Project Experiences
My current project deals with social media and CSR issues. Our objectives of the project are to fully understand the company’s social media initiative and give an final recommendation of future improvements or changes. These final recommendations are based on numerous of factors: comparisons to other companies, the general cohesiveness with the overall company, and levels of CSR involvement. The two biggest obstacles the team has had to overcome goes over the general and part of the detailed work of the project. I have also included ways in which my team has overcome these specific obstacles.
One of the our biggest obstacles had to deal with measurables. We had a problem creating an overall scoring system for all companies. All the tested scoring systems had the problem of subjectivity. We found it virtually impossible to solely make a quantitative system. Many of the companies we are looking at vary in similarity to our client. We have looked at the most similar types to car companies and international apparel. With this said, a major success for one company could be something we were distinctly trying to avoid for our client, or vise versa. Since the companies are so diverse, it is hard to measure CSR involvement because one company could be more involved with the community while the other is more involved with environmental impacts. It is rather difficult to gage with is ‘better’ than the other. Ways we have overcome this obstacle is to forget about seeing all companies in a general way. Instead, we are seeing them individually and tying in their CSR projects to their overall strategy. This really helps us point out distinct positives and negatives within one company and one theme.
Another obstacle we have encountered is the quick adjustments to client’s needs. We have quickly found out that our clients numerously change their ideas of certain elements of the project. We have to constantly be on our toes to make quick changes to any work or goals. At first, this was more difficult in the beginning than now because most of us were not familiar with social media and the consulting world. It was apparent that our group thought that our slides and graphs were subject to little change or complete involvement with our client. We quickly found a way out of this obstacle by constantly showing rough drafts of work to fully understand the progression of the project. As slides evolve, both our ideas change and blend together to create more awareness of needed fixes. We have all learned how to work with a client and incorporate new techniques with changing agendas. It is beneficial for us to see the progression of the project theme as well as individual goals.
—a.cortez
