Work Environment in the Public Sector Session by Caroline Berryman

At George Brown College every day for us is a new opportunity to learn something new as a digital marketing student. Last week our professor Wendy Greenwood invited Caroline Berryman as a guest speaker. She is a passionate marketer, storyteller, and relationship builder and currently working as strategic development manager of marketing and communications for York Region, a public sector.

Public Sector Vs Private Sector: Working in the public sector is totally different compared to the private sector because the public sector is a nonprofit making sector that works for the betterment of people and the environment for a particular region or location and is owned by the government. Whereas, the private sector deals with clients and organizations to help them in marketing or grow as a brand in return for making a profit out of it. In my case, I think the private industry is more appealing for me to start a career because my ultimate goal is to build a private marketing company and while working in the private sector I can learn more about my future plan.

Social Marketing: Social marketing is an educational campaign designed to influence positive behavioral changes in the public instead of selling products and services. We try to manipulate public behavior to benefit individuals and communities with a particular message. It’s designed to influence positive behavioral changes and focus more on selling an idea rather than a product or service.

Case Study:

In this session, we got a case study where a staff rescues 69 turtle eggs at a road construction site we have to generate ideas for communicating discoveries for future events like this and we came up with the following solution.

• Work with local media outlets to write or film segments about the discovery.
• Create social media campaign using hashtags and creative visuals to inform people about the discovery.
• Creating a billboard for the movement
• Conservation – creating projects surrounding wildlife, the importance of it to engaging local school
• Create a local Radio campaign for increasing awareness and people engagement
• Create a video series to promote and educate the people of today about wildlife with a partnership with wildlife forward nonprofit organizations

From the above-mentioned ideas, Caroline Berryman really liked the idea of creating videos and partnering with nonprofit organizations. She also likes social media campaigns with hashtags. However, she said that this event happened in summer, and schools were closed because of vacation.

In my case, I think I would more likely to focus on selling a product or a service as compared to the idea because changing the behavior of the public is more challenging as compared to selling a product. Because behavior change is not instant it required strong reason and practice. However, selling products and services is all about fulfilling the need of the consumer will customer satisfaction at a reasonable price which is more customers oriented. So, I will say that the private sector for me is more appealing to building a career.

Networking/ Job Search Advice: Caroline suggested we do a brief study of the organization where we want to land by going through their website. Use of social media platforms especially LinkedIn to network with recruiting managers and people who are already working there. Do not hesitate to ask questions.  Look at how much does your organization care about the employees?

I am very thankful to our professor Wendy Greenwood for inviting Caroline Berryman for this wonderful session and looking forward to sharing more blogs from my digital media class to share with my audience.