As part of our Transmedia presentation, my group and I decided to focus our research towards the topic of Commercialisation, particularly the differing media impact between a Celebrities and a Social Media Influencer. We chose this topic as we all agreed that Social Media influencers are rapidly becoming more and more relevant in today’s society - whether that is to influence the media we consume, accounts we interact with, music we listen to, or products we purchase. To present this, we chose to divide our presentation into three sections, equally assigning ourselves in pairs to one of these. This level of planning can be seen in the ‘8 categories of interaction’, as we seeked suggestions, suggested different approaches to our work, as well as agreed, disagreed and seeked clarification.

 

For the agreement category, we equally agreed to create an e-magazine, ‘Elite Influencer’, to present our research, which also included a narrated video and conversational podcast. Firstly, to introduce the topic, section one focused on the content from Social Media Influencers, such as fashion and lifestyle creators Sophia and Cinzia, and their audience demographic, presented in the style of a magazine article using the creative platform ‘Canva’.

Furthermore, for section two, Katie and I decided to research into the blurring lines between those described as Social Media Influencers, verus Celebrities, particularly focusing on the growing following behind rapper and boxer KSI, as well as reality show star and Instagram promoter Molly Mae, who both began their careers as content creators via the video sharing platform Youtube. We chose to present our research through the creation of a podcast, using the app ‘Anchor’, which was successful in allowing us to record our conversation together, while both being in different houses. Finally, section three focused on the reverse - the number of celebrities, such as Will Smith, who have begun launching themselves into the world of Social Media, content creation and product endorsement via video sharing platforms such as Youtube and TikTok. Furthermore, we decided to create surveys in order to gain a better understanding as to how people felt about these topics themselves.

 

For section two, Katie and I decided a podcast would be an interesting approach to our presentation, as it allowed us to be able to discuss the changing world of ‘Influencers’, who are becoming recognised with celebrity status. To accumulate our research, we decided to focus on one particular Social Media influencer each - Molly Mae and KSI - and understand their audience demographic, partnerships, revenue and transmedia content. In addition, to gain more insight and audience reception, we created a Google survey in order to find out how the public view Influencers in comparison to celebrities, who they are more likely to follow on social media, and most importantly - who is more influential in terms of consumerism. Our survey results coincided with the research we had also conducted, suggesting that social media influencers are becoming much more relevant to today’s society with their transmedia content, as well as their ability to create a level of trust and reliability towards their audience to encourage them, as consumers, to purchase a product they endorse.

 

In reflection of our project, we connected and worked well together as a group, as previous group projects together throughout our time at uni have allowed us to learn about each other’s strengths and weaknesses, this links to Schutz (1958) Interpersonal Relations theory that inclusion, such as being part of a group, and affection are two of the three basic human needs. Using this knowledge, we easily established who would participate in which section, as we have pre-existing knowledge about each other’s interests and media capabilities. Using Social Media platforms, we regularly connected as a group to discuss our ideas and work progress, as well as using the Google Hangout feature to talk via video chat once a week, to share our progress. In reference to group dynamics, our group showed Lewin (1948) theory of interdependence, in which it is necessary for group members to get something done in order to cooperate with others. This is because each of our individual research and work was significant to the success of the overall project.

However, while our group collaborated successfully together, we did not assign a set leadership within our group. This could be considered as a weakness as we did not have a specific individual who was in charge of all of our work. As well as this, research suggests that ‘adaptive leadership allows leaders to mobilize people to tackle tough challenges and thrive’ (Heifetz et all. 2009, cited in Natalie Khan. 2017, 179), which is something that we chose to do collectively as a group instead of assigning a specific member as a leader.

 

Overall, the way in which we collectively worked together to create our presentation was successful, as well as the work we each produced to present our research and public survey results. Similarly, our final presentation was successful, especially helped by the fact that we collectively connected regularly as a group, including a rehearsal of our order and timings, as well as ensuring we all had scripts prepared in order to summarise our work. 

However, we also encountered some difficulties over the course of our work. In the initial planning stages, we had considered the idea of creating Social Media profiles, in order to demonstrate the job of a Social Media Influencer, however we encountered difficulties when finding a suitable tool to create these profiles, so instead we decided it would be more beneficial to our presentation to focus on adding to our magazine instead. In retrospect this may have been a good addition to our project as we would have been able to demonstrate a typical influencer’s social media profile from an audience perspective, rather than a screenshot. Another issue we discovered was the amount of responses of our surveys. Due to the scale of the project, we were unable to gain a large amount of reciprocation towards our work, which meant that the survey results cannot be completely generalised, however, the responses we did receive correlated with our research, suggesting that it was fairly accurate.