SARAH

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           Project three was the project that allowed us the most room for creativity in our work, requiring myself and other students to create a campaign that is unique to us. When given this project I knew exactly how I wanted to present it to my audience and am still confident in the three genres I picked. Looking back now, the process of creating the genres and promoting them was difficult at times, but with more practice, more techniques are learned and able to be used to create an effective project.

            From the start, jumping right into Project three from the end of Project two did make things quite stressful, but the fact that we were to base our genres off of the research conducted during Project two made all that work even more worth it. Based on the research I had previously conducted, I felt prompted to name my campaign “Reality TV: A Simulated Reality” since majority of the sources I used for Project two came to the consensus that reality television is a contrived product, pieced together by producers and even some reality stars. The intention behind this campaign was to explain to my audience that reality TV isn’t always as real as they believe it to be, but to do this in a humorous way and to discuss shows that people tend to favor so that they will be interested in what was presented on my genres. I found that the more I tried to get my posts to be relatable, the more people engaged in my genres and even seemed to enjoy them. The three genres I chose to use for this project were a Twitter account, an Instagram account, and a Wix website. I chose these genres because I thought they would appeal to my audience and be easy for them to access, seeing as my intended audience is those who engage in reality TV, typically consisting of teenagers and young adults, making social media outlets a commodity for them. Reality television stars and the drama that occurs on their shows is typically the talk of social media, so using these specific genres is an effective way to communicate information to my audience while still allowing me to use humor in posts and make images and layouts aesthetically pleasing, also appealing to a younger crowd. Towards the beginning of my project I tended to use logos, mostly presenting my audience with facts I learned from my research, but as I continued to develop on my genres, I learned that audiences respond better to pathos. Appealing to peoples’ emotions and the things they like to see causes them to engage more and prompted more individuals to follow my Twitter and Instagram accounts. For this project, I used a large amount of pictures and tried to incorporate most of the research I conducted during project two in order to have enough background information to use correct humor and facts. Besides the process of creating these projects, another difficult aspect was promoting them.

            When promoting three genres about reality TV it can be hard to find mediums to promote them on besides the actual account. When faced with this challenge, I chose to promote genres on other ones, as well as on my Twitter account for this course, causing most of my promotion to take place on Twitter and Instagram. Along with this, my P3 page on my Wix account for this course has links to all three of my genres, allowing viewers easy access to the genres which is always preferable. When promoting genres it’s important not to be too aggressive, but an occasional post sharing a username or link can encourage followers on one account to follow the promoted accounts as well. My hashtag was posted on my class twitter account and I found this medium to be the most effective in being used for promotion in comparison to my other strategies. I already had 50+ followers on this account, most of which being college students who also needed to promote their genres, yet are still young and interested in social media. This caused most of the followers on my genres to be other students from this class, although, by using specific hashtags, accounts that focus on television, truth, and the reality stars I posted about also followed my genre accounts and even tagged me in posts about relating topics on occasion. I followed most of the other students’ genre accounts along with popular reality TV stars and the accounts their franchises have, such as the Kardashian family and their respective makeup and clothes brands. I have been promoting these genres since the beginning of November, so all in all, I have had a month to become accustomed to posting on these genres, realize the kind of layout I wanted, and how to effectively communicate and relate to my audience. When it comes to this project in comparison to the others, as well as looking at it as a whole, it was different from any kind of project I have ever worked on before.

            For the majority of Project two I was conducting research or trying to understand the points that sources were trying to make, but with this project it was all on me to compose. Instead of trying to understand others, I took the information I learned and made it simple for my audience to understand, and even presented it to them in fun and humorous ways so that they would enjoy engaging in my brands. Both projects required editing in order to perfect my final project, but Project three allowed for visual improvement through creating a specific look and layout, which made designing the genres enjoyable for me. With this in mind, I was concerned with the information I presented to my audience, but more so how this information was presented and how well it looked together, whereas in project two I was not worried about this aspect. This caused the presentation of my genres to become the most difficult part of composing them, making sure they look pleasing to the audience as well as include information they can relate to is key in keeping an existing audience interested and drawing in more audience members. If I had known what I know now prior to starting this project, I would have focused more on these aspects rather than simply trying to present people with information. This concept is what is key in social media and is even an underlying concept behind reality television, contriving a specific look must be done in order to gain a following, causing this project, campaign, and research topic become applicable in life