Case Studies and Interviews

This week we began to consider our initial case study ideas and started to research current launches, campaigns and crises to see if any of these interested us enough or were detailed enough for us to write about and analyse. To begin my research I looked at a number of social media sites to identify the recent trends and what people are/have been hyping over for the past few days. I looked on the 'Discover' page on twitter and on the 'popular' page on Instagram to see if anything caught my eye. However, most of the trends that day were more to do with celebrities and gossip and less to do with something I could actually report on and analyse. Therefore I moved onto looking at key news websites and identified a few ideas such as new technology product launches or the VW and Fifa (Sepp Blatter) crises. The issue with both the Fifa and the VW scandals is that they happened at a time before I even started my research and therefore the PR campaign set in place to control the crisis and criticism would be difficult to measure from the beginning. Therefore, I kept on researching current news stories and found numerous stories on the new Halloween Burger that Burger King were releasing as an October exclusive up until the end of the month. I then continued to search for news articles on the release of this burger and also looked on social media and websites such as YouTube to see how Burger King were using PR to promote their exclusive product. I decided that this was a campaign that interested me and consequently I began to gather a range of web links and videos and also begin to create a timeline of the campaign so I can see how it progresses and therefore analyse how effective it is for them in the end. I'm going to continue to research the PR surrounding this Black Whopper Burger and record the various articles, campaigns and feedback on this in a timeline to enable me to make a final judgement about how effective the entire campaign was and how this affected sales. 

In our last seminar of the week we discussed the most effective ways of interviewing people and the best type of questions to ask a subject that we are interviewing. The key is to remember that the interview isn't about you. Also it's important to remember to endure silence during an interview or whist interviewing as it usually provokes the interviewee into talking in more detail and giving more information, which will make the interview more interesting. Varying question types from light-hearted to more intense questions is important and the best types of questions to ask are usually open ended questions that encourage the subject to express themselves more and allow variety in the answers they provide. Finally, always ensure that you tell the subject you are interviewing what you need from them e.g. "I need an emotional quote" therefore you will both be on the same page and will have a mutual understanding about the purpose of the interview and the interview question style.