to agenda setting, that we talk about in The Agenda Setting Theory. This is the theory that media sets the agenda for us, and we kind of just take whatever they give us. This is a big problem because the places we are relying on for our information, are not always accurate. For example, everyone that led us to believe that Castro was dead. Well the thing is, that most of those stories and news providers may have not even known that they were giving out false information, because it was already skewed and things had been removed from information before it even got to the producers! There's a lot of problems that can be caused by this, but one thing we can do to help that is to just become more aware of what is happening and become knowledgeable about the Agenda Setting Theory.

Facebook Ad - Extra Credit

Facebook & Google Campaigns

This semester, I focused in on a campaign for the company I work for, which is Red Rock Property Management. Our primary focuses were Google and Facebook, but mostly Google. A very large portion of our clients find us on Google, and we rely heavily on those Google reviews to send those clients our way. Throughout the course of this semester, I was able to increase our google reviews as well as our Facebook presence, likes, and reviews. My mission was to increase the amount of leads generated from our Facebook page, and I was really pleased that we actually did do this! We got several tenant leads and a couple of owner leads that I was able to convert to clients. 

My campaign plan consisted of three major steps. First, I started posting more to our page, and tried doing one post a day, but some weeks I only got a few posts in per week. This increased our Facebook page exposure and did allow more people to find us. Unfortunately, there isn't a way to track the clicks from our Facebook page to our website right now, and so I don't know exactly how many leads came from Facebook. But I do know that we got more messages over direct message in Facebook, so that worked out well. 

The next step of my campaign was to get our page verified. Unfortunately, we bought a new office space right before Halloween and ended up moving and having to change our address. This made things a lot more difficult in getting our page verified, because the change for Facebook was taking forever! It is still a work in progress, but we are getting closer. 

The last step of my campaign was to run a reviews campaign to increase our Facebook and Google reviews amount. This campaign was a little different than the previous campaigns that we've run, where we typically have a gift card giveaway after drawing a name from all of those that left us reviews. For this campaign, our team just changed the way that we respond to reviews. When we get positive feedback, we now encourage people to share their experience with us on Facebook or Google, and it has really helped us to get more reviews just in this last quarter. 

Overall, it was a successful campaign! I was satisfied with the outcome and where we are at today. We hope to just keep pushing forward to gain even more exposure within the community and continue building a positive reputation based on exceptional customer service.