In my final project for this class, it was my responsibility to take the research from project 2 and apply it to three different genres. I decided to take all my research to online media. For this media campaign, I took my message “Does American theatre have a political impact?” and put it on Facebook, Twitter, and an interview which was posted on YouTube. All forms of media had their own sets of pros, cons, and challenges, presenting me an opportunity to see what it’s like to be a social media personality.

            For Facebook, instead of creating a page, I created an open group to discuss political theatre. By creating a group, I could put my friends into it and they could do so with theirs, this way I could immediately reach people with my message. People could leave the page if they so pleased, but a majority stayed on the page and some were consistently active (i.e. commenting, liking, and even posting). For this group, I would typically post information such as “The great thing about political theatre is that it brings two separate genres and combines them together, allowing for a wider audience to experience social and economic issues that are important to playwrights,” as well as links to YouTube videos I felt were relevant to my message, such as an interview with Lin Manuel-Miranda discussing politics in American theatre. I did face some challenges however, I couldn’t follow celebrities or musicals, and since this was a group and not a page, anyone could post in it, and some people abused this. Since I was an admin, I could remove inappropriate posting from the page and kick such abusers out. I mainly used ethos and logos, relying on evidence and logical statements to get my message across, which I think worked well.

            Secondly, I chose to use Twitter as my second genre in this media campaign. Twitter presented many great options, as well its own hindrances. Unlike my Facebook group, I could follow celebrities, news pages, and brands. Doing this allowed me to potentially reach a more targeted audience rather than just my Facebook friends. While most of my friends are interested in theatre, some of them may not have wanted to be put into a group unwillingly. Twitter however let people follow me if they enjoyed what I posted, giving me a more focused group of people. Twitter also gave me a quick and easy access to gifs, which if I wanted to post something funny a gif could essentially be a punchline of sorts. Also, Twitter has the option to post polls, so I ran a poll around the end of my campaign asking my followers if they thought political theatre has an impact, which several people took a part of, resulting in some pretty interesting results. Furthermore, I would post four pictures of a musical or play that had political messages, something that several popular pages do with movies or TV shows. By utilizing these archetypes, I established both ethos and pathos towards the Twitter community. However, doing this was not necessarily easy.

            Some of the challenges I faced using Twitter were rather apparent before I started campaigning, the main one being its 140-character limit. I had to plan on what I was going to say, unlike Facebook where I could write as much as I needed to. Planning for it meant having to cut down important information and splitting them into several different posts, which might’ve made my message less cohesive. Also, running a twitter page means being much more active on it than Facebook or practically any other social media platform, so being on top of it is crucial.

            Lastly, I took to YouTube to post a 20-minute video of me having a conversation with choreographer Juliet Fixel, a friend of mine. She had recently taken part in a piece of political theatre entitled “In Trump We Trust,” which while it was a parody it still discussed the U.S.’s 2016 election. We talked about her involvement in it, as well as my research, and gathering her opinion about American political theatre. The biggest challenge I faced with this genre was Juliet’s audio quality, we used Google hangout and at some points her audio would cut out, and I couldn’t do anything about it unfortunately. This form of media basically only utilized ethos, since I was talking to a professional actress and getting her opinion on the topic.

Getting my message out proved to be much harder than I had previously thought before starting this campaign. Like I had said previously, I added dozens of my friends on Facebook and followed many, many, accounts on Twitter just to gain reciprocation. Fortunately, there was somewhat of a tipping point with each genre where I was getting a consistent amount of activity on these platforms. I also cross-promoted each genre with one another, that way if people wanted to see my Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube video they could easily access it between platforms. I also promoted my pages on my personal Facebook and Twitter accounts, as well as my class Twitter, receiving an adequate amount of follower activity afterwards.

There’s something to be learned about social media personalities by the end of this project, and that is that it’s a lot of work. It may not seem like it, but remembering to post multiple times a day to spread a campaign message takes a lot of time.