Assignment 2 Reflection

I was the mediator cum social media manager for this project. My task as the mediator was to resolve any conflict between team discussions. Overall, I would say that there wasn’t much mediating to do as we did not have much conflict; everyone in the team was open to different ideas and were willing to incorporate individual suggestions here and there into our project.I feel like my job as a mediator was to give a third opinion to rationalise the decisions my team took. 

I volunteered to do the artefacts for our social media account as I felt that it would be a good opportunity to brush up on my photoshop and content creation skills. Apart from creating the posts, I had to come up with the content. There was quite a bit of research I had to do as I wanted to make our content as refreshing as possible rather than give generic content that everyone knows about. One problem I had was finding new information on cyber security as most of the measures could already be easily found online. The survey that we conducted really gave us insight on what our target audience wanted, and from there I worked accordingly to meet their wants and needs. I decided to look at things from a different point of view – use existing content on cyber security but put my own twist on it to make our content engaging.

I took inspiration from instagram pages like @flagyoureit and @girltalk.sg, where they incorporated both interactive and informative elements in the content that they shared – which was what we aimed to do as well. However, creating content was not as easy as I thought when I was not well-versed in photoshop. I thought I could just use templates off the internet to create the posts but they mostly had to be purchased. Thankfully Zul offered to revise the basics of photoshop. I still remember taking at least three hours to complete the ‘A guide to: cyber threats’ post but I slowly got the hang of it, making the remaining posts easier to finish. This has taught me to appreciate the content that such pages – no matter big or small – put out, as there has to be a considerable amount of research done so we do not misinform our followers, as well as the time and effort put into making the posts aesthetically pleasing and easy to take in. 

This project has prepared me for challenges I will face in the future as an aspiring communications professional, as it really placed an emphasis on communicating issues efficiently which prevented our team from having any serious conflict. I have also learnt that in a team, sometimes it is okay to ask for help rather than shouldering most of the work by myself.