As manager of the Facebook page, I had full control of the content that was available to the public on that page. I consulted the group with regards to the profile picture and the cover photo and we had already had some logo design ideas. I felt that it was important to settle on a logo for our company before making the page live so that there was no confusion about the branding of the company and that there was a consistent image behind our production. Once we had settled on the image, which was an alarm clock reflecting the Wake Up brand. I created the page, added a short bio about our company and a shortened manifesto to give the public a clear and concise understanding about the project. Once the page had gone live, I began to invite friends to ‘like’ the page enabling any content published to appear on their walls and giving them the permission to react and interact with that content. The company each liked the page and began inviting their friends as well so we were able to reach more people quickly. I began to upload relevant content to the page, including news stories involving knife crime, murders and other shocking stories involving crime and injustice. This content set the tone for the performance and whilst was not all directly about our production, did offer an insight into the sort of information Wake Up was interested in and taking influence from. The company was interested in getting to know the audience in order to best suit their performance and so I set up a vote post on the site which asked the audience whether they had been a victim of knife crime, also offering the options of ‘no’ and ‘I know someone that has’. This gave the company information about the relevance of the subject to our target audience, which were students of the university and adults. As it happened, none of the voters said that they had personally been involved in knife crime but many know someone who has which then made us confident that we could present our performance that would inform and stimulate concern for the topic without upsetting those that have been affected. With the case of Stephen Lawrence causing such a long lasting effect on the legal landscape of Britain, there are still stories emerging relating to the case and its effects thereafter throughout our rehearsal process, we were able to post about the case, and on-going developments to keep our audience up to date with the story that was so central to the influence of our performance.
The Facebook site also acted as part of our publicity and marketing program. We were able to advertise our performance, make our audience aware of where and when the performance was going to take place and offer links to the LPAC website where they could purchase tickets and read further information. By creating an event on Facebook, we were also able to get an idea of how many people were planning to attend, as we knew that ticket sales were likely to occur much later in the process. Having that information enabled us to consider how we wanted to interact with the audience based on the potential size of it. Uploading pictures to the site was another way in which the audience could get an insight into what we were doing, get a feel for the tone of the piece using costume, location and light. Pictures were much more interactive than text based posts because people could see the actors that they knew personally and this caused some discussion and excitement for the performance.