My autoethnographic investigation is focused on observing the audience through my dashboard analytics on the Anchor app and website. I have also decided to include Instagram as a platform to track my audience and to articulate an idea of what kind of people listen to my podcast, what aesthetics do they follow, which episodes do they respond well to and what are the most popular episodes or topics.
From observing the content interactions on my Instagram page, the story that was viewed the highest was my second episode or my first proper interview with Lemon Pepper the band. The Instagram story promoting the episode was viewed by 68 users, users that included the band themselves, other musicians that I had interviewed for previous Digital Artefacts and personal friends. It is key to note that I had also reposted the story to my personal Instagram as well this allowed for my engagement to increase as a lot of my users came from that account.
The data from my Instagram account also showed that the profile had reached 84 accounts total, this was not synonymous with the amount of people who actually followed the account and liked the Instagram posts but mostly included the general reach and impressions that I had received for my page. However, in the last 30 days of uploading my first story the account has reached 122 accounts.
I have observed on my Instagram page that for my reached audience 48.7% of the users were from Sydney and 27.2% were from Wollongong and the top age ranges were 18-24 (86.7%) which indicates that I have achieved reaching my intended audience of young Australians who enjoy listening to music and engaging with local creative arts.
Based on the autoethnographic data, the most popular story and post was my first episode with Lemon Pepper. This would indicate that I could improve aspects of the interview questions, my approach to talking to guests and creating an atmosphere that is similar to what I described in my second blog post where I included a field site map, showing the casual but professional tone I wanted to convey to my audience.
The second episode of my podcast was a lot more professional and not as laid back (this was different from the other since I had never met that guest) this could have led some listeners to lose motivation in listening and to listen to the next episode.
However, the analytics received from the platform that I uploaded the podcast to Spotify from Anchor, shows that the same accounts return to the podcast.
My Digital Artefact report would improve if I asked other BCM students over Twitter or Instagram as well whether or not there is a reason to the difference. If I could analyse the data more effectively and then analyse the autoethnographic aspects of my research.
(Digital Methods for Ethnography: Analytical Concepts for Ethnographers Exploring Social Media Environments) The aim of ethnography is to introduce analytical concepts suitable for ethnographers dealing with social media environments. As result of the growth of social media, the internet infrastructure is very complex, according to Alessandro Caliandro "...principles of the Digital Methods Paradigm, I suggest that the main task for the ethnographer moving across social media environments should be exclusively that of identifying an online community". For my research this would also be referring to the idea of pro-sumers (Ritzer and Jurgenson 2010), insofar as they can actually interact with online content, by producing, commenting, reusing, remixing and sharing them in a many-to-many kind of logic.
The [2.1] Evans and Stasi (2014) shares the importance of identifying representation and the hierarchical power relations often constructed between researchers and the researched as a key methodology in fan studies. "Fan studies is already doing the ontological work of the crisis of representation... the object of the study (the fan) and the researcher... has the critical capacity to implode subject/object binaries as a practice of research, which has long been a concern of feminist methodologies."
In my conclusion, my autoethnographic investigation is focused on observing which episodes they respond to the content by collecting the data of online interactions each Instagram post and story receives. This will involve watching how many users comment, reply to Instagram stories, and including the amount of impressions and the reach the promotional material receives.
Bibliography:
Digital Methods for Ethnography: Analytical Concepts for Ethnographers Exploring Social Media Environments
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