Developmental Work

Group Work: Game of Phones~February 4th 2019

Today, we were asked to get into our groups and choose what persona or mascot we want to carry out throughout the semester. Though we have been discussing personas and mascots up to this point, it was much harder trying to figure out what role we hoped to take on and what this role would be promoting.

Ultimately, we were inspired by the Instagram/Facebook/Twitter page called Humans of New York, in which photographer Brandon Stanton captures real life New Yorkers and asks them for a quote about their daily life struggles, joys, and overall moods. We thought we would do our own version of this through a mental health campaign involving teddy bears.

Everyone looks to teddy bears as a sign of comfort, even myself who is a 20 year old in college. So, we thought we could capture a photo of our Teddy Bear around campus and promote positive thinking through the use of inspiring quotes to help anyone in their ups and downs. We even hope to involve students in the campaign, to make the university experience even more positive. This is important as many college students suffer from anxiety and depression, and we are looking for ways to inspire others and cope with illnesses like these through this campaign. Photos of the students interacting with the bear, even cuddling it, with a positive caption underneath could truly inspire people to "Find their Teddy" and strive for ending the stigma around mental health.

GOALS FOR NEXT MEETING

- Campaign Name

- Name for Teddy/s

- Platform it will be Published to

- What content we plan on posting daily/weekly

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Group Work: Game of Phones~ February 11th 2019

This week, Game of Phones truly accomplished the goals we set our last meeting!!

We decided upon the Campaign Name "lilbearthoughts" which will also be used as our social media handle. We thought this would be a good name, as we hope to publish content that will inspire others to live a happy and healthy life style surrounding mental health awareness. When people tend to be open on social media, it is has been referred to as "bare thoughts." Therefore, we though switching bare thoughts with "bear" thoughts would not only tie to the social media market, but also give a presence to our bears and why we are using them in our campaign.

The names we have given to our two Teddy bears will be Bertie and Bettie! They both will have very seperate personalities and we are trying to show how even the most unlike of bears can be happy in their own way. StatistIcally, men are more sad than women, so we are trying to target both audiences in a way that is relevant to them, therefore making two bears with two different personalities is the most effective.

The platform we are choosing to publish our content will be both Twitter and Instagram. Instagram will be used to post our daily and weekly content, with pictures and captions that will include tips for living a healthy lifestyle and effective ways to cope with stress etc. While our Twitter will be used to engage directy with people. Using the hashtag #TalktoTeddy we want to engage directly with our audience and allow them to ask question about our campaign as well direct them resources that can better help them, since we are not trained professionals in mental health. As we said, the content will range from inspiring quotes, tips, resources we will provide to help those struggling, and we hope to remain a positive outlet and provide a good message to those who need a "pick me up" each day.

We want to stress that since we are not trained professionals, we will being giving advice via research ad statistics from Trained professionals about how to cope with mental health. We also will be provding resources each time, so that our audience is aware that we can not help them alone.

GOALS FOR NEXT MEETING

-officially publish content to our pages

-create illustrations to post

-decide what group members post what days

-get more followers

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Group Work: Game of Phones~ February 18th

Bertie and Bettie have officially started posting content!

My group and I have begin posting content on our Instagram and Twitter pages! The photos, like the one above, feature Bettie and Bertie taking part in everyday life de-stressors and are there to inspire others to relax as well. We also will be posting quotes, pictures of the Teddy's with people, and other new content.

We are still working on illustrations to add, but as you can see we created a logo for our instagram and twitter handles like the one above.

We also thought it would be important to pin a tweet with a link to the national health service so that those who feel like need more help, can have quick and easy access via our home page. It also works as a disclaimer to show that we are only here to spread positivity, and can not always be the help that everyone needs! By pinning this tweet, it will always be firstly available to anyone who finds themselves on our page!

In the meantime, my group has also decided what days people will post what. Our schedule is as follows:

Monday- Lucy on Instagram

Tuesday- Shannon on Twitter

Wednesday- Charlotte on Instagram

Thursday- Amy on Twitter

We are unsure whether weekend posts will be available to the public as we though the weekend might be a useful break to get ready to publish the content for the next week! We do hope to post more than once a day on each site. Specifically, on Twitter we hope to use the #TeddyTalks to talk with followers about our page, mission, and answer any questions based on our research. We also are growing our follower list fast, and anticipate to follow many more mental health awareness pages to spread our word and mission

*GOALS FOR NEXT MEETING*

-publish more content

-more followers

-have clearer message

-feature students on page

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Group Work: Game of Phones ~ March 4th

This week was all about following other accounts and gaining a bigger audience

We have not been getting much interaction from our audiences so this week we decided it would be important to follow a lot of accounts and try and engage more with the platform communities on twitter and Instagram. We did this by finding accounts that were similar to our own, and following them as well as the accounts who are following those accounts. We went on a "follow spree" as some may call it and it payed off pretty well. We were able to gain more followers and receive more likes on our posts than we have received in the past.

Our group has also continued with posting on our allotted days, but it is hard to remember to keep up with it and make sure we re posting and engaging enough with our followers. I've noticed that when we tweet out for people to tweet us, it does not work as well as when we tag people and ask them something specifically and directly. I'm going to try and see if there is something I can do that can help us have more interactions on our platforms.

We also began using Instagram stories which has helped us engage with audiences more personally as they are scrolling through Instagram. It gives us a more active presence on our platforms and it has allowed us to create polls, questions, and more to interact with followers which has been great. We use the stories to post motivational and positive quotes. Bertie and Bettie are rarely posted on the stories because we keep their content for the actually Instagram page. While these quotes are used to help our followers stay present with us while also reminding them of our mission in a more general context.

*GOALS FOR NEXT MEETING*

-More interaction with followers

-Feature students- still have not accomplished this

-add more types of content

-Receive more likes

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Group Work: Game of Phones~March 11th

This Week Game of Phones is slowly wrapping up our campaign with the presentation date coming up!

This is a brief section of the latest content we have posted. I am very happy with how often our group has kept up with posting, even posting on the weekend and days we were not even obligated to. My group and I work very well together and I have not doubted us at all or been unhappy with the work that is being published. I think we have also done a good job with posting content with both bears, Bettie and Bertie, showing how each of them have different personalities. Bertie is way more reserved and shy, and Bettie is way more open. Both still can be positive, which I think is important because you don't have to be one type of person to be happy and positive.

We also were finally able to get student interaction thanks to our follower, Natalie Beech. We wanted to engage more with the college community at LTU because those are the audience that we have and that tend to face depression, anxiety, and stress on the daily. We also noticed a spike in our likes when we posted with another student, so hopefully before the end of the assessment we can engage with more students. We were lucky to have several young people reach out to us on Twitter and respond to our tweets, which is not something that has happened so much since we started. It makes us feel like our mission is finally touching people and making them speak out about keeping a positive mindset, which is amazing,

We actually faced an issue last week due to a following spree gone wrong. Basically, when I was following a lot of people I did not think to look at their profiles, and in doing so I did not notice that I followed pages with provocative and sexual content. We are not judging these pages, but we quickly unfollowed these pages when we realized because that is not a part of the message we are trying to give. Although we want as many followers as possible, the followers we have and that we are following are also a part of our message and the community of people @lilbearthoughts wants to be surrounded by.

My group and I also met to discuss our final presentation. We created our slides and made sure that none of our content overlapped with one another, especially in regards to referencing and our final submission. While we are individually finishing up our blogs, we are pretty much done with our project which is extremely surreal. We have yet to decide whether we are going to continue this even when the project is over, but to this point I am so proud of the mission we have chose and the lives we have brought positivity to each day, and I'm excited to see what the future holds for Bettie and Bertie.

GOALS FOR FINAL PRESENTATION

-Meet and practice presenting

-Clean up slides and make sure content is clear'

-Make notecards for yourself and time yourself

-Submit final work