This day was a blog post on International Women’s Day.

Laura emailed around saying they’d gotten the Marjon blog up and running and they were looking for contributions, and specifically one on international women’s day.

Since I went to the day, I offered to write this post, though I mentioned I didn’t have any pictures so they provided them.

Because I’ve written a lot of blog posts, this was probably the easiest thing I’ve done for marketing. I think the hardest part was trying to stay accurate, since I wrote it over a week after the event. Also, as I mentioned before, there was a Labour candidate there and I’m still not sure how that works with making stuff for Marjon but I felt like it was important so I included it.

The difference between this piece and some of the others piece I’ve done for them, is that I can directly see the shares and likes and views for this post, so can better see how the audience responded to it. It’s been shared around on Facebook and Twitter by the speakers who were involved in the day, but the video and snapchats have gotten a better response. I think covering all bases makes sense, but ultimately, I think people are more likely to watch videos because they don’t take so long, they’re easy and more entertaining. This is frustrating though, because that’s not what I want to do, but it seems  to be the way everything headed… The next blog post I do for them (either one about moving off campus, or mental health in deadline season) I am going to try including a video and see how that one goes.

Blog post for reference: http://sites.marjon.ac.uk/marketing1/2018/03/06/reflections-on-the-women-in-leadership-conference/

For this day of experience, I once again ran the Marjon university’s Snapchat account for the day. It was International Women’s Day, and the university hosted a conference full of speakers and discussions. As well as attending, I took pictures of speakers throughout the day with captions, and I also did short video snippets of various talks.

To avoid interrupting  the speakers, I sat right in the middle of the room to get a good camera shot. This was also so I could see everything without having to move or get up and walk around. This would give the students viewing the snaps a better view.
Because of the audience – Marketing have explained that the main audience of the Snapchat is mainly current students – I tried to keep the captions relevant and interesting, using some of the filters Snapchat offers and coloured writing instead of black. Because it is student centred, tried to keep it informal. My usual writing style is naturally very informal anyway, so this was easy.

There was a part of the day where a political candidate for the Labour party came in to talk about women in politics. I was nervous when putting this on Snapchat, because I was aware that I was running an official account for the university and you have to be careful about things like that. Though, since there was no one from another party there, I had to put it up anyway. I wouldn’t say it affected how I described her talk, I was just aware that it was something I probably should be careful of.

While I did upload to the Snapchat account for the day, in terms of what I got out of it, there wasn’t much. The talks throughout the day distracted me a bit, so the social media stuff was more of an afterthought, something I was doing because I was already there. Looking back, I could have gotten a quick one minute interview with some of the speakers, or asked them to pose for photos or something extra, to make the Snapchat more interesting, but also to use other skills that aren’t just taking photos on an iPod.

Friday 26th Jan

For the marjon media people, I was asked to film and edit Lee Ridley’s keynote at the Speech and Language Therapy conference. For this I booked out a video camera and rifle mic from Rob, since I figured I’d be filming from the back of the drama theatre.

Filming isn’t something I’m particularly brilliant at, but I didn’t have to get b-roll or music or sound effects or anything like that, really, just make sure Lee was in shot for the whole thing, and that the sound was good, so I just kept my headphones in the whole time and listened through them to make sure the levels were okay.

Part of the brief was to edit the video, so on Monday I edited together a video for the Marjon Facebook page, about 2 and a half minutes long featuring the start of the keynote because I thought that was the part most relevant for Facebook; I think Laura wanted to put the full video up on Youtube so I saw the Facebook video as a snippet into a 45 minute video.

Laura emailed me back saying everything was fine, but could I edit out the introduction and put in some text instead, which would cut the video down to two minutes, so I re edited and included a text part.

The video on Facebook has 1.5k views, so that’s pretty exciting!

I felt pretty comfortable doing this piece, because it didn’t involve talking to people, which is what I tend to struggle with. Though, like I said, I don’t feel especially confident filming, it was a fairly simple video to make, and the edit was more important than the actual shots, and I do feel confident in my editing. Laura’s change was a good call, and I had considered taking out the intro part, but wanted to provide some context. I wouldn’t have thought to include text, however, if Laura hadn’t mentioned it.

Having a brief to work to makes things slightly easier, I think, because I know exactly what I need to include and what marketing was looking for. Like with the Eli interview, there were some suggested topics to ask him about, which made questioning easier, but I was also free to ask him about other interesting things as well.

Yesterday I produced content for Marjon’s snapchat account, according to a brief set by Laura Bell.

Since the Student Union Presidential positions are opening up in a few days, Laura asked me yo interview the president about the role, to create interest and clear up some questions about the roles.

About 1pm I went to interview Eli, taking a picture and writing that there would be an interview coming up, and followed with around 5 minutes of questions and answering. Because it was Snapchat, which Laura requested because most of the followers are current students, I don’t have any clips of the questions I asked, or his answers, and they’ve since been deleted because of the whole 24 hour thing.

I think it went well, Eli answered the questions really well and I tried to throw in some questions about him so the interview was a bit more interesting. This was a good start to producing media for Marjon, but because of the nature of the content, it’s difficult to get feedback on how I did. Hopefully the next thing I make for them – planning to do a piece on the new societies being started here – will be easier to assess.

Yesterday we wrote fake cover letters and talked about our mock interviews in December.

The interviews I’ve had before have all pretty much gone the same way – me fumbling to respond in coherent English to simple questions – and somehow I currently have a job, so who knows how that happened.

I was really pleased with how my cover letter turned out; I thought it was professional enough but there was still some personality there so it hopefully wasn’t boring. Rob said it was good, but to ease back on the personal stuff a bit, which I won’t disagree with – there is a line and I might have crossed it. Everyone makes such a big deal about standing out, and I think that’s a huge part of getting a job, but maybe not giving a potential employer my entire life history is a good idea.

Surprisingly though, I found it wasn’t difficult to find positive things to write on it. It’s easier in writing though, to a nameless, faceless person, whereas in an interview I still don’t want to sound arrogant, even though that kind of is the point to an interview. You’re both there to have a conversation about how great you are. I think all of the quizzes helped, because they were much more positive than I thought. There was also one entirely dedicated to strengths, which helped me write the cover letter, and gave me a nice ego boost at the same time.

This lecture, we were creating CVs. And not like our original CVs, that have to all look pretty much identical and contain all the same information with slightly different GCSE grades, but personal CVS.

Because journalism is a pretty creative industry, I wanted to make a creative CV, something that kind of says what kind of person I am and also showing I know how to use InDesign past a 20 minute crash course.
Being me, I created my CV to look like a Wild West Wanted poster. It’s not finished, as I need a professional-ish headshot to go in the centre, and need to change the background colour, but the info is down, and the design is mostly complete too.
I chose this design because it will definitely stand out, it’s a bit weird, and hopefully they’ll know I’m a bit different because of it.

Shannon Brown CV unfinished-wmqbh2

This week, I took some online quizzes on the Marjon Futures site.

The most interesting one was the Temperament quiz – essentially a version of the MBTI test, which I’ve done many times already. I’ve always had the same answer when doing it before – INFJ – so I wasn’t expecting anything new on this one, but it told me I was an INFP – the only difference being a preference for spontaneity and going with the flow. Depending on how much these personality quizzes are to be believed, that might explain why I’m struggling to get organised and complete tasks on time.

Out of the quizzes I took, they were mostly different answers to what I expected. The Stress Management one, for example, would I cope well with stress “most of the time,” and I don’t really agree with that. A healthy management would be talking to people, working through things,  allowing time for breaks. I tend to ignore stressful things until it gets too much then blitz through and produce something a little bit half-assed.

On writing that, I realise I definitely to start handling that a bit better.

For this week, our task was, essentially, the same as last week: create a radio show aimed at a specific target audience.

I might have suggested children as our audience, without specifying age group or gender, which was probably what threw the task off slightly.

Due to personal issues, I hadn’t brought anything for the session – I didn’t have a chance to create anything – so I filled in for a missing person on they day, and ended up writing and presenting the news.

This wasn’t aimed at children, but instead aimed at parents listening to the show with their kids; many families listen to the radio together in the car.

I think this worked, because it was designed to give the parents something to focus their attention, before the show that really wasn’t for them.

I wrote the news the morning of the show, so we would be broadcasting relevant events, and because I wasn’t aware I’d be doing it till then, and scripted out what I would say. Then, during the main body of the show, I looked for, and scripted, a new section of news, to add a bit of variety.

The first reading went well, and I don’t think I stumbled over any words when reading it out, but I know I did in the second one. However, I think that was because that was my first time talking live on radio, and I was very nervous. With practise, I think I’ll do a better job, and my voice will hopefully sound less shaky as well!

To go back to our audience – because we didn’t specify and age group and just said “children,” there were some differences in the style of the packages people in the group made. Some were made for very young children, but some were about school and option for after school.

To improve, I think we will select an age group and, possibly, a hobby, or interest of the intended audience, so we have a more focused radio show. I think we will also need to pay more attention to the order of the packages – we started with one about films because it was the most ‘news’ based.

While I think this is a good structure for most shows, I don’t think it worked with ours, because we were aiming it at children – I think we should have started with a more exciting package to attract the listeners attention, as well as ending on an exciting one as well, so they have something they know they’ll want to listen to.

This would work best with a preview, or a ‘coming up on…’ section, so I think we should also include on of those next time.

Overall, I think the show was a big improvment on the previous weeks show, which was the main focus, really.

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