#assignment_4

In order to create a truly successful interactive installation, one needs to consider the emotional effect that the piece may have, a truly successful designer would design the piece to create a specific emotional environment. For my project, the intention is to generate feelings of joy as well as staving to create a form of trust between the controller and the participant. The best way to achieve this goal is to incorporate a level of Gamification within the piece, creating a goal to be reached within the piece, while also providing positive feedback for a successful run, and providing negative feedback for a fail state. By doing this, the piece starts to become a game and attracts people to use it in its intended way.

In doing research for assignment 4, I came across a few projects that were quite inspirational. I’m going to go into some detail on them to explain why they may become useful to me while I continue working on this project.

Nike has a visibly strong presence on Facebook (See: Nike’s Facebook), with a whopping 26.9 million ‘likes’ on its main corporate account. Besides the main account, it has several sub-accounts that cater to a particular category of the brand, such as NikeWoman (Women’s apparel and shoes), NikeCourt (Tennis), Nike Skateboarding, etc. Each account easily boasts at least a million ‘likes’. The look and feel of the pages of the different accounts are consistent. They comprise of videos that share stories of great athletes, accompanied by “inspirational” captions.

“The only person that’s going to have power over me, is me.”

“The court is calling. Always answer.”

Their brand slogan “Just Do It.” is echoed, implicitly and explicitly, over and over through its posts, thus conveying a consistent brand story and image. 

From Nike’s Facebook profile, it is evident that the company emphasizes on the use of social media marketing, and is doing a fantastic job at it. A look at the various accounts shows that they have been fairly active, their latest updates being early this month.

However, for the purpose of this assignment and my subsequent analysis, I would focus on Nike’s main corporate account. The last post was dated 1st September this year, and there has been minimal activity since then. The months of June, July and August seem to be the most active in posts. There were 6 posts in June, 7 posts in July, peaking in August with 15 posts. Every other month only sees around 2 to 3 posts each month. A likely reason for the spike in the number of posts towards August could be due to the 2016 Rio Olympics; Nike featured several Olympic athletes, such as Simon Biles and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, in its videos.

Pertaining to the Facebook page, Nike uses a lot of visuals in the form of videos. The captions are kept short and succinct; this allows the videos to fill the audience’s visual field, greater grasping the audience’s attention. There is a use of “conversational voice”, with the use of contractions and simple, short sentences. I believe the way it crafts its posts is to cater to its target audience, them being mainly young athletes. The attention span of the younger crowd is relatively short, and visual aids appeal more compared to wordy posts. Nike is also fond of including quotes in its captions, which are often the words spoken by the people featured in its videos. It increases the emotional appeal of the message because it is as if the characters in the videos are speaking to the audience.

Comparing Nike’s Facebook account to Adidas (See: Adidas’ Facebook), a close competitor in the sports apparel industry, they are very similar in that they mainly cosist of compelling visuals and videos.

If you are surfing the internet, you can almost get depressed of all the beautiful and nice things you can find there about others. Everyone looks so great and kind on the internet: people share the prettiest vacation pictures on Instagram; they share what they have all reached in their lives on Facebook; they are really funny and sharp on Twitter; they have the best CV on LinkedIn; and they have the nicest friends and are always partying, what you can see on Snapchat. People only share the best sides of themselves and it looks like they never feel bad or go through bad things. People always present themselves better than they are on social networking sites and I think the reason for this is that people can actually influence how other people perceive them. In face-to-face interactions we cannot always control this, because we are also communicating by our nonverbal behavior and sometimes we send nonverbal signals which are different from the way we want to be perceived (Hargie, 2011).

Most of the time I catch myself on doing it, on presenting myself in a good way on social networking sites. All the things I have described above, I am doing it myself. I post pretty (vacation) pictures on Instagram; I share that I have got my driver’s license on Facebook; and I share partying pictures with my crazy friends on Snapchat. Just like everyone else is doing. I am noticing that if I am having a busy period on school and because of that, not doing many nice things, I remain silent on social media. So when I had vacation, I was posting regularly on Facebook and Instagram. I think I was doing that, because I wanted to show other people what a nice time I was having on my vacations with my friends and family. Besides that, everyone is always sharing their vacation pictures and stories, so I didn’t want to stay behind and didn’t want to let it look like I wasn’t having a nice vacation. This also has to do with the shared context of Facebook and Instagram. Shared context is one of the three key factors associated with computer-mediated communication and consists of norms, rules, procedures and languages, which are known by each member of a community, in this case a social networking site (Ellison, Hancock & Toma, 2011). In the case of Instagram the shared context is beautiful pictures that can be made even prettier by some filters. So as a result of this shared context everyone, and also me, is presenting themselves in a good way, or perhaps even in a better way than they really are.

Besides the fact that I am sharing nice and fun moments on my social media, I (unconsciously) share sometimes things where I stand for or what describes my identity on my Facebook page. I share these things by liking Facebookpages and I have written unconsciously between brackets, because I like these pages most of the time to receive more information about the topic and not because I want to let other people know that I like that kind of stuff. Some good examples are the pages Stichting StopALS.nu, de Viergang (my gym), Frustraties van Kassamedewerkers (Frustrations of cashiers) and JaofNee. Even though it was not my intention, I reveal a lot about my identity by liking these pages. Individual identities are constructed around roles and I show some roles that I am with these pages. I show for example that I am a cashier at a supermarket and that I am a donor.

So now I have told about how I present myself on social media and the reasons behind these presentations, it is your turn to think about how you present yourself! Do you share only nice things on social networking sites or do you also share the moment you are feeling bad?

Sources:

Ellison, N. B., Hancock, J. T., & Toma, C. L. (2012). Profile as promise: A framework for conceptualizing veracity in online dating self-presentations. New Media & Society, 14, 45-62.

The Name On My Coffee Cup - Illustration