First day of my writing and communications training today and it’s gone really well! Slight culture shock getting up so early having not been a 9-to-5er for a while but I’ll get used to it soon enough.
Jess introduced me to Jeevan, who’s also doing the training, so it was just the three of us all morning. This made it quite relaxed and informal. Jeevan seems like a really cool guy. We’ve both been involved with radio but our writing experiences are different (he’s a songwriter).
It’s a long time since I was in Uni studying Media Arts so when we came to learn the basics of communications, although some of it was common sense, I have to say I did struggle getting my brain into gear after all this time!
The basic principle of communication is relaying a message to an audience. The ways you can communicate are both verbal and non-verbal. Non-verbal could be an image or using body language whereas verbal could mean spoken or written word. When you get to the written word, you can’t always get immediate feedback and you can’t judge the context of what is said using body language or other non-verbal signs. I guess that’s why so many people when using MSN or something similar use ‘smileys’ to give extra information (and maybe emotion?) with what they’re saying.
Tweet, tweet
We started talking about the web and how it has given us so many different ways for people to communicate – email, MSN and social networking sites like Facebook. You can share photos on Flickr. You can share your thoughts on a blog on LiveJournal and you can even micro-blog on sites like Twitter.
For about 5 minutes, I was the designated Twitter expert! I showed Jess and Jeevan the basics and how different people use it. You can keep in touch with friends but it’s also used as a marketing tool, so if you’re ‘following’ NME on Twitter they will ‘tweet’ you with gig news and album releases.
We also talked about being sensitive to your audience. I did a bit of this when I worked for an advertising agency – making up a profile of the customer who is most likely to go and buy a particular product. I guess we take advantage of the fact that we communicate in different ways with different people: you’d talk differently to your two year-old niece than you would to your boss (at least I’d hope you would!) so it’s not just a case of how we communicate to sell things.
So this is the first of my weekly blogs. It’s good practice actually as I’d got out of the habit of writing, plus I’d never thought to target my ramblings at anyone before!
Time for the assignment...
Later on, Jess and I began talking about the website copy we’ll be working on – a charity working with people who have suffered human rights violations. This is an actual real assignment. I have to confess I’m both nervous and excited at the same time! We went over the current copy and discussed what we could do with the text on the site at the moment. There’s a bit of tidying up to do – very long pieces of text and a couple of inconsistencies – but it’s great to have so much information to hand already. I’ll do a bit of research myself and see whether there are any charities offering the therapeutic community approach.
If there’s one word for how this makes me feel, it’s empowered. I know at the end of this I’ll look at the work produced and feel proud that I’ve seen it through. It’s flattering that someone has the confidence in me to carry out this project.
Crazy poodles
This week’s task was to find a piece of communication that has made me think or that’s struck me in some way. C showed me this weird poodle aerobics clip on YouTube so I’d have to go with that, even though it’s one of the more bizarre things I’ve seen recently!
After seeing the clip I was tempted to look up the story behind it. Well, it’s not every day you see biped poodles on an exercise video! It reminded me of music videos and performances by Goldfrapp.
Her dancers wear bikinis and prosthetic wolves’ heads when on stage. The ‘sexiness’ of the dancers is compromised by the scary headgear. Is it that they’re actually meant to be wolves but have donned a human costume, or is it vice-versa? The poodle clip looks cute, fluffy and de-sexualised compared with the infamous Eric Prydz music video for Call On Me.
Motivation
But back to the training, the last thing we did was go over a training and development plan. Jess and I had already talked about the sort of things that I wanted to get out of the Poached ‘experience’ but also as this is Jess’ pilot of the scheme, we’ll both be learning from this.
The goals we set up were both personal and professional. For instance, we touched on my depression and I mentioned that motivation is sometimes difficult for me, so that’s going to be assessed on an ongoing basis. I felt comfortable talking to Jess about this. Sometimes you can find people who don’t fully understand what depression does to you and it’s a bit embarrassing, but I had no problems talking about it today. I’m really looking forward to learning more writing and editing skills too. That last sentence makes it sound like doing the writing and communications training is by the by, but it really isn’t!
I went home feeling like I’d accomplished something and I was getting somewhere with my long-term goal of being a freelance writer. Yay!
