Project development

• Aim: To investigate the impact social media has had on human interaction.

How to utilise Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to generate ideas/ get brand awareness:

• Research current trends - TikTok
• Use instagram to discuss collaborations with people - social media makes communication around the world easier, you can direct message famous artists. 
• Twitter can be used to announce/ tease the idea of new music to make people aware, get people interested in your brand before the music is released. 
• Soundcloud/ TikTok can be used to release samples of your music, any social media user has the opportunity to post their own content once they create an account.
• Snapchat can also be used to post samples in order to receive audience feedback. 
• Crowdfunding (kickstarter)
• Crowdsourcing can help you to find a team of people to work with you on your project; artwork, sound engineers, musicians and lyricists at a cheaper price than using famous or super professional workers. 

Ideas generation and collaborative projects:

Slack: Is a cloud-based proprietary instant messaging platform and is a collaboration software,  allows you to share files with other people in private chats. 

• Channel for every conversation 
• Team members can join and leave channels as needed 
• Threads keep side conversations from derailing the topic or project at hand.
• Collaboration beyond colleagues - share channels with companies and businesses you regularly work with - like clients, vendors and partners - to bring all the right people into the same room. 
• face-to-face and face-to-screen - talk in depth over voice or video calls directly from slack. If you need to show your work, you can also share your screen. 
• Integrated file sharing - drag and drop PDF's, images, videos and other files directly into slack. Get feedback on your work and create an archive of your progress. 
• able to connect your tools with slack - the slack app directory has over 1,500 apps that you can integrate into slack. you spend less time juggling tabs and more time focusing on getting real work done
• or build your own API's where you can get even more from the tools you rely on. Configure slack for your teams unique needs and technology with the slack API.
• Keep your data secure - the site uses slack to run slack, so your data is protected. They also work with customers everyday to make sure their data security requirements and expectations are met or exceeded. 

“Slack is like an ongoing meeting. You stop in for the portions that are important to you, and leave the room when you’re done. Free to come and go as you please. If someone needs you, they’ll call you into the room.”

Matthew Taylor - digital production editor - The Times (UK)

The Sunday Times and Slack:

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Case study: Sheffield Soup: An example of 'grassroots' project - a project produced by amateurs, increasingly distributed by social media.

How does it work?

• individuals pay £5 to attend a scheduled event.
• they receive a bowl of soup to eat while they listen to a series of pitches.
• all funding generated from the door goes to the winning pitch so that the project can be developed. 
• the founder, Pennie Raven, initially floated her ideas on Twitter to get the project started.
• Convinced that a Soup project must already be up and running in Sheffield, Raven set out to track down the founder so she could offer to help. But it did not take long for her to realise that the concept had not yet reached her city.
• "In that moment I just thought: 'Right, well I'll do it.'" Within 48 hours of setting up Sheffield Soup online Raven was being sent emails and messages offering help and support. "I was completely blown away," she says.

How the soup project is changing the UK: BBC News:

Detroit Soup is a concept for crowd-funding dinners that has raised more than $100,000 (£63,900) for community projects in the Motor City. It has rapidly spread around the UK.

More than 100 people turned up to the first Sheffield Soup in July. "I had no idea that it would be this successful," says founder Pennie Raven. 

She started the project less than six months ago, after hearing about the crowdfunding funding dinners in Detroit from the BBC.

It's a simple concept, explains Raven. You pay a small entry fee in return for a bowl of soup - and the chance to hear local people pitch ideas to help your community. After questions are taken and liquid meals are served, everyone votes for the project they liked best. The winner gets to keep the money paid at the door.

At her first event, the ages of those who paid £5 to get in ranged from 15 to over 65. The ideas pitched were as diverse as the audience - from a 3D printing project to a sports club helping people with disabilities. 

After a bowl of spicy gazpacho or creamy carrot soup, the audience picked their favourite. It was the Real Junkfood Project that triumphed, winning £540 on the night. The project's volunteers create meals in the community from food thrown away by supermarkets, grocers and food banks. 

"I can't quite put my finger on what is so special about Soup," says Raven. "But I had five people say that they were going to set up a group in their neighbourhood on that evening."

One of the projects that failed to win the Liverpool Soup in May has already found this to be true. The Housing Hackathon wanted to raise money to hire a venue so that students could get together to create mobile apps to help solve housing problems in the city, explains Patrick Hurley from Liverpool Soup. 

"Somebody afterwards went up to them and told them that they didn't need the money that was on offer," he says, adding that one of the audience members had a contact who could give them a venue for nothing. 

Even the winners agree that Soup dinners are more about the people they meet there than the money that is given away.

Sheffield Soup uses Twitter to announce locations of the next project pitch evenings where they mention the where's and when's of the events and request that those attending let them know so that Sheffield Soup can make sure there's enough soup for all the attendees. 

Veronica Mars movie 

Crowdfunding (kickstarter) project: The Veronica Mars movie project 

Veronica Mars movie 

After the tv series' cancellation in 2007, Thomas wrote a feature film script, continuing the story. However, Warner Bros. declined to fund the project. On March 13, 2013, Thomas and Bell launched a fundraising campaign on Kickstarter to produce the film. It attained its goal of $2 million in eleven hours, breaking several Kickstarter records, including being the largest successful film project on the website. After raising a budget of $5 million by the end of its run, principal photography began in June 2013 in Los Angeles, and concluded in July 2013. An additional day of shooting took place in December 2013. With 91,585 backers, they raised $5,702,153.  

Crowdfunding (kickstarter) project: Studio Killers 404 

Started 14 days ago, and so far it has 1,987 backers with a fund of £118,122 pledged of £90,000 goal. 

Studio killers is an internet phenomenon of vibrant animation and music amassing over a 120M views on YouTube! This secretive audio visual group is comprised of 4 individuals ( 1 visual artist and 3 musicians). But to the general public they are known as the virtual characters that represent them: femme boss and front woman Cherry, Keytarist Goldie Foxx and DJ Dyna Mink. 

Evaluating Project Development Tools:

A number of project management tools are available that help media professionals manage projects. Email is widely used, as are basic social media sites such as Twitter, but more sophisticated sites also exist – some free, some paid for.

These include Redbooth, Projecturf, Apollo and Basecamp.

Red booth: an intuitive booth workspace:

• get more work done with shared workspaces 
• helps to avoid micromanaging. is designed to empower self-directed teams, enabling individuals to demonstrate their progress. Now you can check in only when needed, freeing up your time to focus on growth.
• visibility and transparency - easy to manage team members work
• manage projects more efficiently- red booth allows you to set deadlines and targets for key tasks 
• video chat options for meetings 
• reporting analytics 
• available on App Store and google play store 
• costs $15 per month for a year, and $18.75 per month for any amount of months you choose (business price).
• unmatched user experience 
• comprehensive project management 
• communication made easy 
• permission-based operations 
• extra safety features 
• used by Huffington Post 

Projecturf: project management software

• project turf can be used to reduce business chaos, recapture lost man-hours, and gain critical business insights. 
• collaboration tools for large teams, insights for project managers, and plenty of security for peace of mind. 
• branded workspace where your people meet and interact in real-time
• its built for larger teams and enterprises to connect people around the world. 
• costs £50 per month for your business team.

Social media measurement and aggregation:

Key Terms:

Trending: when social media measurement tools flag the most popular hashtags and fastest moving content, especially twitter.

Social Media Aggregation: the process of collating the data of all your social media in one place.

Social Media and Search Engine Optimisation: a major internet marketing strategy that involves the process of affecting the visibility of a website in a search engine. May target different kinds of searches, including image and video, academic and news searches. 

Finding out how many times a website has been visited, or how many times a project has been discussed on social media, is a vital tool for many media professionals. 

Sites such as BackTweets, Hootsuite and Mention are designed for this purpose, allowing project managers to collate trending data on how many times a hashtag has been used or shared.

Mention:

• Drive the conversation - mention enables brands and agencies to monitor the web, listen to their audience and manage social media. 
• able to listen to online conversations and never miss valuable information 
• share relevant content with your community and build your audience
• listen to what people are saying online before planning your social media content. engage your audience in a relevant way to grow your brand. 
• 750,000 + marketers are growing their brand online with mention, e.g. Lamborghini, Allianz, Airbnb, Microsoft and Deliver. 
• Online media monitoring
• brand management - receive alerts ever time your brand is mentioned - aggregates/collates information.
• social media listening - qualitative insights 
• social media management - post and schedule relevant social media content. 
• keywords mentioned in social media platforms - receives alerts 
• competitor analysis - what is said about your competitors 

Backtweets: is a Twitter analytics tool which allows users to search through a twitter archive for links including shortened URLs that were sent on twitter. Backtweets enables individuals, companies and their competitors to gauge the quantity and quality of their twitter reach by showing the number of times a link was tweeted. From a business perspective, the backTweets service can help corporations understand how individuals interact with their brand. 

Hootsuite: Hootsuite supports social media integrations from Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus and Youtube. Hootsuite ensures that everything posted onto one social media can also be published, at the same to time to all other, or select, social media profiles that the user also has for a monthly fee. Help you use images for content - copyright free as you are part of the company. Access to free courses, articles to help you out with online trends. 

Call of Duty: (link back to unit 2 pre-production documentation)
Key terms: 
Blended marketing: refers to social media campaigns supporting traditional channels. 
Synergy: defined as the interaction between two or more organisations to produce a combined effect greater than what could be achieved on their own. 

Blended marketing and synergy for Call of Duty:
https://www.alistdaily.com/digital/call-of-duty-wwii-marketing/ 

WWII is serious business, but video games are still about having fun. Activision partnered with Spotify to hide a set of cryptic audio messages inside the Call of Duty: WWII beta. Those able to decipher the codes were rewarded with special “calling cards” when the game launched on November 3. This was the first brand activation to use Spotify codes by incorporating code-breaking both inside and outside of a game.

“We’re always looking for new ways to innovate in our digital marketing, especially on popular platforms and with partners that we know our community will love,” an Activision spokesperson told AListDaily. “Once we knew the team was conducting a beta, we wanted to tease our campaign content and characters in new and interesting ways. When we saw what Spotify was doing with their new codes, we felt like it was a perfect fit for our fans.” 

The undead returns to Call of Duty: WWII, and players will be able to battle hordes of Nazi zombies in an alternate history that is separate from the campaign. Sledgehammer Games revealed the Nazi Zombies mode during a panel at San Diego Comic-Con, along with an official trailer. 

This may be Call of Duty’s third visit to World War II, but developer Sledgehammer Games didn’t skimp on recreating the details, spirit and stories of this dramatic time in human history.

“Brotherhood of Heroes” is a documentary that details some of the key locations of the war and the stories behind them, as they relate to the Call of Duty: WWII single-player campaign.

“There is this respect and honour you have to pay to not only the people but to the places,” said Glen Schofield, co-founder and studio head at Sledgehammer Games in the documentary.

First released in 2003, Call of Duty took players to the battlefields of World War II. The game’s new take on AI-controlled allies forced players to think like a squad rather than operate as a “lone wolf.” From that point on, Call of Duty spawned a culture of squad play among friends—a theme that resonates in Activision’s marketing efforts for WWII.

http://www.redbeecreative.com/insights/blog/call-of-duty-world-war-ii-live-stream

Call of Duty: WWII launched a bespoke teaser specifically to announce the date of the main trailer launch. Receding waves dragging over the sand of what fans guessed were the beaches of Normandy to unveil the date and time of the launch event.

DATE ANNOUNCEMENT

The days of linear television marketing where the scheduling of a programme remained the final weapon in the channel’s tactical armoury, held as a closely guarded secret until press day, feel very outmoded now. Netflix and Amazon aren’t interested in the threat of counter scheduling, and their bold date announcement trailers nine to 12 months ahead of release create the sense of event that was once the preserve of theatrical movies.

The entire CoD event was itself really to herald the Nov 3rd launch date – eight months ahead.  

LIVE SPIKES

It is no surprise that CoDWWII used a live streamed moment to preview their main trailer. Live video is critical both in terms of social media’s new algorithms, and also the proven metric levels of viewer engagement.

In many ways the actual trailer for the game was hugely conventional – displaying most of the tropes familiar in game and movie marketing.

PLAN YOUR CULTURAL MOMENTUM MAP

CoDWWII held back many facets, perhaps tactically, perhaps making a virtue of what was ready. So “Nazi Zombies” were mentioned but not in gameplay, Online Multiplayer was trailed to be shown at the E3 convention in June.

Transformers star Josh Duhamel was revealed as the lead character (though once again tactical leaking of him in full mo-cap suit, the day before he followed CoD on Twitter, was a big hint to fans weeks earlier). With Transformers: The Last Knight scheduled for release in late June, it would be a dead cert that CoD will have plans to ride that cultural peak too.

PRE-RELEASE ENGAGEMENT

One form of marketing interaction that is open to gaming companies, but not their television counterparts, is early access beta testing.  But TV can still demonstrate its own forms of fan commitment with engaging video preview stunts, like the one we did for Fox Networks Group’s Outcast launch.

Overall, while we learnt that the CoD franchise was going back in time to its own World War II roots, the marketing campaign is demonstrating a commitment to many of the future disciplines that need to become the gold standard of television marketing. 

https://www.dualshockers.com/call-of-duty-social-media-dark/

Ahead of what is rumored to be a new game reveal on Thursday, Activision has changed up Call of Duty's social media platforms.

It’s finally time folks. After over a year of rumors, speculation, leaks, and more, we are seemingly only a few days away from learning about this year’s Call of Duty title, rumored to be a soft reboot of the Modern Warfare series. Today, almost all of Call of Duty’s social media accounts went “dark,” changing their profile pictures, banners, and even their descriptions.

Of course, given the fact that all these changes literally tease nothing specific, we really have no new information on the game itself. That being said, this is the first “official” tease we’ve gotten from Activision about the game, so that in and of itself is noteworthy. I’ve included a screenshot of the game’s official Twitter account below so you can see the changes, however, you can also find them on almost all of the game’s social media accounts, including its foreign ones.

For those that don’t know, a few days ago a rumor came out that the next Call of Duty game was set to be a soft reboot of the Modern Warfare series, with the title simply being Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and the full reveal coming on Thursday, May 30, 2019. As of right now, this tease lines up with the latter, considering Activision generally starts teasing the reveal a few days before.