To gain audience feedback we used various different techniques and sources. Our first way of getting audience feedback was by uploading the video to Facebook. A social networking site, Facebook is the best place in order to get personal comments from audience members. The feedback was entirely positive, all comments were complimenting the videos and there were up to 15 ‘likes’ which in Facebook terms is a sign that the item is popular. A criticism however that can be used against using Facebook would be the fact that responding is optional, and perhaps only those who enjoyed the product decided to respond. There is no way of seeing how many people have viewed the video therefore the people who positively commented or liked the video may only represent a minority of viewers.
We also used a focus group in the task of gaining audience feedback. We asked our group the following questions,
1) Did you enjoy it? Why?
2) What did you get out of it?
3) What did you think the message of the story was?
4) Did you think the brand was established? How?
5) Do you think it is sexist/bias in any way?
6) Did you identify with any of the characters? How? Who?
7) Did it tell you anything about relationships?
8) Did it give you any information about the world today?
9) What is the official image that you received?
10) How do you think it can be improved?
The concept of Audience can be used to critically evaluate our media product as the audience response is used as a key way of measuring the success of the video. Through the use of the new media technology of Youtube, we posted the video up there for people to watch and to respond as the whether they liked it or how they felt. A specific example of response from the audience was from Youtube user, Skeme14. Skeme14 commented saying “yesssss this video is ill”. The term ill, although used out of context and not used in its correct meaning, can be translated positively as a good comment about the video. By looking at the terminology of the statement, we can gather that Skeme14 is a great example of the audience we were trying to aim at. He uses young and ‘street’ dialect and as our video consists of characters that Skeme14 could possibly relate to or look up too, it shows that we have managed to hit the audience originally aimed for. Another example of strong audience feed back is from Youtube user bonesbilly545 who simply stated, “this is amazing”. Another sign of how the audience consumed the media product. We can tell by looking at bonesbilly545’s Youtube channel that he is another member of the audience we were aiming for as he has liked music videos with similar styles to ours.
Another way of detecting audience opinion on Youtube is by using the popularity bar. Having had 9 likes and 0 dislikes, we can take this as excellent audience feedback.
