Digital Director Project Brief 5 – A Sketchy Reflection
When I think of “group projects” I think of small collaborations between no more than five people who don’t know each other and never really get to know each other despite this supposed “collaboration”. Digital Director and Sketchy Students was my first experience with an entire class project that allowed people to work with their passions and strengths, and gave us a change to know like-minded people through the countless hours required to produce what we did.
For myself this was an incredibly positive experience working alongside my social media team who all showed similar interests to me and had pre-existing knowledge of this aspect to the overall production. As Sketchy Students Instagram Manager, I discovered that overall it is best to “aim low, shoot high” in order to not over-estimate the potential of such a short time frame project. As I articulated in Project Brief 4, I found throughout the month or so of actively posting on the account, it generated very little discussion and/or attention from Instagram despite following what myself and the class believed to be the most successful method of reaching audiences – through tagging.
I guess the best way to look at this experience of running the account is that despite its failures, I learnt a lot using accepting failure of something like this and considering that sometimes things need to go wrong before they can go right. Meaning that an Instagram account needs to be well established before it can go actively seeking an audience. Essentially I believe if there’s not much to look at on the Instagram, someone isn’t going to pay much attention (at least I feel that way when I go on Instagram and see an account with
To briefly make mention of the way the whole class got along – I observed the class dynamic on many occasions. Mostly what I noticed was that people with roles in other areas at times would butt heads with my team in order to have their ideas shown over decisions that our team had made which we thought would be in the best interest of the project. Naturally, this was hard for my social media team to understand because we felt that our knowledge of what would be successful was sufficient and after all, it was our designated area of the project.
Ultimately what I’m going to take away from this project is a newfound understanding of big collaborations and how I can still use what I love (social media) to contribute to it. I have genuinely enjoyed the experience and I’ll miss working with such creative, fun people.