NWSLSC has a strong sense of community, everyone is there to help and is friendly no matter what.
I asked Dad the same questions as the other Interviewees, and most of them revolve around me in same way, since he joined Surf Club to help me as a Nipper. His answers were:
I have been a member since 2012, as I joined with you when you who started Nippers at age 11.
I have seen most of the Facebook pages and groups.
I use Facebook but not Instagram.
North Wollongong Surf Club facebook page and Surf Club members group.
I only use Facebook, as I find it more useful.
I tag you in events and information you might find helpful or may be interested in.
Yes, I find the Patrolling roster for each season on there and make sure you see it.
From this discussion, I have found that Dad uses the accounts and groups to make sure that Him and I are up to date with what’s happening at the Club.
I follow almost every social media account or group that the Club has, and use both Facebook and Instagram regularly, and have found both platforms are useful for different things. Instagram is good for visually telling – showing images or videos of events and interesting stuff, with little text. Whereas Facebook is good for lots of text and information and event planning. I don’t comment often, usually only interacting through likes, however, I do comment when it is something I need to know. I don’t think that I prefer either platform over the other, as, like I stated before, both platforms are suitable for different things.
North Wollongong often has big events on the beach.
The next four Interviews are focused on people’s experiences with the Club’s social media and what they think about the Club’s social media usage. North Gong has a welcoming community and places a large emphasis on being friendly, and I believe this has translated across to North Gong’s Social Media presence. I aim to find out whether the people I interview believe this to be true by analysing their social media use. To determine this, I have asked each Interviewee this set of seven questions:
How long have you been a member of North Wollongong Surf Club?
Are you aware of the various social media accounts the club has?
Do you use either Instagram, Facebook, or both?
If yes, which accounts do you follow?
Do you prefer one platform you interact on over the other?
Do you interact or get involved with these accounts through likes, comments or reactions?
Have these accounts helped you during your time with the club?
Interview 2 – Kel Giddey
My Digital Artefact, North Gong Daily, was created for Kel Giddey, who originally created the Instagram and Facebook Accounts, so I thought it would be good to get his perspective on the Club’s social media. His answers were:
I have been a member of NWSLSC since I was about 12. So, 41 years.
Yes, I’m aware the club has both Instagram and Facebook accounts as well as website.
I use both IG and FB, both for personal and business pages.
I follow both, otherwise I follow approximately 800+ accounts on Instagram.
Both platforms have their different merits. I prefer Instagram for instant responses, but Facebook is better for getting announcements out to a wider audience, especially in relation to surf patrols and surf club business etc.
I get involved using all methods – likes, comments, shares, and reactions.
These accounts have definitely helped during my time. In fact, they are increasing in usefulness as members become more tech savvy.
Kel uses both Facebook and Instagram to interact with the club, being as involved as possible, and values Instagram for its speed, and Facebook for its ability to spread information to a wider audience, which is something that NWSLSC aims to do well. It seems that as more and more people become familiar with technology, moving to social media is crucial for raising awareness
Interview 3 – Anonymous
My third Interviewee was happy to be interviewed, however, they have asked that they remain anonymous, and under the MEAA Code of Ethics, I am required to comply. As they have been so helpful, I want to ensure that I respect their wishes, so I will refer to this person as ‘A’ when speaking about them from now on. Despite choosing to remain anonymous, A does still reveal some information about themselves, however this was their own decision and they have allowed me to reveal this information. A’s answers went as follows:
I have been a member of the club since 2008, participating in nippers
Yes, I know the club has an Instagram and Facebook account, as well as North Gong Daily*
Yes, I use both on a daily basis.
I follow the Instagram and Facebook accounts, as well as North Gong Daily, and being a member of the NWSLSC members group.
I think that interacting on Facebook is easier than Instagram.
Yes, I will like or react to post that I find interesting, but I rarely comment.
Yes, by following these accounts, I feel that I am constantly up to date with the latest events and info regarding what’s happening.
From these answers, it seems that A prefers using Facebook due to the more informative nature of the Facebook, as A likes to know what is happening with the Club. However, A still likes to use Instagram regularly.
Next up – An auto-ethnography of my own use of the Club’s social media, in North Gong Pt. VI!
Make sure to read North Gong Pt. III, the start of my Digital Story, before reading this!
Nippers on Sunday’s is always packed
Interview 1: Social Media Manager – Laura Booth
For my first Interview I spoke with Laura Booth, and prepared a different set of questions than the ones for the other interviewees, since she is the North Wollongong Surf Life Saving Social Media Manager and will have a different perspective regarding the various accounts. I spoke to her in person a few weeks ago, during a Patrol we both were rostered onto. The Interview transcript went as follows:
H: How often do you update and post on the social media?
L: I try to do it as regularly as possible, at least every Sunday, once or twice throughout the week and when something relevant happens.
H: How long have you been running them?
L: For the past two seasons, so one year.
H: Do you run them all/did you create them?
L: No, I just took over. Yes, I run them all, but Nippers stuff is separate.
ย H: How often do people comment or react to your posts?
L: Someone always reacts.
H: Are there any posts that do particularly well?
L: Posts that have things to do with events that have happened and we have pictures to go with it do the best. I guess ones that require an interaction, like Nippers type ones or the presentation.
Our goal is to increase our exposure and awareness to potential sponsors and other clubs.
Laura Booth
H: Do you know how much engagement you get?
L: Utilising social media as a free platform of advertising and creating exposure has been made really hard by the way that Facebook and Instagram now filter posts. Iโm finding now we arenโt getting as much interaction with posts now because of this. Facebook and Instagram keep trying to encourage me to pay to help โboostโ interaction.
H: Do you have plans or a schedule?
L: The plan was to post every Sunday, and have every Patrol Captain send a pic and update of the patrol, not going so well for Instagram and Facebook.
H: Does anyone help with it?
L: All self-guided, though lots of people have access to accounts.
H: Do you have goals?
L: Our goal is to increase our exposure and awareness to potential sponsors and other clubs.
Laura also shared her Accounts’ insights (above), which highlight how many people the posts reached (1,090) and how much engagement is achieved (657) as well as how this compares to the previous posts.
An exploration of how sporting organisations communicate with its members, with a focus on North Wollongong Surf Life Saving Club and the community around it.
North Gong Pt. I and North Gong Pt. II are my Pitch for this project, so make sure to read those to find out about my initial thoughts on the topic!
The way people communicate is constantly changing, as new advancements in technology continue to appear and develop, and, in the last few years, mobile phones, social media and the internet have come to the forefront of this communication.
With the internet came the development of online communities who can connect with people who share the same interests (Luck & Buchanan 2008, p. 45). These advancements have made communication easier for a large amount of people, and most organisations and businesses have incorporated social media into their plans.
For
Organisations such as North Wollongong Surf Life Saving Club, social media has
been invaluable in planning its weekly, monthly and yearly operations and
goals. North Wollongong Beach is an extremely popular beach, the Club needs to
be prepared for every Sunday, as Members volunteer to patrol the beach in
shifts and there needs to be a certain number of proficient award-holders
available to spend the day at the beach.
During this Study, I aim to find out how North Wollongong Surf Life Saving Club interacts with its members through social media and how its members respond to this and whether they have a preferred method of communication with the Club. I have spoken to 4 people and myself, with one being the person that runs the accounts (Laura Booth) and the rest being members of the Club.
For the interview with Laura Booth, I asked her a different set of questions than I did the rest of the interviewees as she is the one running the accounts, therefore she has a different perspective and insight into the social media of the Club. In her Interview, I asked her about the performance of the accounts and how much interaction they achieve and what they aim to get out of it. In the other Interviews, I asked about how the interviewees interact personally with the Club and what they think about the Clubโs social media presence overall.
From this I believe I have achieved an understanding of why Sporting Organisations utilise Social Media to communicate with their members, as well as discovered what certain members think of this plan.
My digital artefact is a Surf Report Website called North Gong Daily, created as a partner for the Instagram and Facebook pages of the same name, originally created by Kel and Michelle Giddey, who I know through North Wollongong Surf Life Saving Club. Theyโve been running NGD for 2 years now, and so, at the start of BCM112 I approached with my offer. Since its creation, I have continued to upload surf reports daily, which takes roughly 10 minutes to do, and have spoken to Kel and Michelle about potential upgrades and changes to the site recently.
These possibilities include:
Advertisements/Sponsors
โ Kel and Michelle have spoken with Quadrant Financial Solutions about
potentially featuring ads on the site and have sampled it on Instagram
Dropshipping
โ Selling merchandise by taking orders and placing them with the manufacturer,
who then ships directly to the customer. This can be achieved through plugins
such as WooCommerce.
A
SurfCam โ a 24/7 video camera, like the one used on Coastal Watch placed at North
Wollongong Surf Club, letting people view the conditions for themselves live.
However, we would need permission from the Surf Club, and Wollongong City
Council.
Updated
Merchandise โ NGD has sold Shirts since the before the website existed, and
recently began selling Hoodies, so I have suggested that the next order of
shirts and hoodies should have the website URL on them, to help advertise more.
What Iโve
found whilst creating North Gong Daily is that since it doesnโt require Users
to be signed in to access any information and the topic is always the same, it doesnโt
generate much discussion, since it is just giving important information and
only receives views rather than likes. This makes it hard to access feedback,
unless I ask people for it. Iโve found that this isnโt the most effective form
of gaining feedback, as it requires people to access the site then search for
something they can comment on, which usually results in a compliment or appraisal
of the site, rather than encountering something naturally and providing
constructive criticism.
Since NGD was made for two people, the most important feedback is from them, since it must cater to what they want it to do, as well as the users. As this is the case, I have iterated multiple times to suit what Kel, Michelle and the Users want.
As we are coming into Spring and Summer now, I believe North Gong Dailyโs social utility will increase as more and more people begin going to the beach again due to the heat, and will need some way of accessing information whenever they want, with no cost of entry. North Wollongong is also one of the most popular Beaches in the Illawarra area, so having that coverage is helpful for a lot of people, both local or non-local, as seen in my starter pack
Through
utilising three platforms โ Instagram, Facebook and the Website, North Gong
Daily indicates a fully connected Network Topology with
each platform utilised acting as a node, connecting to the others in a
distributed network, with no one controlling platform.
NGD does this
by reaching out to a wider group of people, with each platform used as a tool
to provide exposure and link to the next โ which creates this connected network
amongst the platforms.
Since its creation in May, during BCM112, North Gong Daily has reached 1,857 views, with Referrers from Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Search Engines, and has gone through multiple iterations.
However, since the Prototyping Stage of North Gong Daily, very little has changed, but I have spoken to Kel and Michelle regarding the future of NGD, and come up with a few ideas, for both my DA (the website) and their part – the Instagram and Facebook pages.
Kel, Michelle and Myself spoke about 4 potential ideas for North Gong Daily, which are:
A SurfCam
Advertisements
Updated Merchandise
Dropshipping
The North Gong Daily SurfCam
Kel and Michelle spoke to me recently about the idea of installing a Surf Cam at North Wollongong Surf Club, similar to the Cams used CoastalWatch. This will provide Surfers with 24/7 coverage of North Gong Beach, and letting NGD expand its services. To do this, NGD will need explicit permission from North Gong Surf Club as well as Wollongong City Council to install the Camera on the Club Building. After this is implemented Kel and Michelle will continue to make their daily reports, but also have the Camera for when they aren’t there.
Advertisements
From the 29th of September to the 7th of October, NGD also trialled having advertisements at the end and in the middle of each post. Kel and Michelle are friends with the people at Quadrant Financial Solutions, so they partnered with them during this time.
After this, Kel approached me about potentially having Quadrant’s advertisements on the site, in return for sponsorship and financial payments. This would help decrease the costs of produce Shirts and Hoodies, paying for the potential SurfCam, and paying for the WordPress Premium Plan, with the potential to upgrade depending on the amount.
Updated Merchandise
I also spoke to Kel and Michelle regarding the merchandise available for NGD, and they informed me that they plan on offering more styles for the T-Shirts and Hoodies as well as different merchandise. I have suggested they add northgongdaily.com next to the Instagram and Facebook symbols, to get more views for the site by promoting it more.
Dropshipping
I also spoke to them about implementing an online store onto the site, so users don’t have to message NGD about purchasing merchandise, and they were open to the idea. In order to do this, I would need to implement “Dropshipping”, a supply chain management method, where a business doesn’t keep stock itself, and instead passes on the sales order to a third-party supplier, who then ships the order to the customer. This can be done via certain plugins such as WooCommerce, which I discovered thanks to a Reddit Post on the WordPress Subreddit that I posted on in BCM206.
The future of North Gong Daily holds many different possibilities, and I expect it to continue to grow.
The IoT is a collection of all objects that have some form of connection to the internet, ranging from ATM’s, Phones and Computers, to everyday items like cars.
One of the features this presents for most devices is location services, letting people use applications like Google Maps. However, this comes with the added side effect of constant surveillance, as these devices are constantly uploading their location to the company that owns the service, who are then able to sell that data to the highest bidder.
Even options like disabling location services can be untrustworthy, since when agreeing to Terms & Conditions of anything, it may include that you agree to be tracked, recorded, having your online activities followed, and more, similar to the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica Scandal.
However, Bots may also have malicious purposes, such as discovering passwords, obtaining financial information, sending spam and accessing information from infected computers.
However, some ChatBots exist on Social Media Platforms, “A social bot is a computer algorithm that automatically produces content and interacts with humans on social media, trying to emulate and possibly alter their behaviour”.
A bot is essentially an algorithm pretending to be a User, used to continue or alter conversations online.
So if you think you’re interacting with people online, chances are they could be a BOT.
This study will be completed over the course of the next four weeks, until the submission date of the final report, on the 10th of November.
During this coming weeks, I will spend time at the Club, talking to both members and club officials, as well as observing whether they use social media whilst at the club. I will also monitor the Clubโs various social media pages, during these next few weeks to see how much engagement the Club gets, as well as how people interact with the Club when online.
North Wollongong Surf Club has 6 social media profiles, pages and groups linked to it, on both Instagram and Facebook, which are:
North Wollongong SLSC โ the Clubโs public Facebook page, which has 992 followers
nwslsc_nippers โ another Instagram page, focused on the Nippers Program at North Wollongong, with 778 followers
nwslsc_boaties โ an Instagram page with 187 followers, with a focus on the North Wollongong Boat crew
Images sourced from Facebook and Instagram
During my research, Iโll look at most of these profiles and how much activity and engagement they get. Although I have only just begun my research, it is already clear to see that the most popular part of North Wollongongโs social media presence, is the Nippers Program and its supporting material.
When interviewing and talking to the people involved, Iโll need to make sure I follow the MEAA Journalist Code of Ethics, to ensure none of the Participants feel they have been misled or harmed as a result of my study. I aim to do this by informing all Participants of the research I am conducting, asking permission before using their name, picture or information given. I believe that since I have been a member of the Club since 2012, I believe the people I interview will be able to provide me with information that I will be able to apply well, whilst still maintaining respect for those being interview, however, I need to ensure I can remain professional despite my ties to the club and its members.
When presenting my final report for my research, I plan on submitting it as a series of short blog posts on my website, ๐พ๐ช๐ง๐ก๐๐ฎ, under the BCM241 category.
From the research Iโve currently completed, there is little to no previous research on the topic of Surf Life Saving Clubโs and their Media Usage. I have discovered though, that a large amount of Surf Clubs have some form of social media presence, and researching into whether North Wollongong has a stronger media presence than other Clubs and why they do could be a good follow up to the study I am about to undertake.
My research topic is an exploration of how Businesses communicate with its members, with a focus on North Wollongong Surf Life Saving Club and the community surrounding it, which I am a part of, and has been a big part of my life since I was 12.
Since the creation of social media, Businesses have slowly been incorporating it into their business plan, since it has almost limitless applications. During my research, I aim to discover how North Wollongong Surf Club has incorporated Social Media into its communication, and how members keep in touch with whatโs happening within the club.
Understanding how North Wollongong uses social media and more traditional forms of communication and how its members prefer to communicate with each other and the club would be incredibly helpful for the Clubโs social media managers. Knowing what platforms and method of communication is preferred by members would allow the Club to prioritise whichever method is preferred by members.
My project will be conducted alone, and I will observe people using social media during my time spent at the club, by speaking to various members, and with those people in charge of the clubโs social media profiles.
Since I am a part of the group being researched, this study will be conducted like an Auto-ethnography, as well as having elements of a Digital and Industry Ethnography. In The ethnographic I: A methodological novel about autoethnography, Ellis states that Auto-ethnography is:
“an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyze (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand cultural experience (ethno)”
(Ellis, C 2003).
This statement explains that auto-ethnography is a form of ethnography where the Researcher analyses and applies their own experiences to the topic being researched. My research will act as an auto-ethnography because I will be using my experience as a member of this club, and including myself as a participant in my study.
This study will also act as both a Digital and Industry Ethnography, two prominent topics looked at this semester. As we learnt in Week 6, the Internet acts as both a culture and a cultural artefact โ it has its own dynamic community with a distinct way of communicating, and it can be used to display information deemed important to anyone. The emergence of the Internet has also created a new Industry of jobs, based around the Internet, with roles such as aggregation and curation or management of certain profiles or websites.
By researching how North Wollongong has established their social media profiles, I aim to find out what influenced the Clubโs decision to use social media as well as find out how successful they have been and how they use it. I will also be talking to members, to find out what they think of these, and how and when they interact with these profiles.
My research will also touch on Week 8โs topic of the Media Community, as I look at these members of North Wollongong who could be classified as โfansโ of surf lifesaving.
de Matas, R. (2019) โSensory autoethnography: Engaging the senses, emotions and autobiographical narrative towards a transformative pedagogical practice in higher educationโ, Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 12(1/2), pp. 167โ180.
๐พ๐ช๐ง๐ก๐๐ฎ ๐ค๐ฝ 