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WILL A GOOGLE SEM STRATEGY BE YOUR BEST FRIEND THIS YEAR?

Author: Sophie Morris

Hello my friend! My name is Sophie and here you will find a blog on how to achieve a successful google SEM strategy for your own business! But firstly, a bit more about me will do. My future aspirations involve being in the world of digital marketing. I love all things digital and am purpose-driven to provide impactful work that will catch the eye. I come from a Journalism background but have a double degree in both Marketing and Advertising. In addition to this self talk, I hope that my creative side of my degree can provide some insightful and well-researched work in a rapidly growing digital world. As I am still learning and growing in this discipline, I would like to think I have some incredible insight on various marketing concepts and can inspire creativity for future marketeers!

SO… What is Search Engine Marketing may you ask?

It is fundamental that you understand the power behind Search Engine Marketing for any business which is just getting started OR even a business that has existed for quite sometime. If you’ve ever wondered, “what is SEM?” you are not alone. There are a lot of terms in digital marketing that sound the same or have similar definitions. ALEXAblog

So let’s define this term shall we?

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a digital marketing strategy used to increase visibility of a website in search engine results pages (SERPs). So basically, SEM is pushing your business to the top of your Google result pages whilst your competitors will be scaling down, isn’t that beautiful. Additionally, the umbrella term is alternatively coined to as paid search or pay per click (PPC). Meaning, using a SEM strategy is arguably the fastest way to drive traffic to your business’ website. OPTIMIZELY

If you are still having trouble finding the differences between SEM and SEO (search engine optimisation), this quick 3 minute video from IgniteVisibility will help justify the main differences.

WHAT DOES SEM LOOK LIKE?

As stated previously, Search Engine Marketing is a form of Pay-Per-Click advertising, meaning that the ads that come up on your results pages are through paid advertising. There are various forms of Search Engine Marketing that appear when you type in your keywords on search engine result page. IIDE provides what these Google ads will appear on your page from shopping to text advertisements.

SHOPPING ADVERTISEMENTS – This form of advertising that shows images and links of the actual product itself. Would be beneficial for an ecommerce store.

https://iide.co/blog/benefits-of-search-engine-marketing/

TEXT ADVERTISEMENTS – This form of SEM are providing basic ads that look exactly like organic search on Google. Although, they will typically include “Ad” highlighted with the search result.

https://iide.co/blog/benefits-of-search-engine-marketing/

YOUR BEST PRACTISE GUIDE: KEYWORDS & MOBILE OPTIMISATION

A few tricks to reach your niche or demographic for your business would be to start narrowing down specific keywords or phrases to gain a larger reach and begin climbing your way up from the bottom of the funnel.

“Keywords are the foundation of search engine marketing after all“

https://www.wordstream.com/search-engine-marketing

Keyword Management Strategy: For SEM to be cost-effective and work well for your users, a keyword management strategy would be vital. It will increase the likelihood of your business reaching a potential customer by viewing your ads alongside results for refined search queries. You need to identify keywords that are relevant to your business and that prospective customers are likely to use when searching for your products and services. Furthermore, there are many tools to help you do this and free options available that optimise the search result for you. WORDSTREAM

WORDSTREAM

Mobile Optimisation: Another crucial step you should take whilst undertaking SEM strategies would be utilising mobile optimisation. Mobile is an essential platform to reach potential customers and beat your competition. In many cases, mobile ad traffic has surpassed desktop. It is imperative that you understand how powerful mobile search really is and to implement it in your SEM strategy. PARALLELINTERACTIVE

https://www.parallelinteractive.com/sem-best-practices-improve-rankings/

WHAT NOT TO DO ….

To avoid any unethical practises whilst implementing your SEM strategy, it would be suitable to go through this list and check the worst practises. WebFX provided the top 10 worst practises on the web that will further your knowledge on what NOT to do:

  1. Generated content
  2. Links from bad websites
  3. Stuffing your meta keywords
  4. Duplicating your own content
  5. Duplicating someone else’s content
  6. Cloaking
  7. Keyword link stuffing
  8. Invisible keywords
  9. Buying links
  10. Misleading headlines

WHAT WILL BE YOUR KEY ADVANTAGES?

It would be extremely beneficial for you and your business to utilise SEM tools. There are many advantages of using SEM for your business. For example, by increasing your online presence, you also enhance your brand awareness and visibility. This, in turn, leads to online leads and generates sales.

To be completely honest, if you are not using SEM you are entirely missing out on a massive growth for your own business. One of the advantages of search engine marketing with PPC is that it can provide near-immediate results, with fast ROI for businesses that want to grow their traffic quickly and capitalise on a short-term window.

Furthermore, paid search results dominate above-the-fold content, with typically four ads on desktop and three on mobile, users will always see paid ads before organic search results. SEM also provides you greater control over your marketing messages and products. RADDINTERACTIVE

IMPORTANCE VS DISADVANTAGES

Yielding a successful SEM strategy impacts your overall businesses digital marketing performance. Without one, your business could potentially lose a bunch of potential customers and brand awareness, especially with the rapidly growing technological platforms nowadays. Although there are many advantages to SEM, there are also many disadvantages that are marketer must be weary of.

IIDE explains the 4 disadvantages of SEM:

  1. Increasing Competition
  2. Higher Costs
  3. Fluctuating ROI
  4. Ad Blockers

WHY CHOOSE GOOGLE SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING AFTER ALL

As previously stated, SEM comes with a lot of advantages and has a significant impact on your overall digital marketing performance. Why should your business implement it?

Using Google for your SEM strategy is a great option for many reasons. Google is the most popular search engine of 2020 and also is the most successful search engine to date. COMPARECAMP.

GOOGLE’S SEARCH ENGINE USER SHARE PERCENTAGE AT 78.92% https://comparecamp.com/sem-statistics/

Google has shown from facts and figures that is undeniably the most powerful search engine in history, this is where most of your customers will be looking for products and services. It has the power to increase visibility and awareness for your company and improve your digital marketing performance significantly.

SO! We have come to the end. I hope that I furthered any of your previous knowledge or expanded your horizons on the world of Search Engine Marketing. After all, SEM will be your number one best friend for your business… maybe next year?

Acknowledged Sources:

  1. BLOGALEXA
  2. OPTIMIZELY
  3. IGNITEVISIBILITY
  4. WORDSTREAM
  5. PARALELLINTERACTIVE
  6. COMPARECAMP
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Why are people abstaining from social media?

BCM312 – The Idea Blog on Communication Avoidance

There are so many websites, applications and technologies nowadays that are keeping our minds constantly looking down at a screen, reminding us to check the latest feed and never leaving the house without our phone in our pockets. As we know it, the world is surrounded by media. As a society, a good percentage of us are addicted to social media and without realising, have a habit of using a good portion of our day scrolling through our social channels. Recently it has been brought to my attention that there is a complete opposite idea to social media addiction and that is, communication avoidance.

This idea of communication avoidance made my own self ponder and articulate how much I am using my phone and checking on it every 5 minutes to see if I have an email, notification or any form of communication being sent to me. Communication avoidance is basically a rejection of any form of media and communication. “Communication avoidance” could be a form of silencing communication or avoiding and blocking distractions. What we know so far is that research and findings on communication avoidance isn’t that up to scratch, and this is pushing me to be more curious about this research topic, “technologies of communication and use receive much scholarly attention while technologies of avoidance and non-use receive comparatively little” (Plaut, 2015).

A few examples involving the idea of communication avoidance are limiting yourself on your favourite applications, ignoring calls and texts, and blocking distractions. This topic has much significance in todays society as previously stated. A good percentage of our daily lives are glued to our screens and we are not getting the most satisfaction out of the day, which may lead to distressing factors that I will get into.

I brainstormed a couple of research questions surrounding the topic of communication avoidance, that being:

  • “Why do people prefer to avoid social media in this century?“
  • “How does media refusal affect or benefit your daily life?”
  • “The power of silencing through social media technologies“

Although, the research question I am leaning towards states: “Why are people abstaining from social media?“. This research question could assist me gaining more information in regards to how many people abstain from social media or take short breaks to clear their mind specifically in regards to their psychological state. As we all know, social media and technology can be mind boggling at times, there could be a range of negative factors that could include mental health issues, depression, isolation etc.

This idea of communication avoidance comes in hand in hand with a term called “information overload“. Which is a behaviour of an individual whom is overwhelmed by digital media. Although over the next few weeks, I would like to research the significance on how abstaining from social media could improve your psychological well-being.

“Being socially connected to others can ease stress, anxiety, and depression, boost self-worth, provide comfort and joy, prevent loneliness, and even add years to your life. On the flip side, lacking strong social connections can pose a serious risk to your mental and emotional health.”

https://www.helpguide.org/articles/mental-health/social-media-and-mental-health.htm

The Help Guide’s article on “Social Media and Mental Health” outlines a range of negative affects on social media usage. They state “multiple studies have found a strong link between heavy social media and an increased risk for depression, anxiety, loneliness, self-harm, and even suicidal thoughts“. (Robinson & Smith, 2020).

Another analysis on “Smartphones, Social Media Use and Youth Mental Health” regurgitated the idea of psychological concerns from using social media and the negative effects. “Concerns have been raised about social media platforms having been deliberately designed — in highly sophisticated ways that use behavioural psychology, neuroscience and artificial intelligence — to promote behavioural reinforcement and behavioural addiction” (Abi-Jaoude, Naylor and Pignatiello, 2020).

All of these factors have such significance on the use of communication today. These studies find that people who consistently use social media could potentially have negative side effects in their lives. It is important to realise your habits online and how much time you’re really spending going online. Communication avoidance could be a behaviour in which you find a healthier balance e.g. limit your screen time, turn your phone off during busier parts of the day etc. “We might limit our communication in order to carve out a bit of quiet for contemplation, rest, solitude, boredom, or daydreaming” (Plaut, 2015).

To conclude, I will continue to look further into studies about communication avoidance and how more people now than ever are abstaining from social media. This topic or idea is very timely and will aid my understanding in communication avoidance and information overload. Hopefully I will be able to pinpoint a certain demographic for this research project in the future to see how they react to communication avoidance and the steps they take to minimise their own media usage. As Ariana Grande once said “looking at my phone but I’m tryna disconnect it” (Just Like Magic, 2021).

Thank you.

References:

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THE FUTURE OF WORK: WILL WE BE REPLACED?

A DIVE INTO HOW US HUMANS DEAL WITH WHAT WE CALL "THE FUTURE OF WORK" WHEN IT COMES TO TECHNOLOGY AND HOW IT CAN SHAPE A FALSE NARRATIVE.

digitaltrends.com

The actual term “future of work” has been a phrase that I’ve heard not only from my University studies, but also growing up my whole life from parents, friends, professors and teachers. It seems to be a daunting topic to those who have jobs in areas of engineering, teaching or even just a plain old job in any field. But why so? There is a stigma around what all of our future of work looks like with the fast growth of technology. The thought process that comes from this issue, is that we ALL need to be cautious of every move or decision we make when choosing a career. Because one day, a computer might just be able to take that job that you loved right away from you. Although, this fear may be instilled in one’s mind because of the negative narrative placed on the phrase “future of work” from what they’ve heard growing up. There is actually a lot less to worry about with this phrase, and us human beings are the creators of our own future with correlation to adaptation, as long as we adapt, we will be fine.

The narrative that comes from the future of work, is mostly quite negative. The Industrial Revolution was the forerunner of this theory of being “replaced” with machinery, but now in the 4th Industrial Revolution, technology is the replacer. Believe it or not, people used their own hands to find and/or make their own resources ranging from clothing, finding food supplies, or trapping animals for their fur or food, and that’s just a small snippet of the hard work people did to make a living. Once the industrial revolution came along, these individuals found that their “own hands” were not needed anymore. They were replaced with large machinery, there was no more hand picking or doing labour from human physical touch unless you used a form of machinery.

“The Industrial Revolution represents the time when home production of goods began to be transferred to factories powered by steam and electricity, fuelled by coal and oil. Producing things in mass quantities and transporting things faster over long distances”.

“Industrial Revolution for Kids: A simple yet comprehensive overview” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nl_-6WPQ4Sg

Technology has since grown from the late 1700s, and in correlation with the fear of machinery replacing those hands in the era of the Industrial Revolution, individual’s of this century are afraid of their career paths and supplies they work for are being replaced with even bigger and better technologies. People are scared of change and/or being replaced in every aspect in life, but the future of work will be entirely subsequent by technology, and we can’t pretend that it won’t be this way.

Workplaces are especially of those in particular who have adapted to the fast-moving paces of technology. There have been a number of instances where an employee has been laid off or made redundant because their work is not needed anymore, and is replaced by either a computer or some type of machinery. Although, this factor does not define if a human is good or worthy enough to work in their career. This just means that individuals need to create the narrative that we, as human beings, need to adapt to the future of work and what it will entail, rather than focusing on the negative concept behind the future of work. It’s all about change. Of course, technology is going to run the next few centuries of the workforce, it is inevitable. But, through recent readings and studies, experts also know that a machine cannot replace a human’s attributes. “Study after study shows that while technology will alter many roles directly, it’s also set to have indirect effects. As demand for mathematics, computing and data analysis grows, so too will the need for human attributes like creativity, critical thinking, persuasion and negotiation“. (Bruce-Lockhart 2020).

“The human can do things that the machine can not do, and together they do better”.

Kai-Fu Lee. CEO of Sinovation Ventures. – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DY1j2drdl1w&feature=emb_title

We are shaping our own negative narrative when it comes to the future of work, relatively to us making a positive connotation. Bernard Marr analyses how we can prepare for the future of work in a more positive light, he explains individuals will need to act and engage in lifelong learning, so they are adaptable when the changes happen… “rather than succumb to the doomsday predictions that “robots will take over all the jobs,” a more optimistic outlook is one where humans get the opportunity to do work that demands their creativity, imagination, social and emotional intelligence, and passion.”

“While nothing is certain, it’s important for every human to begin taking steps in the direction to prepare for a future where machines become colleagues. If we don’t begin to adapt to the changes today, it will be challenging to catch up later.” (Marr, 2019).

Michael White’s ‘absent but implicit’ is a practise that enables us to know when something is wrong. Through a negative experience to positive experience, and to know how to drive ourselves forward in the future. This comes back to the original thought process of the future of work being nothing but jobless, we need to think more optimistically and not focus on the growing rate of technology, and if in fact it will replace our jobs. Our overall focus needs to be based on how we can go about adapting to the future of work. Not how we will be replaced.

https://nuwrld.org/get-ready-for-the-commercial-real-estate-apocalypse/

To conclude, the future of work is something we don’t need to ponder about constantly. Of course there is an overlying fear of being replaced by technologies, but we need to remember that we are surrounded by work every other day. Ourselves need to push for further education on the future of work, through life-long learning and growing our own toolbox. The future of work is something we need to adapt too, and change our own values and potentials for. As individuals, we have a responsibility to create our own path and future, and by doing so, it would be obliging to focus more on the positive narrative rather than this negative narrative on how technology could replace our jobs.

References:

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Advertising Amongst Social Media Platforms by Sophie Morris and Julia Johnson

Finally! The finished product of our digital artefact is now available for everyone to watch. Over the last few weeks, my collaboration partner and myself have been examining how social media stars and influencers use their platform/platforms to advertise other companies products, and their own through self-branding e.g. merchandise & defamation. Both Julia and myself have been researching the world of advertising through weekly blog posts and a shared google document.

We used the MEAA code of ethics as a directory when approaching our research into our niche. 

Our ethnographic study aims to understand why online advertising is such a big trend these days through influencers, merchandise, self-branding and defamation.

Final Project: “Digital Artefact: Advertising Amongst Social Media Platforms”

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BCM313 Reflection: An Interview With My Queen or Better Yet, My Inspiration.

“I love being in an environment where we are constantly challenging the digital industry and testing new ideas. Every day I learn something new at Sparro.”

Zoe Mullane

For the subject “BCM313 Future of Work” we were assigned to interview someone that had a profession or career path in our desired future. The purpose was to conduct a narrative interview with this individual to find out their personal values, how they have managed change or disruption in the workplace, and what they expect from the future of work.

Zoe Mullane, my closest relative was kind enough to share this interview with me, making this assignment a whole lot easier. Zoe is a couple years older than me and we have always shared such a close connection growing up. I always aspired to be just like her, not in a creepy way, but in a way that she carries and presents herself I find amazing. Zoe was one of the main contributing factors to why I chose my degree in Communications & Media and even doing marketing. Zoe was the one who got me thinking about University in the first place. Zoe was generous enough to have a meeting with me last week and I had time to get enough information down to reflect on her as a person, so here goes this narrative.

“ I did a full 180, I struggled through high school and nearly didn’t complete school. But then I realised I actually really enjoyed learning and now I’m grateful that I am in a career that enjoy every day”

Zoe Mullane

As much as there are positives, there are also some negatives to begin with. We began with the question on who Zoe really is, which today is a very smart and beautiful young woman who achieves her best at everything she does. Although, Zoe stated that she didn’t always feel this way until she got a bit older. By this she meant that her past was dictated heavily around her choices and experiences as a teenager. She dealt with a lot through her youth, including bullying, heavy family issues and many personal traumatic experiences. If you’ve noticed, the word “experiences” has already been a significant stand out during this narrative.

All throughout my life of knowing Zoe, I have noticed what a go getter she is. Zoe always has so much to offer this world, not just academically but in every other aspect of life. Zoe explained that she managed to push through these hard circumstances because she wanted to change her life around, it was literally an option out of leading down a destructive path or leading herself to a successful path which we all know she deserved. So that is what she did.

Zoe went on to complete year 12 in 2014 and topped her class during the HSC in almost all subjects she did. Then, after bartending for 5 years at a popular bar in Sydney, Zoe decided to make a massive leap of faith and enrol herself into the University of Wollongong studying commerce doing a major in marketing. After recently graduating last November at UOW, Zoe applied for a digital marketing job at a successful digital marketing agency. Keep in mind, this was the first place where Zoe applied after graduation. No experience, no internships, just a degree.

And just like that, out of 50 applicants, Zoe landed her dream job as a digital marketer, but little did she know how quick her roles would change. Her job consists of working across major retail clients and handling adverts for big e-commerce companies. She handles AdSpend and a whole lot of data. In the first six months of working for this company, Zoe was promoted to be the digital marketing executive and moved onto bigger and better clients which is an outstanding achievement for being so new in the company.

The discussion on what Zoe expects the future of work to be like was very surprising. Zoe especially, is fond with working from home as the past couple of months due to COVID she is already shifting the way she used to work. “Covid has put a lot of things into perspective. Just from 4 months of working from home, COVID has completely changed the working environment. Working from home is definitely more efficient, although I am missing that human contact and work culture that we have in person. “

“I expect that digital will grow massively with more people shopping online as covid has made more people be less sceptical of online shopping because they previously went in store yet now they need to shop online”.

Sometimes when I feel unsure or confused about the direction I’m heading in or what I am going to do in my future, I look at not only Zoe’s career journey but also her life path as it inspires me to not give up on myself. You can overcome bad experiences and triumphs in your life even at a young age and still achieve big things, you just don’t know it. Zoe is even more of an inspiration and mentor to me now than she was before this interview.

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BCM241: Research Project Pitch

For BCM241 Media Ethnographies, it is now time for Julia and myself to present our digital artefact pitch. Our media niche of course, “advertising amongst social media platforms“, is what we have discussed and analysed in the video below. We decided to explore the trend of advertisements across social media platforms via Instagram and TikTok from large influencers like Charli Damelio and Addison Rae.

By doing this, we will be analysing how influencers use their social media platforms and mass following to promote a brand or organisations products. We would like to dive in on how advertising can make a company sales and profit, also collecting information on the consumer market and if the advertisement had a successful reach.

Using the autoethnography method and using observation as a primary data collection will help us further our knowledge of the advertising aspect online. By collecting comments made by the general audience of an influencer’s advertised post will also assist in our research in later blog posts.

Both Julia and I have planned on taking field notes of our own engagement in the advertising industry on these social media platforms on TikTok and Instagram. As we did from the beginning of our collaboration, we will also continue to communicate over Facebook messenger, Discord calls and writing notes on our shared Google document.

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BCM241: Behind the Scenes – Background Research and Ethics of Advertising through Influencers

Now that we have initiated our research plan and made a planned schedule of our media niche, it is now time to display our background research and show some ethical implications of advertising. In this blog post there are two initial goals, that being background academic research and the ethical implications of our media niche. By doing so, we will be analysing secondary sources that represent our niche of advertising amongst social media platforms. For example, we will be looking at the way Instagram is now used as a platform for social media influencers especially around advertising and promotions, we will dig deeper into this throughout this blog post.

Background Research

An important step of all of this is to have good background academic research, this being to help myself and Julia understand our paradigmatic framework a little better, and to make it easier on our field notes and data we collect in the upcoming weeks. Our theoretical framework will involve us gaining more insightful information on our media niche, that being advertising but looking throughly at the app Instagram, and to use this information to gain a deeper understanding on our topic.

By doing so, we will be using the autoethnography method. Julia and I will be interviewing a small local influencer who regularly advertises on Instagram for a popular clothing brand in Australia, Princess Polly. For example, during both of our experiences during this media niche, we both bought a product from one of her advertisements on Instagram, with a unique discount code “chels20”. Based on the interview, we will be seeing how our interactions with her advertisement and code reflect on the results of her overall deal.

In reference to the above photo “WHICH SOCIAL MEDIA CHANNELS ARE MOST IMPORTANT FOR INFLUENCER MARKETING”, we noticed Instagram as the most used social media platform for sponsored content by influencers. From these statistics, we will be focusing our research on the application Instagram (whilst still referencing other platforms). For example, 30% of people view stories in comparison to 70% of people engaging with posts on Instagram. We investigate this more thoroughly in our studies.

This paper “Influencer Marketing in 2020: 5 Guidelines for Maximizing the Results of Working With Influencers”, will help Julia and I build a structure for how social media influencers interact with their audience online. According to “A Simple Guide To Instagram Influencer Marketing in 2020”, Cronin states that “the emergence of Instagram influencers opened up huge opportunities for businesses looking to authentically market their products to their target audience, and thus the ‘paid post’ phenomenon was born.”

“A recent study of social media studies found that over 50% of users prefer getting product information from influencers and other users rather than straight from brands or advertising. And 34% of users have found a brand solely because of an influencer post.“

Something important to add, even outside of the people who we follow on Instagram and Tiktok who are big influencers like Charli D’amelio, we will see an average of 40-50 advertisements in one day from other small influencers, accumulating to the 4-5 hours we spend on our mobile phones and social media. This comes back to how influencers advertise on their social media platforms, “with 800 million active users, Instagram has become the platform of choice for influencer marketing. 72% of users said they have made fashion, beauty or style-related purchases after seeing something on the app, proving its power in the digital marketing landscape of 2020.” (Cronin, 2020).

Ethical Issues

Like many research tasks, we must involve some ethical issues that arise during the process. Julia and I have outlined a few ethical implications that we need to abide or avoid by. By doing so, we will only be making general observations about a comment that a fan or an influencer has made for example the small local influencer that we will be using will not have their name shared and comments disclosed, basically not specifically quoting what someone else is saying. It will be recorded in a fair and ethical way, being anonymous. Also, both Julia and I have agreed to being unbiased on the particular social media influencer by making fair and not biased opinions/comments on the situation at hand. We will also be using the MEAA code of ethics as a directory when approaching our research into our niche. 

References

Cronin N, “A Simple Guide To Instagram Influencer Marketing in 2020”, Web Article, July 23, viewed on 28th August 2020. https://www.hopperhq.com/blog/instagram-influencer-marketing-2020/#:~:text=People%20who%20have%20built%20a,or%20the%20stories%20they%20tell.

Gotter A, “Influencer Marketing in 2020: 5 Guidelines for Maximising the Results of Working With Influencers”, Blog Post, February 11, viewed 27 August 2020. https://adespresso.com/blog/influencer-marketing-guidelines/

Rimmer K, “The Stats Driving Influencer Marketing in 2019“, Brand Resources, viewed 28 August 2020. https://www.tribegroup.co/blog/the-stats-driving-influencer-marketing-in-2019?

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Where Did My Job Go?

BCM313: Future of Work – Narrative Reflection

A recent and obvious experience of change in my workplace involves the temporary shutdown of where I work, from the occurrent COVID-19 crisis. This experience has ultimately held a lot of change within my life and had caused quite a disruption during the mid-year of 2020. Although I am now back at work and getting used to this new world, with new rules & regulations that are prominent in my workplace, I’ve had a lot of small instances I’d like to discuss that impacted my self-development and my experience near-approach on the work environment and the future of work. By doing so, I will be thinking narratively with background secondary sources, with a massive help from the late narrative practitioner Michael White.

However, I would like to begin with a little background story on my small role at work. As a full-time student at my local University, I needed a small casual job that consisted me working on my days off or throughout the night time. A perfect job that suited that well was a bar role. I make all kinds of alcoholic beverages, make point of sales, do TAB and gaming etc. Whilst at the time this was an amazing job and a good income for myself at that current time in my life, all clubs in New South Wales ceased admist the COVID-19 pandemic that occurred in March/April.

After receiving the news that I had basically lost my job for the next couple of months and had no reassurance on when this COVID pandemic would be over (which currently still isn’t), I was forced to stay at home and work out the next few steps of my current life. This obviously meant losing all sources of income, using my savings that I didn’t have much of already and not being able to use this time at work for taking my mind off other stresses like the University workload (which is extremely helpful with a full-time schedule).

Narrative Therapy, which was introduced by the late Michael White whom was an Australian social worker and narrative practitioner, put together a method which is a practise of narrative self-reflection. This concept was originally for a therapeutic sense, although it is now applied to an individual’s scenario/situation or the reasoning behind the individuals actions. Using White’s practise will create a guide for a personal and distinctive reflection of my last few months of change and disruption. “Although life is rich in lived experience, we give meaning to very little of this experience” (White, 2007).

In synergy to Michael’s comment on lived experience it would be fair to comment on the meaning behind a experience-near narrative on the future of work, according to Gerard Monk this involves “a description of events that relies on a personal or local understanding rather than on an understanding borrowed from established knowledge or expert opinion” (Monk, 1997).

During my time of online learning in the “Future of Work”, I’ve been able to capture what my understanding of experience-near really is. This involves the concept of the “absent but implicit”, which was also a theory introduced by the late Michael White, highlighting the idea that in every experience there’s a different view of what the experience is not.

“Thinking narratively helps us to identify steps that we have been taken in life that are distinctive in some way”

Chris Brooks, 2016

So first of all, I will be discussing my first step of narrative reflection, storying. This is based off describing my unfortunate situation whilst my workplace was going through a temporary shutdown during the COVID-19 crisis. My understanding of my workplace being temporarily shutdown revolves around the “absent but implicit” concept, as my experience of the closure meant that my funds were lower as usual and I could not afford to make impulse purchases like clothing, lunches etc.

The second step would involve myself figuring out what would be the opposite feeling towards the closure of my workplace that I found unsatisfactory. The absent but implicit concept would involve me actually flipping my emotions towards this hard time of losing my job, into something positive. Getting more time to spend inside with my family, learning more about each other and sharing quality time building relationships, which usually wasn’t in my day to day routine.

The third step involves myself reflecting… to cut a story short, I would describe this time of my life as a scary time period that had a lot of distressing factors, with factors of losing my weekly income, being self-isolated, not getting out and losing all motivation to socialise. Narrative reflection is founded on the idea that the stories that we tell about ourselves are not private and individual but are a social achievement” (Carey & Russell 2003).

As I find this ordeal upsetting and being confronting in my life, the absent but implicit understanding of this experience makes me consider my actions throughout this time period. I had a safety net for so long, and never imagined something like this to happen, this has made me develop better thoughts and values that line up with the “real-world” or the “future of work”, as not everything will be as it seems, and one day the world might just be gone as we know it.

Furthermore, after considering and reading over my reflection. The absent but implicit concept comes back, “a narrative way of understanding difficult situations“. This whole experience shows me that after losing my job for a couple of months, that many positive things came out of this, ultimately making my mental state happier by being with family a lot more and using this time to sort out my University life. Although this choice and decision was not ideal, I was still in an environment where I was getting work done, getting quality time with my family and overall was taking steps for a happier life.

References

Brooks C, “K on Stepping Stones”, Flickr, October 2016, viewed 28 August 2020.

Carey & Russell, “Outsider Witness Practises”, Future of Work, Workshop 3, viewed 27 August 2020.

Monk G, “Narrative Therapy in Practise: The Archeology of Hope“, 1997, viewed 29 August 2020.

White M, “Maps of Narrative Practice”, Academic Journal, 2007, viewed 28 August 2020.

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BCM241: The Plan – Online Advertising Amongst Social Media Platforms

Over the past couple of weeks, Julia and I have been studying more about our particular media niche involving online advertising amongst social media platforms. Stemming a new idea from in particular the beauty industry and how large companies use social media influencers in advertising their products. Therefore, this week is all about PLANNING out our research. This will involve us both problematising a few ideas, drawing up a research plan and scheduling our research that we will be conducting over the next few weeks.

Just a quick thought before I get into the planning process of media ethnographies, have you ever noticed an advertisement on your social media platform whether that be on Facebook, Instagram stories or Twitter? Well, in this day and age you will begin to notice a range of advertisements from actual influencers or what otherwise is known as an online persona. The younger demographic whom are currently growing up in a world of new technologies are being introduced to this “online advertising” trend. Although, there can be a few problems with this that we will draw up further on.

PROBLEMATISING

The first step of our process is to problematise our media niche. This involves Julia and I to identify a few problems within our research that will help us find a direction for a later digital artefact. From our expertise, advertising in the social media area can have a positive but also negative effect. Depending on the influencer or company, young teens or adults WILL NOT support or buy into these companies depending on their reputation and past histories. For example, YouTuber Shane Dawson has now lower ratings due to controversy over old videos, which correlates to losing followers and profit from sales.

A few key issues that arise with online advertising include:

  • Controversy over influencers advertising products that don’t relate to their brand or are controversial in the public eye.
  • Wrongful advertising.
  • Discrediting a company and/or defaming another brands product.
  • Not supporting the actual brand/organisation from bad publicity or ratings

Our paradigmatic framework will explore the content shared from social media influencers e.g. Charli and Dixie D’amelio, and taking notes on how they advertise brands across their social platforms ie. TikTok and Instagram.

RESEARCH RESEARCH RESEARCH

Now we begin the vital part of research. Julia and I will be using methods of qualitative and quantitative research to detail and present our research findings. A lot of secondary sources will also help us enhance our findings on advertising amongst social media. By doing this, we will make sure to record notes on our media niche, highlighting who is advertising products, where the product is being advertised and how they are using their platform to their advantage through engagement and interaction. Furthermore, we will use our laptops and phones to maintain our research and to backup our findings. Our main ethnography method is aimed at “audience ethnographies“, this is how the audience respond to the media through culture/politics/social settings, the link below is our example of audience ethnographies.

http://www.globalmediajournal.com/open-access/audience-ethnographies-a-media-engagement-approach.php?aid=35086

SCHEDULE OF RESEARCH

Below is a diagram of Julia and myself’s research schedule, by allowing a week to week description of the research we will be undertaking, will help us further our findings and allow time for change if needed. Each week will deepen our understanding of the media niche “Online Advertising amongst Social Media Platforms“. Both Julia and I will be elaborating each week on these tasks, contributing 3-4 hours weekly via discord calls and Facebook messenger. Also using a google doc to document our ideas and research.

Thank you for reading!

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BCM241: My Field Site

And finally… from last weeks blog post to this weeks blog post, a lot has changed! After long conversations and a very informative tutorial. I have completely changed my media niche and have also found myself in a collaboration with someone in my class, welcome aboard Julia! Her WordPress is linked if you would like to give her blogs a read. Our change in paths led from discussing our interest in the beauty industry online, in particular, for big social media influencers whom are on mostly TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.

Ultimately, our idea is to showcase online advertising amongst social media platforms, this involves the biggest social media influencers in this current time. Charli D’amelio, Addison Rae and Dixie D’amelio, whom are three of the biggest TikTok stars the world has yet to see. Through their use on social media, they are able to mass advertise products to their younger demographic following.

Their prominent advertising is through the applications TikTok and Instagram, usually making a short video to promote a collaboration with a brand. From personal experience, if I saw my favourite social media influencer wear a certain type of clothing, makeup or perfume, I would’ve made a consumer purchase straight away, without even viewing the tangible product.

Below is my mind map for “Online Advertising Amongst Social Media Platforms“, locating the influencers, interactions, advertised products and the social media platforms that are used. Because this topic is so broad, I need to introduce a few main collaborations and ways these influencers promote their products.

Charli D’amelio is the main influencer Julia and I will be discussing, and for obvious reasons. Charli is the most followed TikToker in the world, at 78 million followers on TikTok, 26 million on Instagram and 6.44 million on YouTube. From these numbers you can scope out how much of an effect she has had on not just the younger generation, but even on the older generation. Her engagement is at a crazy standpoint, reaching from 1-30 million views from one video.

But, it is not just Charli whom is reaching a wide target audience. Other social media influencers like her sister Dixie D’amelio and Addison Rae are also making a massive gain from these platforms. With this engagement, comes fan loyalty and an influence on the people who watch their every move. All these social media influencers have a lot of power over consumer choices, politics, charities etc. This is where we move on to brands and collaborations.

Charli and Dixie launched a makeup collaboration with the popular brand Morphe 2 only one month ago. This collaboration seriously outlines how one application can change someones life. This makeup line is aimed at generation Z, more focused on the natural side of beauty. When this collaboration launched, Morphe sold out of most of the products on their online store and also in-store. This highlights the purpose of advertising, from social media platforms. From Charli and Dixie’s online persona and TikTok videos, they managed to sell out a makeup collection with a huge brand.

I’m so excited that I can now dig deeper into this media niche with Julia this semester. Because this topic is so broad, we will be using these few social media influencers and focusing on how they are advertising brands and products amongst platforms online.

Thanks for giving this a read!

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Anytime Fitness Kiama Reopens Following Post-COVID19 Lockdown Restrictions

Photo: Sophie Morris – Anytime Fitness Kiama 13 June 2020.

All fitness facilities reopened their doors today in New South Wales after a 2 month closure from the current COVID-19 global pandemic, Anytime Fitness Kiama being one of them to reopen to members.

Anytime Fitness Kiama had their doors close on Monday the 23rd of March, after the COVID-19 restrictions occurred and ceased every fitness facility across ALL states in Australia.

In the past two months of quarantine, Anytime Fitness owners have been working towards changing the environment within the gym and to reopen a new and improved fitness centre for their members. Also, obliging by the new laws and regulations surrounding numbers in the venue, the social distance rule and complying with thorough cleaning of equipment.

With a medium to full car park today at 9am when Anytime Fitness reopened, members were all ready to show their support and get straight back into their normal fitness routines. Some walking straight back in like the normal times.

It was fortunate to see today that members were following the guidelines of the COVID-19 social distancing rule, kept their equipment clean after usage and abided by the rules and regulations.

Zahli Howard, a local Anytime Fitness member stated that when the gym reopened she was pleasantly surprised with the new look inside the gym, “it was like a new improved environment, I honestly love the set up and what they have done with the place, it is like a whole new gym.”

“Although, the limited numbers and the spacing will be something to get used too. The machines and little areas around the gym have been closed or kept distanced for obvious reasons. It will be interesting to work around other people whilst keeping your distance, as sometimes it is already hard enough using one set of equipment.” Miss Howard said.

The early morning saw an estimated 10 members scanning in to the gym. This was much excitement for Anytime Fitness Kiama owners. Members were also being monitored and recorded as they entered, to abide by the 100 person per venue rule that the NSW government announced last Tuesday.

As Anytime Fitness Kiama is quite a small gym, they could accommodate to the limit given by the NSW government. Although, it will be interesting to see the numbers of members in other popular gyms around the Illawarra.

Kyle Bennett, a member of One Fitness which is a similar gym in the area of Kiama, discussed his excitement to get back into the gym in the next following week as he feels as though the past couple of weeks have driven his motivation back after doing limited exercise.

“It’s been a long time and I’m pumped to get back in there. It’s been odd to go from working out every day after work, to nothing at all.”

Mr Bennett also shared his thoughts on the way the local gyms will work around the new laws and regulations, whilst maintaining social distancing and using gym equipment.

“It’s good to see all the restrictions been raised, although I’m a bit nervous to see how it all unfolds. It will be strange to book in a time and plan out your workout beforehand, hopefully as months go by it will get easier and feel like normal again” Mr Bennett said.

One Fitness Kiama is reopening on Monday the 15th of June also having to close from the current pandemic of COVID-19.

For obvious reasons, people in NSW will be cautious but keen to get back to their local gyms. The current rate of COVID-19 in NSW is at 3 this week, which is at a somewhat slow rate compared to previous weeks.

Hopefully in the next few weeks, the local fitness centres in Kiama can see more members come back and start engaging with the gyms.

A very well done job to ALL local gym owners whom have struggled from the current pandemic, hats off to you.

Sophie.

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Opinion Piece: “How Travel and Commuting Negatively Impacts Academic Performance and Social Life”

https://www.uow.edu.au/about/locations/wollongong/getting-to-campus/train/

Commuting is a part of our daily lives, whether that be to work, school, sporting events or University. Although, commuting can come at an expensive cost and have a strain on specific individuals health and performance. For instance, the topic I chose to research over the past couple of weeks was how commuting to the University from a fair distance affects academic performance and social life. Most classes at the University of Wollongong are compulsory (except the current circumstances of COVID-19), and many students that I know/knew of, struggled with the commute to the University whether that was on their academic performance or social life. According to The Observer, “the life of a commuter is tiring and taxing. It takes a heavy toll on students mentally and physically to juggle their academics, internships and daily commute while trying to maintain relationships with their friends and significant others”. I will always come back to this quote as a student whom typically finds a strain on mental and physical health from commuting 30-40 minutes away.

In my opinion, commuting to the University is an issue for myself and I deal with it almost every time I drive to my tutorials or lectures. The research project that was undertaken was specifically aimed at the BCM212 cohort, and that said, being students that lived at least 20 minutes away from Wollongong. This led me to my goal, receiving great results from a wide range of blog posts, twitter polls and a survey which from now gained up to 26 responses. From this data, I have gained great insights on students’ mindset on the commute to University and how it affects them.

Based on my data, I saw that commuting has a 50/50 impact on a student’s academic performance and social life. This is quite a substantial impact on those students whom struggle with disadvantages when it comes to getting on top of their work from that week, getting to the tutorials and lectures on time, also craving in work by a due date because they were to stressed or anxious. This quote taken from a lecturer at the University of Wollongong ties back together on my opinion “for those of you with a significant commute, coming all this way for a lecture and going all the way home again is a very poor return on the investment of your time (Bowles, 2020).

I expected a lot more students to struggle with how the negative impacts on academic performance and social life from commuting constantly, more students were leaning towards their social life being affected other than their academic performance. My first collection of research data displayed below shows the qualitative findings of students whom find travelling to the University stressful/daunting. Surprisingly, 57.7% of students responded with no, not really. Whereas, only 42.3% said it does make them anxious and stressed.

I gained a mixed response on the question below which was “does the distance from the University to your location affect your time to remain on top of your homework, lectures and assignments?”. 50% of students stated no, and the other half responded with a yes, and it can sometimes. In my personal opinion, I am voting for a massive YES. The distance from my location to the University definitely affects how much work I will get done in a day, the workload I need to complete for that day and my mood.

To go back to the core question of this research, my collection of data from the BCM212 students on the question “how has commuting to University affected your academic performance (homework, tasks, assignments?), gave the response I’ve been searching for. With 18/26 (69.2%) students saying that commuting does affect their academic performance more than average.

I think throughout research, it is important to recognise other students’ opinions on the effects of travelling/commuting to the University, I left this question wide open for responses, the BCM212 participants wrote a few responses like so –

  • “It’s expensive, I spend $80 on fuel a week. I get back pains from commuting so often”
  • “If there is a crash on the highway when I have a class, I can be up to an hour late, which is not good at all as I live in Sydney and if the class is only an hour, it is pointless for me to do the trip”
  • “Sometimes I miss classes as the weather is bad and I don’t feel confident driving”
  • “After spending hours on public transport, I get really tired and unmotivated”
  • “Effect it has on my sleep through waking up early for lectures and tutorials”
  • “Because I live an hour away, by the end of the day, I am leaving immediately and not staying to socialise, which has had an impact on the number of friends I’ve made.”

Additionally, the student experience on commuting to the university will be different for each student. Some individuals are motivated to drive and have enough energy in a day to be on top of their workload/assignments. Whereas, other students don’t have the same mindset and can find themselves falling behind or anxious with not enough time in the day to stay on top of things.

Keeping in mind, a lot of students don’t have the excessive time of commuting. 61.5% of students said it takes around 30+ to travel to the University from where they live, with the other 38.5% taking up to 1-2 hours. According to a research paper on ‘The impact of commuting time over educational achievement: the case of Chile’, Chavarria stated “both commuting time and travel mode have an impact on the cognitive performance and current mood of students” (Chavarria, 2018).

Overall, the survey results I have gained has found a percentage of 50% when students were asked if the distance from the University to their home location was affected. I have drawn up a conclusion that many factors can affect a students’ ability to complete tasks on time, get to tutorials/lectures, see family and friends because of travelling from a distance. To see that 69.2% of students rated the average score of commuting affecting their academic performance has totally shaped my opinion on the negative effects of commuting, whether that be through not getting enough time to spend socially or through poor results on work.

Bibliography –

  • Bowels, K 2020, ‘#BCM212 Understanding Research (as a) Practise’, University of Wollongong, Lecture 1, March 4, viewed 2 June 2020.
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JRNL103: Explainer on Bots and Trolls on the Hashtag #ArsonEmergency

In the summer of 2019-20, Australia witnessed the worst bushfire season to date, with over 1 billion animals deceased, 34 people deceased, 46 million hectares of land destroyed, and many homes and businesses being burnt down. With this, came a lot of media attention, with news updates 24/7 that were factual. Although, some individuals/or what otherwise is known as robots or troll-like accounts posted fake news and misinformation that quickly spread surrounding arson attacks. This is where the hashtag #ArsonEmergency came interplay and will be the focus of the explainer. With many false accusations surrounding the bushfires, especially with the involvement of arson attacks being the main cause of the bushfires, I will be analysing the conspiracies and spread of misinformation throughout this piece.

Fake News – “False stories that appear to be news, spread on the internet or using other social media, usually created to influence political views or as a joke”

Cambridge Dictionary – https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/fake-news

Conspiracies on the #ArsonEmergency Trend, who is responsible for the spread of misinformation?

The spread of misinformation about the bushfires began under the hashtag #ArsonEmergency, a study team of researchers from the Queensland University of Technology found many accounts (300+ to be exact) what are otherwise known as “bots” or “accounts acting under suspicious behaviour”, whom were pushing the idea of an arson attack, otherwise highlighted as “an attack where property is set fire to“ being the drive behind the Australian bushfires. The team of researchers found that the troll-like accounts were pushing the agenda of false conspiracies. But why?

An analysis that was undertaken by Dr Timothy Graham from QUT found that in comparison to the hashtags that were more generalised like #Australianbushfires and #Australianfire found a lower proportion of bot-like tweets, also stating that the hashtag #ArsonEmergency was focused on “climate denial” and was actually a political strategy with tweets aimed at the The Greens Political Party, claiming to be responsible for the bushfires, where there is NO evidence anywhere that supports this conspiracy. This is a primary example of the pitfalls on usage of social media, as messages were clearly created to share false information for the vulnerable users on the application Twitter. Although to continue with the conspiracies on climate denial and the political-agenda, specific tweets could not be found to be a particular group, but fake accounts whom are benefiting from posting their political ideologies and positions.

The Conversation in their article on “Bushfires, bots and arson claims: Australia flung in the global disinformation spotlight” posted this graph below, highlighting the number of tweets that involved the hashtag #ArsonEmergency. As seen below on the graph, January 7th-8th 2020 had a massive count of up to 4000 tweets.

https://theconversation.com/bushfires-bots-and-arson-claims-australia-flung-in-the-global-disinformation-spotlight-129556

To fact-check more on this information, I found of an ABC news source that in New South Wales, only 24 individuals were charged with arson during the bushfire season. This is only a very tiny portion compared to the other factors surrounding how most bushfires start. The main factors that start fires in general come from these percentages (ABC News):

  • 37% suspicious
  • 35% accidental
  • 13% deliberate
  • 6% natural
  • 5% re-ignition/spot
  • 4% other

Fake Information Surrounding the Australian Bushfires

Besides conspiracies on Twitter with the hashtag #ArsonEmergency, there were many stories surrounding false information with satellite images of the bushfires. There was also panic posting on social media platforms, that were accidental spreads of fake news. With the spread of fake news surrounding such a detrimental time, this for obvious reasons caused worry within the publics and communities of those affected, and there was a lot of uncertainty on what sources to get the news from or where it was being published.

The Sydney Morning Herald stated in their article “How ‘Fake News’ created an information crisis about the bushfires” that “within local reporting, wrongly suggested that there had been 180 arrests for arson-related crimes made in conjunction with the bushfires“. This was a quick mistake from the journalist, and does not identify best practises in social media usage.

Furthermore, celebrities who were only trying to raise awareness of the bushfires and were ethically doing the right thing, were posting false images of the fires that were minor errors. For example, there was one main photograph that was spreading around the time of January, that looks to be a satellite image of Australia burning, but it was actually a graphical representation of the Australian fires overtime. AFP Fact Check Australia, posted an article on this issue highlighting “a Brisbane-based photographer said he created the image digitally using NASA’s data of the Australian bushfires“.

Anthony Hearsey

The photo represents past and present data from NASA and is a graph from that is based from the information given during the time frames of 5/12/19-05/01/20. Many people believed (and for obvious reasons), that this photo depicted real time fires that were burning in Australia. When in actual fact, this image is just a visualisation that a photographer creatively analysed and made.

This photo and the story itself led to much more misinformation and went viral. During the time frame of January, thousands of people shared this image on all the social media platforms, and a few celebrities whom were misinformed, shared the image to millions of fans which although shares the context of how bad the fires were in Australia during the summer season, but actually sharing misinformation that isn’t coming from a credible source.

To conclude, the Australian bushfires were not started under an arson attack and a team of researchers from the Queensland University of Technology found that many bot-like and troll accounts were posting suspicious content under the hashtag #ArsonEmergency during vital times of the bushfires. Many were deemed to be pushed by political agenda and climate denial. Misinformation can be spread during stressful times, because of the vast information we already know, when people whom are worried for their safety, property and most important of all their lives, they need the news to update them on every move. This is where misinformation gets spread and fake news is created, mostly from panic, but from what some accounts have highlighted, from political ideologies and beneficial agenda.

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Analytics and Network Analysis Report – #WestandwithQuaden

Introduction

Within this analytics and network analysis report, I will be thoroughly investigating the hashtag #WestandwithQuaden. To begin with an overview and the severity of this topic, the Quaden Bayles hashtag originally began with a Facebook video taken by Quaden’s mother Yarraka Bayles in the month of February 2020, the videos purpose was to show the effects of severe bullying and how badly it impacts a 9-year-old child.

Quaden Bayles, born in December 2010 and was found to have achondroplasia from a young age, this being the most common form of dwarfism. Quaden is also of Aboriginal Australian decent and both Quaden and his mother Yarraka have stated that this form of bullying came from both Quaden’s background nationality and his disability. The original video on Facebook that was posted on Yarraka’s online account has since been deleted, but did gain around 25 million views last time it was viewed. This video was very distressing for any viewer to watch, as you felt the heartbreak for both Quaden and his mother Yarraka. Later in this report, I will be highlighting how much support Quaden got, not only from the Australian public but ALL across the globe.

Content Analysis: To provide adequate research for this report, I have made three research questions to share my findings and make discussion on my analysis. The social media platform Twitter will be my main source of evidence, sharing results of numbers on a post, whom posted on the hashtag and how it spread so rapidly on Twitter. I will also be undertaking a Google Trends analysis to depict the amount of people who searched up this hashtag when the story was shared publicly on Facebook, and how it unfolded the story of the innocent Quaden Bayles, a nine-year old boy from Brisbane Australia. Furthermore, I will be using the application Hashtagify, to display what the correlation was between Quaden and other search terms.

Hypothesis: My belief is that the hashtag #westandwithquaden through research will share how viral a story can be through tweets, conspiracies and celebrity ambassadors. I will also show evidence of when the hashtag became popular and prevalent from when the original video was posted.

How viral was the hashtag #WestandwithQuaden or Quaden Bayles, in response from google search terms?

Methodology – Searching through the platform Google Trends for #WestandwithQuaden, I have managed to gain some good results for an analysis in the month of February.

As stated in the introduction, the original Facebook video was published in the month of February 2020, spiking a viral video with a massive like and comment ratio. The video had over 25,000,000 views, below on the Google Trends analysis has displayed evidence on how the hashtag went viral in the time period of February 9th 2020 – March 22nd 2020. It was literally at a standstill before February 16th, peaking to 100 in just one day on Feb 16th.

Google Trends analysis of #westandwithquaden

During the time periods of February 16 to February 22, the search term for #Westandwithquaden, shows the representation of the highest point of the chart in that time in Australia, this shows the peak of popularity of when the video was posted and then became viral. From this Google Trend analysis, evidence is shown that the hashtag and search term for Quaden Bayles did in fact spark in the month of February.

To back this google trend analysis up, I decided to go outside the box and customise my search options on Google Trends for the search term “School Bullying” and “actor” (for later purpose and evidence), in the time frames of January-March 2020, just to gain an insider and comparison to see if there was a growth in this term during the time of the #WestandwithQuaden hashtag.

To my not so surprised thoughts, this came into much correlation and peak interest with the Quaden Bayles search term, within the time periods of February 19th – 27th, and especially peaking in the search term on Feb 22, 2020.

This in my personal opinion, depicts that the video and story had a massive impact on the Australian public, it would be great to find out information on why people were searching this term up in that time frame, was it for educational purposes on bullying or to find out more about Quaden’s story.

How did the public accommodate the story? Did they react with support or no support?

Methodology – For this section of my report, I will be using Twitter’s search engine and using a range of Tweets from celebrities who were in support. I will be discussing how people talked about it and the way they shared their views/opinions on the topic.

To start off with a bang, the below tweet came from an iconic figure, notably speaking Aussie Hugh Jackman, and also a big NRL sport star Josh Dugan. Other massive celebrities chimed in to the situation as well sharing their support for Quaden. Hugh Jackman in just one tweet got up to 85.5k likes and 15.5k retweets, this tweet in itself showed massive support for the story and Quaden from the public. Although, there were some negative comments that tried to debunk Quaden’s story and were in no support at all, which I will be discussing in my last research question.

Methodology – To find out more information on how people talked about and shared the hashtag #WestandwithQuaden, I used the platform Hashtagify that analyses the data behind one hashtag, based on its popularity, search terms, related hashtags and the locations it’s coming from.

Through my search of Quaden Bayles, I found many related hashtags that correlate with the story, that being #BullyingisNotOk, #StopBullying and #Quaden. It would be interesting to see why #auspol was in much correlation to the related hashtags..

Another surprising moment in my research, was that the top Tweet percentage was in the US with 58.16%, this shows how viral the video went, reaching countries globally, but especially in the US. The odd thing about this is that Australia only got a tweet percentage of 10.2%. This data definitely shows you how a local story can turn into a global sensation in the time frame of 24 hours.

Worth a mention, @RealJamesWoods also known as James Woods one of America’s biggest actors, tweeted alongside Australian supporters, to his 2.3 million followers which gained 46k likes and 11.3k retweets, the way this story travelled through Twitter and other social media platforms is pretty incredible, all this data is showing the true growth in analytics in today’s society.

@RealJamesWoods tweet, 2/21/2020.

How did conspiracies travel through the story of Quaden Bayles?

Methodology – In this last research question, I will be sharing the ways in which conspiracies travelled through the story of Quaden Bayles. After the viral Facebook video, Quaden got a lot of positive comments and support globally, although there were many haters that were trying to debunk Quaden’s character. I will again be using Google Trend analysis to see the interest over time in the conspiracy of his age and if he was indeed, an “actor”.

Many started a false rumour about Quaden’s age, the biggest conspiracy of all, stating that Quaden is actually 18 years of age. According to AFP Fact Check, a photo of Bayles and others encased in an “18th birthday” frame appeared to add fuel to a conspiracy that he was in fact 18 years old. Below I have embedded popular tweets that have stated Quaden’s age and character is false and for money.

https://twitter.com/justpipertoo/status/1230978618140057600
https://twitter.com/ItsYoAdrian/status/1230992115116670976
Google Trends
Analysis of the search term “Actor Quaden Bayles”

As you can see from the Google Trend analysis above, when I searched the term “Actor Quaden Bayles”, once again it hit peak popularity on the graph on the 16th of February 2020. To confirm, Quaden Bayles is in fact a 9-year-old boy from Brisbane Australia, AFP fact check have wrote an article about the trolls whom targeted Quaden and have gave sufficient evidence of the Bayles’ families online footprint. With this video of Quaden on an SBS documentary ‘Living Black’, you can clearly see the age Quaden was at the time of the documentary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOEyjl0Msm0&feature=emb_title

Conclusion

Through my analysis and network report, it is clear to see that the hashtag #WestandwithQuaden went viral in the month of February 2020. Through my methodologies and findings, I have supported this evidence by looking at the trends on Google Analysis, Hashtagify and Twitters advanced search. Although, there were many negative individuals who didn’t support the 9-year-old boy from getting support, many celebrities and big influencers gave their all in the support of NOT bullying. The results in my findings show a success in a viral story of awareness for bullying.

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Research Proposal: Does travel and commuting weaken academic performance and social life?

As a student that lives a 40 minute distance from the University of Wollongong, I have to travel by car or by train for each day I attend, counting up to three times a week. Although 40 minutes does not seem to be that long, it still remains to have an effect on either how much study I get in one day or losing precious opportunities to be with my friends or family. According to The Observer, in their piece ‘Does Commuting Weaken A Students Academic Performance‘ article, commuting takes a heavy toll on students mentally and physically to juggle their academics, internships and daily commute while trying to maintain relationships with their friends or significant others. (Ayaz, 2013).

As I wrote in my first pitch blog post, this topic fits close to home. I was very curious to know if other students dealt with similar situations to mine with the transportation, social life, stress, financial burdens and casual jobs which all had to do with travelling up and back to University. From my own experience and through other sources I found through my research, travelling and commuting does have a somewhat detrimental effect on the university student experience whether it be academically or to social life. This topic is quite broad, I had to narrow down my ideas to one topic that would be timely, relevant and achievable.

So, keeping on with the topic question and narrowing down the scope of my topic I am going to dive into the factors that affect travelling or commuting to the University, through academic performance or the affects on a students social life, throughly investigating grades and marks in assessments/assignments. In Kobus, M.B, Van Ommeren, & J.N., Rietveld P’s study, they had found evidence that students with longer commute times have lower average grades, but the magnitude of this effect is unclear. Furthermore, based on my recent poll on Twitter, I have found 55% of students are affected academically by travelling up and back to the University, this could range from their time to study, work load with assignments and other readings to keep up to date with. My other poll outlines that 69% of students find it daunting and have anxiety to drive or use public transport to get to University, with including factors of bad parking, traffic, the amount of time it takes etc.

More to discuss/think about it, commuting is like having another class added on top of your schedule already, and by the time you have got to your tutorial or lecture, your brain is so set on the journey you had, making it hard to focus on anything BUT learning. In Alfano’s and Edujlee’s study ‘Differences in Work, Levels of Involvement and Academic Performance Between Residential and Commuter Students’, it states numerous studies have examined differences between students who live on campus and those that commute to college, with some studies suggesting that students who live on campus tend to have advantages over those who commute to campus.

Through Old Dominion University’s study on “The Relationship Between Living Arrangement, Academic Performance, and Engagement Among First-Year College Students”, the study showed that people who lived on campus showed a better score in their finals, whereas commuters had academic challenges. Factors associated with high academic performance suggest high levels of engagement in campus life (Balfour, 2013). In the first lecture at the University of Wollongong for BCM212, the lecturer stated for those of you with a significant commute, coming all this way for a lecture and going all the way home again is a very poor return on the investment of your time (Bowles, 2020). This statement gives evidence of how much travel really does impact your time to work and the negative sides of going up for one hour of your day when some lectures or tutorials are mandatory.

To conclude, I will be gathering more evidence of how travelling and commuting weakens academic performance and social life, I would like to do more Twitter polls using the hashtags #BCM212 and possibly doing questionnaires, surveys, or finding other students to interview that are in the same boat as my situation, whilst researching academic journals and articles.

Bibliography –

Alfano, H.J., Edujlee, N.B, 2013, ‘Differences In Work, Levels of Involvement and Academic Performance Between Residential and Commuter Students’, Student Journal, viewed 23 March 2020, https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nina_Eduljee/publication/254255949_Differences_in_work_levels_of_involvement_and_academic_performance_between_residential_and_commuter_students/links/545782b60cf2cf516480e143/Differences-in-work-levels-of-involvement-and-academic-performance-between-residential-and-commuter-students.pdf

Ayaz, B 2013, ‘Does Commuting Weaken A Students Performance?’, The Observer, web post February 20, viewed 22 March 2020, https://fordhamobserver.com/14460/opinions/does-commuting-weaken-a-students-academic-performance/

Balfour, S 2013, ‘The Relationship Between Living Arrangement, Academic Performance, and Engagement Among First-Year College Students‘, Old Dominion University, viewed 22 March 2020, https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/efl_etds/84/

Bowels, K 2020, ‘#BCM212 Understanding Research (as a) Practise’, University of Wollongong Lecture 1, March 4, viewed 23 March 2020.

Kobus, M.B, Van Ommeren, & J.N., Rietveld P 2015, ‘Students Commute Time, University Presence and Academic Achievement’, ScienceDirect, viewed 23rd March 2020, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0166046215000216?via%3Dihub

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Draft Pitch – Does the travel and commuting weaken academic performance and social life?

In our BCM212 lecture, two themes were sprung onto us Uni students. One, being curiosity, and two, the whole university student experience. For myself, trying to figure out a topic and question for the university experience was interesting, I had many options pop up in my head as I live about a 40+ minute drive from the University itself. Although, issues that struck me were on the lines of:

  • The anxiety being at University and meeting new people, are you sociable or a quiet-minded person?
  • The actual classes itself, do you feel yourself being academically capable for these?
  • All the money that you are spending to be at the University yet you don’t know if this degree is really your future path?

OR (the question I chose to stick with and get annoyed with the most frequently)

“Does the travel and commuting weaken academic performance and social life?”

Now, this research question is definitely close to heart. To give a brief summary of why that is, is because I live down on the south coast of Kiama, this is approximately a 40-45 minute drive (depending on the traffic in the peak times of 8:30 and 4:30 on the Princess Highway) and about 45 minutes up to an hour on the train although regular track work will affect these times.

The distance to North Wollongong 3 days a week, having a casual job and a some-what bomb of a car can sometimes really affect my student experience. I am curious to know how many students deal with the basic necessities of getting to University, do they need to catch the train for financial reasons? Do they even have a car? Does the distance from the Uni to home affect their time to do homework and lectures?

Being a second year student myself, I have had a years experience of travelling to North Wollongong most days of the week, and have had the ins and outs of public transport and driving. Most of the experience has been rather good than bad. Although, commonly you will find train timetables being rescheduled or fairly late, this has a detrimental affect on students whom need to catch the train and need to get to a tutorial or lecture at a certain time.

Therefore, driving also can be a massive disadvantage to the university student experience, before even leaving my home, I am getting anxious thoughts about the parking, the amount of money I will spend that day on parking, the traffic through Wollongong, and just the plain old “bad” drivers.

I am curious to learn more and find out if other students at the University of Wollongong deal with both advantages and disadvantages of the transport and travelling situation. How it affects their life, how it works in their favour or does not. Having done research on this topic will hopefully guide me throughout this semester on my curiosity of the student experience.

Sophie.

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Astrology Lane – Digital Artefact Contextual Essay

Overview –

At the start of the “BCM114: Making Media” journey, Abbey Doyle, Rachel Hopkins and I (Sophie Morris) came together collectively and made a Digital Artefact (DA) called “Astrology Lane”. We decided to make this concept “Astrology Lane” for educational content and accessible use for the theme of astrology, and also for other people who had a passion/interest for astrology. Mainly, we would focus on the aesthetics for people to enjoy our original work and content, which I think helped us gain more followers. Along the way, our methods and how we would use this to our advantage were made amongst the following platforms –

  • Instagram
  • WordPress
  • Spotify
  • Twitter

Our Instagram page was where most of our work was put forward to fellow peers. Because Instagram is such an accessible tool to use on social media, we thought we would gain more media attraction and a name for ourselves on this platform, which people thoroughly enjoyed. Most of this content was educational and aesthetically pleasing for our followers. We have gained up to 214 followers to this date. Instagram was our main tool for followers and engagement.

We collaborated with Enventure on Instagram to give our followers an insight on where the best place for a holiday would be for their sign, we recognised more quirky content like that is very interesting and gains engagement.

The slideshow below shows all our work, collaborations, analytics, feedback and the project with “Enventure”, including tarot card readings for the signs, our latest posts and theme.

Analysis –

In our final stages of our Digital Artefact, we lacked with putting out content and weren’t on the grind as much as we would of liked. We did not get the time to make our own original prints for T-shirts and get to the point of posting original creations of memes. Our online presence was highly mentionable, our user engagement and analytics showed us that our Instagram was getting way more attention than our Twitter, Spotify and WordPress. Our time management within the group also stopped us from doing good things with our DA, if we had time together to sit down and make more ideas the project could of gone better. In recent readings and lectures, our DA possibly went through the FEFO stage as we just weren’t putting out enough content and lacked as weeks went on. Although, we utilised Instagram effectively, with polls and other user engagement stories which was great for insights to our posts. Our expansion of our DA by collaborating with @intoourgarden and @_enventure_ also was a big leap and successful. During our prototyping stage, we made big changes to our theme on Instagram, and I do feel like this helped to be more pleasing for the audience. Overall, I think that our Digital Artefact needed more time to grow, we learnt that if we wanted to grow the page and brand more, we would have to post regularly, make interesting content and not just use Instagram as our only platform.

Links for our Digital Artefact are available below –

https://www.instagram.com/astrologylane/

https://open.spotify.com/user/abbeydoyle1?si=oh_JN6cRRbGavfvWJN2dIw

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JRNL102 EMOTIONAL HISTORY TASK – SOPHIE MORRIS

REFLECTION STATEMENT –

Emotion – Surprise

Stephen “Slippery” Morris – former Australian rugby league player, discusses the time he versed Balmain Tigers in a tough football game and snapped a partial bone in his rib which punctured his lung, a life threatening audio.

IN – IT WAS JUNE 1983…

OUT – ….IN THE NRL

DURATION – 1:48

https://soundcloud.com/user-600905563/jrnl102-emotional-history

This assessment task for JRNL102 was designed to record a time in an individual’s life where emotional history was involved. Over-looking the subject outline, the purpose was to edit and record audio with elements of music and sound to make an emotional history piece, then writing a reflection. The interviewee I chose was my father, Stephen ‘Slippery’ Morris, who was a former rugby league player for St. George Dragons and the Roosters beginning his career in 1979. I focused his emotional history on surprise, as he encountered a situation whilst playing football that could’ve been disastrous.

“Something has to be surprising, or it’s dead” – (Glass, 2016)

https://www.mixcloud.com/sydneyoperahousetalksideas/ira-glass-on-journalism/

Before I discuss his emotional history story, I would like to discuss how much this task intimidated me and my insecurities. Recording my own voice, interviewing and editing audio is all brand new to me, I never touched an editing software system and I’m not advanced with technology as much as I thought. Although, now that I have experienced the app Hindenburg and used zoom recorders to finish this off, I feel much more confident with editing audio, setting a tone, the usage of music and making noise edits.

Between my father and I, we share a close relationship. I felt like I could interview him in a way which no other journalist could. He is a very introverted person, however, he pulled through for me and this task. To start, I set the interview up in a very quiet room in my house, where he felt most comfortable, this was for the purpose to harness the power of the audio to capture his emotion. This also helped muffling out any surrounding noise that would interrupt the audio. To warm him up, I asked him his age, name and what he ate for breakfast, following on from that, the interview flowed. He was discussing the history of his football, the time he won the first Dally M award in 1979, and the changes around football.

When I began my editing process with this piece, I noticed that my father used a lot of broad expressions which was only the negative moment in my editing process. However, I managed to maintain his expression of surprise during the interview and left in the natural breaths and tone of his voice. I added in cheering to highlight the atmosphere of the crowd at the stadium, then used music as tension before he broke his rib in the tackle, which resulted in a collapsed lung that he was unaware of for two whole days. In my live lecture, Macey stated “sound creates a movie in your head” (Macey 2019), which was what I was hoping for during the editing process for the audience. To add to this, I found a quote by an artist “no sound is innocent” (McGinely 2004), that is fitting for the audio subject to the story.

My overall experience was positive and negative, I thoroughly enjoyed the process of learning how to edit and make my own piece of work. I am happy with the outcome of my emotional history audio piece as it is my first time.

REFERENCE LIST –

Macey, J (2019). Lecture, Week 4, “Adding Actuality to Audio Storytelling”, viewed 19th August 2019.

Robin, M (2004). “The Great Learning Orchestra”, viewed 20th August 2019.

Freesound.org – audio pieces, viewed 20th August 2019.

Glass, I (2016). Podcast, “Ira Glass on Journalism”, viewed 21st August 2019.

AUDIO LOG 20/08/19

STEPHEN MORRIS INTERVIEW –

0:00-0:05 “My name is Stephen Morris, I played half back for St. George in the 80s”

0:05-0:11 “It was 1983”

0:13-0:21 “This uhm particular incident happened at Leichhaardt oval against Balmain Tigers in the ARL competition”

0:21-0:31 “Going to talk about the difference in the professionalism from the 1908s up to today, 35 years ago.”

0:31-0:38 “An incident that happened to me, an injury that I, I received an injury against Balmain in that game”

0:38-0:47 – “During that game, I was tackled and slid along the ground, and my legs went over the back over my head”

0:47-1:05 “New Zealand international player landed on top of me whilst my legs were over my head and slid along the ground, I’d been tackled, which caused some serious damage that I didn’t know about till later, um, which I received a broken rib and rib cartilage”

1:05-1:18 “Um, I went off immediately because I was only a little guy and he was a very big man, I went to the dressing sheds and was very distressed, couldn’t breathe. Just a couple of trainers there”

1:18-1:30 “There was no doctor, I didn’t see the doctor was available until after the game. Back in those days you only had one doctor, maybe a physiotherapist and a couple of trainers”

1:30-1:38 “What happened later, the doctor came in after the game, and gave me a couple of tablets, he had a look at me and said “go home and rest””

1:38-1:47 “I went home and took the two tablets, and I found out at training on the next Tuesday night from the doctor that the tablets he actually given me was Morphine which I never had taken before”

1:47-2:05 “And I lay on the lounge for two days and had X-rays and two days later and found out then I had a punctured rib and broken lung and the fracture of the bone had gone into the lug and deflated the lung, and so I had a collapsed lung, so it could’ve been very serious”

2:05-2:20 “Now I didn’t find out about this until the Tuesday at training. These days, with all the doctors they have a staff of about 20 at each of the NRL clubs to look after injuries and treat them”

2:20-2:28 “Today, they have an enormous medical staff and so that sort of thing wouldn’t of happened”

2:28-2:39 “There is a big difference in how they care for their players and the professionalism from the 80s to today in the NRL”

Soph. x

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Media Audiences

As a little girl singing every melody and chord I could sing to “Yours Truly”; to finding out my individual taste in the world of Miss Ariana Grande, I got to watch my inspiration on the 9th of September, 2017.

Before I begin my admiration of sharing music with her on that night, I want to express how someone like herself in such a large industry constantly shares love and strength no matter she endures in life. After the devastating bombing at her Manchester concert in May 2017, Ariana remained to stay strong and honoured the victims of her attack, organising a benefit concert in the city of Manchester. Her strength and courage to bring humanity together with music and help one another instead of recoiling under the violence of this world, is not only uplifting but incredibly brave.

“Somewhere Over the Rainbow” – performed by Ariana Grande, in memorial for the Manchester angels.

The 9th of September, 2017 was the night I was got to witness Ariana Grande’s concert. Singing from the heart, live and raw. The arena felt so inclusive, thousands singing in harmony and it was all for the love of music. The emotions through her powerful lyrics are memorable, her presence up on the stage is something to never forget and each individual was touched by the love of music.

“I hope that people can relate to my music, it’s very relatable, it’s very fun and it’s very honest.

Ariana Grande

Grande, my biggest inspiration today, creates another whole aspect of music, courage and individuality for me as a young woman, her lyrics and harmonies shape a whole lot of strength and expression for not only myself but many others. Watching her concert, I could feel each individual sing to a different part of themselves, all with different stories and lives.

Witnessing Ariana’s magical performance that night has filled my heart and has stuck with me for the past two years. Her influence on me has grown at an even higher peak than it did that night. I am able to connect with her like a friend, she helps me through her music and makes a personal connection to me through music every day. The feeling of being in an audience with people with the same love and passion for music is truely admirable and I will never forget that night.

Thank you for reading my first post!

Sophie x x

My Final Reflection on BCM313 Future of Work

So here we are! My final blog post for the semester. Not going to lie, taking a third year subject whilst in my second year felt a bit daunting to begin with. But I am so grateful that I made the decision to choose this as an elective this year. It has been nothing but great to work with such a great group of individuals, including the teaching staff and students. Honestly this subject was by far the most valuable and calming of all, I would actually recommend this subject to any younger peers of mine who are looking for a subject that is worth going too.

Learning all about narrative practise (which I never heard of before taking this subject) has completely shifted my thoughts on the future of work, and that is all thanks to you Kate. Before this, I was very stuck and unclear with my future direction and what I intended to do with my degree. But now that we’re here, I feel so much clear minded and motivated to push myself and find my dream job.

Obviously this year has been very rough with losing work, losing that human connection through University face to face and of course a lot of negativity throughout the world, but we’ve managed to reflect and get on with our busy lives and try our best, and that is all we can do. It was so refreshing to have other peers of mine in the same boat and to discuss our lives and the future of work like we were best friends, (even though we’d never met).

Going into my third year next year not knowing what the future looks like or holds is quite scary, but this subject has left me with so much to think about and use in my future subjects. I can just imagine these third year students getting to graduate with this subject and getting the send off they deserve, because what an amazing subject to finish off on.

AND that is a wrap from me, thank you both Kate and the teaching team for being so open and transparent with us students. You’ve done incredible and I couldn’t thank you enough for being so lenient and welcoming. Gave me some confidence I never thought I’d have.

Sophie

RESEARCHING SELF-BRANDING IN ADVERTISING

Have you ever purchased a streamer’s or influencers merch? Personally, having an individuals merchandise is a very close and personal concept. You buy it and support the person because you like who they are as a person or their content. It all began with musicians, you would attend their concert or performance and there would be a stand waiting for you to buy their merch, although nowadays there are multiple groups of talented influencers and creators who sell merchandise to their loyal fans. I will discuss how social media creators use their online persona to their target demographic and how they are prominent advertisers on TikTok and their Instagram pages, using their mass following in a smart business way.

The culture of online advertising is growing at a fast rate and many influencers are benefiting from this. Through consistent advertising and having a large following, an influencer can profit off self-branding. “Self-branding has been mainly reviewed as a set of practices, a mindset, and/or a way of remaking the self as a salable commodity to attract attention and acquire cultural and monetary value through social media platforms” (Liu & Suh 2017).

Tom Peter described self-branding as so, “the main promise of self-branding is that everyone has the power to be their own brand and that a person’s main job is to be their own marketer“. Everyone loves getting new valuables, it could range from a mug, a t-shirt or a comfy jumper. The point of this merch is that it reminds you of a certain influencer you love. Something to note in this world of influencers, is that you don’t have to have a million followers to market your merch to your fanbase, if you have a few loyal fans you could make this work.

This topic of merch and self-branding brings me back to the social media platform Tiktok, which is the easiest way to market and sell your product at this current time. One 15 second video could be used to fill, advertising your own merch, makeup or clothing line. A good example of this is from the Tiktoker Chase Hudson, he uses his platform to advertise his own merch line. By wearing and showing off your merch, attracts the fans to do the same and buy buy buy.

Another social media platform that has the highest engagement as of today, is Instagram. This is where you will find the most advertisements and branding for big influencers or content creators. The reason being, is that Instagram allows you to promote your brand through multiple media channels, including a story, IGTV, an Instagram ad, Instagram shop and normal post. That being said, many content creators use Instagram to promote their merchandise to fans through instagram stories, posts and through the Instagram shop.

Through my own experience of purchasing merch, I have made this decision because I’ve seen the person I view or watch consistently show off this product multiple times through social media platforms, which captivates my eye. By doing multiple posts and sharing your merch/product to your fans is a smart business move and will ultimately make the influencer/content creator profit in some way.

Self-branding has become super prevalent in this era and will continue to be what we know for the next decade. It will also be used for commercial gain as well as personal gain if you love the influencer or content creator. Individuals who self-brand will continue to be responsive to their target audiences and make their product unique.

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