Tag Archives: final project

Mastering Storytelling in Photojournalism

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Abstract

Over the past few decades, new media technologies such as smartphones, tablets and other devices have changed storytelling and the ways stories were once delivered. Due to the shift in new media, there are new ways stories are shared through social media sites such as Facebook(an online social networking), Twitter (an online social networking service that enables users to send and read short 140-character messages called “tweets”),Instagram (is an online mobilephoto-sharing, video-sharing and social networking service that enables its users to take pictures and videos, and share them on a variety of social networking platforms) and blogs (a discussion or informational site published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete entries (“posts”) typically displayed in reverse chronological order).

A popular site that uses storytelling and visual rhetoric through various social media platform isHumans of New York, a photo blog by Brandon Stanton. The photo blog introduces viewers to various stories that explore issues such a sexism, freedom and loss just to name a few and in doing so has vastly changed storytelling. The photo blog shares unique stories via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and their site which affords viewers and user of those online communities a chance to connect and engage. Often times many of these stories receive over 1,000,000 views and were broadcast on local news station. In an effort to understand how the stories mediated through Humans of New York become successful and afford users a chance to engage, I will analyze how the stories become successful and assess their best practices.

By determining their best practices, I will use their best practices to produce three images on the subject matter loss and populate these images via my personal pages on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and personal blog Black Attire Aficionado and monitor user engagements with the subject. The quantification of user engagement will entail monitoring the sites and record and analyze the different ways users interacted with the image. Essentially, by using their best practices, I believe I can produce user engagement to Humans of New York but on a smaller magnitude. Finally, by understanding user engagement on different social media sites, one can tailor the message for a specific audience which can contribute to a more successful story delivery.

 

ePortfolio

Proposal

Write Up

Class Presentation 

Project Reflection

Social platforms for Deliverables

Image 1: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Black Attire Aficionado

Image 2: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Black Attire Aficionado

Image 3: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram 1 & 2 and Black Attire Aficionado

 

Analytics/ Screenshots can be found via my Dropbox

Mastering Storytelling in Photojournalism- Project Presentation

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Abstract

Over the past few decades, new media technologies such as smartphones, tablets and other devices have changed storytelling and the ways stories were once delivered. Due to the shift in new media, there are new ways stories are shared through social media sites such as Facebook(an online social networking), Twitter (an online social networking service that enables users to send and read short 140-character messages called “tweets”), Instagram (is an online mobilephoto-sharing, video-sharing and social networking service that enables its users to take pictures and videos, and share them on a variety of social networking platforms) and blogs (a discussion or informational site published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete entries (“posts”) typically displayed in reverse chronological order).

A popular site that uses storytelling and visual rhetoric through various social media platform isHumans of New York, a photo blog by Brandon Stanton. The photo blog introduces viewers to various stories that explore issues such a sexism, freedom and loss just to name a few and in doing so has vastly changed storytelling. The photo blog shares unique stories via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and their site which affords viewers and user of those online communities a chance to connect and engage. Often times many of these stories receive over 1,000,000 views and were broadcast on local news station. In an effort to understand how the stories mediated through Humans of New York become successful and afford users a chance to engage, I will analyze how the stories become successful and assess their best practices.

By determining their best practices, I will use their best practices to produce three images on the subject matter loss and populate these images via my personal pages on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and personal blog Black Attire Aficionado and monitor user engagements with the subject. The quantification of user engagement will entail monitoring the sites and record and analyze the different ways users interacted with the image. Essentially, by using their best practices, I believe I can produce user engagement to Humans of New York but on a smaller magnitude. Finally, by understanding user engagement on different social media sites, one can tailor the message for a specific audience which can contribute to a more successful story delivery.

Download (PPTX, 420KB)

‘Signed Off’ Final Presentation

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Abstract

Social medias are websites or in the recent years’ applications that allow users to create, share, and participate in online social networks. Users invest time and money into building their presence online, and continuously pour efforts into perfecting that presence and drawing attention to it. Jobs have arisen due to the demand of strategies on how to the best encourage participation and attract attention in online social media sites for companies and their products. With social media now being such an important part of life with human growth, interaction, development, and relationships all at its feet; the question arises of how does it affect us arises?

‘Signed off’, is a final project experiment which I subjugated myself to undergo. The task of the experimental project embarked on the basis in which I, Mariah Rajah, would completely and purposefully disconnect myself from all social media sites such as Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Tumblr, and Twitter. This experiment hopes to track through daily blog posts, captured video, and photos how the disconnect affects my attention and participation structures, as well as provoke or bring into the light underlying psychological disturbances caused to either emotion or affect during the two-week experiment.

With the support of research material, I hope to prove how social networking sites are a large contributor to the decline in generation Z’s cognitive ability to process, find, and pay to longer forms of  information whether video content or text, to disregard the need to take part in face-to-face contact and interactions, to lack social skills, to display signs of attachment and addiction, to lack the ability to deal with problems without the need for mediation communicative applications, as well as to crave or demand the need for instant gratification in all aspects of life. ‘Signed Off’ hopes to shine light on the ways social media has removed human behaviors from humans and led them to only being to best functioning individuals in online spaces.

‘Signed Off’ PowerPoint Presentation

Revised Abstract

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Abstract

Over the past few decades, new media technologies such as smartphones, tablets and other devices have changed storytelling and the ways stories were once delivered. Due to the shift in new media, there are new ways stories are shared through social media sites such as Facebook (an online social networking), Twitter (an online social networking service that enables users to send and read short 140-character messages called “tweets”), Instagram (is an online mobile photo-sharing, video-sharing and social networking service that enables its users to take pictures and videos, and share them on a variety of social networking platforms) and blogs (a discussion or informational site published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete entries (“posts”) typically displayed in reverse chronological order). A popular site that uses storytelling and visual rhetoric through various social media platform is Humans of New York, a photo blog by Brandon Stanton. The photoblog introduces viewers to various stories that explore issues such a sexism, freedom and loss just to name a few and in doing so has vastly changed storytelling. The photo blog shares unique stories via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and their site which affords viewers and user of those online communities a chance to connect and engage. Often times many of these stories receive over 1,000,000 views and are broadcasted on local news station. In an effort to understand how the stories mediated through Humans of New York become successful and afford users a chance to engage, I will analyze how the stories become successful and assess their best practices. By determining their best practices, I will use their best practices to produce three images on the subject matter loss and populate these images via my personal pages on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and personal blog Black Attire Aficionado and monitor user engagements with the subject. The quantification of user engagement will entail monitoring the sites and record and analyze the different ways users interacted with the image. Essentially, by using their best practices, I believe I can produce user engagement to Humans of New York but on a smaller magnitude. Finally, by understanding user engagement on different social media sites, one can tailor the message for a specific audience which can contribute to a more successful story delivery. 

 

 

 

Final Project Draft

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Abstract

In a exploration of the photoblog Humans of New York (HONY), a blog by photographer Brandon Stanton. The photoblog provides a unique way to share stories via social sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Blog. The photoblog introduces viewers to various stories that explore issues such a sexism, freedom and loss just to name a few. This new platform of that shares stories has changed photojournalism. The purpose of the project is to identify the best practices that HONY uses and try a create an image using their best practices. The success of the project will be determined by how many likes, share, user engagement the image receives across various social media sites.

My Write Up, Reflection and Presentation are located on my ePortfolio profile.

 

Here are the links to my personal Social Media Sites that I used for the purpose of the project:

Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, my WordPress personal blog Black Attire Aficionado .

Here are the links to Humans of New York social media sites that I used for the purpose of the project:

Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and the website Humans of New York.

Progress Update 11/30

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Last week I outlined my success, shortcomings and plans for the next phase of the project. This week organization has gotten much better and so has picking and choosing content to engage with.

In terms of organizing i started screen shotting note worthy tweets as they happened rather than scrolling back. I created a separate folder on my phone as well as my desktop to store the information quick and easily. I’m finding this makes writing the progress update as well as the power point so much easier as a whole.

In terms of picking content I tried to stick to things that I had real opinions or feelings about because content with no meaning usually goes no place. I also found that evenings are the best time to tweet because they gain the most views. So i’ve been tweeting during the day but mainly engaging at night.

This weeks highlights

This week (albeit a short one) was more successful in terms of my content getting viewed. Though I haven’t gained many more followers my tweets gain more views per hour than they did last week. The most noted tweets this week came on friday the 27th after I tweeted out about Planned Parenthood in the wake of the tragedy in Colorado. I did not tweet directly at anyone or state a clear opinion I merely provided fact about the organization. In the first half hour alone these two tweets had gained 100+ views and engagements. tIMG_2751 IMG_2752

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To date this pair of tweets has been my most successful and I plan to implement this idea in the final week of my project. I thought this project would be a lot more difficult but I’m finding that its really not much different from what I usually did except now i’m doing it with an agenda or strategy and purpose. I think i’ve progressed nicely and I will have a decent amount of data to draw on for the final product.

Looking Ahead

This week will be the final leg of the project experiment phase. The last week will be about cross posting content from other sites to my twitter feed and though I have done this before I will focus on it more in addition to my hashtags and engagement strategies. Originally i was playing with the idea of using hoot suite or tweet deck but i’ve shied away from them because i want to stay genuine to the projects main focus which is twitter. I honestly did not like tweet deck and hoot suite takes a bit of getting used to and I don’t want to taint my projects results because I’m not familiar with the platform. SO! In the final week it will be a hashtagging, topic engaging and cross posting blitz. I hope to have enough data to compare to the sources I based my proposal on as well as the strategies I utilized. I will also break down my final results into categories instead of doing it by week. So far my main content engagement has been with trending topics so I need another week to balance it out.

UPDATE FOR 12/3

-live tweeting professionally (look for local event related to social media, digital, etc.) and compare to personal live tweeting, check analytics
-revisit 3rd party analytics for further insights (especially Hootsuite)
-play around with Jetpack (for analytics) for ePortfolio
-other efforts to increase engagement through social media (your work via Dept. of Education)
-analog efforts for branding, networking (e.g., business cards)

After meeting with Professor Belli I realized there are some important things i’ve been doing but neglecting to mention. So as mentioned last week and with Professor Belli I wanted to toy around with a third party app, I hated tweet deck but i’m going to give hoot suite another run and see if scheduling tweets makes a difference in my user engagement. Live tweeting is also something i’m looking to do but I havent yet found a program or event that fits in with my account or my time schedule so I may just do scheduling tweets as the last element of the project. Jetpack the plug in was pretty complicated and I havent yet gotten access to the instructions so i’ve let it be for now for the sake of time.

Other related elements that i’ve been creating are, business cards to promote my accounts and my brand and i’ve been asked to help manage the NYC DOE district 21 twitter account, which I created for them last week. By applying some of the strategies to that account i’m hoping to be able to get them decent recognition and foot traffic.

Download (PPTX, 1016KB)

 

(POWER POINT NOT YET UPDATED 12/2)

Progress Update 11/25

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I began my project a week ago and to be honest I lacked confidence in myself and the success I could bring to it. I combined and tweaked some of my strategies due to time constraints but they’re all still of the same genre. So my updated timeline looks more like this,

Week #1- Leverage trending topics. I will explore the moments and trending sections of twitter and engage in the conversation for at least 2 of them per day. Boost visibility by tweeting with at least three content based hashtags that represent a call to action.

Week #2- Fuel my profile with shared content. I will share and comment on popular stories to attract or raise questions about the content.Branch out. I will locate and attempt to engage with three professionals in my desired career field (marketing).

Week #3- Cross post. In the last week I will share my content from linkedin and open lab on my twitter to show professional work on my twitter feed as well.

Week #4- For the last week I will gather and assess my data, see which week had the largest engagement and overall by how much (if any) my engagement increased.

I mainly combined similar strategies and will be continuing to apply all strategies as I incorporate new ones. I started out with 27 followers, less than 50 views per tweet, 5 or less mentions per month and had never been added to any lists.

What i’ve done to date

So far, as I touched upon in class last week my tactics have been rather successful. As of 11/23 (One week since I began) I have,

  • Gained 6 new followers
  • Been retweeted 4 times
  • Been favorited 7 times
  • Added to two lists
  • Mentioned 2 times
  • Had an all time high record of 101 interactions per tweet

I actually surprised myself with how much my tweeting and interactions took off by using hashtags and joining into trending conversations. I chimed in about Charlie Sheen, Heart Health, Obama, Womens rights just to name a few. It was actually pretty fun and interesting, because I got to read all these people’s ideas on the subject to scroll through a category.

The biggest obstacle so far has been without a doubt keeping my content up to date with the ever fluid topics of twitter. I go to class or work for a few hours and now what’s on my timeline is eons old. So thats a challenge for sure. Otherwise I haven’t had any major roadblocks that I see as a threat to my project.

Critically though I need to be more organized and write down the results over every day instead of scrolling back through my timeline as thats really time consuming. I also want to sit down and really read through hoot suite and see how I can get that to really work for me because right now I still end up back on the twitter app because I’m so versed in it.

This week I think I did a good job of being on more regularly and reading through content instead of scrolling like a madman. Moments without a doubt makes it easier to see stories but harder to interact with individual tweets so I have to move away from using that and stick to the trending topics tool which is a little harder but necessary for this project.

Moving forward and looking ahead I look forward to trying the next strategy and implementing it in addition to week ones. This week I am sharing content like crazy, news stories, blogs, journal articles and more and then commenting or interacting with it by asking questions or giving feedback. I hope to have an even keel of both informative news sources and op ed interest pieces to balance out the kinds of interaction I get.

Revised Final Project Proposal

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My focus for this final project will be framed around twitter and user engagement. I originally wanted to observe two very popular and active twitter accounts for their user engagement but now I’m tailoring it to build my brand on twitter. I am basing my strategy on the textbooks and material we’ve read in class as well as outside sources. My objective is to see if by applying these concepts I can gain a larger following. After looking through the material and realizing I would like to have a larger twitter presence I propose to apply one strategy a week and in the end seeing if they have increased my user engagement or following.

On twitter there is a feature that allows you to track the engagement of your tweets, it tells you how many users have seen my content. So I would in turn be able to see if the tactics are working.

REVISION: The deliverables i will be providing will be in the form of the analytics bar on twitter, i will be screen shotting and posting the weeks results on my e portfolio and then reflecting on the experience and then comparing the results to the sources suggested outcomes.

First I will average my current user engagement to compare to the engagement at the end.

I have broken down into 5 weeks the strategies I plan to apply and at the end of the week I will see by how much, if any my engagement increased.

Week #1- Leverage trending topics. I will explore the moments and trending sections of twitter and engage in the conversation for at least 2 of them per day.

Week #2- Boost visibility by tweeting with at least three content based hashtags that represent a call to action.

Week #3- Fuel my profile with shared content. I will share and comment on popular stories to attract or raise questions about the content.

Week #4- Branch out. I will locate and attempt to engage with three professionals in my desired career field (marketing).

Week #5- Cross post. In the last week I will share my content from linkedin and open lab on my twitter to show professional work on my twitter feed as well.

Week #6- For the last week I will gather and assess my data, see which week had the largest engagement and overall by how much (if any) my engagement increased.

My objective for doing this project is to better learn how to management my content online and build a profile to reflect that of an emerging professional. At the end and in the final version I want to answer these three questions.

  1. How did I apply each strategy? What was hardest and what was easiest about doing so? Which did I feel worked the best?
  2. Which one statistically had the largest engagement increase and over all by what percent did my user engagement change?
  3. Did I accomplish my goal? If not how do I plan on continuing to do so and what do I think my twitter profile now reflects of me as a student, professional and person?

My sources potentially would be:

Digital Literacy Text

Writing with new Media Text

http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnrampton/2014/09/29/25-ways-to-grow-your-social-media-presence/

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/26-tips-strengthen-social-media-marketing/

http://mashable.com/2011/12/15/branding-and-social-media/#j_qJ42Q0haqM

I plan to add additional sources as I go into depth about why people are drawn to certain content, what makes content engaging and what is the best time of day to publish content.

 

Final Project Proposal

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Throughout this semester we have covered a variety of new media trends and how they change how we use the affordances of social media. For my project I would like to focus on virility and how stories, ideas and even current fads spread.

My focus or main tool will be twitter as that is my favorite social media platform, it is also the one that changes the fastest and is the most fluid in its trends. I propose following two verified (twitter’s label for reputable users) sources, one being entertainment or trends and one being news and current events. At this moment I have two main twitter feeds I would like to track the first being Cosmopolitan and the other being CNN.

My goal is to sit down daily and track both accounts daily activity and then record their virility. I will ask the following questions,

  1. Which account posted more, was it frequent throughout the day or grouped together?
  2. Which account got more retweets or shares, mentions and overall response?
  3. Were there any similarities in the stories, if so how were the reporting of the events different?
  4. Which account saw a more positive user engagement? Why might that be?

My goal is to see what type of information a twitter user notices and gives reaction to. For example does a political story about Syria or a “Top 5” blog from Cosmo rake in more web-traffic?

We as a society do most of our day to day activities online but how much of that information do we actually process and are we jaded or indifferent to the current events of the world and more interested in what’s keeping us entertained. By following both these twitter feeds over a month’s time I hope to see overall which twitter account garnishes more regular recognition and engagement. Both accounts are big names in their respective worlds and are widely recognized names.

At the end of the project I plan to answer the following in my final product,

  1. Which account consistently had more user engagement? Was it positive, negative or neutral?
  2. Which account posted more regularly and was that a factor?
  3. Formulate a hypothesis with the collected data as to why one was more favored over the other.
  4. Does this data suggest a change in the type of information we prefer to see online?

Viral posts are a norm online and often we will see the same story told through multiple channels and we all have a favorite source. However is that source a cookie cutter news outlet like CNN or FOX or is it a blog like the gothamist or Cosmo. I hope to gage whether or not there is a preference among twitter users and if so what it is.

The only variation to my project that i am on the fence about is potentially following two types of each account for example CNN and FOX and Cosmo and US weekly to better back up any results i may find. Overall though the general idea is news vs. entertainment.