Communication
How it all comes together
For my capstone, I wanted to bring all my new skills together into a marketable package. With that in mind, I chose to focus on the business world. I wanted to make sure that no matter where I landed, I’d have a skillset for success.
Entrepreneurship
Building my own business
Corporate Communication
Working within corporate America
Consulting
Contracting as an independent consultant
These are the skills I collected
Business Planning
In Media Entrepreneurship, I built a business plan for a geopolitics podcast as a semester-long project.
Here’s some highlights, without giving too much away.
A Quick Look at my Business
When I started at Georgia State, I knew that I loved the idea of podcasting and that I wanted to tackle the problem of disinformation. Creating my executive summary gave me a chance to really think about how I wanted to do that and develop a concrete plan.
In each episode, I’ll hit on trending topics like “You Mighta Heard About…The Chinese Spy Balloon.”
Finding the Problem
I didn’t think of podcasting as a problem-solving tool until Professor Metcalfe proposed this model. By thinking about an issue that my listeners may struggle with, I was able to think more clearly about what I could offer them as a product.
SWOT Analysis
SWOT analysis helps work past challenges, while looking forward to opportunities for the future.
Breaking Down Business
My original plan was just to start a podcast and make money. I didn’t know everything that went into that. SWOT helped me to take each part of my business and figure out what I did and didn’t know and how to address that. I’m using this skill now in my Consulting seminar, to find solutions to problems faced by our client.
Market Analysis
In my International Communication class, we studied how cultural globalism shapes media cultures. Layma Husseini and I analyzed Bollywood as a contraflow to western media. In the end, we found that Bollywood fulfills three roles: coexist, coproduce, and counter.
Global Box Office Ratings
My part of the project focused on analyzing Bollywood’s place in the global film market.
I pulled data on box-office ratings from Box Office Mojo. This exercise in data analysis set me up to do strategic analysis for corporations that operate on a global scale. I learned to identify key factors of success to make an educated deduction of the success of Bollywood as an industry competitor.
Analyzing Market Share
I combined my analysis of box office ratings with research on Bollywood’s place in the world market as a box office film industry in terms of revenue, accessibility, and competitive services like streaming. I compared how Bollywood measures up to the two largest worldwide markets for movie-going audiences: the United States and China. This kind of market research could be valuable in any career.
“Bollywood has increasingly emerged as a significant competitor to Hollywood in size and enthusiasm of audiences.” (Curtin, 2007)
Social Media Analysis
In Corporate Communication, my team analyzed the social media strategy of a vertical farming business called 80 Acres Farms.
80 Acres Farms’ Social Strategy
“Farmer Features” are stories that highlight 80 Acres Farms’ employees to show the people behind the food. They say that customers enjoy these reels, because they like reading stories about other people, rather than always just seeing products. It personalizes the company. This idea of using reels to animate quotes is a clever strategy to boost visibility and show employee satisfaction, because Instagram boosts videos over still images. This is an example of a best practice that I can take from this project and apply to my consulting project. This was a good lesson in carrying over strategies I learned at Georgia State to my future career.
Marketing
Building this plan taught me marketing skills that I applied to other courses, like Consulting and Radio News and Podcasting.
Brand Identity
While I never took visual communication, I did have lots of opportunities in my classes to create branded graphics. I created covers for both of my podcasts, You Mighta Heard About and Lost Places & Faces.
Building a Marketing Plan
While building my final business plan, I did a lot of research on marketing and promotion. This gave me a more solid idea of how much a podcast would cost to launch and maintain an audience. This is half of my monetization plan. I’m using these skills now to built a communications strategy for our consulting client.
