Summary Two

I must say the task when first assigned was quite overwhelming. It was necessary to delegate a director who perhaps had the best understanding of the task. Once Manika Naidoo was delegated as director, I found things fell into place rather well. She was able to collate our ideas into a proposal, which clearly depicted what we all needed to do in order to achieve our task.

I delegated myself the position of managing communication between the team. From day one, I collected my team members contact details and created a Facebook Group so we could have constant communication outside of class. I composed an Excel spreadsheet detailing everybody’s available times to meet vis-a-vis and communicate via Skype.

After discussion, I would make an announcement via Facebook, of when we were meeting next, and what work needed to be achieved by a particular date. Facebook’s group options permitted us to upload documents and indicate who had seen the posts.

Furthermore, we used Twitter and created our own hash tag (#Gloco13T4) as an additional source of communication. There is a saying: if you can’t explain something simply, you don’t really understand it. Twitter is fantastic for this by limiting you to 140 characters to get your message across. Using this platform forced members to deliver a succinct message and it would become clear to other members if the task was understood or not.

Initially setting up these communication platforms and collaborating with individuals on assigned work was one of my major responsibilities. I then helped with collating and editing team members’ work to compose our final document and prepared and delivered the presentation and the accompanying slide show.

We were quick to start with our research, and decided on ideas on how to communicate and promote T4 collaboratively and swiftly. This came easy to the group. What was difficult is that we had too many ideas we thought could be incorporated into the task. After careful discussion in our first meeting with Marius, we realized what we were choosing to use did not fit in with the project. We needed to edit and revise our proposal and ultimately, chop some of our members’ ideas out. Despite this, we all took a very mature and diplomatic approach to satisfy everybody; hence we were able to put our efforts fully into a finalized version. This was the YouTube campaign, which everybody, I believe, contributed fairly to.

The major troubles we had, and perhaps this came from constantly refining our project was some misunderstandings when team members needed to deliver their assigned task. Perhaps they didn’t understand it as well as the ones that delegated it to them, but it resulted in late submissions and revisions of their work done by either Manika or myself. This at times was irritating, not because I felt they did not pull their weight, but rather that they were submitted late, which delayed other work for the project. Alas, we got there in the end.

If this project was to be approached again, although the work loader may be larger, it is far easier to coordinate three people as opposed to five. I found myself one of the most flexible of the lot along with two others. The remaining members were not, in my opinion as willing to make the extra effort to meet up – a bare minimum of once a week. This became irritating, because three of us would be up to date and more familiar with the work, and the other two not. It made it harder to progress faster and further with the project. However, I will say they were very diligent in making sure they kept up to date with Facebook posts and tweets.

This project, and class in general has truly opened my eyes into what is available now for low-budget campaigns and company’s to make a name for themselves. How their message and persona can spread like wildfire via online platforms. We mention in our CSD what traditional campaigns would do if given such a task as we were. Social media would not be the crux of their crusade, but part of it in some way. I think we were very realistic in our approach, but also had we had an estimated budget, I think that may have influenced some of our decisions.

If confronted with another similar project, I would be pushing Twitter as a major platform for interaction with potential clientele and personas. The mere direct tweeting or “mentioning” of a Twitter user sparks interest and flatters the user, as we found when trying to gauge interest in The T4Story. I am more familiar with Facebook, but via this project have really come to learn and respect Twitter more and can see its potential and value in communications and marketing.