It’s pretty much impossible to get through a degree of Public Relations in todays society without hearing about the importance of understanding social media. For me, during my studies I learnt that social media was so important, especially for non-for-profit organisations. I have learnt through my internship that this is definitely the case and should be utilised by organisations.
At my internship I have been asked to develop a social media plan based around World Meningitis Day. As I am doing my internship at a non-for-profit I am learning that social media is valued as it is free and effective in reaching its target audience. As a part of my social media plan I was asked to look into Vine App. Through my research I found that Vine App is an application that makes six second videos that loop and can be linked to Facebook and Twitter. I was very excited to learn about this, however I was surprised to learn that this app was only available for the IPhone and the phone we would be using is not an Iphone, its an android. Therefore I was faced with the challenge of figuring out what else we could use that’s free and easy and does a similar function. That’s when I discovered Viddy. Viddy is an application that makes fifteen second videos. The ideas of these short videos is that they are fast and punchy and challenge businesses to promote certain products or events in a short time and in a creative way. So I did some further research and I found this app was going to be great as it was downloadable on the android phone.
All was going well, I had implemented Viddy videos into the social media plan and thought I knew how to work the app. However, when the time came to make and upload the video I was faced with many issues. I could not seem to upload the Viddy to Facebook or Twitter. The challenge I faced was that the business page is not like a personal page. You don’t log into it and therefore you cannot link the Viddy to that page it would have to go to your personal page. Another issue was that the app simply did not work. For some reason the app would not upload to Facebook or Twitter, it simply was not connecting to these sites. After some time of trying I eventually figured out I could upload to YouTube from my phones version of the video not the Viddy apps version of the video. I have now uploaded a Viddy video successfully and am happy to say I look forward to the next one next week which will be made for World Meningitis Day.
Although in my degree I learnt the importance of social media, and I agree it is so important, I never realised that there were apps involved and there would likely be challenges involved.
If I have one recommendation it’s that you should learn how to use an app before suggesting that your workplace use it. I am learning so much about applications and social media and it’s a great learning curve.
Check out the first viddy if you have a moment
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1to12Ka--2w
-Alyce
