On October 18, as part of the series of workshops about marketing following his first lecture “I’m Media”, Mr Sungjin Hwang, an expert in digital marketing, shared with us specific knowledge in this field as well as solutions for the improvement of the World Reporters’ online activities. In a friendly manner our mentor, Mr Hwang, taught us interesting and practical lessons about the proper use of SNS. After three sessions, we became more aware of the different ways to take full advantage of social media.
During the first session, we talked about WHY we keep doing this project. As Mr Sungjin Hwang said, before starting anything, we have to thoroughly understand our reasoning behind the initiative, so that we do not easily give up on it. If we consider it as a duty, we will find hardly find any interest or meaning to it, therefore our motivation won't last long. In other words, the driving force behind any of our actions should be strong enough in order for it to go a long way forward. As a result, he suggested us to find something new to enjoy in the project besides the things we have already been doing so far. “Together we can make a change in the world”, creating good personal brand value is such a great way to push up a project’s value. By managing our online image, we can make a contribution to the World Reporters project in a both easy and efficient way. Imagine that it takes us only 3 to 5 minutes to share or talk about World Reporters on our personal SNS account, but the attention paid to the project is going to be 3 to 5 times bigger. And the best thing is, it would improve our overall attitude toward the project if we consider it our daily task without adding any pressure to it.
After a short break, we continued with the second session about specific SNS use methods. Mr Sungjing Hwang reminded us of the “Social network theory” introduced by sociologist Mark Granovetter. He emphasized the importance of “weak ties”, saying that almost all turning points in our lives come from weak ties relationships. In the current media century, it becomes easier and easier to enable this kind of weak ties via social networking. Therefore, unlike in the past, nowadays rather than asking “Whom do I know?”, the question “Who knows me?” is much more important, he affirmed. While using SNS, our personal network is naturally extended, so what we post or how we react to certain things online generates an effect bigger than our imagination.
To elaborate on that, he recommended us sharing our personal experience via social platforms. In relation to this, he shared a number of stories along with the lessons behind them. Some people consider using SNS as a way to make friends online and later meet them in real life, which is called O2O (online to offline), as Mr Sungjin Hwang explained; some are not familiar with SNS because of their educational or living environment; some prefer just browsing rather than really using it; while others even find jobs through SNS groups. Provided with this explanation, we realized what a considerable part of our lives does the SNS take. However, we should not overlook its downsides as well. We agreed that the biggest weakness of SNS is that having once started using it, people unintentionally spent too much time immersed in it.
So, the question of “How to use SNS effectively?” arises. Again by the method of storytelling, our lecturer directed us to the way of efficient SNS use. The first step of that path is to make your goals clear. There are hundreds of reasons people are using SNS, but it might turn out to be a pure waste of time if you don’t even know what you use it for. Instead of spending hours scrolling by thousands of posts with nothing to stay on your mind, you should define clear purposes, allowing SNS to become of a great assistance to both your professional and personal life. Second comes the right choice of an SNS suitable for your needs. There are plenty of social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. You don’t have to use everything but considering various conditions such as living area, personal preferences or purpose of use, is important. Each SNS has its own specific characteristics and features. For example, Instagram holds the great power of using hashtags as searching tools, while no other channel can be compared with Facebook in the terms of worldwide connections and communications. Finally, you need to understand your SNS channels in depth in order to use them in the most effective way. Facebook has the function of listing, so that it combines your friends or liked pages into one newsfeed. This simple categorization helps Facebook users optimize the time spent on the app. According to Mr Hwang, thoroughly understanding how certain channels work means that you can make the most out of their functions.
During the last session, we discussed ways to improve World Reporters’ online activities. To begin with, he explained the so-called “1:9:90” principle of the Internet, which refers to the percentage of different types of SNS users, and their characteristics. Among internet citizens, 90% are viewers – people who keep observing and rarely raise their voices and 9% are followers who actively react to everything with likes and comments. The remaining 1% can be referred to with various names such as speakers, writers, or creators. They are the “big mouth” since they create most of the content circulating online. He emphasized the idea that our World Reporters project should belong to that 1%. To help us achieve that goal, he pointed out different aspects we should focus on such as target audience, content, multilingualism, media channels and sharing system. These remarks will definitely bring a great change to our working ways as well as the look of our channels.
Thanks to our mentor, Mr Sungjin Hwang, and his workshop, this time we did not only open our eyes to the different ways in which SNS works but also found out how to utilize its use. In the future, we plan to undertake specific changes with the aim of bringing to you diverse and useful information in the most effective and interesting way. Don't forget to follow/subscribe to our channels for more updates!
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