Module 3 Blog Post - Audience Engagement

Hello, my name is Sarah Arkison and I am the Undergraduate Recruitment & Liaison Officer for the Alberta School of Business at the University of Alberta. I direct the School's undergraduate recruitment/marketing/communications activities and manage our Student Recruiter, who along with myself, is responsible for our social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

My personal account on Facebook has been active for many years and mainly it is used to connect with friends and family that live outside of Edmonton. I have resisted other forms of social media for years, simply because I just don't feel like I have the time or the inclination to be that connected.

That being said, I actively tweet and posts on our School SM accounts. At first, I created these accounts to use as another tool for student recruitment. We very quickly came to realize that our current students were quite active on the accounts, so we changed our strategy to try to connect with our two audiences, as opposed to just our prospective student audience. We recently launched a hashtag campaign, specifically targeted to our current student audience, as a means to create a sense of community online and to promote the amazing diversity of our student population and their accomplishments and experiences.

Using Storify has been quite inspiring and I would like to explore more about using media to tell a story. I am also very interested in learning more about creating a sense of community for students using SM and how to better engage our two distinct audiences. As I do not have any formal communications training in this area, I am hoping that this course will allow me to add to my skill set and work on creating engaging SM content.

Module 3: Communicating with Mortgage Brokers

Social media has always been a key fascination of mine, ever since 'Nexopia' was launched when I was in junior high. At the University of Alberta, I studied Marketing and graduated with a Bachelor of Commerce degree in 2012. I toyed with Facebook and blogs for a while, but it wasn't until graduating that I really began to realize how powerful of a role social media can play in people's daily lives. My personal social media experience shifted from sporadic Facebook posts, to a blog documenting my travels in Ecuador, and then my presence today—on a number of social media platforms.

Source: Flickr. (Illustrated by Gerardo Obieta.)

I'm currently a Marketing Coordinator at Optimum Mortgage—a division of Canadian Western Bank. Our clients are mortgage brokers, who are looking for lending solutions that will meet their customers' needs. Communications, in general, plays a pivotal role in my daily responsibilities. Some of them are:

• Creating, editing and distributing weekly Optigrams (eNewsletters), to thousands of brokers across Canada. 

• Finding innovative ways to provide product and service messaging at conferences and tradeshows.

• Developing content for editorials, magazine ads, digital ads, and our website. 

More recently, I have convinced our management team to consider social media as another communication tool. Through my own research, I've found that there are many brokers who use social media to connect with their own clients. Every week, I analyze trends in what brokers are discussing. Any trends I see are then used in the creation of our weekly Optigram. 

On November 22, I'm planning to launch Optimum's first Twitter account, which will coincide with the largest Canadian mortgage conference of the year.