The Semester is Coming to an End and so is the life of My Laptop…

Although my technical knowledge has grown leaps and bounds over the course of this semester, the tools I have are not a reflection of that growth.

I’m a simple person, who never felt the need to upgrade my computer. I always buy the cheapest phone my carrier offers because I am not a person that has spent a lot of time with my technology. I am even satisfied with my very low-grade camera which is so sad because I did attend photography school in the late 90s with dreams of being a photo-journalist. (Think National Geographic.)

To prepare for school I pulled a very large, dusty, slow laptop out of a drawer and asked a friend to wipe its memory clean for me. I wanted a fresh start for the both of us and was hoping this maintenance might make one or both of us faster.

This is the only computer in a household full of children’s school loaned Chromebooks that is Microsoft program compatible. It is slowly falling apart. The doo-hickey on the side that holds CDs or discs opens at random moments. The charger sometimes charges, the battery sometimes holds battery life. It lasts about 20 whole minutes unplugged. Yesterday the old gal decided she might be done. I have given her a pep talk, some CPR and a good push with those paddles that pump electric currents into hearts that have stopped beating…Still it’s on a wing and prayer that we enter our last seven days of this semester together. Whilst I was writing this she blacked out again. She’s been like this all week. Will she cross the finish line with me? (Not apologizing for another running reference. )

I don’t know if I have more words than all the words I have previously used to describe the growing pains I have felt over this three long months. I would say highs and lows but in all honesty it has been lows and lows.

Weird to type that. I am being graded and I have straight As, but if I were grading myself on perfecting the skills introduced to me this semester I would be failing myself.

I think I’ve stated this before somewhere along this line of woe-unto-me filled posts…the more I learn, the more I realize I have to learn.

I have so much to learn.

I once had a blog called “Good is Enough” and that has often been my motto in life. I remember in 7th grade Honors English class we were creating presentations for a big history fair. My partner was spending so much time on the details of our display. She would get out her ruler and make sure the angles on our construction paper cut-outs were straight and exact. She would make sure the margins on our printouts were perfectly even. We argued a lot that night as we glued and chopped, printed and cut our way through our tri-fold poster board project. I am surprised our friendship survived. I had never known that type of perfectionism existed. We won 3rd place that year, out of our whole school, crooked corners and all.

I hope my partner learned what was engrained in my mind after that experience…that “good” was “enough.” I am trying to adopt that mantra once again. Being in school now means so much more to me than it ever did. I have so many reasons I need to excel, and while I am not quite ready to go and offer myself up to the marketing world, I am pretty sure my computer isn’t coming with me.

We both need rest and an upgrade. One of us probably needs to retire to the place that old laptops go when they’ve served their special purpose…shhhh…don’t let her hear me say that. I need her with me for just a few days more…

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In which she compares school to running a race. She promises it won’t be the last time.

Maybe it was too soon to call to that light at the end of the tunnel. 14 days left of “Marketing Madness” but who’s counting?

Me. I am counting every. Single. Day.

Let’s get into it.

I have already stated I will not be an analyst. There was some curiosity at the beginning, I haven’t known what I want to be when I grow up. I’ve always said “A Writer,” but as that has proved to be so much more difficult than I thought it ever could, so I need a day job. I have been open to possibilities.

Needless to say, I went into this analytics class with an open mind.

Things were going okay, I mean, after the horrors of Facebook and Google Ads in my advertising class what could be worse?

Analytics was hard, it made me leak brain fluid.

It caused some intense questioning of my intelligence, however my advertising class took first place in “classes I never want to revisit.”

Advertising is still causing headaches and will until the very last assignment is turned in. Today I had to set up a fake Twitter ad. I have no idea if I’m doing it right. I feel like I’m blindly turning assignments in and hoping for the best. Also a trend in online school is to have a discussion over a topic by posting your thoughts and making comments on two other student’s thoughts. This can get tricky because we are all saying similar things… This week to mix it up we have to respond to five students and come up with some kind of rebuttal to their thoughts. I am low on conversational juices at this point in the school season.

How many different ways can I say “yeah, I like what you said there…”

Hence that assignment won’t be done till the morrow. When my brain isn’t mush.

Are you flattered that I save my blogging for the end of the day when I am sure the hamburger I had for dinner resembles what is left of my brain matter?

Back to my analysis class…

I spoke personally to a group member with whom I’ve only WhatsApped with. He was very kind. He has a grown daughter in a Masters program who gave him this advice…”Dad, this is a 100 level class, you are spending too much time, for too little points.”

I tend to agree with her. This week I had planned to explore the WONDERS of Tableau. If you aren’t familiar it’s a data visualization tool. I wanted to see if it lived up to the hype a different group member had given it.

“Try it,” he said, “I am really liking it.”

Perfect timing, I have an assignment I need to come up with. Why not make it getting familiar with this program?

Why indeed.

I needed proof of my studenticity to get access to Tableau which was a pain. It took me three days of my precious workweek and back and forths with help desks to figure out all I needed was my unofficial transcript.

Hurray! I finally was approved and had an access key.

But no, it would not download. It kept bringing me back to the homepage that asked me to sign in and which version did I want?

How am I supposed to know which of the six versions of your program I need? How about all of them? No?

After downloading and downloading and downloading and finally restarting my computer hoping that would help, I tried to get on to my student portal to maybe work on another assignment.

The universe had other plans. I was denied access to my own portal. It did not recognize me as enrolled. La sigh.

After 30 minutes on a help desk chat it was a simple fix. But I didn’t want anything to do with Tableau. I’m no quitter and I’m also a glutton for punishment, so the next morning I sat myself down and found an email from the Tableau help desk sending me a new link that should work. This was not a link to my student year long free access, this was merely the two week access they give to anyone willing to brave this program.

Still, it was something. So on I trudged. I watched a few YouTube videos that were not helpful. Finally by late afternoon with no work to show for the last 6 hours I threw in my towel for Tableau. Tableau 1-Me 0.

Next up, DOMO. I won’t get into the nitty gritty but DOMO was so beginner friendly. I wasn’t able to upload the data I wanted to use but at least they had sample data. I would have something to turn in.

“When will she talk about running, I’m so excited for it, but what does it have to do with school and classes and learning.”

Well, I will tell you…

Between my dabbling in young adult education (that space in time where we don’t really know why we’re going, we just know we should so we sign up for classes that we don’t really care about and have more withdrawals and drops than actual credits.) and my dive into young motherhood, (yes, some personal information. I am a mom of four and have been a mom for 21 years.) During that time of motherhood where I had very little that was my own I became deeply immersed in long distance running. I loved and still love running for the satisfaction it brings of a goal well-planned. Plan out your workouts, follow your plan, watch as those long runs come and go, check, check, check…it’s incredibly fulfilling to someone whose daily tasks are undone in a matter of minutes by little hands.

What I learned in running long distance is that you do not want to be told “you’re almost there!” By anyone, unless the finish line is literally around the corner. I “almost there’d” myself last post, and the finish line isn’t around the corner until I have one or two assignments left in this semester. So I’m sorry to myself. I apologize. Take a deep breathe, focus, one foot in front of the other. It’s okay to visualize the finish line right now because it’s going to feel good, but it doesn’t mean you can stop and walk.

Is that the light at the end of the tunnel I see?

Maybe there is a faint glimmer. There are 4 weeks left. One of those is the glorious holiday in the United States that we call Thanksgiving. Online school gives no quarter for Thanksgiving. What they don’t know is I’m the one that cooks it for my family. It’s a long and exhaustive process. Am I supposed to tell them I have sprint planning and proofs to do and that’s why they have no rolls this year? No pie? No cheese potatoes?

I don’t know how it is going to work out this week but as with every weekend, I’m amazed I’m still here, that I am still passing, that I have survived another week of online college.

As this semester comes to a blessed end I have to share the most important thing that I’ve learned. It’s not about analytics or strategy or Google and Facebook Ads.

It’s about people.

It’s about these four groups that have been thrust upon me in my four classes. I have noticed a pattern in my frustration. Whenever I begin to get really frustrated with someone that hasn’t been responding to my frantic texts, emails, threads, and I am ready to call them lazy to my family and curse the ground they walk on, they respond.

And then I learn something about them. And then I feel like a complete jerk for not practicing compassion and patience. I am so anxious to get these assignments done I want everyone to plunge ahead with me.

But sometimes there’s people like Margaret, from Nigeria. Her time zone is 7 hours ahead of mine. She doesn’t own her own phone and can only communicate on her husband’s. She only has time to work on her assignments from 11pm to 3am in her nighttime because she has kids and they need her. Margaret is trying to better her circumstance and I sit over here with my laptop and phone and supportive family and get all judgey when I don’t know Margaret.

Knowing someone, even the littlest bits, helps develop compassion and empathy. It helps me. I have a picture of Margaret in my head now and I’m rooting for her and all the Margarets out there. If my patience and understanding will aid her just a little bit, it warms my judgey heart.

I think that’s my favorite take-away from this semester and I’m hoping to carry it with me as my college experience continues.

Group Work…am I right?

I currently have four classes and four sets of groups right now. In one class I have been working with the same group for 7 weeks now. We started off a little rocky, one student ended up dropping the class after a bit of a row. It was quite dramatic. We’ve found our rhythm though and have had as much fun as we can doing assignments that are completely new to us.

Two of the groups are very new, as in starting this week we have first assignments. One of the two groups has come together quickly. The other one I have real concerns.

And then my fourth group has changed 3 times, and each time it consists of me and another girl that shares my name, and then other people that filter in and out. Erin and I have gotten the job done every time so we’re alright.

I guess what I’ve learned about groups, especially in an online setting such as this is that I don’t know them. I have very little time to get to know them, and sometimes they don’t want to share, which is their right. Getting to know them has advantages, it helps me empathize with them. I might gain a little insight to what their life looks like on the other side of the computer. I might understand why they’re not communicating quickly.

Even if I don’t really get to know them I try to give them a persona, a life, a family, a job, problems. It helps me speak to them as real people, with kindness and patience. If all we see are typed words it gets very easy to be short and snippy. Texting is an art form. How does one communicate the feeling of their message without the inflection of the spoken word? And with brevity? It can be very tricky.

I don’t like group work any more now than I did before classes began, my worry is personified by thoughts of letting the group down instead of just myself on an individual assignment. I also dislike being on someone else’s timeline. I do like being able to distribute the workload.

I’m just hoping I can keep these last five weeks and four groups straight.

Midterms and midterms…

somehow this year my midterms coincided with midterm elections. It’s been a week.

This week I had to create an infographic on the how-tos of Google Ads. Friends, it still makes no sense to me. On paper it looks great, one merely creates a campaign and then two ad-sets in that campaign and then keywords, and one must only use 7-10 keywords and only 2-3 ad-sets but when you pull up Google Ads I see nowhere to input these things, and quite frankly I’m too scared to go back and examine it.

I will share my infographic here with you because I happen to love making infographics, and if my job for the rest of eternity was to create them I would live a blissful life.

Today I’m putting together a PowerPoint for my Digital Marketing Strategy class and it could take all day. It covers all parts of strategy, a world once again I am not sure I belong in, but I will give it the “college try.”

As for Mid Terms in the United States of America, they were multi-layered. I am grateful for a country with regular elections but they don’t bring out the best of us. Politics are really a strategy of their own though, and we have studied marketing techniques used by different campaigns, now that is pretty fascinating.

It starts with such hope and the Golden Circle…

every Monday does.

Let me paint a picture for you.

On Monday I read through each of my four classes lists of assignments to get a mental picture of what my week will look like. Some classes have assignments due throughout the week, some classes have all assignments due by Saturday at midnight.

I try to be completely finished with all of my assignments by Friday but sometimes they bleed into Saturday. I am grateful for that sixth day. Some weeks are so reading intensive. Because I have four classes on different aspects of digital marketing the information often bleeds into each class.

The pro of this is I get to learn and understand in a little more detail different aspects like key performance indicators and customer personas. The con is that sometimes information repeats, but I really do need to comb through each article to make sure I’m not missing anything.

It’s a strange thing to attend school in my mid-forties with a family depending on me, when last I went I was 21 and fancy free. I had no “why” back then.

I learned about the Golden Circle this semester, a concept created by Simon Sinek. He decided that the reason certain companies do so well is they are driven by a why, and not a what.

We can certainly apply this to ourselves. When I was in my twenties I had a fantastic corporate job that I landed because I spot a little French. Side note: French Canadian is very different than France’s French. Pardon Moi. S’il vous plait.

My “why” for going to school was just to complete it because it sounded like a good idea. I actually really love to learn. My job was full time, my fun was certainly full time. School was part time and I failed pretty miserably except for my English classes thank you very much. So it wasn’t really a “why,” but more of a “what,” I wanted a degree just because.

Life has taught me grit.

I also have my family’s eyes upon me.

I have been waiting throughout my children’s young lives to be able to contribute monetarily to our family needs. We have sacrificed much being a one income family but we have also thrived.

I have determination right now that really has to see me through when times get tough. I realize this is a long game.

So every Monday I open my assignments for each class, I read material, I drive the kids to their various activities, I bribe one to make dinner, and I delve into the unknown again and again. It’s a bit like Groundhog’s Day, the 1993 film starring Bill Murray in which he relives the same day over and over again.

My goal every week is to remain positive, to avoid the fetal position crying jags, to have perspective about these blips in my whole school experience. Some assignments are going to be a lot of fun, some will be mundane, and some will be downright pits of hell but I will try equally in all of them.

You can be sure I will keep posting about what each day holds.

All the Tears I’ve Cried…

Friends, this isn’t a world I want to live in. I am not now, nor have I ever been a numbers gal. I also don’t enjoy games of strategy.

What I’m saying is digital analysis, and digital strategy are Right Out.

Where can I fit into this world and is there a place for me?

I think there is, and I think it has more to do with content.

Let me back up…I hit a low point today in the middle of my “keyword search.” Do you understand how many keyword search engines there are out there? I used six today. I have six new passwords and six new usernames, only to discover each one would only give me a small amount of data to complete my assignment. My assignment seemed very simple, my friends…research keywords to use for our client and give them a rating based on search volume, SEO difficulty, CPC, and potential. I didn’t think it would take me long at all. But each program would give me one or two of items off that list, and Google wouldn’t even rank some of the words that other sites did. It was so exhausting. I only have a few cells of my Excel sheet filled in after hours of research.

I pulled up my boot straps and moved on to the next assignment to see if I could at least get that one done. It was building a Google ad based on keywords.

I won’t cover in this post why I am now terrified of Google Ads but I will say it’s based on my experience in this same class on Facebook Ads. I will also say that I have found myself, no exaggeration, curled up on the floor in fetal position during my Facebook Ads weeks, (of which we spent three) because I could not get the pixel to work.

If you have been reading with me since day one you will recall I mentioned online school has no teachers to raise our hands to, no one to come help when we’re stuck. We have only other students in the class, who so far seem as clueless as me, this is 100 level after all, YouTube, which is really hard to comb through for specific questions, believe me I have TRIED, and email to talk to our professors, but by the time they get back to us, the assignment is due.

They all have real jobs. And they refer to their other jobs as Real Jobs because being an online professor is not a lot of work. I picture them sitting at their desk in their free time grading away willy-nilly but they do not have to create the content of the class. They do not have to lecture. They simply say here is what you will be doing this week.

Oi, I digress. Basically ad engines also terrify me and there is no one to help when I hit a bump.

You know what doesn’t terrify me?

Blogging, mockups, A/V Scripts, Writing. I love to write. Hence this blog and your exposure to my daily mental strain.

I had one moment today when I started to put together a “quick data cycle” for my analysis class in which I had to review Pivot Tables and found a nice bloke to explain them to me via YouTube in a three part series and did I want to add the add-on he created called Pivot Pal? Again, a “quick data cycle” with insights, summaries and recommendations took me five hours.

I realize five hours is more than a moment but what I was trying to say is that after keyword searches and Google Ads and data cycles I wondered, “what the hell am I doing? This isn’t me, I’m the one with her head buried in books and join NaNoWriMo every year only to fail but I have a million stories I want to write and I think I can mess around with Strategy and Analysis of any type of numbers?

No.

And I found myself crying yet again today. Not to the extreme of the Facebook Ads incident of 2022, but enough for my dog to lick those salty rivulets off of my face.

So what do I do?

I had a moment where I considered quitting. It was such a short moment. Fleeting, really. I can’t quit when it gets hard. I am middle-aged you see, and we have perspective. We also have kids. Most of them grownish enough to know that Mom has started school for the first time in 20 years and she quit when it got hard.

Do you see?

Do you understand?

Plus I am more than halfway. I will crawl my way to this finish line. I will pass these three wretched classes and the one that I actually enjoy. I’ll pass that one too. Then I will regroup and move on to next semester and hope the cards fall in more varied areas besides the digital marketing world.

Amen.

The Keyword Conundrum

So, I am in the midst of six articles and four videos on keywords…Keyword Research: A Beginner’s Guide, Keyword Planner, How to find the Right Keywords…there are so many rules. You don’t want an over-competitive word because it is too vague (my inference, not a direct quote) but a low-volume word might bring zero people to your site. Again I was linked to He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, the dude that one professor loves, but everyone seems to use, and he is NOT 100 level friendly, my friends. What is back-linking? We haven’t covered this yet. I’m sure some research will answer that but I am elbow deep in Google Ads this week and I have to say…I am terrified. My nephew the Digital Marketer insists that Google Ads is cleaner than Facebook Ads which has left a scare on my heart. I have anxiety though. Looking through the materials I see that the layout is very similar to Facebook Ads. Tonight I have to come up with a list of keywords for my client. Maybe that’s what’s triggering.

I emailed my client about how are progress is coming as she kindly lets us experiment with her marketing needs. I didn’t hear anything back from her. She is really good about reading email.

Can I read in to the silence? I try not too, but there is that little niggle in the back of my mind that she has regrets.

I also remind myself that we are newbs. I warned her we are newbs. We have only been doing this for 8 weeks so if she is displeased that is on her.

Back to keywords, “there but for the grace of God go I.”

Content Marketing…teach it to me like I’m learning the language…

Today was a really good example of nerdsplaining…if you are wondering what nerdsplaining means, it’s speaking to someone as if they are already familiar with the jargon related to your field of expertise.

My online professor posted a list of YouTube videos and digital marketing articles that were supposedly helpful to us, and then we were to answer a list of follow-up questions to determine our comprehension.

Enter a video which will not be named here from a content creator in the marketing world that my professor reveres. The title was roughly something like What is Content Marketing.

“Great,” I thought, “That’s the first question on the list. I am going to watch this video and have a clear picture of what content marketing is.”

That is not what happened. I watched the video, and never once did the creator tell me what content marketing was. I tried to infer from context clues. I knew that it involved blogging and videos. The creator mentioned he made 12 videos a month and only 4 blog posts a month. Luckily YouTube was here for me today. Another creator who will not be named, but who I now will add to my list as “extremely helpful” mentioned he had watched ALL the videos on content marketing and found none of them helpful.

“Wow,” me thought, “this guy is really dedicated. He took the time to watch ALL the videos on content marketing for me and others like me.”

His video started off with a story to help create a clear picture of what content marketing is and then shared a dictionary worthy explanation.

Interestingly enough, all of my studies yesterday were on the science of storytelling, and how it can actually relax and focus us so that we retain information better.

In conclusion my friends, I know have a perfectly clear picture of what content marketing is, so never fear.

It was time…

Time is a hot commodity for everyone. When my kids were young, very little time was my own.

Children grow. It’s a strange phenomenon. One day I’m drowning in diapers and one is on my hip whilst another is on my leg and then the next they are asking for car keys and Taylor Swift tickets. It’s quite jarring. And expensive. So in the mean time while my brain is no longer trying to plan the next day’s homeschool lesson or how to help Suzy toilet train, I signed up for classes.

Online classes.

The last time I took classes of any sort it was the year 1999 and we were all terrified of Y2K and computers were rarely used in classes.

I can’t raise my hand when I have a question. There is this thing called Canvas that is universally used for, well, Universities and the email is not intuitive.

In my classes, they have lists of blogs and YouTube videos that are teaching us. Not teachers. The teacher is mainly facilitating. By facilitating I mean putting us in these horrible things called “groups” wherein we are forced to reach out to each other using apps because we are a global school and must figure out some time within all the time zones where we can plan time do group projects. It’s absolutely terrifying.

I hope my time is being well spent. I’m 8 weeks in right now and every day brings a new experience, some are fun, most are painful.

What I learned thus far…

There is no tutor for Facebook Ads, or Google Data Studio.

YouTube for such programming assumes I know more than I do. Teach this to me like I am a 5 year old.

Every time I am introduced to a new program that should make my life better as a marketer I realize how far I have to go. Photoshop is also not intuitive.

But I’m also learning about myself.

I am learning to manage time in a different way. To delegate jobs I thought no one in the house could do but me. I am learning to teach myself when all these years I have spent teaching children of all sorts.

I’m still not sure I am exactly where I’m supposed to be because this is all so foreign to me, but it was definitely time.