Social Media Project

Group Company Report

My group and I chose General Electric (GE) as company to investigate their use of social media.

Our group company report can be found here: http://ism3004.wikispaces.com/General+Electric 

Reflection on the project and what I have learned

Graphic 1: Social Media Examples

First, I was a little bit skeptical about the group project, as we did not have any influence on the groups. I have often gained bad experiences with respect to group work in this kind of format, as not an unessential number of people tend to free ride in some way. However, I have to admit that I was positively surprised by my group which turned out to be highly motivated and which wanted to finish the project as soon as possible. Apart from one group member who did not respond to our message at all and did not participate, everyone participated well and did a good job. Moreover, I thought that the way of communicating with my group members might not be convenient and easy. However, I have to admit again, that it turned out to be easier than expected as e-mail and especially the discussion board helped a lot to communicate and organize the work. Furthermore, it was not only a good way for sharing and collecting ideas, but also for giving immediate feedback.

The project itself was interesting as I did not know all these social media platforms before. I got to know many new ways of using the Social Media for advertisement and promotion purposes. I was surprised about the large number of Social Media channels being used by General Electric. However, sometimes it was hard to investigate if the company itself is responsible for the content on some of the websites (e.g. Flickr and Instagram) or if people unrelated to GE are responsible for it. One could just have an educated guess about it.

All in all, I learned many new ways of using the internet, especially the Social Media, for marketing. I got a good overview of social media channels being available and I got a feeling of how a company might or should promote itself on these platforms. Moreover, I enjoyed the group work and I learned how to use the discussion board to organize and manage the project effectively and efficiently. Finally, I learned how to use or set up a wiki as I have never done that before.

Graphic 1 by Nina Maria Scherl.