Design Thinking for Innovation | Final Reflection

1. Challenge

My personal challenge is to improve my social media skills (mainly on Instagram), find my community  online and truly connect with people through my content (short view). I'm focused on photography and  audiovisual (mostly aesthetics) and educational content (like career advice, motivation and  self-improvement)

I'm a content creator/entrepeneur/copywriter and I want to become social media manager and content  strategist to create content for brands and offer courses online to help people improve their digital  presence as individuals or with their entrepreneurship (long view).

2. Selection

I've choose mind mapping because I believe it fits with the stage of my process because: I know the  content I want to create and be better at it, I know the people (by estadistics and human-centered  researchs) who may be interested and find it valuable (but they have not found me yet) , I'm aware of  my limitations in terms of knowledge and equipment (and I'm working on it) but despite all this I'm  aware that in order to achieve all this things there's little - but important - daily tasks that I need to do in  order to be more creative and successful and I think mind mapping i'ts definitely going to help me to  identify those least visible things in my mind in a more deeply way than just a to do list. I'm also studying  and practicing social media strategies on my personal account and getting and measuring feedback. I'm  in the stage of making a proper segmentation but I'm not confident enough with my content to make a  money investment, that's why I think this tool is beneficial to my current scenario.

3. Application

I applied mind mapping with my -short view- challenge and I am really positively surprised. I wrote  "Social Media improvement" on the middle and start to draw arrows around with questions like "how to  create valuable content", "to whom is the content", "what skills are missing" and I realize (despite the  benefit of a proper organization) that I already had the answers to these things (after all they're all  logical and mostly predictable) but write those things in paper lead me to another questions behind the  surface that changed completely my mindset, and that's what I think this tool is about.

4. Insight

After I think about the basics I wrote, deep things starts to come to my mind and the first thing was  "WHY I create content?". It seems like a simple question but it leads me to this: I create content for  pleasuring myself. And that's the conflict of interest that I was having from the beggining: How can I  create content for my community (what they like) if I don't have a community yet? If the most important  thing about create something is do it entirely for your community, where's the personal value in that?  and of course this can be subjective, but I don't feel comfortable creating in those terms, and when you  are studying traditional marketing they always insist in "you have to do what you public wants even if  that it's not what you enjoy the most" and of course this could apply for a job or for a brand strategy but  it's not apply for my personal digital presence. It seems a little dumb now that I'm writing it but it was a

real insight for me. Another productive conclusion was that I'm not feel confident about my content yet  because I need to make MORE to get better. Invest on equipment, go to new locations to shoot, be  consisent with my feed and posts and really interact with the public that I have now, and not be anxious  for growth because it has to be organic and it's just a matter of creativity, proper action and time. And  last but not least, enjoy the process knowing that I'm doing what I love.  Nothing of what I just wrote  would have happen withouth this tool and I'm deeply grateful for that. And all this helps me to achieve  (organically) my long-terms goals in a more confident and centered way.

5. Approach

Honestly I'm going to try all the tools from this course, but for sure I will continue practicing mind  mapping in a regular basis, not only with professional intentions, also in a personal way (it's like a form  of therapy itself). I think that is important to write things down and draw some lines to get access to  other thoughts that otherwise will remain unseen. I'm thrilled to try them all but Visualization + Mind  Mapping it's gonna be my double choice for next time.

