Summing up 6 Weeks of Mobile Storytelling
A short wrap up of what I liked, found challenging and got out of mobile and social media storytelling.
I have always been a huge believer in the power of social media as a medium of storytelling.
Throughout my life, I have been very engaged with various types of social media storytelling. As I have gotten older, I have noticed how much the world relies on and values this medium.
The whole social media and content creation sphere has interested me for so long. I had always wanted to try some form of content creation for social media, but never really had the drive or a clear direction of what to do. So, naturally, when I saw Lehigh offered a summer course pertaining to this topic, I jumped at the opportunity.
My favorite project that I worked on for this course was definitely either the final project or the Week 4 social video assignment. As I said earlier, I had always wanted to do some sort of content creation, specifically video, and these projects gave me the motivation to do it.
I loved the process of having guidelines on how the final product should look, but enough freedom to choose whatever topic I wanted. For example, for the social video assignment, I knew I wanted to do something with skateboarding as I have been doing a lot of it ever since quarantine. So one day, I went out skateboarding around my town, but I brought my tripod with me. Once I found a good hill, I just set up the tripod and let my creativity flow.
It was a similar story with my other favorite project, the final. After some thought, I knew that a story about a non-essential business during this COVID-19 culture would surely be interesting. Luckily, I knew a non-essential business owner, and he happened to be more than happy to sit down for a short interview and let me pick his brain and take pictures of his workspace.
Other than my favorite projects, I will come away from this class knowing the ins and outs of not only mobile and social media story telling, but how to properly integrate multiple social mediums to get the optimal amount of traction on a post. I think that has been the most valuable part of this class. Sure, you can create a great looking and professional video or series of photos, but if you do not market it correctly across a few different social platforms, the post will never pick up views, likes or exposure.
The hardest part of this class for me was probably the Twitter engagement portion. I think I struggled here because of two reasons: One, I don’t love sharing my opinions with others, nor do I feel like I have that much to say to the world or class; two, and probably the bigger reason I struggled with it, I work best with set deadlines. The Twitter project was very open ended with no real set deadlines other than to tweet a few times a week. I find that when I have a deadlines, I am able to execute very well, but when it is more open ended, I sometimes fall short.
Overall, this class has proved to be extremely helpful for my own understanding of what it takes to tell your story across multiple mediums of social media.
