The UK contestant for Eurovision was Molly Smitten-Downes.
Her song was Children of the Universe. Molly didn’t manage to gain huge success
in the contest. We researched how Twitter and Facebook was used in promoting
her, what was her presence like in social media and did this change during the
whole period of Eurovision song contest.
Some of our research questions:
- What kind of campaign does the representative of UK have on
Facebook and Twitter?
- How does Molly interact with people and has her social media
presence changed during the Eurovision period?
- What is the content like posted in social media, more
straight-forward promotional, or personal?
- What is done to attract the audiences in other countries?
Molly seemed to be new in the music field, so in the
beginning she didn’t have too many fan communities, fans or followers
considering she is from the UK. Her popularity was rapidly expanding, starting
from the beginning of the contest and specially since she became the
representative of the UK. At the time of the semifinals there had been an
increase in people’s activity on Facebook, and even new fan pages have been
made since.
In our opinion, Molly was trying hard to create a community
around her and her team, but did not manage to do this so well in the end. Her
presence was somewhat personal and she shared a lot of pictures, retweeted fan
tweets and had some minor interaction with fans. Still, she didn’t manage to
create too much social media popularity, and we felt that maybe it was because
it felt a bit forced at times. Her fanbase did grow, but probably not as much
as was expected.
BBC used many of their channells to promote Molly. On Twitter
BBC campainging for her, was quite effective and they reached a lot of people
in the UK and abroad. During Eurovision Contest BBC
was also very active and constantly cheering for Molly, but also commenting on
other contestants. BBC Eurovision managed to get Molly’s fanbase very active on
Twitter.
In the end we can say that social media had big part in this
Eurovision song contest. Social media platforms were used actively for
promotional and informative purposes. The contest and her team and BBC had a strong
online presence during the weeks before and during the competition. Even though
most of the content posted was mainly meant to raise awareness, support and
excitement among people in the UK, they probably managed to reach Eurovision
fans all over Europe.
Full report: here.
You also had quite a bunch of questions! And answered some of them very shortly. Too shortly, if you ask me. For example it would have been interesting to know how exactly Molly gained notice of foreign fans, with hashtags or how? It would have also been interesting to see some stats like how often BBC posted, how they were received (retweets/favorites etc.) or how rapidly her popularity grew or something like it. All in all some examples would have been nice. :)
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand you did manage to answer all of the questions and the report was very easy to read.
"In the end we can say that social media had big part in this Eurovision song contest"
ReplyDeleteI agree, and judging by artists' behavior in especially Twitter during the whole week, they were obviously encouraged and perhaps even instructed to be more visible in SoMe.
Very good conclusion in the report. I'm sure the research could have been more thorough, if rest of the team was more involved.
Thank you for your final report Team UK! From what I understand there were some activity problems regarding some members of your team. I will talk about this with Cai and we will consider what the appropriate action should be. The good thing is we can tell pretty accurately if someone didn't carry their weight and they will not get a passing grade, at least without significant additional work.
ReplyDeleteI understand well that the problems mentioned above reflect how deeply your team was able to perform the research and analysis required in this task. Considering that, I think the final result is quite decent! It is quite short in comparison to other reports, but it is to the point and easy to read. It doesn't get into a very deep analytic level though, by which I mean looking into the underlying reasons behind the made observations.
I like that your team followed BBC closely. Other teams didn't analyze national broadcasting companies as closely, perhaps partly because some of those companies were not as active as BBC.
In general there were not many statistics or images to support the report. It would have been nice to see graphs about different indicators relevant to your research questions. For example research question number five could have benefited from analyzing the tweets during the contest in relation to other time periods and/or other artists. The answer to research question six is so short that it would have benefited from a description of the methodology used in determining this outcome.
To sum up I think your report is decent in the context of the troubles your team was having, but obviously it doesn't go as deep as some other reports. Thank you for completing your effort despite the difficulties!
Here’s the feedback from team Finland:
ReplyDeleteEven the list of research questions was long, questions were promising. All questions get at least some basic answer. Overall structure of the report is very clear and writing style is perhaps a bit boring, but very easy to follow. Conclusion on report and your blog post are well written.
Some of the questions could have been explained or researched little bit more thoroughly, now the information provided in results part is too general. It would have been interesting to see some data you’ve researched, especially if you "went to the dark side of the Internet to find it”, as one member on our team put it. We’d also like to see some graphics/statistics to support your analysis, for example statistics on Twitter or follow-up on Molly’s Facebook likes. Also we’d loved to see sources used listed and linked to the text.
Despite some issues team has created a good basic report with nice little details. It has potential to be great and would have just needed a little push. Especially we liked the distinction between the artist / record label promotion and other promotion (BBC promoting the artist in a much more aggressive way). Here’s a comment from a team member:
“ It was clear they understood it was a necessary part to include and that the artist’s own campaigning has in this context very little impact. What every report should have realized to do I think is to make the connection that a record label will have absolutely no impact through social media campaigning, but rather through traditional means and getting _others_ to “campaign” for the artist, as in this case it is safe to say that the business interests of BBC go hand in hand in promoting the Eurovision participant.”
So, excellent work team UK, well done!