While students and faculty made their way around University of Wisconsin’s campus Wednesday afternoon, a conference room of 20 people hovered around laptops on the second floor of the UW Bookstore.
A staff of around 20 worked to produce and run this year’s #UWRightNow campaign, taking submissions from a number of social media outlets and publishing them to the live site. This year, the theme for the 24-hour social media campaign was “Face to Face,” which asked for UW students and alumni from Madison and all over the world to engage via YouTube, Vine, Instagram, Twitter and written text submissions. A tweet from UW’s Twitter account said the project had reached 1,000 submissions by around 10 p.m.
Three groups, one responsible for sifting through social media, a second of “web folk” managing the site and a third of editors working on online text submissions were involved in the project, according to UW spokesperson John Lucas.
As for coordinating submissions from all five social media platforms, UW journalism professor Stacy Forster said they have dedicated teams for every medium, looking at the content coming in from each.
Lucas said he would describe this year’s set up as “remarkably similar” to the #UWRightNow campaign from last year. However, he said due to simplifying the posting process on behalf of the organizers, they were able to spend more time looking at posts versus mechanically uploading them to the site.
Comparing this year’s campaign to last year, Lucas said this year they wanted to focus on people’s stories and faces rather than what someone is doing at a specific moment. He said he thinks the important thing this year is that they did not do exactly the same thing over again.
Last year, the campaign drew 1,018 submissions, including tweets and photos.
“The idea wasn’t so much to go and see the total volume we could get but more about could we kind of show the community and show its face and tell stories all in one place,” Lucas said.
Echoing this sentiment, Forster said in a lot of ways, she thinks this year’s #UWRightNow is similar to what she saw last year in terms of the enthusiasm and excitement that people have for UW.
Since last year did not have a defined theme, Forster said she did not know how people would respond to the theme this year with the focus on people and places.
“I think we’ve been pleased that people who have been participating have picked that up and gone with it and done some creative thing,” Forster said.
Because this is the second year of the campaign and people might have known what to expect, Forster said she thinks in some ways they gained richer content and participation. She said she is excited that people wanted to participate again and be a part of telling the story of the university.
Reflecting on the day as a whole, Forster said going through all the posts from earlier that day, she was amazed to see how much happens on campus in one day.
“It’s amazing all the different things that are going on at any given time,” Forster said. “This is a really neat way to capture that and show that off.”
As for the future of #UWRightNow, Lucas said if University Communications could think of a new way to do the campaign and people seem interested, the project is very likely to return next year.
