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To Publish or Not To Publish

Honestly, I came into this class not knowing what to expect or what Publish was even about. However, after a whole term of silently crying in a corner thinking of concepts and calming myself down through consuming sweet Thai Milk Drinks, I was able to pick up a few things in this class that I believe I may need in my life.

1. Things can and WILL go wrong when you least expect them to. 

I have to be honest. I am quite a clumsy and naive individual. I forget that I live in the real world where mistakes happen and decent internet connection is a myth in this country. You have to plan ahead for these setbacks and be very careful with how you are to proceed with your project. However, being the utterly flawed individual I am, I end up making some pretty bad choices which leads me to stressful outcomes. Examples include, accidentally using my group’s facebook page account to reply to a friend with an inappropriate comment that was meant to be posted through my own personal account, and of course, the video and tumblr-related incidents in which I even had to drive to a friend’s house in another village to post my report at twelve in the morning. 

Thus, the moral of the story is to take account of all possible hindrances and have a set backup plan when they happen. It also helps to be incredibly observant, cautious, and critical to achieve quality results. I mean, honestly, this is mostly my fault because we were even given a guest speaker for this particular topic who told us to be prepared. So idk, sorry!

2. Distribution is Queen

Thinking of what to say becomes even harder when you want to be heard. You have to attract and appeal in order to inform and impact. People, nowadays, need more than just a story. They need an interesting and relevant output as well. 

This can be done through adding images, videos, or even by simply adding a twist to your topic. I cannot emphasize how many hours I wasted deciding on how to get views from others. For our page, Dear Darling, I thought a good strategy was through creating a criteria for the participants in our videos. One of the aims was to find well-known respondents or people who had a somewhat strong personality or an appeal when being interviewed. Of course, there are other ways to reach this goal. However, under the pressure of a deadline, there is only so much a person can do. 

The best thing to do to ensure an effective and successful distribution is to think outside the box. Be creative. Visualize your audience and recreate your idea into what they would be attracted to. This is important for what use is a good intention if there is no good impact among others as well? 

3. Content is King.

Literally, the first thing I learned in class. 

What you talk or discuss about in your product is one of the main aspects you need to focus on. The message is just as important as the output. There has to be meaning behind what you are doing. Sure, there is no harm in making some products purely for entertainment and fun (e.g. my Facebook Live Video), BUT as a person working with the media, you have to also take into account the meaning you choose to influence your viewers with. Your content may even determine the amount of viewers as well, so it is definitely a big factor that must be considered to create a successful project.

Best way to go would be to think of something authentic and relevant. This is, of course, easier said than done, but through an ample amount of research, creative thinking, and also critical thinking, you can successfully give an accurate, clear, and deep message in your products.

 BEST EXERCISE OF THE TERM AWARD:

Although I enjoyed most of the activities in this class (Special Mention: tweeting hugot lines about our lesson for the day), the best project for me was the “Facebook Live” project. It was super fun, despite being somewhat stressful. I actually liked coming up with ideas for this one and I now even have better concepts for it. That is how much I liked this project. Plus, it was definitely challenging and I like challenges because I sometimes like giving myself a hard time for once you get through the hardships, the feeling you get is really fulfilling. 

Also, its a good exercise to test your creativity and can even help you learn a thing or two about improvisation so its truly a good exercise for people who want to work in the media. 

IF I HAD ONE MORE CHANCE TO DO IT:

Definitely, this goes to the “Facebook Page Making”, Dear Darling. We had so much more plans for this page that I thought would have been tremendously interesting to pursue. However, due to time constraint, we could no longer do those extra ideas. If I could do it all over again, I would still go with the whole Dear Darling plan, but I would also make more time to push through with our other projects. I believe we would have gained more viewers and subscribers while showing more meaningful and relevant content as well. 

SUGGESTIONS ON IMPROVING THIS CLASS:

1. Focusing on the Blog

I kind of think a good exercise would be to have students regularly write posts in their blog that is pertinent to the topic the class recently discussed. I honestly thought we would be focusing on creating a good blog or something during the first meeting. I believe its kind of productive to do so because it really tests your creativity on how to deliver your message to others. I mean, even this post has been influenced by that way of thinking. I’ve been shuffling through gifs and images just so I can add a bit of spice in my work so I don’t bore you. However, despite the little extra stuff, I still know how to say what I want, which I think is important to learn. Plus, its a good way to see who is listening in class. 

2. Improving on improvising and spontaneity

Mini exercises that help improve our thinking during critical moments are really helpful in my opinion.... I’m sorry if I sound like a masochist BUT in all seriousness, the exercise where we had to tweet our lesson for the day really had me SHOOKT. However, it did force me to think quickly about what to do, so maybe small things like that can help improve others on dealing with sudden pressure.

3. More tips on how to be properly execute content

This is one of the things I have a problem with, honestly. Its easy for me to think of a thousand concepts, but its difficult to actually create a great product quickly which I think we need to master once we graduate and work. I am still somewhat puzzled as to how I’m supposed to do this. I understand the part where social media accounts of our page can be utilized to act like human beings. However, I am still kind of troubled as to how to gain other people’s interest through different means when we just started out, so I think more guidance would be somewhat helpful. 

Please don’t hate me. :(

All-in-all though, I enjoyed this class a lot and I am not just saying that to pass, because I’m not the type to do so.

 I like learning things especially those that help me improve not only my skills, but myself. Particularly, the best thing about this class was that I learned we could all impact and influence large groups of people. It is just a matter of how we are to do so which will determine our success. Once we figure that out, we can create real changes in the society which is truly important especially during these catastrophic times.

I know I have a lot to improve on and also a lot things to think about. However, I believe this class has helped me gain more knowledge that hopefully will one day help me reach my goals. So a big thank you to my professor and to my classmates who have all made me a bit wiser than I was before. I really appreciate everything that happened here and will try my best to apply these new information in my life.

 Who knows, maybe one day you’ll find me doing miracles you never expected. ;)

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#DearDarling: Kwentong pag-ibig mula sa iba’t ibang henerasyon

● Dear Darling is all about the meaning of LOVE by different generations. ● Our goal is to let the people know the perceptions of people on love from different generations particularly from the Baby Boomers generation, the X, Y, and Z Generation. ● We consider this page successful since we had built our audience and had an engagement with them.

The term Dear Darling is inspired by the famous line from a local television series - Maalala Mo Kaya - which tells true stories on television by starting with the line, Dear Charo. Darling, on the other hand, came from the BUZZFEED post regarding the endearments used by Filipinos.

Goal and Social Media Platforms

The goal of our page is to bridge the gap between generations when it comes to love. We want to share the perceptions of people on different aspects of love from the Baby Boomers generation, the X, Y, and Z Generation through photos and videos. Ultimately, our goal is to show that true love still exists.

At first, our target for the Facebook page was to get 500 likes and 1000 engagement. On Twitter and Instagram, we wanted to have at least 100 followers. As of 8th of April, 2:50 PM, we have 287 likes and 702 followers in Facebook, 80 followers on Twitter, and 28 followers on Instagram. Though we have exceeded our target number of audience on Facebook, it became difficult for us to reach our goal on the other two platforms.

Content and Results On March 25 at 9:30 pm, we officially launched our Facebook page. The day after, we had a change of profile pictures in our respective Facebook accounts.

Our caption was: In love? Hinahanap si "the one"? Nanliligaw? O nililigawan? Pakinggan ang mga kuwentong pag-ibig mula sa iba’t-ibang henerasyon. I-kwento mo na rin ang iyong istorya! April 1 & 4 | 9:30 pm Connect with us through: Facebook: facebook.com/DearDarling2017 Twitter: @DearDarling2017 Instagram: @DearDarling2017 #DearDarling

Combining the likes of our profile pictures, we gained 664 likes, almost 700. With this, we believe that our profile pictures contributed a lot of engagement and hype.

The content of the page focuses on sharing experiences about “LOVE” from different generations. We posted “humans” where we ask individuals certain questions and their answers are posted along with their pictures. These stories are posted every night from March 27 to April 7 at 9:30 PM, the peak hour on Facebook.

For the main videos, we have tackled two different aspects of love namely, courtship and relationship. The videos only ran for 3 to 4 minutes. The first video had 10k reach and 1.6k engagement. The latter video garnered 3k reach and 315 engagement.

Before posting the main videos, we also had teasers which included short clips and gifs including the one below. These teasers were done to pique the interest of the audience.

In posting every publicity material, we made sure that we had captions that would catch the audience’s attention. For example: In our 2nd main video (Relationship), our caption was, “Commitment, sagabal sa pag-aaral? Ano ang "relationship" para sa'yo?”

Another example is the caption on our 2nd Teaser Video (What is “Dating” for Generation Z?): Dating? Uso pa ba 'yon? Pakinggan ang mga kuwentong pag-ibig mula sa iba’t-ibang henerasyon. Bukas na!

We used Filipino in writing our caption since we believe that our own language was more heartfelt. In addition, we always made sure to put open-ended questions so that our audience were compelled to think and ponder. This way, we would engage them with our content.

The challenges our page and group have faced included the inconsistency and rescheduling of posts. Our lack of participants and weak household internet connection contributed in the difficulty of sharing and posting our pubs.

This, of course, forced us to meet in person despite having no classes on certain days.

It was also hard to edit all the videos on time. We had a total of fifteen videos to merge into at a four minute video and the raw videos were not given on time to our editors which led to a lot of adjusting and rushing.

This led to us having to deviate from our original plans and also contributed in the problem with inconsistency of posting.

However, despite the problems we faced, we were still able to successfully promote and update our page. We were able to post both planned main videos, teasers, and the humans as well.

Learnings and Realizations First of all, making a concept that would appeal to people is not a piece of cake. Making our audience hooked into the content we posted daily is also not an easy task.

Despite the difficulties we have encountered, it was exciting, honestly, when it was time to post our content. It was undeniable that the post engagements, Facebook likes and Twitter & IG followers gave us the satisfaction and motivation to improve the products & content we present through these social media platforms.

Another realization that we had was that no matter how prepared we are (as proved by our nifty Google Drive), some things don’t workout the way we expected it to be. Specially when our initial goal was to a reach a half a thousand likes on FB and a hundred followers on Instagram & Twitter. One then should know how to adjust to different scenarios. Plan B and even C should always be available. For our group, the files were accessible to the rest of the team that made it easy for everyone to post it on our social media platforms.

Also, being responsible for social media management is never easy. It takes patience and discipline to launch a campaign. A simple mistake can affect our page and/or your campaign.

Publishing online may seem an easy task, but it really is difficult to know what content may encourage an individual to stop scrolling and engage with the post.

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The TraDigital Age

One of the biggest names in Philippine media is that of ABS-CBN. Famed for its television broadcasting, ABS-CBN is a merging of two broadcasting companies that has made its mark on Philippine media history. As competitive and creative the network is, with the digital age coming into play, their strategies and techniques had to change. With the advent of this new form of media, every other form of media must make up for this expansive and ever-growing digitization

It is because of digital media that traditional media platforms are threatened and challenged by the changing tides. This challenge, though, can be an incredible indicator of whether or not traditional media forms will be able to last as they adapt and improve themselves to fit the times.

One must be living under a rock if they did not notice the buzz all around the viral Jollibee advertisements that came out a couple of weeks ago. Jollibee released a series of videos released both online and on television. The videos were not your typical advertisement, they were short films with a very heart-wrenching or touching story that, of course, featured a certain Jollibee product.

The short videos were an instant viral. The video itself garnered over 900,00 views on Youtube and ‘Jollibee’ became the number one worldwide trending topic on Twitter. People everywhere shared them all over Facebook, as well. The audiences were moved as they cried, laughed and got kilig along with these videos that tackled love in all its forms. For an entire week, people could not get over the Jollibee advertisements. Not even Jollibee anticipated the amount of reactions and attention their videos received. There were a lot of tears and a lot of anger expressed all over social media. People expressed their emotions through tweets, posts, and, of course, memes.

                Photo grabbed from Raphael Phoebus Ubales

The success of the Jollibee advertisements was more than a marketing ploy, it was also a wake up call to everyone who works at traditional media companies, one being ABS-CBN. This was yet another proof of the evident rise of digital media. Jollibee hardly had to promote their videos because the video itself did all the work for them. It was through people’s shares, retweets, and reactions that the Jollibee advertisement gained its audience - it was the audience who did all the promoting for them. This was the kind of success and advertising that media companies everywhere desire.

It is for this exact reason that Bombet Orteza, an account manager for television in ABS-CBN, expressed both his fear and awe of the very much talked about Jollibee advertisements. “Mahirap talaga for us [traditional media] to cope with social media,” Orteza admits. He believes that social media poses a huge threat and challenge to traditional companies, especially in terms of advertisement. For Orteza and his colleagues in traditional media, they believe that digital media has a lot of advantages, “Penetration is easier on social media.”

However, Orteza also claims that the emergence of digital media has also encouraged traditional media to keep up and to become even more creative with their marketing strategies and outputs. Traditional companies are now also utilizing social media to their advantage; ABS-CBN came out with iwantTV, an online platform wherein they broadcast their Kapamilya programs and movies.

Traditional media companies also use social media platforms to campaign and promote their programs. They make sure to create pages on Facebook and Twitter to reach their audience online and also post promotional materials that will garner more viewers and supporters.

Orteza says that the Jollibee commercial phenomena was not the first of that type, he mentions the “Karen” commercial done by McDonald’s a long time ago. To him, this was what inspired advertising companies everywhere to start creating heartfelt, creative and, as Orteza placed it, “may kurot” commercials for this is what  truly makes an impact on the Filipino audience. “Dapat creative [in order] to reach your audience and to communicate your message.”

With these changing times comes new competitors. Media organizations that do not fit into the mold of the traditional media forms. These competitors are those born and bred for the digital age. Digital media organizations have grown in number and style as the platform allows for a different kinds of media to be featured on it.

One of these organizations born of the digital age is Our Awesome Planet (OAP).

Our Awesome Planet is a travel blog focusing mostly on the Philippines and ASEAN countries. It was founded by Anton Diaz in January of 2005. Since then, it has received thousands of followers through newsletter, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Youtube, and Google+ (“About Our Awesome Planet”, 2014). 

Though the travel blog was born in the digital age, it experiences its own set of challenges in the media industry as well. One of their writers, Abigail Javellana, mentioned how one of the biggest disadvantages of using digital media to head their organization is the negative response from online users. According to business consultant, Miranda Morley, “…digital media can spread bad information about a business just as fast as it can spread good.”

But just as there are disadvantages in the medium, there are also advantages. Javellana notes that, “The biggest advantage is it’s very accessible for everyone to share information you need. It’s has a big market with a wide reach.”

Because of the different ways digital media handles itself, Javellana noted that the best way to measure success is through one’s following, their influence, and their engagement with their audience.

In terms of competition, she said, “The blogging community actually aren’t ‘madamot’ when it comes to sharing information, in my experience I feel that we help each other out. But if you want to be one step ahead of the game you should be updated with the latest social media platforms and trends online.”

When talking about the future of of digital content and distribution, her immediate answer was videos. “It’s the age of video. Video content is the future. Gen Z are the generation who are into youtube and video content (A. Javellana, personal communication, February 24, 2017).”

Javellana admitted that OAP hopes to tap into the future digital media through of videos, as “For now, we are trying to crack youtube, our videos work for Facebook but not in the other. So that’s something we need to fix.”

With this in mind, it is clear that no matter the type of media, every form faces its challenges. Some bigger than the others, but a challenge no less. Thanks to the digital age, all forms of media have had to adjust to the fast-paced, easy information giving forms of digitization. Hopefully, both forms find a way to improve media in general and continue to inform and entertain the public as effectively, honestly, and efficiently as possible.

References

“About Our Awesome Planet.” (2014, September 19). Retrieved from

           http://www.ourawesomeplanet.com/awesome/about.html

M Morley. (n.d.). The positive and negative impact of digital media on business

           [Web log comment]. Retrieved from

           http://smallbusiness.chron.com/positive-negative-impact-digital-media-

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8.9.2016: Dave’s iPad

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Men’s Valentine’s day: Cloudy with a chance of Rain

Valentine’s day. A day of hearts, love, and, well, MONEY. Stereotypically, on one side you have the women who put effort and time in making gifts and planning elaborate schemes for their significant other’s pleasure. While the other side contains men who couldn’t care less. 

Example Given:

While the girls think of creative and even expensive ideas, guys opt to present their special lady with gifts such as:

This Poetic Valentine’s Day Balloon (It’s so deep that you can’t even comprehend it’s deepness rn)

or this Usable Declaration of Love 

or even this Elaborately Planned Work of Art (Plus points for staying on theme!)

It seems to be evident that while women strive to make Valentine’s day an unforgettable day filled with thoughtful presents for their partner, men view it as a complete hassle and become expert budget analyzers.

However, with the help of artificial intelligence, it’s been proven this theory to be FALSE. 

According to Poder.IO, during Valentine’s day, men spend 65% more than women do. These gifts don’t benefit them either like splurging on those 6 pieces of nuggets from Mcdonalds. Rather, they spend most on jewelries for their special lady.

This doesn’t just apply to the older generation, but also applies to the millenials. Millenials actually 64.3% more than those above the age of 25!

This goes to show that gender or age don’t matter what comes to love. 

HAVE A HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY!

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Paint to People

As a kid, I never liked sitting down or staying still. I never liked being quiet or taking naps (which I tremendously regret now). I hated it whenever my siblings would remain glued to their devices and ignore my constant pleas for attention. I never understood the appeal of a computer or the fun a person can get from using the internet. During my early years, the only applications I found worth my time were either pinball, minesweeper, or paint and even then I eventually got bored. I guess it was much later when I began to appreciate having the internet. It was around grade 4 when I started to use it to connect to people. Often times, I would go back to America and stay there for many months, yearly. This made me really miss my close friends in the Philippines and I remember I would go online on Yahoo messenger until late at night in order to talk and video chat with them due to the extreme time difference between the two countries. I consider this time to be the first moments I truly experienced the Internet. This is because I was using it with a purpose. It helped me stay closer to my loved ones despite being miles apart. Although they were not exactly with me, I did not feel the same loneliness in America as I did when I ignored the power of the internet. Before, I regarded the internet as an evil invention of technology that aimed to detach human beings from one other. However, as time passed by, and especially during that moment, I understood that it was not meant to be a tool that dissolves relationships. Rather, it was a tool that gives us opportunities to strengthen old ones and make new ones. Now, in my college days, I continue to be thankful for invention of these technologies for it has helped me build friendships and keep already existing ones. Of course, I am grateful for all the other features it has. However, I believe that the most important utility of the internet is still the one it first aimed to do, and that is CONNECTION.

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I know that I know nothing

A great philosopher once stated, “I know that I know nothing” and although I am neither good at philosophy nor great, I do agree with this statement quite ardently. Ever since I’ve started my Communication Arts majors, I have come to realize that I have no idea what I am doing most of the time. While my classmates already have their backgrounds on photography, on films, and on editing, I am left by the corner wondering what the hell is the difference between deep focus photography and just regular photography. However, I no longer see my utter confusion as a weakness. Rather, I find it as an opportunity for curiosity and learning. I’ve come to realize that the classmates that I thought were more advanced than me were just as clueless as I am. We all came here for the same reason. It wasn’t because we knew everything, but it was because we wanted to learn everything and I guess that is the only thing I expect from PUBLISH. Although I have no idea what it is, I want to understand and discover all that I can about it so that one day I can say that it wasn’t just a requirement, but a blessing that helped me make miracles.