As mentioned in my last blog post, while assignment 4 has few parameters, we have been asked to incorporate four online screen media characteristics into our work.
The first that we will be incorporating is interactivity. Our audience will be offered a number of ways that they can interact with our piece through our website and Facebook page. The audience will have the ability to work through our original Korsakow project as they wish, before having the chance to interact through our Facebook posts and complete our quiz. The project involves a different layer of interactivity also, as it asks our audience to react to our posts and comment something that will end up being the basis of a new project.
Cross-platform is another characteristic that is imperative to our project. Our project is spread across many different platforms including Korsakow, Facebook, Wix, uQuiz and Youtube, with each of these platforms contributing to the project. Korsakow is important as it provides our main project, and Facebook is the major way we are communicating with our audience. uQuiz and YouTube work hand in hand to give our audience the answers to what album covers we recreated in Judging by the Cover, and Wix is what ties each of these platforms together, creating a hub for our project. Through this, we will also be hitting the requirement of including a number of media types. Our Facebook page will feature a range of written content and photographs, while video will be featuring on our website through our ‘your first impressions’ section.
Our project will also be non-linear. While we do suggest that the audience first views our Korsakow project before interacting with the Facebook page, quiz and other elements of the project, the audience is free to make their own decisions of which elements of the project they wish to invest themselves in and in which order they do this.
Finally, our project will also display the characteristic user-generated. A large part of our final project revolves around our users commenting on our Facebook posts with their first impressions of an album cover that we can use to create a video, as well as users actively taking our quiz. Without the users interacting with our project, we will have no content to generate and quite simply no project at all, as this is all about the users.
While my first blog post may make our thinking process for coming up with this project simple, it was anything but. It did take us a long time to come to the conclusion that we wanted to create something social media based, and even when we did, we weren’t exactly sold on the idea. Speaking to the class through our first feedback session helped us to cement our idea. We were doubting the use of a quiz in our project, however majority of the groups thought that the quiz was an idea that suited our project well, with some groups suggesting ways to actually execute this. Another group suggested that we use Instagram story polls to promote our ideas, and while this is not something we plan to do at this point in time, this suggestion helped us to think more about ways that we can quickly and easily ask people to contribute. Asking people to comment long pieces may not be practical, where as polls or quick and easy ‘comment one sentence’ posts may give us more responses.
A concern of mine at the current moment is that, while we now have quite a solid idea that i’m glad to say will definitely teach me something about the way people contribute online, our idea did take a very long time to formulate. While we liked the idea of looking at first impressions and seeing people contribute to the project, we were unsure for a very long time as to how to achieve this. Because of this setback, it now means that our Facebook campaign, especially the section that asks people to contribute their ideas, will not be able to be opened for as long as we hoped, as we will need to allow ourselves a week to actually produce the video and ensure it is of high quality. This makes our window of opportunity smaller, as we will now be relying on people to interact with our Facebook posts quickly.
While this has the potential to effect our projects outcome, it does not mean that it is impossible to gain enough responses. In the text ‘The Impact of Social TV and Audience Participation on National Cultural Policy: Cocreating television comedy with #7DaysLater’, author Jonathon Hutchinson (2015) discusses the ABCs collaborative project with online up and coming YouTubers called #7DaysLater. #7DaysLater was created to engage a younger demographic, and asked audiences to contribute their ideas and plots for the producers to use to create the comedy episodes. The interesting thing about this project was the time frame associated with creating it. On Monday, a Google Hangout would be opened for participants to comment in, the actual filming would take place from Wednesday, with the final product broadcast on Monday. While the ABC team is much more experienced than we are, and has a larger scope than we do, #7DaysLater proves that a short production time is possible to create something well.
Something that will be important for us to do is ensure our posts ask our audience to contribute in a way that is quick and easy, and does not require much work of them. Published in 2016, Decreasing Attention Spans and Your Website, Social Media Strategy suggests that the average human attention span is just 8 seconds, something worsened by ever-growing social media. This means we need to create something that is able to be absorbed by our audience in a short amount of time, otherwise something that attracts our audiences attention and hooks them in for longer than this period. The author of the piece does make many suggestions to people who use social media for marketing and advertising, one of these relating to frequency. He suggests that posting the same piece of content a number of times to ensure it is viewed by as many people as possible is both okay and very important. This is a strategy that we will be implementing, as we do not have a lot of time to waste making hundreds of different posts, yet we also need to ensure we are reaching as many people as possible.
Another important thing we need to ensure is that our posts are asking our audiences to do something that is interesting and enjoyable. While The Hunger Games series is not an online screen media piece, the franchise used online channels, particularly Facebook, to involve the audience. At the time of the Mockingjay Part 2 film release, The Hunger Games Facebook page asked its fans to post images of their fan art through the hashtag #mockingjayfanart, with a Fan of the Week chosen each week. While this campaign did not target the ‘quick and easy’ element, the franchise understood their audience and created posts that would engage them in a way that was interesting. The page has also followed along with the suggestion surrounding frequency of post, with the page being updated regularly, even years after the final films release.
While something as involved as a fan art would never work for our piece, we have been able to identify that our audience would be more likely to respond to something quick and easy. Therefore, asking our audience to comment their first impressions of our chosen album artwork in one sentence is likely to be the best way to target our audience moving forward.
Research (as listed above)
Academic: Hutchinson, J 2015, ‘The Impact of Social TV and Audience Participation on National Cultural Policy: Cocreating television comedy with #7DaysLater’, Communications, Politics and Culture, vol. 47, is. 3.
Project: The Hunger Games movie 2016, Fan of the Week, Facebook, 6 February, viewed 16 May 2018, < https://www.facebook.com/TheHungerGamesMovie/photos/a.288998967783428.89832.159746560708670/1324782467538401/?type=3&theater >