The day of the seminar arrived and despite the tremendous speed at which it had approached we were all generally well prepared for what was to come. A group of us met a couple of hours before the seminar was due to start in order to ensure that everything was under control. I was part of this group, having successfully made the journey across three changes in public transport with my 100 cupcakes unharmed.

Together the group of about 4 of us finalised all aspects of our presentation through a combination of printing, tweeting and general logistical discussion. We fiddled around a little in order to make sure our live twitter feed was up and running, this resulting in my 3 year inactive Twitter account being resurfaced with a flood of posts hashtagged “SocialSeminar”. Once more group members began to arrive we started to move across to building 80, transporting all required props with us. At 3.30 Ned met with the guests and took them for a coffee/brief while the rest of us set up for the Seminar now that we had gained room access.

Despite having a few technical difficulties during setup and also not realising that we were in fact allowed to stop people from entering the room before our start time of 4pm, everything was sorted and we were away and running by 4.02pm!

REFLECTION:

Overall, I feel that our seminar was a success. Despite having little time we had managed to gather three unique, engaging and beneficial guests to speak in front of our peers. I think the content that the guests provided was a perfect mix between being interesting and insightful whilst also providing valuable information about working within the social media/online industry. Another thing which I felt work particularly well was our live twitter feed, as this was a simple and entertaining way for our audience to engage with us and our guests.

During the seminar I was responsible for live tweeting from both the RMIT adventure twitter account, our own In(ternet)ception account and then also my personal account where appropriate. Although this was a minor role I felt that it was essential in maintaining and content in the feed. I feel that with this role, as well as the other task I undertook as part of this assessment, that I contributed evenly to my group. It was great to work within a group where we all seemed to be on a similar wavelength and where we were easily able to establish clear roles and intentions. As we were able to distribute tasks so well we made a process which could have easily become highly stressful a relatively smooth endeavour and I think this is something we should all be congratulated for. Finally, it should be noted that we would have never have been able to achieve such a result without the tireless work of our tutor Mark. He supported us every step of the way and was a huge component of our success.

After purchasing all the required ingredients and doing a little research I came up with the idea of creating social media inspired “Facebook Like” cupcakes. The main thought behind this was being able to use the phrase “we’ll give you a like for a like at our seminar” for promotional purposes and also just because I knew they would make a cute and hopefully delicious addition to our In(ternet)ception seminar.

I documented my cupcake journey, appropriately thought the social media platform of Snapchat and my Snap Stories can be viewed below:

Here is also one of my “cupcake updates” which I posted into the Facebook group in order to keep the team updated:

From the time of discovering our group, topic, theme and short turnover period, within the two weeks following the week 2 workshop we were able to achieve much more than we had initially anticipated. Having, such a large group it was quickly discovered that meeting as a whole group outside the allocated class time was not realistic so instead we communicated as a whole through Facebook and met in smaller groups where necessary.

Over the two week period and by the week 4 seminar we had accomplished the following:

• Locked in our three guests: Nick Pearce (co-founder of Homeless of Melbourne), Sophie Draper (Communities and Marketing Manager, Uber Australia) and Sarah Stone (Youtube Sensation)
• Allocated specific roles for each individual
• Designed promotional posters and videos
• Created a Twitter and Instagram account (ideally want to have a specific hashtag so that we can organise I live twitter feed during the seminar)

As well as contributing to group discussion over Facebook and attending required group meetings through this two week period I was also allocated the task of building questions to be asked to our guest during the seminar. I started forming these in a google doc so that they could be viewed by the entire group with Bec and Ned being able to also edit the document as Bec would be writing the questions with me and as Ned was our MC so it was important he be familiar and comfortable with what he was going to have to ask. I also nominated myself to bake some social media related goods to be shared during our seminar, a task I would not be able to complete until the Thursday beforehand.

Below are examples of my contributions within the Facebook group and also the google document which I formed in order to collaboratively write the questions/script for the seminar with Bec and Ned.

In our workshop today, based on individual interests, the room was divided into potential seminar groups and topics. Personally, being interested in the online and digital aspects of the media industry, I headed to the section of the space titled social media. Unfortunately, with the majority of the course population drifting towards film, television and documentary the survival of “social media” as a seminar topic was initially looking quite bleak…

However, slowly through a combination of nominating absent friends and convincing a few to switch from their first chosen group we were able to get our group numbers up enough to ensure we remained. Our celebrations were somewhat short-lived though, as minutes later we discovered that we would be leading the way and that Social Media would be the first seminar to take place.  After a vote, a theme for all of the seminar’s was also established this being “Epic Adventure”, which then formed the steering committees’ page of RMIT Adventure – the title of the entire seminar series.

Having a seminar topic of social media, a theme of epic adventure, an almost secured group of 13 people and a mere 3 weeks before out seminar date we spent the last part of class frantically brainstorming. We made both a Facebook group and a google doc in order to communicate outside of class, looked at potential people to contact over the next week in order to lock in our required three guest speakers and also began discussing in depth the requirements of the task and the different individual roles that would be needed.