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Social Media Strategy

According to a 2017 study, 47% of respondents “were concerned about government violating their privacy,” although this concern reduced significantly when the issue was framed as one of an “anti-terrorism measure” (University of Sydney 2017, p.2).  

 

These findings seem to be reflected in online discourse around the issue.  Trawling through articles on government surveillance published on Facebook, the same few sentiments often show up in the comments sections:  if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear; I want my own privacy, but I also want dangerous people to be monitored; and a seemingly helpless resignation to the government’s access to our data.  The issue can provoke responses both highly emotive and more detached, as it has become such a pervasive idea in modern life.

 

Research indicates that there is little (possibly statistically insignificant) divide across gender, age or education levels when it comes to opinion on government surveillance.  Partisanship, however, is a factor:  38% of Coalition voters say they are “concerned governments are violating my privacy online,” compared with 50% of Labor and 54% of Greens voters (University of Sydney 2017, p.22).   Because our project casts a critical eye over government surveillance, our target audience is therefore slightly more left leaning.  

 

Although the story within our project has a Singaporean character and explores the implications of government surveillance in Singapore, we consciously made the decision to not specifically target people either in or from the country.  This is because of information we came across during our research about Singapore’s limits on freedom of critical speech.  We feel it would be unethical to try to push our content towards anyone who could potentially suffer negative consequences for viewing it, and that we are not in an educated enough position to decide what that risk is for anyone else.  Therefore, we will be targeting a local audience.

 

We are intending to conduct our social media campaign without any budget.  Panopticon has its own Facebook page, where we plan to publish links to relevant articles and research on the topic of government surveillance.  In doing this, our goal is to have people begin engaging with the page, commenting on posts and sharing them, in order to further expand its exposure.  Of course, once the actual project is launched, our Facebook page will also post clear information directing followers to the site.

 

On Facebook, there will also be two personal pages set up for the characters within the narrative.  These will have content posted to them “in character”.  This will serve as bonus content for users of the website, as the profiles will be linked to within the story, and also as a promotional tool.  We don’t expect these characters’ pages to attract an audience on their own, especially as it won’t be apparent that they are characters, let alone from an interactive website.  Instead, the Panopticon Facebook page will link to the characters’ profiles for users to explore and gain a sense of the story in the lead up to the project’s launch.

 

Instagram will also be utilised, and will possibly be our most powerful tool, particularly as without a product to sell our main goal is engagement, and Instagram has the highest rate of interaction per follower (Elliott 2015).  Because the platform lends itself well to concise, impactful imagery and our project utilises a fair degree of mystery, we are expecting that Instagram will significantly help to build our audience.  We plan to publish images and short enigmatic “teaser” clips, both in the lead up to and after the launch of the site.  For example, we may use a dark image overlayed with a short audio clip of a tapped phone call, ending abruptly with the character realising they’re being listened to.

 

We are not asking followers to watch a short film or a full-length trailer on Instagram, but hoping they will consume just enough content to establish a growing curiosity about the project, exploiting the sense of ambiguity that the artwork itself contains.  Each post will use hashtags to attempt to direct users browsing both political and media-interest topics, such as #surveillance (currently sitting at around 123,000 posts) and #interactivemedia (approximately 7000).  Hashtags are expected to be particularly helpful directing traffic to our Instagram account:  because we're not selling a product that people will be actively searching for, they will provide an organic way for followers to discover the project, and according to Simply Measured (2014) Instagram posts with hashtags have been found to have a 12.6% higher rate of engagement than those without.

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References

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The University of Sydney 2017, Digital Rights in Australia, viewed 8 April 2018, <http://hdl.handle.net/2123/17587>.

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Elliott N 2015, ‘How Does Your Brand Stack Up On Facebook, Twitter, And Instagram?’, Forrester, blog post, 15 September, viewed 7 April 2018, <https://go.forrester.com/blogs/15-09-15-how_does_your_brand_stack_up_on_facebook_twitter_and_instagram/>. 

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Simply Measured 2014, Simply Measured Q3 2014 Instagram Study, industry report, Simply Measured, viewed 10 April 2018, <http://get.simplymeasured.com/rs/simplymeasured2/images/InstagramStudy2014Q3.pdf.>

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