One of the main teams I am on is the social media team. My tasks revolve around researching our target audience and influencers with similar interests to the organization. As well as design and posts graphics and images for the social media pages and other platforms that may use these images such as outreach team.
This week I pitched an idea to the boss and the rest of the team. This Sunday was Super Bowl Sunday, but something happened over social media that became more trending than the Super Bowl itself.
Kanye West posted an image of himself holding a piece of paper on his Instagram. Social media instantly took this image and turned it into a meme template where they wrote text within the paper in his hand. I pitched we jump on this trend to my supervisor the Monday that followed the Super Bowl and he approved the idea immediately. I did also reach out to the rest of the social media team to get their input but got no feedback.
On Tuesday I edited the template and showed it to the team for approval, only two people responded with their input. On Wednesday at 5pm it was posted. After it was posted another intern in my group messaged saying they feel the meme is too controversial and was a bad idea.
It was really frustrating not because of their opinion on it but because they had over 24 hours to say something and instead decided to say something after it has been posted. She reached out to our supervisor with her thoughts on the post. He responded with that the meme is just internet culture and that we were just using the template for views. The post ended up doing well when it came to interactions from viewers.
I feel like this experience really tested my communication skills when it comes to working with a group of people with different perspectives and is something to be worked on. When working with others opposing opinions are common and expected. I feel ethically it is important to listen to everyone’s opinion; however, it is also important to express yours in a respective manner because people are not mind readers and it is important for teams to be able to communicate accordingly within the workplace.
