Promoting Local Business Through a Blog

Looking back, I had a pretty local upbringing. I mostly ate Indonesian food, wore Indonesian clothing, and played Indonesian games that were created by local businesses. The people who work to preserve our culture. You form a sort of community with these businesses to the point where you know each other by name and are friends with each other.

I always wonder when I show my friends Indonesian food, and they can't even recognize them. It's quite interesting because Indonesia has seen a rapid movement to become more international. While I admit some foreign products are much more eye-catching than some of our own, we should not forget those in our own country just because theirs are better. We should support these businesses especially in a hard time such as this. The pandemic forced local business to close. These businesses support our communities and yet some people are forgetting them in favor of businesses from other countries. With this, as my main subject, I decided to base my projects around local businesses. Due to my interest in both photography and technology, I decided to do something that would blend these two. My goal is to research, interview, and photograph different local businesses in my area. Then create a blog featuring the stories of the owners and their businesses, highlighting their struggles during the pandemic.

By the time I wanted to create this project, I had a small amount of photography experience. I was also a bit rusty due to the coronavirus, so I decided to use social media and some old photography books as a way to inspire myself to think more creatively. I needed to fix this problem quickly because the photos would be the main attraction for my product. Not only that, my project will fail without substantial knowledge in creating a website. I have to be able to create an aesthetically pleasing website while making sure that it is user-friendly. I also needed to develop my social skills which put me in a tricky situation.

Global Context

The global context that my product interacts with the most is personal and cultural expression because I will be expressing myself through my photography and blog as well as promoting local Indonesian businesses. Indonesian culture is vital to my identity and the people featured in the blog have something to do in it by being business owners and supporting the local community. Photography is also an art and my own way of self-expression. This project will help me see what my fellow countrymen are doing to express their culture and themselves.

Product

My final product is a website that showcases local Indonesian businesses of varying types. The blog goes by the name of Lokale was created not only to bring attention to local businesses but also to take a deeper dive into who the owners are and their story. The website also has a segment dedicated to their stories of surviving during the pandemic.

The website currently features eight articles each including several segments. The first is general information about the business, the second being the owner’s story, and the third being their experience during the pandemic. Each article also features a collection of pictures taken and edited by me showing off the location, person, and what they do or their products. The pictures are either in a slideshow form or scattered at their appropriate segments. It also features an “About” and “Articles” page featuring more information about the project, its origins, and its creator as well as the articles themselves.

My product connects to my global context “Personal and Cultural Expression” through my photography. It is how I express myself. This also relates to the owners and how they run their business because it is their way of expression. The cultural expression part is present in some of the businesses I interviewed because they sell things native to Indonesia or a modernized version of it.

Reflection

Working on the project provided me with a better understanding of my global context which was Personal and Cultural Expression. I not only learned about how I could express myself through photography and my writing but also learned more about how other people express themselves not only through their daily lives but also through their businesses. I learned that someone's job is also a way of expressing themselves and is one way to know more about them. The project provided me with immense knowledge of how people maintain their way of expression through hard times like the quarantine.

This project helped me gain new abilities and further expanded on the ones I already had. Examples include social skills, photography, and website creation. Each of the skills could be used in future situations as well. Learning skills wasn’t the best part of the project though, the people were. As I met more people, I got to know their stories, I got to know who they are and their dreams. It's interesting to see how people could express themselves in different ways. I was also able to showcase a problem that I think is very important to our society. I got to know the story of the people in our country trying to make a living.

IB Learner Reflection

Being in an IB School, I need to relate all of my actions to the IB learner profiles to see if I did things correctly. The IB learner profiles help a student to know more about the world around them and develop useful skills that they can use in their futures as well as good behaviors to practice. Throughout the process, I believe that all IB learner skills were used in some way but I believe the most prominent ones were communicator, inquirer, and open-minded.

I showed the skill of being a communicator through acquiring information and feedback from my interviewees and supervisor. I took that information and used it to improve the writings of my website. I had to deal with interviewing people who couldn't speak my first lanuage and had to accordingly adapt to it. In the end, I believe that I worked effectively to communicate this information towards the readers which is why I chose communicators as one of my IB learner profiles.

For my project to succeed I have to be an inquirer. I asked people questions that relate to their careers and how their business was doing at the time because it was the most important part of my project. I had to learn more and research website design and photography.

The final profile was being open-minded. I received a lot of criticism from peers and my supervisor. I have to take these all with an open mind and utilize them to make a better project. I also have to be open-minded with the people I was interviewing because they had different opinions on different topics.