After weeks of planning and emailing and harassing my friends for contributions, semester 2 is coming to a close. As is My Morning Story, although I guess it doesn’t have to. In preparation for our presentation, our group has been idly discussing ways that we could expand My Morning Story into a long-running project. As we’re all going our separate ways in a week’s time this is unlikely to happen, but it’s been interesting to think about our work from this perspective and consider how we might turn it into something bigger.
Six weeks ago we pitched My Morning Story, and since then it’s been exciting for us to meet every week and look at the new submissions, assessing the direction of the project as got bigger. We got stuck into planning straight away, which was to our advantage. Through our personal networks as well as the connections we had made through platforms such as Twitter and Tumblr, our project gained momentum steadily from day one. I feel that we worked together well, and our project stayed on track due to the detailed project plan that we maintained from week to week.
Our roles were evenly distributed throughout the project, and in our weekly meetings we evaluated each person’s workload and delegated upcoming tasks. My role was to monitor twitter and to tweet regularly, calling out to our followers and promoting the quality submissions that we received. I enhanced our reach by retweeting the My Morning Story tweets into my personal feed, which gained our project a little more exposure. I also wrote the brief for the project which was refined by group members and used across each of our platforms, and kept an eye on instagram and our gmail account for submissions. My personal connection with Tess also proved to be valuable, as she provided us with a stand-out submission that gained lots of attention on ABC Pool.
I collated information written by myself, Tom and Georgie into the slideshow presentation, and prepared this presentation for uploading. I felt constantly involved in the project and excellent communication between all members meant that everyone always knew which point we were up to and what needed to be done.
Working as part of an involved and interested group was great for a project like this. Over my time at university, I’ve wondered how social media strategy really worked – for instance, how do you know where to start? As we bounced ideas off each other this semester, I began to get a feel for the running of projects like My Morning Story, and I have to say that I really enjoyed working on it. Putting the ideas we’ve learnt over the semester around user generated content and participatory experiences online has been a valuable experience which I think will come in handy in the professional world.
Using ABC Pool has turned out to be a pretty good experience for me as well. As I enjoy producing audio, uploading my work onto Pool has been a valuable way for me to receive feedback and gain some exposure for my radio pieces. As a result of uploading my work to Pool, I have received several offers of collaboration, and have had my piece featured on the Pool homepage. I have also been contacted recently by a Radio National producer who is interested in using my piece for one of her shows. I hope to continue using ABC Pool, as I think it’s a great way to reach a different audience, and I’ve found the community to be very engaged and supportive.
This semester has given me really valuable insight into the development of social media strategy from the very starting points, following through to the creation of a functional collaborative project. As for me – I’ve become much more confident in contributing to these kinds of projects and collaborating with fellow creatives.
It’s done and dusted: 
