During week 11, Jess started to write posts on Facebook to promote our project and attract people to comment their first impression for that new album cover. Due to the time limitation, we all invited some friends to participate in. However, even with our friends’ help, we finally got only about seven responses to made into videos. We expected our project to be very user-generated that could really collect opinions from unknown audiences, but found it really difficult to let online viewers spend their time on that. The project I researched is an successful Instagram activity named Aerie Real, that has over 10 thousand posts under its tag, so I’m trying to learn how to motivate audiences to actively contribute to the media project. 

Aerie is a sister brand of American Eagle selling lingerie, and has launched a campaign named #Aeriereal on Instagram, that encourages women to post unedited photos of themselves wearing a swimming suit. With tagging #Aeriereal, the brand will donate 1 dollar of each Instagram user to the National Eating Disorders Association. This campaign is not just a media work, but more like to be an effective advertisement, that precisely targets on young women. According to Krupnick’s post Aerie’s Unretouched Ads, it is proved that young women are easily influenced by the aesthetic on popular social media, and use that standard to examine themselves. Beauty and confidence are two common issues that can quickly attract people’s attention, and the project expressed a positive attitude of healthy body image that most audiences agree with, so they may be willing to take a few seconds to view. Compared to it, our last theme – album cover, is more narrow and complicated. We wanted to achieve the sense of creativity, and wanted audiences to spend a bit more time on interacting and thinking about its meaning, but it would lessen the number of audiences to a certain extent. For an online media program, creators need to consider of their target audiences and then balance the content and incentive, depending on the purpose of that project.

Further, it is important to choose the suitable platform. In my opinion, social media platforms are huge user-generated products, and different apps have their different features. For the Aerie project, Instagram is a wise choice that the brand needs photos to advertise their clothing, and users like to use visual media to express themselves. Also, the most important point ‘unedited’ can be showed. However, for our work, we are looking for audiences’ first thought right after they saw the album cover, so we consider that text may be the quickest and easiest way for them to do. On Facebook, they may feel more casual to comment just like they usually do. Moreover, Facebook can cover different kinds of media, such as linking to the quiz and the original Korsakow film to clearly show the whole progresses. 

To realise the ‘user-generated’ feature preferably, we may need more time and effort to think a series of related activities that keep the Facebook page alive.