For our final group project for BAMA 513 (Internet Marketing), my group decided to approach a local business, Cartems Donuterie and offered to help them further develop their Social Media presence online. Cartems was already very active on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter and had a good sized following on each. The purpose of this blog post is to discuss my learnings from this consulting project.

In our kickoff meeting with Cartems, they told us they could use help getting more engagement within their online community. They wanted to do this while staying true to their mission of celebrating and encouraging smiles, conversations, and donuts in and around Vancouver. I thought this was a very well thought out goal. As we learned in class, getting additional “likes” and “followers” on social media isn’t nearly as valuable as having truly engaged and committed fans. Because of this, I was excited to tackle this challenge.

Most of our experience at b-school is working on cases for fictional companies. As we got into this project, working with a real client and real information, I quickly realized that we were faced with a few very real challenges:

• Our group had to scope the project ourselves and be very clear about what we would deliver. This project easily could have gotten bigger and more complex, but given our collective capacity, there was only so much we could accomplish over the 6 week course
• Cartems was not nearly as responsive to emails as Sauder professors and this slowed us down on a few occasions
• For Cartems, it was business as usual. Even though we wanted to take over their social media accounts to run some tests, Cartems continued to post as they usually do, and we held off on running some tests we had intended because we didn’t want to clutter their feed by having 5 simultaneous campaigns at one time

Once our work and analysis was complete, our group had the opportunity to present our findings to Cartems founder, Jordan. After spending the past 16 months in school, I’d almost forgotten how presenting to a client is very different from presenting to a professor. Our Internet Marketing professor, Paul Cubbon had warned us that presenting to our client would probably be very casual. In fact, when we asked Jordan where he wanted to meet, he initially suggested a local pub, definitely more casual than the academic setting we’ve been used to. Unfortunately, on the day we agreed to meet, Jordan was sick, but understanding that we were under a school deadline, he agreed to meet with us but changed the location to a local coffee shop.

Presenting in a coffee shop was a unique experience and I learned a few things from the experience that I thought I would highlight:

• Be familiar with the location you agree to meet. Is there actually room for 6 people to sit around one table?
• Show up early to get a good spot. If that fails, don’t be afraid to ask other patrons to move.
• Make sure your laptop is fully charged, there’s no guarantee you will have access to an outlet
• Have your slides prepared, but be ready to jump around based on the clients questions
• Take screenshots in case the internet isn’t working

The actual experience of presenting was a bit awkward. Our group had decided in advance that we wanted to give everyone an opportunity to talk so that everyone could learn from the experience. If this hadn’t been for academic credit, we probably wouldn’t have elected to have five different people speaking to the client. Luckily, we had prefaced Jordan about this and he was very understanding. While having five people speak in an academic setting works fine, “and now Lauren will walk you through the analysis we did”, it felt too formal for a coffee shop and I think it hindered some of the casual conversation that may have arisen if we’d had less people speaking.

My role during the presentation was to take Jordan through our recommendations. As I started to talk, I realized the delicacy of the situation. Here we were, a bunch of almost MBA grads, telling this guy what he “should” do with a business that he’s spent the past 3 years pouring his heart and soul into. I found myself carefully choosing my words, and I tried to make everything as factual and non-biased as possible, ie, “considering that ABC, we suggest that you XYZ”.

In the end, Jordan seemed interested in the work that we did. He was particularly interested in some of the analytics we had done on their website and Facebook page and liked many of our ideas to further engage their followers.

As I’m coming down to my last few days of b-school, this was an interesting project, to go through. It felt like I had one foot still in school and one out in the real world. For this reason, it was a good teaser before going back to the real world and I definitely learned some important lessons that I will be able to take forward with me.