By Brad King, Assistant Professor, Ball State University
On Thursday Oct 15, Hallmark Homes Inc., a home builder in the Muncie, Jnd. area, approached the Ball State University Department of Journalism with an interesting request: assemble three teams of students for a project with ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, a popular television program through which a family receives a new house in seven days. The show would be coming to Bunker Hill, about 70 miles north of the university.
Derek Wilder, Hallmark’s chief executive officer, wanted to make sure that the thousands of volunteers, builders and sponsors — many of whom don’t receive recognition on the television program — had the opportunity to have their stories told. The catch for the team, though, was that the show won’t air until sometime in January, which meant we had to build not only the network, but the media outreach as well.
Braveheart Volunteers
In six days, four professors — Dr. Becky McDonald, Dr. Dustin Supa, Prof. Jennifer George-Palilonis and I, assembled the teams:
- One group of graduate students would help coordinate the media relations, directed by Supa and McDonald;
- One four-person team (three photographers and one writer) would be the only non-ABC behind-the-scenes team documenting the work site, directed by George-Palilonis; and
- One 30-person social media team to document all of the activity around build site, directed by me with the help of my graduate assistant Rhett Umphress.
While we did that, Jayson Manship, the director of operations of URBaCS, built a JOOMLA website (www.hallmarkextreme.com) and a Word Press blog (www.hallmarkblogs.com), as well as launched Facebook, Flickr and YouTube sites. [There's also Twitter.]
George-Palilonis and I decided that we needed to attack Wilder’s problem while also planning for the post-event production. The goals:
- create a dynamic site that generated video, text and pictures of the volunteers, sponsors and contractors each day;
- shoot behind-the-scenes images, organized by day and subject, for interactive photo galleries that would air when the show airs;
- build a Google Earth presentation of all the sponsors (there were 150 from eight states) and spectators, which involved data collection and entry;
- create a running image and text gallery of each day’s work for the creation of a coffee table book that will be published after the seven-day period.
U.S. Sponsor Map
While I ran the social media teams in four-hour shifts from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m. each day, George-Palilonis ran the behind-the-scene teams in shifts that oftentimes ran as late as 3 a.m.. Many of the students were trained as journalists, but we also had students from Communication Studies, Theater, Telecommunications and English participate.
Each shift started with a 20-minute “boot camp” detailing the information we needed on that shift and assignments as to who would cover what. We also created a strict file-structure regiment so that we could easily track the information we received from the disparate sources. And since we had privileged access behind the scenes, we had to make sure we received approval from ABC for any shots that may give away information on the house before the final day’s “reveal.”
The results:
- The team posted 353 photos, mainly from the behind-the-scenes team (although nothing of the actual build), but also from the social media team, which did 86,000 views during the week;
- The team (along with students from Anderson University) developed 31 short videos (mostly two-three minutes in length), all with point-and-shoot cameras and most with no editing. The videos collectively had 19,000 views during the week.
- The Hallmark Extreme event site had 49,000 visitors and 223,000 page views during the event;
- The Hallmark Blog had 102 posts which attracted 10,000 visitors and 80,000 page views.
At the end of the shoot, we had reached more than 100,000 site visitors and generated roughly 400,000 page views with little promotion and even less time to prepare.
The Hallmark Blog will continue through the show’s airing and the coffee table book, documenting the entire process, will go on sale as soon as the show airs as well.
Brad King is an assistant professor of Journalism and an Emerging Media Fellow at Ball State University. He is also on the advisory boards for South by Southwest Interactive and Carnegie Mellon’s ETC Press.