By Clarissa Dale

Sharing is Caring

Mentors always bang on about how important it is to make shareable work. What people want to see is useful, unexpected, controversial, humorous or shocking ideas. Of course that makes sense, but it is no easy feat – and with a new challenge to make our scabs as interesting as possible, I’m racking my brain as to why any one (that isn’t an sca student) would want to read our blog posts, that are at times probably quite self indulgent. 

With this challenge in mind, I was thinking about what makes something shareable? I mostly only share video’s of Slow Loris’ eating rice balls or infant monkey’s being combed with tooth brushes. I’m more of a mobile uploads person myself, but that’s beside the point. The point is what you share on your personal profiles says a lot about you. 

When scrolling through social media sites, there is an overwhelming amount of shared content to sift through, the majority of it a load of crappy vines, football posts or people falling from things. People share content that makes them laugh, cry or scream in shock. People want to be the first to find unexpected and interesting things and start discussions. 

 But why are adverts rarely shared? Probably because the majority of them are mind numbingly boring, and look like adverts. Automatically people become untrusting and glaze over entirely when adverts make their way to social media. I was looking through a few of my scamps and idea’s the other day, and realised all of them looked like ads. Which is so boring. It’s hard enough to make a set of coherent prints that do the job, but whats harder is making that set of prints seem like everything other than an advert. People share ridiculous things on Facebook because they provoke reactions and get people talking. My idea’s need to do the same. People will only share things on their personal profiles if it resonates with them, and probably if they think it will earn them a handful of likes and comments. 

Skittles is one of the only campaigns I’ve ever engaged with and shared on my profile, and that’s because it’s completely ridiculous. I’d never seen any form of advertising look like that before. The video instructed me to put my index finger on the red skittle, making me play a leading role in the advert, as a man dressed as a kitten started to lick my finger. 

I guess it’s a pretty good test of an idea, to ask yourself would share this piece of work on your Facebook wall?