The Midterm Presentation.

Tonight, my little group of marketing-classmates and I presented our midterm assignment to the entire class.  And ours was indeed the littlest group.  I hadn't noticed before, but one of the other groups was comprised of seven people, (in theory, that's almost twice the man-hours that the larger group had to dedicate to writing their marketing project), so we were at a little disadvantage from the start.  And start we did, as I volunteered for my group to go first.  I wanted to get it over and done with. But I also wanted to be the first group to present our marketing ideas; wine pricing, label redesign, promotion, events, social media, etc., because I had a feeling that the three other groups would probably have the same sort of ideas that my group had come up with.  Tactics, tactics.
Speaking in public is not my favourite thing to do, but I can make myself do it.  As it turns out I didn't have to say much.  One member, a mere 25% of our motley crew, who is the lone American and the only one taking this class for a grade, (yes, 75% of my group are not Americans, or taking the class for a grade), did the majority of the presentation.  However, I didn't just stand around twiddling my thumbs, (no, I left that particular presentation skill to the two men in our group).  I busied myself with manning the class computer.  I had decided that the visual vehicle of our presentation should be driven by a blog that I had set up for that very purpose. (Thank you Blogger/Google for free blogging). The blog proved to be a great tactical coup because the other groups, as I had anticipated they would, used PowerPoint (boring) to present their visual content. Our instructor loved the blog format.
The fifteen minutes allotted to us flew by, thank goodness, and the feedback was very positive. Phew!  Then the instructor dropped a bombshell - we have to do it all over again next week for a couple of Napa Valley College-bigwigs, Shark Tank-style.  Not good.

Social media.

Tonight, being that our instructor is still out of town, my marketing-classmates and I had a guest speaker.  Andrew Healy, a native of Ireland, is the founder of 3 Rock Marketing.  3 Rock Marketing is a small marketing company based in Napa that specialises in social media. Mr. Healy's presentation was really interesting and he had a lot of good tips for those marketing-type folks who already use social media in their workplace.  In fact, he had so much to say that the class ran a little bit late, but nobody seemed too bothered.
Although Andrew's main focus was on Facebook, (and how to optimise your company's online presence - for a relatively small amount of money), Andrew covered most social media applications like; Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter.  Now, of late, I had been thinking that Facebook was a little passé, but apparently I am wrong.  It seems Facebook is still the go-to platform for companies who want to reach the most people...and translate eyes-on-the-page into dollars.
Nowadays, one cannot escape the ubiquitous, highly recognisible, stylised, little social media icons that appear on just about everything. The Facebook icon was even on a bottle of San Pellegrino that I took out of the refrigerator when I got home from class.  I'm left wondering who are the people who have the time to go to San Pellegrino's Facebook page and read about sparkling water, albeit Italian.   I am not one of those people.  I barely have time to post on this blog.