My Humble Abode

This week, I expanded on my idea of how to better leverage LinkedIn for pharmaceutical marketing. Unlike last week’s planning stage, this stage really did take more work and concentration—especially with the annotating that needed to be done so thoroughly, along with the structuring necessary to create a good plan that would bring this vision to life.

I occupied most of Saturday morning and afternoon reviewing the sources in my initial bibliography. I made extensive notes on all of them, summarizing the key points and considering how they related to my overall aim. The more I researched, however, the more I realized that some sources I had initially chosen weren’t working for where I was going. Some simply weren’t the appropriate choice for what I needed to accomplish, so I went and substituted those with better alternatives. I also acknowledged a gap in my research: I needed more targeted information on how LinkedIn specifically plays a role in pharmaceutical marketing, particularly regarding social media websites like Facebook or Instagram. This realization helped to narrow my search and make my research even better. It’s intense labor, but I can feel the project becoming more polished and effective step by step.

Here’s an example of what changed:

Upon closer inspection of my sources, I decided to replace a few of them. My initial selection wasn’t serving to help prove my argument about the importance of expanded LinkedIn usage in drug marketing—it simply wasn’t the right piece for the goals of my project. My new source is a far better choice. It offers case studies of actual past marketing campaigns that suffered because of technology deficiency, and this drives the point home especially about how places like LinkedIn are critical today.

When I initially began to work on the central part of my project—the project plan—I had a lot to consider. Writing the rationale was particularly challenging. It was to be at least 250 words, but I prefer shorter, concise descriptions by nature. However, I struggled through and began considering further steps to better organize myself. One thing that came to my mind was using Asana as a planner for the next five weeks. I figured that by writing down my assignments and activities at this point, I could maintain my rhythm as I went along.

But putting down those five weeks itself was a challenge. As mentioned earlier, I prefer to just dive into the work and figure things out. Making up what would happen and having everything figured out beforehand is not something that is easily second nature for me. But, upon reviewing my proposal and the rewritten bibliography, I was able to work out a clear direction. It is not perfect, but it gives me a decent direction to follow—and already that feels like some sort of achievement.

This was an enjoyable and trying experience—it really made me see the various layers that are involved in content creation. I had no idea there were so many steps to get to the end and create something of worth to my readers. It’s definitely more than I anticipated, but I’m learning so much in the process.