Knots’n Dust Live Tweeting Report
By Lama Hatoum, Layan Zein, Maria Khoury and Sarah Kaskas.
The event we covered is entitled KNOTS’N DUST which is an art exhibition shown at the Beirut Art Center located in Jisr el Wati near Soue El Ahad. This event is done by the artist Francis Alys, his exhibition shows videos and photo’s that he took in Lebanon during the 2015 sand storm. This man took the chaos that hit Lebanon and turned it into art, this is why we chose this event because it really relates to the people of Lebanon. To be honest, not many people in Lebanon well at least the one’s we know have an appreciation of art and not many know where the Beirut Art Center is, since this exhibition really was inspired by an event that happened in our country we thought people should go and see it. So we decided to get the word out to our twitter followers. The live tweeting of this event taught us how to prepare for a live coverage and how to get our message out using a limited number of words. From our introduction to our concluding tweet we were telling a story through a social media platform, but of course we had some mistakes, yet we learned from these mistakes for next time. We will explain how we prepared for this live coverage, the results we received and our limitations.
1. Develop a work schedule for your coverage:
To begin with we had to do research to understand what the event is about, I found the event online from “Lebtivity” website which is a website that shows all events happening around Lebanon during specific dates. After finding this event I researched about it to find out more about the artist and his work through the BAC website, when I realized that the artist based his work from the sand storm that happened in 2015, I had the curiosity to know more. At that moment I pitched the idea to my fellow group members and they loved the idea. After that we had to find relevant hashtags that suit the event. Maria came up with #Knotsndust which is the title of the event, in this way the name of the event will be well known. Than we decided that we will use BAC’s hashtag which is #BAC to promote the center more and the #francisalys to get the artist name out there. We discovered that the artist has a twitter account to we also tagged him in some of our tweets.
During the event we divided our work; firstly we all scheduled tweets prior of the event answering the 5 W’s so that each of our followers would understand what are we tweeting about. The 5 W’s where answered due to prior research we have done about the event, and researched helped us have background information about the event so we would understand more what was happening during the explanation/talk we got. I (lama) scheduled and Sarah schedules 3 tweets and Maria and Layan scheduled 2. When we met with the Communication manager at BAC named Bassem Saad, he explained to us about the exhibition and various pieces of art. The order of out tweets made sense, we started by introducing the aim of the exhibition and what it is about. Then we mentioned the opening hours and location of the exhibition , we later added fact about the event to engage people’s interest. During the event we began quoting the information Bassm Saad was telling us and taking videos and photos to show visuals of the exhibition to attract people’s attention more.
Maria was taking photos of the pieces he was talking about and quoting some of Francis Alys’s own personal sayings. Sarah was taking the information Bassem Saad told us about each art work and quoting his words. Layan and I were taking some videos and writing up some descriptions, this was the job of each member of the group. But during the exhibition each one of us started seeing stuff that caught our attention, so this led each one of us to post some tweets that revealed some of our own opinion about the exhibition and we each posted photo’s that we personally liked and quoted them. During the event I wanted to try to live tweet a video while trying to explain what Bassem Saad told us about that drawings of the girl knotting her hair, but I don’t think that went so well, I was quit nervous while speaking.
The tweets were then put together in a moment to form a story. Each member created their own “moments” because we all have different followers; we wanted each account to have a moment so we can get to a wider audience. Our moments included our personal tweets with the tweets of the members of the group. We think our tweets are clear and covered the entire exhibition and gave the audience a glimpse of what it was all about, from the location, the artist, his inspirations, how he sketched his work and prepared for his work.
The difference between our scheduled tweets and the live tweets is that the scheduled ones contained facts about the topic that anyone could find through an online search; we posted a photo of the sand storm which is the bases of the exhibition and a photo with location of the Beirut art center. On the other hand, our lives tweets were able to show the art in the exhibition and detailed information about how the artist created his work.
2. Audience research:
As mentioned, our target audience is Lebanese citizens that don’t know about this exhibition, we want to get BAC’s name out there and the main idea is for the people to appreciate the man who took a chaotic moment that happened in Lebanon and made it into art. Our main goal to anticipate what aspects are most relevant to our audience, this aspect is Lebanon so that is why we started by talking about the sand storm, posting videos and photos of Francis Alys days in Lebanon. Than we tagged the Daily Star a Lebanese newspaper while stating that this event has to do with Lebanese chaos turned into art and this event should be covered and talked about by Lebanese press. Than we started relating the story of the sand storm that shows chaos, suffocation and turbulence to the drawings of the knots to explain to our audience more about the relation in the title “knots’ dust”. Our audience was not specific as in age, gender or social community. We wanted to get the word out to all Lebanese Citizen’s we wanted our followers to tell their family and friends about his exhibition, for people to start visiting the Beirut Art center.
3. Our Limitations:
As for our limitations, we should have firstly created more hashtags. After the event was done we started coming up with #beirut_art_appriciation and #chaotic_transformation. We should have brainstormed more, while trying to create our hashtags. Another thing we should have done was tag the Lebanese American University, first by showing that our university is part of this live coverage, second in the communication arts department there are many students and even professors that have a passion for art they could’ve saw this hashtag or the tag. There was a slight lack of information, because every time we asked “what does the artist mean about a certain element” the communication manager would say “I don’t know the artist has his own way of putting things and I think he wanted his audience to answer these questions by themselves” we wish we could’ve answered these questions for our own personal use and to inform our audience even more.
4. Tweet Analyses
Most Viewed Tweets:
Least Viewed Tweets:
We realized that the tweets that have more visuals, hashtags and tags are the ones that have the most impressions and views. Plus since Sarah and Layan have the most followers they also got the most reactions. Even tweets that where so general like time and place or quotes that Francis Alys used to say, where not viewed much. Although the tweets with explanations of a certain piece or video has the most impressions.
Work flow 1/1: We were able to organize a work plan and get quotes, photos, videos to show visuals to our audience and we got background information about the topic beforehand to support our live tweeting of the exhibition.
Quality of reporting 3.5/5: We did everything that was required, but since we had to tweet on spot some of our tweets could’ve been better phrased. We think this just needs practice, since it was our first live tweeting event we are not used to providing clear and well phrased information on the spot.
Quality of Presentation 3.5/4 : Our tweets where well organized from a clear introduction, location, opening hours, the artist and during the event we covered the entire exhibition with all information that was given to us and we concluded by supporting people to come to this wonderful exhibition.
Effort/Creativity 4.5/5 : We put a lot of effort into this live tweeting event, we contacted many people for help such as Louai Kaakani who was not able to be with us during the event, but sent us an email about background information about the event and we contacted the communication manager to help us out instead. We were able to put our own personal opinion in the tweets with clear photograph and videos, plus we tried to do a live video while speaking during the event.
Total: 12.5/15
