The Spanish representative during this year's Eurovision Song Contest, performed in Copenhaguen was Ruth Lorenzo Pascual. She is a singer that became quite popular during her performances in the well known talent show "X-factor". Very few years after that, she was selected to represent Spain for the song contest performing "Dancing in the rain". She was one of the most liked singers of Spain to take part in the competition of the last years. She finally finished on the 9th place, one of the best results in the recent years for Spain, in the contest.
In order to have a concrete analysis we’ve reduced the questions in this four summary questions:
- What kind of campaign does Ruth Lorenzo and TVE have on Facebook and Twitter? (We have decided not to study the label record because we didn’t find any relevant campaign in it)
- Which are the differences between the use of Twitter and Facebook?
- Are there fan communities in other countries? How do these communities operate?
- What is done to attract the audiences in other countries? (This question is explain throughout the whole results)
The use of the social networks has had a vital
importance in the contest. It has mainly had an effect to Eurovision itself as
an interactive show. Therefore, it has also affected the artists that took part
in it. Among those, we obviously find Ruth Lorenzo’s professional career. The
non use of Twitter and Facebook would have clearly decreased the importance (or
at least the level of followers and spectators) of the show. While we were
investigating for the project, we found an enormous amount of Spanish people
not only on the social networks but also in the real life, that Eurovision
without Twitter would not have been the same, or that they would not have
watched it. This has made things much
easier for us: nowadays everybody uses social networks so it has been easier to
follow all the process of the Song Contest and the final show.
The fact is that Eurovision is not a very followed and respected show in Spain, as it is always said that our country basically takes part in it just to lose the contest. Moreover, it is also very criticized the fact of being in the “Big Five” and paying every year an amount of money basically just for being in the final without having to pass the semifinals (if we take in consideration Spanish current economic situation).
The fact is that Eurovision is not a very followed and respected show in Spain, as it is always said that our country basically takes part in it just to lose the contest. Moreover, it is also very criticized the fact of being in the “Big Five” and paying every year an amount of money basically just for being in the final without having to pass the semifinals (if we take in consideration Spanish current economic situation).
We have noticed that Ruth has a little bit more activity on Twitter than on Facebook. However, the contents are quite similar despite the fact that she has more important stuff in Facebook than in Twitter. Something similar happens with the account of TVE, the Spanish public television responsible for the broadcast of the contest and supporter of every year’s singer.
Ruth manages her own Twitter and Facebook pages, posting professional but also personal content, fact that can be interesting for her followers. Thanks to Eurovision she has gained a high number of followers, previously she was barely known; despite she is a professional singer since 2010. Apart from Eurovsion she also got a top hit in her career when she performed in the British talent show “X-Factor”.
The amount of people following her increased, as we said, during the previous weeks and months of the performance. That also had an effect on the fan clubs. There were many fan pages in the social networks as well as in blogs, forums and even YouTube. However, most of this accounts have something in common… They were created during the highest peak of popularity of the singer and also had the more amount of activity during the previous days of her performance: They are not used anymore
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Very good summary and conclusions of your research. I liked the fact that you've done research and analysis on her social media usage prior to Eurovision weeks, not only during. The focus, in my opinion, could have been a little bit more on the competition period, though.
ReplyDeleteNice work all together!
Thank you for your effort Team Spain. You report is quite lengthy but packed with interesting information.
ReplyDeleteYou made many interesting observations like how the promotion language changed in tandem with the progression of the competition and how Twitter seemed to be more active during the actual competition due to it’s instantaneous nature. I also appreciate you finding out information about the background of your artist, like the earlier participation in X-Factor and the communities built around that.
The language is a bit sloppy which makes reading comprehension somewhat difficult at times. I gathered a few examples so that you can see what I mean:
-“In fact, the Twitter activity achieved an historical score, being Ruth Lorenzo the 4th Eurovision artist more commented on the social network.”
-“not holded by the Broadcasting channel”
-“Ruth demonstrated his voice quality by promoting herself”
-“On May 3 she arrives to Copenhagen and and she dedicates on Twitter
during the contest she encourage people to vote her in english”
The sloppy language is likely a result from a very deadline driven approach, since based on your Google Drive activity you started to work on this task at a rather late date.
It was nice that you took the time to include many pictures in your report. They would have often benefited from some captions, especially since many of the contained spanish content.
On page 6 there seems to be a slight formatting issue with the picture at the bottom of the page cutting out. Page 13 has also rather weird formatting.
Your future research question about the effects of the contest in the career of the artist sounds interesting.
In conclusion you produced lots of interesting information and answered your research questions well. You provided us with a reasonable amount of statistics and also included some analysis to complement them. The language and formatting of your presentation could use a bit of polish.
Here is some feedback from Team Austria:
ReplyDeleteWhat all members of our team like is that you only have four research questions. Also a report layout is simple. The results of the first research question are quite easy to read, as they’re written in a “timeline” mode. Another thing that stands out is a very thorough research on the artist’s own Twitter use and promotion – especially good is how you started it from the point of time when she was getting more known in Spain. Positive impressions continue with hashtag examples and how they were created to involve people (#MiVoto40RuthLorenzo). The thing that impressed us was nicely discovered information about the promotion actions towards other countries.
The things that need improvement: While the layout of the report is simple, it lacks some balance among the answered research questions. Some were answered more extensively than others. At some points a reader might want to see more charts, or at least tables with numbers to support the claims. From the layout points of view it would be nice if figures would have some explanations what they mean, why they are there (e.g. Fig 1: Number of tweets per hour). We would also like to see more information about the communities in other countries - how they work and what they are like. One member of our team has so nicely pointed it out: “I don’t really see the point of having Q1 and Q2 separated, since you can get the answer to Q2 from very thorough and deep research in Q1.” The references part is a bit vague, especially the last 2 references: facebook.com and twitter.com - why are they there in the first place?
And now some general comments about the report. According to participant list of this course there are no native English speakers here, so we all make mistakes. Some more polishing would make the report a bit more appealing. One member of our team wrote that she liked the following part: ”…otherwise, the official hashtag of the Festival was the most commented in the history of our country.” Conclusion seems to be missing. There might be some conclusions under each of the research questions, but the final conclusion is not there. It would be nice to have some kind of summary of the results. One member of our team pointed out it was interesting to see how the promotion campaigns worked so well on SoMe. Ms. Lorenzo was able to gather a lot of fans in a short amount of time. Maybe you could add some thoughts whether the artist would’ve gotten such high scores without the campaigns? A member of our team would like to see more data related to the Grand Finale period and after. And about the “future questions.” It seems your team was a bit confused what to add there. The section, as Cai nicely put it in his mail, is meant to prevent unnecessary questions like “Why didn't you deal with this and that?” In order to avoid these comments “you show that you have seen these new questions, but you leave them to a future project because there are not enough resources available.”