1. Ro Mit Magazine
Tran Cam Anh – s3255253
Individual Reflective Report
COMM2386 Interdisciplinary Communication Project
Lecturer: Landon Carnie
Due date: 13 September 2011

2. Introduction
For this Interdisciplinary Communication Project (ICP), I worked with seven other members to develop
Ro Mit Magazine (romit.vn) – an online magazine created by RMIT students for RMIT students. I was
the project leader as well as the editor for “Lecturer of the week” column, and co-administrator for Ro
Mit’s Facebook & Twitter pages. To be honest, despite being forewarned about the intense of this
course, I was very excited when acknowledged that we would run an online social media campaign
because I was intended to work in digital marketing area and also in charge of a forum before. In fact,
those excitement and experience have helped me finish my work without being too overwhelmed but
indeed manage to recognize my strengths, weaknesses and learn many new things from this project
that I did not expect at all.
Looking back, moving forward
While working on this online social media campaign, apart from reporting what I was doing in the
weekly blogs, I often found myself assessing my own work and comparing it to my capability, what I
had done before or to other members’ quality of work. Observing what my team and other projects
were doing and listening to what others commented on my work, either face-to-face during meetings
and lectures or written under the contents I created, helped me learn more about myself from this
project.
Social media is my future career
It was 100% confirmed after I completed this course. I felt very enjoyable when discussing with my
team to conceptualize the interactive contents of Ro Mit Magazine, when reading and answering
comments and questions from our readers on Facebook and Twitter, or simply when seeing that we

3. had a new fan on Facebook. To be specific, my future work should involve technology, online
community management and a few creative tasks. I created all the slides for our presentations as well
as the colourful poster for Mit [in] Style photo contest, and they’ve all got praises. And looking back to
the positive results of the whole campaign, I don’t think that I would change our concept since it was
so fun working on an online magazine for the first time.
Regarding social media management, there were many things that I’ve learn for my future career.
Firstly, the conversation is as important as the content. Even if the awareness of our audience is
positive, the engagement still decides the campaign’s success. That was the reason why the use of
Twitter failed although @romitvn had many followers. I only posted the articles’ links and did not
generate much conversation for our followers to respond; only 3% of the website visits came from
Twitter in the end. This failure, secondly, helped push me out of my comfort zone, i.e. Twitter, and
worked more on our Facebook, which I found much more practical and insightful. Finally, I also learnt
about the importance of long-term thinking to build sustainability for such a big project. We did not
plan a detailed recruitment for this project then struggled with the heavy workload and now there was
a huge risk that the project cannot be continued.
My personal skills: the good & the bad
I am now confident to say that I am good at teamwork and leadership, yet since this was one of the
biggest projects I’ve done, it was not an easy experience at all, but then it was my opportunity to learn
how to solve and to grow. I found myself very interested in being the project leader, whose task is to
supervise the progress and ensure the communication between the team members to keep up the
operation. So I diligently sent emails to different departments of my team to check on everything. But I

4. have also learnt that supervising is never enough, especially when working with such a team which
consisted of many talented students. It was difficult yet very essential to make sure that everyone
could have their chance to present their ideas and opinions. I have learnt from Ms Phoenix Ho that
“the first thing to be a good leader is to be a good follower,” and this could not be more right in our
case. In fact, when listening to their ideas, I was amused by the things I could learn or the team could
use, like Uyen’s frequent creative ideas or Chi’s way how to get attention from others during a meeting
by pausing a while before starting her speaking. Finally, being a leader is being rational and definitely
not about being serious, yet I failed it so many times. I had to repeat to myself to give compliments and
thanks to my team members every time I sent an email and try my best to have humour in our
meetings to soothed the stressful work.
The next thing was confirmed after I finished this project is that interpersonal communication is a
golden key in any area. As mention above, I have learned much about the importance of good
interpersonal skills to generate a better teamwork. Also when working with our web programmer, who
looked quite tough and corky at first, I tried to chat with him and found out that he was really
concerned about some parts of our project thus he was not happy to follow our requirements, then he
suggested the alternatives which we could not agree more. So again, “don’t judge a book by its cover”
but rather show my respect and spend time to learn more.
Professionalism is another skill that I tried my best to practice and it turned out very helpful. I believe
the fact that I’d got all approvals from the lecturers for interviewing them was due to the professional
email that I sent out in which showed our gratitude to have them featured on our magazine and
explained the simple steps of the interview. When we faced the complaint of returning the whiteboard

5. to Property Services without cleaning it, I wrote an apology email to take the responsibility and keep it
professional even when we made the mistake. However, the case was a big lesson for me that being
proactive is also as important. I should have had my team to clean it up before returning to be most
professional as we could be.
In addition, I still have my major drawback in time management and task prioritizing. I did not
complete my weekly reports as I was working on the assignments of the other four courses that I was
taking. I was also complained by my team that I paid too much attention in trivial details or took too
much tasks than I should have. Thus now I need to learn to say “No” to certain things and a big “Yes, I
can” to the most important tasks. As I and my team did not give up to finish our website even at 4 in
the morning or the promotional whiteboard after 2 working weeks, it can be seen that great
determination is what I need to better myself.
Conclusion
Having completed this project, now I can’t wait to work in digital marketing where I can play with the
platforms I’ve been familiar with yet also willing to push myself out of my comfort zone to learn more. I
also know that to be professional and to be humble are both important when working with others,
especially when I am a leader. In order to deliver my best work, I’ve got to concentrate more and train
myself to have a bigger determination for any goals I aim for. Finally, knowledge and skills can only be
improved when I have more experience like I did in this campaign, so I should be more proactive and
get involved in more projects in the future.