When deciding on a topic for our assignment, we
discussed Steven’s cousin Sam. Sam is
gay, but had a very hard time coming out to his parents. They never really seemed to accept him. Even after his brave coming out, he did not
feel like he fit in well with his family.
Sam felt like an outcast at school, and at home. Home is an especially tough place to not fit
in because it is supposed to be the place you fit in no matter what. I never met Sam, however, after speaking with
Steven about him, we decided we wanted to focus our trendsetting assignment on
him. We chose the hashtag BeTrueBeYou
because we basically wanted to help spread some love. “In 2014, an estimated 2.8 million
adolescents aged 12 to 17 in the United States had at least one major depressive
episode in the past year” (NIMH.NIH.GOV).
We think this number is about 2.8 million too high and it needs to
change.
Steven and I are known as
by our friends and family as pretty goofy and smiley people. It is very hard for us to hear about young
people who are struggling with sadness and depression, especially when one of
those people is Steven’s own cousin.
#BeTrueBeYou is a movement we hoped we could get trending where people
just posted a picture or story about what they love to do and what makes them
who they are. If the hashtag would help Sam
or others cheer up even a little bit and be happy with who they are, then we
would consider it a success.
Our target audience for
our project was high school and college students, but really anyone could take
part in it. We hoped to reach people
through social media, such as Instagram Twitter and Facebook. Our goal was to have our hashtag mentioned/used
100 times over all 3 social media sites.
We believed this to be a reasonable number based on who we knew. We thought being at a smaller college would
help us spread the hashtag to a decent amount of people. However, our finals numbers came up short
after the four weeks ended. We only totaled
44 hashtags (28 on Instagram, 3 on Facebook, and 13 on Twitter).
Our main objective of
this project was to impact as many people as possible with our message. The message was for people to be happy to be themselves,
which is the same message we want for Sam to understand. The biggest challenge was simply getting
people to use the hashtag. Some people
are very picky about what they post and may think that using the hashtag may affect
their profile/popularity. Another
challenge we foresaw occurring was what happened with the ALS ice bucket
challenge. The more the challenge spread
around, the more the meaning of it got diluted.
We did not want people just posting #BeTrueBeYou for no reason. We wanted them to understand the purpose
behind it.
In a CNN article, about
teen depression and social media, it states how people who share their
struggles/successes online help other people combat the same struggles
(CNN.com). We wanted to use this project
as a way for other people to see that the best person they can be is
themselves. At first, we just tried to
promote our hashtag online, but it didn’t go well because we are not that
popular on social media. Eventually, we
got it to start spreading more through the help of our baseball team and my
sister’s sorority, DPhiE of Adelphi University.
However, despite out efforts, not many people used the hashtag. Most people liked the idea of our project, but
would not post anything.
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