Friday 21st November
Morning sessions with keynote speakers and workshops.
Learning new in empowerment workshops
Students listening to Mathias Haas from Supersocial. (Photo by: Ida Tokola)
Ida To: Many of us took part in Social Media Marketing workshop in the afternoon. It was held by Mathias Haas from Supersocial, who has worked as marketing consultant for many large companies like Red Bull. Our afternoon session flew by very quickly and we were amazed by his knowledge of every social media channel.
Haas for example told us how the Facebook algorithms work, which was very eye-opening since Facebook doesn’t really give out this information on their web page. We learned that if you want everyone to see your Facebook posts, the best thing to do is to post statuses with different formats (photo/link/text) and try to awake responsive conversations in the comments.
Felipe: Just complementing what Ida said about Haas workshop. Other key point for sharing posts on Facebook is the timing. He said that only 8% of your “followers” will receive your posts, so one way to be sure that your posts will succeed is to schedule one-two hours before the time that you wanna share your post, because it takes that long to Facebook actually publish it in their timelines.
Confusion in the Student Exhibitions
Ida To: Before traveling to Graz, all of us were grouped with other European students to evaluate the EYA projects. We worked on these projects many weeks via Yammer, which was an online tool pretty similar to Facebook and Google Docs. Most of us had some problems with this task since EYA didn’t provide us with very clear instructions. We tried to manage and most of us ended up giving some feedback for our projects and designed posters for the Student Exhibition, which was going to take place during the awards.
So, in the afternoon of Friday 21st, we headed to Graz University of Technology to present our posters and student projects. There we were told to present our feedback and posters to an audience, who were to decide which student project had the best ideas. Some of us were happy to meet other fellow team members from all around Europe, when others noticed they were the only ones to present their team. Despite these confusing matters we were trying to have fun in the exhibition. We met a lot of people from Austria and other European countries, which was very nice.
Ida Tu: In addition to the international teams we had all worked in, there were surprise teams built from Austrian students of the Graz University of Technology so every project was supposed to have two posters - one made in Graz by local students, and one made by international teams and carried from elsewhere to the festival. This was the place where I met the team behind the project I evaluated (with Sami and other international students) which was GovFaces - with Sami we both felt they had a good if somewhat idealistic grasp of their project and we gave a lot of feedback as we discussed their project in a generally really great mood. Why I wanted to bring this up is explained a bit further down!
Felipe and Tarina excited to see who has won this year’s European Youth Award (Photo by Ida Tokola)
The Evening Gala
Tarina: The evening gala was the thing we had all been waiting for. It was the ceremony for presenting and rewarding the overall winner of the European Youth Award, along with the other winning projects. The award ceremony took a while but it was worth the wait, after that it was time for, again, networking, buffet food of local goods, alcoholic beverages and dancing!
The party was held inside the mountain, in a space called Dom im Berg. The evening was hosted by Adam Montandon (the first ever EYA winner) and I have to say, he did very well of course, he’s been hosting the EYA parties for quite a while now.
Felipe: Don’t forget to say that WE start the dancing!
Ida Tu: The winner of the European Youth Award 2014 festival was the project GovFaces I mentioned earlier, and while it naturally wasn’t perfect or complete I had to be proud of the guys working on it! They were real sweethearts and deserved to win, and I think both me and Sami managed to congratulate them in person when the award ceremony was over. They thanked us, the feedback team, also on stage which I have to admit was really heartwarming, because we all saw quite a lot work on evaluating these projects beforehand and giving thoughtful and constructive feedback.
The EYA winners! (Photo by Tarina Tommiska.)
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