Capstone Progressions

     As I delve deeper and deeper into my Capstone Project, I am actually becoming rather excited to start putting things together.  After establishing a basic idea for my project, I asked Dr. Matt Kushin to be my mentor because he has the experience with social media that I need.  After meeting two separate times, we determined a much more specific project.  This project will include most of the original ideas that I had, but is a bit more clear and defined.  Dr. Kushin and I decided that my first step for the social media campaign in which I will be developing should be to spend several weeks doing research to understand the concepts behind successful social media, specifically for a small recruiting firm.  By doing this research and creating a well thought out and established plan, I will be better prepared to launch a successful social media campaign for my company.  After I have completed my research and created a plan, I can start implementing it.  Dr. Kushin and I initially broke my project into two sections.  For the first month, I will be completing my research and developing my plan.  Then, during the second month,  I will actually be utilizing my plan and creating the content and using social media.
     Another issue that Dr. Kushin and I came to a conclusion on dealt with my project being somewhat too broad.  Although my job requires me to maintain a website, LinkedIn page, Facebook page, and Twitter page, we decided that the research I conduct should focus on figuring out which form of the social media will be the most beneficial to the company.  Thus, when I actually put the plan into action, I can focus on one source of social media and use the other two forms as just two more outlets for similar content.  Also, we determined that maintaining a blog on the website may be useful.  Since I am not an expert in the field of recruiting, I can work closely with my boss to develop a by-monthly (at least to start) blog that can give our audience helpful tips about finding a job, such as refreshing their resumes or having a successful interview.  Along with some other ideas, like creating a logo, mission statement, letterhead, business cards, and other miscellaneous things, I have completely finalized my project.  To wrap all this up, in the past week I determined my specific project and my deliverables I will be able to present.

Example of following thousands of people on Twitter

     Finally, after organizing all of my ideas, I began some brief research of other companies uses of social media.  Thus far I have found that there are many recruiting firms that appear to be doing very successful on social media.  One trend I noticed is that recruiting firms use Twitter by following thousands of people.  In return, though, they have thousands of followers.  Because I am not completely sold on this idea, I need to do more research to find out it's effectiveness.  Another trend I found is posting short blog posts or articles about human resources.  I need to remember to always give my audience something important to read or they may not read it.  Lastly, I noticed that these types of companies are updating once, twice, or maybe even three times a day with open positions.  This is a place that I would like my company's social media to get to one day.  Overall, I need to do much more in-depth research to discover the proper strategies to use for successful social media.