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Context

I refined my Canva design skills further during my summer 2021 internship with Discover Books by creating many graphics for their social media accounts, including the two I included here. My supervisor suggested using the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics as a way to boost engagement because it was a positive current event that could appeal to a wide audience. While my supervisor and the other interns worked on blog posts and email campaigns about the Olympics,  I posted a graphic featuring books of various genres about the Games; however, I thought we needed to post about the Paralympics as well in order to represent diverse athletes and their books online. So, I made a second graphic featuring books about the Paralympic Games to post after the Olympics ended.

Rhetorical Decisions

    The main reason that I thought we needed to post about the Paralympics as well as the Olympics was because I strive to promote equal representation in whatever communications context I work in. I would argue that corporate social responsibility is such a significant issue in marketing and public relations today that every company needs to support social causes that relate to their work in order to maintain customer engagement. For the two graphics, I used the same Canva template in different colors and included the same number and variety of books (three historical accounts of the Games and three memoirs by popular athletes in different sports, to appeal to a diverse group of reading and athletic interests) for consistency and equality between the two graphics. One post featured dark text on a light background, and the other had light text on a dark background, both to improve readability through contrast. The interns were also required to include some form of the Discover Books logo on every social media graphic to establish ethos and to tag as many featured books as were available in the company’s Facebook shop to make purchasing the products easy for viewers. In addition, I used kairos to my advantage with both posts. Discover Books had already advertised the Olympics for several weeks through blog posts and email campaigns, so I posted my social media graphic on the day of the Opening Ceremony as a reminder to audience members that the main event had begun and the time had come to read their way through the Games. With the second graphic, since it was the first piece of communication that the company put out about the Paralympics, I posted the graphic on a Friday ten days before the opening ceremony and wrote in the caption that followers should order their books over that weekend to guarantee their arrival by the start of the Games.

Reflection

    The graphics were received well by the rest of the marketing team and by the company’s followers on Instagram and Facebook—both had a large number of likes, comments, and tagged product clicks within the first two days after posting compared to Discover Books’ other social media content. Similarly to the situation I had dealt with previously in the PWR Social Media Internship concerning course registration ads, I had a personal interest in this campaign. I generally enjoyed the 2020 Olympics but was very dedicated to following the Paralympics, particularly the performance of one swimmer from my hometown. I wanted others to recognize not only the successes of Olympic athletes but also Paralympic athletes because they (and individuals with disabilities in general) are frequently underrepresented in media. I hope that I will be able to incorporate my personal interests, especially in terms of corporate social responsibility and activism, into my content creation in my future career, but I understand that I need to be prepared to work on media campaigns that are less important to me personally with the same amount of enthusiasm and dedication.