Mary S. Wilson

Buying Local for the Holidays

Above is my team’s final project for my course in social media with @DR4WARD; Social Media U Need 2 Know. We decided to do our research and presentation about daily deal sites, focusing mainly on Groupon and LivingSocial since they are the most popular. From the beginning, we used social media platforms to organize our ideas and interact with each other. We found that the best way to share information and links was with this Google Doc. I loved that with Google Docs you can edit the page in real time and see who else is working on the page at the same time. Once we were ready to start making our presentation, we used this Google Docs Shared Presentation. It was a way better alternative than each making our own sections of the presentation and combining them later because we were able to see each others progress and could make sure we didn’t have any overlapping content.

Another great tool was twitter. We connected with almost all of our interviewees on twitter. It usually started with one of us tweeting at an industry pro who would then tweet back that we could send our questions to him or her through email. From the first day we decided to use the hashtag #SMdeepdive since our task was to take a “deep dive” into a particular aspect of social media. We used this hashtag to send out interesting links about our topic to each other and to prepare the rest of the #NewhouseSM4 class for our presentation. In the days before our presentation we began promoting our team teaching presentation and getting our followers familiar with the social coupons. On our first slide we made sure to include our hashtag and encourage the class to engage on twitter throughout. We also used HootSuite to schedule tweets every five or so minutes that would provoke conversation on twitter and reiterate important points.

Google+ was another tool that was vital in bringing our team together. We made this Circle that was composed of us three as well as @DR4WARD so he could check in with what we were working on and also for the purpose of Google Hangouts. We had one Google Hangout with @DR4WARD (which I wasn’t able to participate in) and another Hangout with just the three of us, where we finalized our project and went over some details.

Since Google Docs was our main sharing hub and Google Hangouts was where we had meetings, we didn’t use LinkedIn as much. We did make a LinkedIn group, which we updated from time to time. I personally updated my LinkedIn activity to let my professional contacts know about the project and how they could follow along with the discussion on twitter.

After the team teaching presentation, the group ran some analytics to see how many people we reached during class. We used the HashTracking website to analyze #SMdeepdive. Of the 154 tweets that included our hashtag, we generated 58,074 impressions and reached an audience of 13,677. Overall, there were 110 original tweets, 24 @ mentions and 20 retweets. We were very pleased and impressed by the high amount of traffic we generated. Please check out the embedded presentation via SlideShare to see what all the buzz was about!

Job Feature Package: Chris Richards

Interesting Classmate Assignment: Samantha Davis

                                                Sketching Sequence

This was my first assignment in PHO 200: Photography for Broadcast Journalists. The task was to shoot somone doing a repetitive process from many different angles. When editing the film the object was to put together clips so it seemed as if many cameras were used to capture a continuous action. Placing two clips together that graphically match but were really shot at separate times is called “matched action.” Since drawing is more of a process than a repetitive action, I couldn’t include as many matched action sequences and it was more difficult to show the passage of time without being too abrupt. However, by using cutaways I was able to make the transitions somewhat smooth. I’ve learned a lot about shooting and editing when putting together this sequence so I’m sure my next project will show great improvement. Many thanks to my willing participant and artist, Kristina Herb.