Graduate students from the University of Alberta’s Masters in Communication and Technology program were on hand at Entreprise Square to present their research posters. Each year, the final-year students present their final project topics.
Hillary Burridge is presenting Creating Internal Ambassadors: A case study of a corporate video-generating campaign.
Thank you for joining us!
Although the tents and campsites have left Wall Street and the chanting occupiers have gone home, the ideas behind the campaign have not dissipated. As author William Greider points out in a panel discussion from Democracy now, social movements often fail, but it`s the powerful democratic conversations that continue.
Occupy Toronto`s message to media and experts who are simply talking heads, image by Hillary Burridge
The reasons behind the birth of the Occupy Wall Street movement have not disappeared. In my opinion, I believe that once North Americans experience a shocking abuse of power and greed again, the momentum will swell up again and the movement will become more influential.
Occupy Wall Street was able to build on the shoulders of other movements by incorporating tactics, symbols and strategies that have worked elsewhere. Using the human microphone, sign language instead of clapping and conducting peaceful resistance to authorities were ways that North American protesters experienced the tactics used in other regions of the world.
Occupy Wall Street showed many non-activists that they have power and can make an impact. The simple act of showing up and protesting inspires people to take control of their situation.
I live in Toronto and every day, I would pass the Occupy Toronto camp in St. James Park. I watched the protest grow and shift as occupiers came and went. When I attended the Occupy Toronto site, I was impressed at the level of collaboration and community within the small park. I took photographs of the scenes, interesting signs, the impromptu library and the media tent. I ventured into the media tent and saw their boards explaining how to get the message out, including hashtags, Twitter profiles and Facebook pages. Engaged activists were on hand to speak to members of the media. It was more organized than most media events I have attended.
Occupy Toronto`s sign, image by Hillary Burridge
In E. Gabriella Coleman‘s article, Anonymous: From the Lulz to Collective Action, she describes how a dispersed group of pranksters changed over time to become a part of a growing global activist movement. Coleman is the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill University and has been studying Anonymous. According to CBC radio’s Spark program, Coleman is currently writing a book on Anonymous.
A crowd a scene in V for Vendetta wear Guy Fawkes masks to show their solidarity. Members of Anonymous use these masks to hide their identity while showing that they share the same ideology.
Coleman’s term “lulz” in the title refers to an altered version of the phrase “laugh out loud” shortened to “lol”. Lulz is also used to describe the fun and pranks that continue inside Anonymous even to this day.
Coleman’s piece begins with start of Anonymous. It originally became an area only for lulz until the winter of 2008 when they began protesting abuse within the Church of Scientology. Scientology became Anonymous’ first target, especially when the Church tried to prevent the distribution of a controversial clip of Hollywood actor, Tom Cruise. As Coleman points out, Anonymous declared war against the Church of Scientology, but this video was actually made as part of their lulz. Shortly after the video was released, Coleman explains that long-time critic of the Church, Mark Bunker, asked Anonymous to take this cause seriously. Some Anonymous members took up the challenge and so began the group’s shift to political action.
Anonymous has used various techniques for sabotage, including:
Anyone can access the information that Anonymous discusses online using Internet Relay Chat (IRC), a real-time messenger service that has been in use since 1988. Their two more important chat areas are Anonet and Anonops. As part of the research into this article, I ventured into the Anonops area of IRC.
First, I used Firefox’s Chatzilla addon to access the IRC networks. Once there, I searched for Anonymous and entered into various areas and chatted with a few other people. The guys chatting were teasing each other and making comments about their body parts and their mothers. It was not a secretive discussion, and all the information was being discussed openly, as far as I could tell.
However, Anonymous has conducted many stealthy and damaging attacks, including:
In our Comm 506 class, most of the students, including myself, were surprised and outraged when we read the article, Julian Assange: The Rolling Stone Interview by Michael Hastings. We have all heard of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange but we know very little about the information that was released, where it came from and the implications of the information. Why is this rarely covered in the Canadian news?
Yes, most of the information concerns Americans, Iraq and middle eastern countries, but the United States are our closest allies. When there is political unrest and economic uncertainty in the U.S., we see it reflected in our Canadian economy with rising gas prices, fluctuating interests rates and the changing rate of our Canadian loonie.
I consider myself to be well-read, and as far as I can tell, my classmates are as well. So why don’t we know more about this? We’ve recently experienced our own controversies, including the robo-call scandal, professional security consultant, Byron Sonne’s recent release from jail after being cleared of charges of plotting attacks against Toronto’s G20 summit, and the government acknowledging that they knew about the extra $10 billion needed for the F-35 aircraft project but did not reveal the information prior to the election. Although we may be focused on our own issues, we should be aware of the scandals happening outside our borders.
I know I’ll be taking a deeper look into the WikiLeaks controversy so that I can make up my own mind on the situation. And I suggest that you do, too.
Cana
As I’m working on a variety of assignments for the final week of the MACT 2012 spring institute, I keep checking Hootsuite for the latest updates from my friends and fellow students. The hilarious students are sending each other helpful, funny and informative tweets and although I’d love to keep myself in the loop, I have to get back to work.
But it’s a catch-22 because I am missing important details about the projects and the opportunity to provide beneficial feedback. This feedback build social capital with my network. We are in the middle of designing our research posters, and many of us are doing it for the very first time. We’re sharing websites for photos, examples of posters and even our draft ones for feedback. It’s a great process and it will make our projects better in the end, but the amount of time it takes is great.
Here’s my draft abstract for Comm 501. Edit as you will!
Creating internal ambassadors: Determining the effectiveness of an organization’s employee-generated video campaign using evaluative research viewed through a Sociopychological lens
Hillary Burridge
The success of YouTube has inspired many organizations to tap into the creativity and knowledge of their employees. Some organizations are asking their employees to create videos to advertise specific products or services. During these internal communication campaigns, organizers encourage employees to vote for their favourite videos.
Literature on crowdsourcing creative projects reveals that organizations produce more innovative ideas when they access the knowledge from a diverse group of employees rather than relying on a single team. By using collaborative production methods to develop creative projects, organizations may be able to access information previously hidden in the minds of their workforce.
The purpose of this project is to determine the perceived effectiveness of a single employee-generated video campaign within an organization. It will be determined by giving questionnaires to employees who produced or voted on videos. Campaign organizers will be given semi-structured interviews to learn if the campaign met their goals. The number of videos received, votes submitted and the organization’s social media metrics will be reviewed to determine the campaign’s reach and participation and compared to goals. By applying a Sociopsychological lens, to the study’s data, this research will contribute to organizational communication knowledge about crowdsourcing creative projects.
Update May 12, 2:30 p.m. MDT: I’m picking the second suggestion and focusing on employee-produced videos. I’m currently debating about with communication theory I should be applying: phenomenological or social-psychological.
For Trish’s PICO concept, here are my tentative answers:
Population: all employees at an organization who were eligible to participate in their video contest (company still TBD, but for now, Canada Post)
Intervention: a video-generating project aimed at employees to increase awareness and encourage the adoption of services
Comparison: perceived adoption of the service. This is a qualitative measurement that will be revealed in questionnaires and then a select group of semi-structured interviews.
Outcome: an increased use of services and higher engagement both internally and externally. This will be measured by quantitative indicators including: number of videos submitted, number of votes received, number of followers on Twitter feed, number of views on Facebook, and the number of media articles describing the event. The qualitative indicators will be written or verbal feedback from employees received by the employees who organized the event.
Original post from May 11, 10:30 MDT:
Hi guys,
I’m hoping to tap any social capital I’ve got left for help narrowing down my research topic. Yep, the abstract is due in 34 1/2 hours and I am still working on my idea. Eek!
Here are my two choices – and keep in mind that I don’t actually have aninwith a company yet – so they are both too broad to accomplish. Double eek!
1) How can organizations crowdsource ideas from employees to make their organization more efficient or more effective?
To illustrate this concept, I’m linking to the University of Alberta’s Reimagine, Rethink, Reinvigorate Initiative that asked staff, students and members of the community for suggestions to improve the school.
I love this concept but I’m not sure what it is I’m trying to learn here. To be honest, I want to learn what the best practices are for crowdsourcing ideas from staff, but as far as I can tell that can’t be final project.
2) How are companies using employee-produced videos for knowledge transfer and to increase employee engagement?
For this one, I’ve got Canada’s Post Employee Video Contest as an example.
I also love this concept because I am interested in internal communications and employee engagement. Plus, I am a documentary film buff (and wanna be documentary filmmaker) so I appreciate the do-it-yourself videos.
Again, I wish I could just make a best practices report, but instead, I think I’ll send out questionnaires and then conduct structured interviews with key informants. Or, if I can swing aninsomewhere, I’ll do a case study.
Okay, so here’s where I need advice:
I’m a little exhausted so I’m not as sharp as I should be when deciding this stuff but I’ll update the blog when I make a few decisions.
Thank you! I appreciate all your social capital!
As soon as you connect to the Internet, you are being tracked. Corporations track your every move, record your searches, your location and your browsing habits. Most of us do not mind giving up a little personal information to get better access to sites such as Google, Facebook and Amazon, but many people are not aware of how much information they are revealing on the net.
During our class discussion with PhD candidate and digital surveillance expert, Christopher Parsons, we learned the scary truth about online privacy. Every tweet you send out also contains 50 lines of information, including a unique tweet ID, code showing where the tweet originated from and the application you used to send it.
Websites and applications have privacy settings that can be adjusted, but according to a recent report from CTV news, millions of people ignore Facebook’s privacy settings and leave them in their default setting. This allows Facebook, and the companies that access their information, free reign over your information, habits and networks. They can mine your data to learn your shopping habits and your activities. According to CBC’s hyper-targeting podcast for the show, Under the Influence by Terry O’Reilly, marketers and companies watch your every move. If you check your bank account in the middle of the night, companies believe that you may be worried about your money and it could affect your credit.
After Carolyn Freed‘s hilarious presentation in the Masters of Communications and Technology (MACT) class Comm 506, I asked members of the audience to submit their photos and videos.
Leah McYYC, Sylvia Tan and Professor, Kate Milberry sent me their photos using Twitter and they’ve been added to the original post. By reaching out to the network of classmates, I was able to crowdsource content that makes the blog posts more entertaining.
Update: New photographs of the presentation have been added. Enjoy!
When Carolyn Freed asked for volunteers for her presentation today, I happily offered to help. I know how tough presenting can be and I figured that I could help out by being an enthusiastic helper. But my eagerness disappeared once she pulled out the blindfolds. What had I gotten myself into?
Luckily, Carolyn pulled out some large letters and we ended up playing a modified game of human scrabble. Carolyn’s lesson was clear — it’s easier to collaborate when you can communicate with your teammates.
If you want to see what happened, you can check out the photos and I’m guessing there are even videos documenting the event. And I’m only guessing because, as I say, we were blindfolded for parts of it.
Hillary`s doing her best Vanna White impression as she holds up the letter L
Image from: http://pic.twitter.com/PhKGsXRZ
Even before Carolyn’s presentation was complete, photos of the event were online. Smartphones have made it easy to capture funny moments and tweet them or share them with your network. Simple things such as enjoying a good meal, reading a funny sign or participating in a wild class game are now recorded and shared with the click of a button. This ability to capture the moment could cause some people to stop participating in groups where they know they’ll be photographed. Or, it can help us to develop a thicker skin and not care if our image is recorded and shared. We will see…
Do you have a photo or video of the event? Let us know in the comments and share it with us by tweeting #mact2012 and #comm506. I think we could all use a good laugh.
Here’s our first submission from Leah McYYC:
Here’s a reader-submitted image from Leah McYCC’s Twitter post: @LeahMcYYC
Here’s are two photos from Kate Milberry:
@JudithDyck58 “collaborates” by acting out the letter E to make the word “collaborate”. Thanks @KateInAlberta for the image: http://ow.ly/i/Cdb0.
Here’s another one from Kate Milberry:
Listening to a question from the audience. Thanks @KateInAlberta for the image: http://ow.ly/i/CdcO.
Sylvia Tan sent us two photos through Twitter:
Carolyn’s book with our terms identified along with another blindfolded image. Thank you for the images from @sylvia_tan.
