Creating a digital artefact repetitively over the past three years of university has allowed me to test my skills, explore my creative direction and initiate projects that have allowed me to gain experience and helped me develop in the social media industry. Throughout this semester I stepped outside my comfort zone of past digital artefacts. I moved into a collaborative project, this being the creative services team (since known as The Digital Memo). This project allowed me to experience what it is like working in a team environment and working with multiple creators and content specialists at once. Early in the semester, I chose to take a leadership role in this project, as discussed in the pitch. As most projects do the start is always so exciting and motivating but as the semester went on it became more of a challenge to communicate, create and find users interacting with content. I will be discussing all things collaboration, ideation, development and feedback. Here is how my final digital artefact went…
Collaboration
Collaboration was a bit part of The Digital Memo. We liked to think of the project as a digital content agency made by us students. The team was made up of about 23 people, of all different media specialities. Jess and I, as third-year students, took on the leadership role of the team to try and create a seamless process and be able to have the main social media pages and website in which we would advertise and promote our specialists. This role meant that I wasn’t offering services to others, but more providing a service to the rest of the team and navigating an external way to reach people who would be seeking help in the creative industries. Throughout the semester I feel we reached fail early, fail often a few times in terms of collaboration within the team. Trying to navigate the best way to contact and communicate things to everyone is something that wasn’t an easy task.
We tried to think of different ways to communicate with the team but staying on discord, for the use of channels and ease of relaying information just seems to be the option that made the most sense. Throughout the semester it was evident that there was a decline in engagement in the group as most team members were just happy doing their own thing, although this made it difficult for me to create content and share information about the specialists on the leading social media platforms, as well as for jess finalising information on the website. Overall it was a good experience working with and trying to manage a team of creatives and this is an experience I will be able to take into the real world with me.
Utility
The utility of The Digital Memo is relevant to users on a personal level. For users, this creates an opportunity to expand their content, and their skills and further their understanding of the creative industries by communicating with the specialists. On a personal level, this project is giving me the opportunity to advance my skills and test my knowledge and management capabilities. Social media management and design are the two main specialities I work on so these were the roles I decided to take on as they help me further my development and experience.
The Digital Memo is relevant to users as it gives opportunities to people who run businesses, content create etc. to get a little bit more inside and quickly find a solution or learn something new.
Feedback
Although my role itself didn’t require just user feedback as much as the feedback I was getting from my fellow peers and specialists. In terms of user feedback, we were able to connect people looking for help with the correct specialists and share information from our main Twitter, whereas our Instagram was used to show off who our specialists were, and some extra posts on tips with social media, marketing and tiktok – this generated by our specialists and I utilised this for content creation and design of the posts and feed.
Ideation and development process
The first thing we had to do when kickstarting the creative services team was to rename the team to replicate the idea and the team as a whole. We wanted the new name to feel like a social media agency and mirror the message we were trying to deliver. We were told to create a story and look inside and outside of the frame to develop the perfect name.
Here you can see our name brainstorm that myself and Jess spent working on, trying to find something that sparked an interest. You can see the thought process and the different lenses we looked through to try and cover all options, we picked multiple options and gave choices to the rest of the team to vote on! The Digital Memo was picked as the winner and the initial creation of the website and social accounts could commence. I put my hand up to run the main social media platforms (Twitter and Instagram) and jess took the role of creating our website. We created a mood board/Pinterest board where we saved photos that gave us inspiration and set the aesthetic for what we wanted the website page and content to be. We also did this to create a logo.
Once all this was set up I came up with templates on Canva for each main post we would have, this included ‘meet the team’, ‘TOP 5 TIPS’ and testimonials of users who had utilised a service of our specialists.
Utilising scheduling tools and planning out posts and theme correcting is something I started with really strong, but as the semester went on and the communication from others slowed, it was hard to post consistently. With what I had I created a planning timeline of the things I wanted to get out and when.
As the semester went on things became harder to create, post and keep up to date. There are definitely parts of this project I wish I did differently and would take a different approach if I was to do it again.
Audience
The target audience of this project was aimed primarily our fellow students who would be seeking assistance for their digital artefact projects during the semester. We also aspired to be able to reach a further audience with people who require some extra help in the creative side of content creation, this could have been aimed at small business owners, content creators and anyone looking to expand their knowledge and skills in certain areas.
Overall there were aspects of the project that worked really well and aspects of the project that could have been done much better. I think that the lack of communication was a big downfall in the creation of this project, things can be difficult if not everyone is replying to messages. I personally wish I took a different approach and spent extra time putting in the work for posts, although with my role I found this hard to do without the support from others and the specialist.
ediTORIal. 