04/03:
Throughout the week, I have covered a lot of promotional techniques and analysed their effectiveness. I now realise that it is better to add as many hashtags as you can to a post as this gets them seen by a wider audience. For example, I added hashtags to a post that had been out for a while and almost immediately afterwards, it had likes from people who were not following us before. I plan to build on this and choose relevant hashtags to draw attention to us more. This applies to all of the social media accounts that we have.
11/03:
This week has been productive because I have carried out a lot of research into various elements of my project and learned some new skills that I can apply to the project. This includes ways to improve on our previous live stream. After looking at a few case studies, I took notes on what we can do and I think that we need to have better lighting, camera angles and links between sections. This is something I will think more into next week when discussing things with my tutor. Next week, I want to look at the Instagram analytics closely, which will enable me to understand what and how to post better in the future.
19/03:
During this week, I have accomplished a lot especially in terms of promotion. Being back in college has enabled me to discuss my project with other people and to get more points across. This means that I am now vaguely aware of what everyone on the course is doing. I caught up on my written work in terms of analytics and created some effective promotion, posting my first Instagram post since I took over. These have caused us to not only gain followers but also The Old Jammers account has gathered some more traffic. I also managed to make another logo option for the rebrand, and uploaded the poll onto Instagram. Unfortunately, I did not get enough for our BCB show and seem to be slightly less focused on this element of promotion. Next week, I want to look into the changes in the Instagram algorithm, which will enable me to understand what and how to post better in the future.
26/03:
Over the course of this week, I have completed my logo designing with Paul. We finally finished off the sizing of our headers once our Instagram followers took part in helping us rebrand. Next time we work together, we will start making posters and leaflets/flyers for physical promotion. I also began planning the schedule for us to use after Easter. This includes dates and locations for the recordings and photo shoot. I compiled a list of ideas for these and thought of when the best dates for everyone would be for these events.
15/04:
I found this week to be greatly productive. After having two weeks off for Easter, we had a lot of work to do before we could move forward with the project. This came in the form of planning. Nic and I sat down together and discussed the days we would be carrying out everything from recording to editing and then communicating with staff members and students who would be involved to let them know or ask them to book rooms. We met with Zaid in central media to discuss filming and editing our showcase and he gave us some great ideas such as using the tv studio to film the introduction sections of our showcase.
22/04:
This week, I finalised the information for locations and organised the photoshoot. Then I relayed this information to the students on the course. I will continue to do this throughout the coming weeks because it is important that the key dates and times are relayed to them enough that it sticks in their heads. This will make it easier and will increase the chances of people being on time and in the right places. One thing that I need to work on from this week forward is managing my stress and thinking about the way I speak to others because previously I have come across in the wrong way and caused myself more problems in the long run. The best way to do this is by talking face to face with others to resolve problems and avoiding messages as the way someone interprets text can be in a different tone to the way you mean.
29/04:
My week has been very busy. I have been speaking to David from BCB Radio and arranged an interview through the BCB News Team for our trio (Alfie and the Bottle Heads). This is something I will repeat every week up until the showcase. Alongside this, I have been communicating with Ruth Peterson about our news article. She sent me the first draft yesterday and I gave her some changes and tips to improve it (this can be found in the communications tab). Another person I reached out to this week is a woman from the Bradford Producing Hub called Sinead. I am still waiting for her reply but John and I are hoping that she will be able to assist us in promoting our showcase to a wider audience.
06/05:
Throughout the course of this week, I have done a lot to plan the smaller details of the showcase. On Tuesday, Nic and I had a meeting to discuss some changes to the schedule and ‘staffing’. After watching our Level 6 Degree Students’ showcase on Friday (30/04/2021), we decided that our internal videographer and editor was not good enough quality for what we wanted so Nic has arranged for a professional to come help us. This meant that the dates for video recordings have been moved from 10/11th to 17/18th. As well as this I started to plan the running order of the showcase. I also printed the showcase posters into 6 A2, 6 A3 and around 50 A5 flyers. I cut these with a guillotine and started distribution around college. Another thing that I have started to do is record footage of students working and rehearsing for a video montage in the middle of the livestream.
13/05:
This week, I have been very productive. On Monday, I completed all of my catch ups in terms of digital space work. This included post analytics of Instagram stories, case studies research and details about the locations we will use for filming.
On Tuesday, I met with Abi to discuss her promotion on our Instagram. She reviewed my designs, gave some input about what to improve and even asked to have my designs to create her own promotion. We then posted these and received a lot of positive feedback such as Abi’s followers increasing by 12 within the week of our posts about her and my paid promotion with Holly Shorty for Abi’s post. I also finished some of my write ups about Watch Listen Tell for case studies and location for filming research. I was informed too that our posters should be linked to Bradford School of Art and not Bradford College due to a rebrand. This meant that I needed to contact Paul and think of ideas for how we can do that ready for Wednesday.
On Wednesday, Paul and I sat down with our old poster and began moving things around to fit in the Bradford School of Art logo. First of all we edited the informative text so that it mentions students from Bradford School of Art rather than Bradford College. We then moved around the logos for our social media accounts, deciding to put them closer to the right edge and decreasing the size of our QR code. After some thought, we agreed the URL for the link tree was not needed so we took that off too. After these adaptations, the logo fit nicely on the poster. During this session, I also created a new poster with all of the students on because we have good quality, professional standard photographs of the majority of students from our photoshoot. I love this poster the most because it gives people a sneak peek at the people they will see on our showcase and also gives all the information they might need without being too formal. Some of the problems we struggled with on this is that there were a few images that would not fit onto the poster correctly. Thankfully, there was one in particular that came across as unprofessional so I asked Paul to crop it. This helped with the professionalism and spacial issues the it was just down to a small gap we had near the top left of the poster. This was easily rectified by adding in the QR code again. We then did a test print to see if the QR code would scan and once happy, asked for the real things to be printed. I then took Tom around college to replace all of the old posters with the Bradford School of Art rebranded posters.
On Thursday, I simply carried out some admin. I evaluated my week and finished off some digital space work.
20/05:
This week, we gathered the video footage for the showcase. Barney, who is a professional videographer came in to help with this. I sat in on some of the sessions, taking some photos to use on our Instagram story to keep our followers up to date with what is happening. One disadvantage to my photos is that I don’t understand how to reduce the exposure on my camera so they were all really over-exposed. Thankfully, Sam from our college marketing team was there to take some photos too and that means that Bradford College will be able to help promote the showcase for us. I used this time to work on Kabeer’s promotion and digital space work and help where ever I was needed. On Tuesday, I had a Teams meeting about digital marketing but unfortunately, I missed a large chunk of it due to helping some photography students with their final major project. This was the second day of filming, which called for me to record the intro and outro of the showcase. I got through these quite quickly but each recording varied in sincerity and information. We decided to go with the initial recording and just cut in some other parts because that was the most sincere one and had most of the information needed. During this, I asked Abi to do a radio interview with BCB. There were a few technical issues when we tried this and so I had to keep on phoning her until we managed to get it to stop freezing and connect. Then the rest of the week has included sending out photos to students for their personal promotion use and portfolio, evaluating my work, and finishing write-ups.