The University of Wisconsin will reprise last year’s successful user-generated social media campaign, dubbed #UWRightNow, on Wednesday, to feature students’ voices using a variety of social media channels.
The campaign encourages participants to tell stories about their relationship with the university and include photos of themselves around campus. Although the day-long campaign debuted last year, this year’s event will be a little different.
“We didn’t want to plow exactly the same ground again,” UW spokesperson John Lucas said. “What we wanted to focus on this year is people and their stories and then also pictures of people, in particular, their faces.”
The project leaders have kept advertising to a minimum until recently to embrace an element of surprise, according to Stacy Forster, a UW journalism instructor.
Forster said people are just beginning to see teaser ads on buses or online and this way the responses are more spontaneous.
“We want to have some spontaneity, if its reflecting UW right now, we want it to be as in-the-moment as possible,” Forster said. “People are really just starting to hear about it.”
Submissions can be made through Twitter, Instagram, Vine, YouTube or through their web-based form. Instagram and Vine are new platforms for this year’s event.
“We’ve got to go with what people are using at the time, and we’re excited about the new ways people can participate each year. I’m sure we’ll continue to evolve in future years,” Forster said.
The coordinators will be editing the submissions they receive with the focal point of this year’s project on the faces of people involved with the university, Lucas said.
Lucas said at this point, planners are unsure what the final product will look like and they have not plotted a future for the project past Wednesday.
The campaign exceeded planners’ expectations last year. Lucas said last year, Twitter alone brought in more than 3,000 tweets containing the #UWRightNow hashtag.
“Essentially, it’s a way for the UW community to express their thoughts about what the place means to them and their experience here on campus and how the university was a part of their life,” he said. “Last year was a blend between crowd-sourced social media content and then also content that university staff actually reported and covered in real-time.”
Mashable, a popular Internet news blog, rated #UWRightNow as its number one user-generated content campaign.
The university was overwhelmed and shocked by the reaction, ultimately posting more than 1,000 submissions.
“One of the things we were able to do was we took the finished product and we gave it to the staff that work in admissions. We gave it to people who worked in raising private support for the university,” Lucas said. “We also gave it to people who conduct tours and work with our visitor information program. We thought it was a neat time capsule.”
One particularly moving submission entitled “Why not me?” encouraged students to embrace new opportunities and became part of Interim Chancellor David Ward’s commencement speech last year, Lucas said.
He added the full project from last year is archived online.
