By Alma Cats
Hawk Communications was not originally on my fall semester schedule. During the summer of 2020, I took a deep dive into the Hawk Communications website and asked previous students of the class how the experience turned out. I got so many positive responses and decided I wanted to be a part of it. I added it to my schedule and the rest was history!
Now, looking back I am glad I made that last-minute decision to add the class because Hawk Communications was incredibly insightful and I’ve gained a lot of social media experience. I was lucky to be placed on two accounts: the Garden State Wine Growers Association and the Red Hawk Sports Network. The Garden State Wine Growers Association is a non-profit organization for New Jersey wineries, vineyards and associated businesses and they serve as an information repository for their members. For this account, I decided to be on the content curation team which had many responsibilities such as: creating content for their Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest pages, brainstorming ideas for blog posts and going to the wineries to capture original content. During my experience, I was lucky to gain knowledge of managing social media accounts and posting onto these accounts via Hootsuite. I never used the platform before and of course, there were some learning curves to overcome but now, I have a new skill that will benefit me in my future endeavors.
The second account I worked on was the Red Hawk Sports Network. I served as a social media specialist and my duties included promoting their new show “Inside The Nest”, creating social media campaigns, developing contests to drive their followers to be involved, and brainstorming ideas to improve overall traffic of their social media accounts and their YouTube channel. This account was particularly interesting because it was the first time they had developed the show and not many people knew about it yet. They relied on me to create content to increase the viewership.
I spearheaded a creative and fun social media campaign for Thanksgiving and I was able to involve many team members of the Red Hawk Sports Network. I asked the members to send videos of themselves explaining what they were thankful for this year. This campaign continued for five consecutive days and the last day landed on Thanksgiving with a series of videos that presented different members of the team wishing their fans, viewers, followers, coaches, and athletes, a Happy Thanksgiving. I really enjoyed doing this campaign because it taught me new things about client management, social media campaigns, and organizing a content calendar.
Most importantly, I was given more experience in collaborating with my team members. My career goal is to work for a public relations agency and of course, it is super important to work effectively and efficiently in groups of people. Some would believe that the ongoing pandemic would have affected our work and we would not be able to deliver the same results, but it actually made us work even harder to create the best content for our clients.
I am truly grateful for the work I did, the people I worked with, and the skills I have acquired. If I never went down that deep dive, then I do not think I would be writing this piece today.