I work on a nearly new team of five, and plan on going through the creative ideas we come up with, the thought processes involved, and the reasons why I think we ultimately succeeded - or failed - in what we were trying to achieve. The recognition of failure here is crucial though. One thing I've learnt so far is that it can be very difficult to tell how popular any given post will be, regardless of how well you think you know your audience.
Right then, since I've got literally nothing else to say by way of an introduction, I might as well get started.
The first thing I want to go through is a post we created back in February. Telly talent-spotter Simon Cowell had just become a proud father (so he's definitely not gay, OK?) and had released pictures of the child that proved to be incredibly shareable.
We had already shared the story, but thought it had become so popular it was worth trying to come up with some fun Cowell-related content of our own.
The X Factor boss is in the light entertainment business, which immediately gave me the feeling we could introduce humour into whatever we were trying to do. He's also well known for being very vain. I'd seen a few jokes on twitter regarding this famed vanity, so I thought it could be something to play on.
I eventually decided to superimpose Cowell's face onto one of the baby pics and write a post to go with it that said: "Simon Cowell releases a new photo of the baby he says is the most handsome EVER..."
The implied joke here is obviously that Simon Cowell is SO vain he'd rather post a picture of himself than of his own newborn child.
The design team did a great job on Simon's face - particularly with the shadowing. And his big smile really helps give the post a jovial feel. The birth of a baby is always a very happy occasion, so I think the lighthearted tone of the post worked really well. And given the ubiquity of the story at the time, it was very shareable.
On Twitter the picture eventually got about 100 retweets, so I would call it a success. I think it perhaps suffered from the fact that the account wasn't especially well known for doing 'meme' style posts at the time. The social team had only just been set up, and The Sun really didn't make any effort with that type of purely social content previously. But it did well regardless and the reaction from our audience was overwhelmingly positive.
OK that's all for now, thanks for reading. I'll be back again soon.
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