This thread is long overdue, but we've decided to delay it a little bit so it's not completely overshadowed by various other events.

So hey, for those who didn't notice, SMW Central has social media pages!! For a few months now, they've been completely dead and unused. This is my "fault", as I didn't have the time to truly take care of them yet, and as I said before, I hesitated a bit before posting this.

I don't know exactly how they worked before I joined staff, but I know that they've been always this side thing that someone in the staff team had to do.
Besides, they haven't been of actual good use for a good while, and our Facebook and Twitter accounts especially have never really been much else than echoing news.

I really want to change that. After some discussion with the PR team and the rest of the staff, we decided we're going to hire new people to specialize into our social media. We came up with quite a few ideas as to what to do with them too, but input from the community is always a good thing to have. Feel free to reply to or add to these ideas!

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Twitter and Facebook

• First off, those two will be synced. There are ways to automate that, which is really convenient. We'll look into these for sure.
• They will continue to make "heads-up" posts about the upcoming events in the site. Preferably more frequently than the site's main page news (we can't make a post there everyday so it doesn't overshadow important posts, but there's a lot more freedom in social media). That includes events that begin or end, reminders of events that will come up or end soon, updates in the event calendar and so forth, as well as the stuff we normally announce, like MotM/Staff Spotlight and new staff promotions.
• Promotion of WIP projects - in allusion to Project Feature which ended up dying out, we would use Twitter and Facebook to occasionally post screenshots, videos or GIFs of various projects that are currently in progress.

So these are given enough attention, I'm going to be promoting one person to take care of both of these. That person will have to

• at least be aware on how Twitter and Facebook work.
• know how to word promoting posts in a charismatic and engaging way.
• check on the Works in Progress subforum often, as well as other forums with projects that can be promoted (Resource and Tool Releases, other hacking subforums).
• be easily reachable by the staff team and especially by me (so either be actively around the IRC or on Discord) so we can occasionally discuss about content to be posted.

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YouTube

This one is extremely tough, because it'll depend on the abilities of the people we may hire.

• We need coherent video styles and thumbnails.
• Contest related videos (i.e. Idol entries) will be bundled up into single videos per round to avoid feed spam.
• Weekly (or so) ports will be brought back. Sinc-X confirmed interest in continuing this project. The way we thought it out, people would suggest in the comments ports they'd like to see being promoted.

Otherwise, we have a few, so far not as solid ideas:

• Promotion of lesser known full hacks in our section in the form of quick playthrough videos describing the hack.
• Helpful, standardized tutorials for SMW hacking and perhaps even hacking of other games.
• Upload of user-made hack trailers (with quality control, of course).

As I said, those heavily depend on the person (people?) we're promoting to take care of our channel. So if you have interest in helping us out with YouTube, please post your ideas! If you were hired, what would you do? Would you be able to pull these off? Do you think you could do something else that would be really cool?

Requirements should be a given. You must

• have good experience with making videos.
• be charismatic and preferably talkative.
• know how to do the tasks you're offering for (if you want to do hack promotions, you'll need to know how to do that).

When offering, examples of your work are of interest, obviously.

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This is an application thread of sorts, but any input is very much appreciated, so please do speak up and discuss. Thanks for your time!

By the way yes, our Instagram account has been killed.

keep facebook professional; news, heads-up, other direct site related content that people can quickly read and, if needed, click a link. Twitter just does not work as a means of communicating this kind of information. You're competing with a million other voices for attention, and whatever you post will be gone forever within 10 minutes. So instead of cross-posting, I'd keep them separate. Use twitter a lot more frequently, with a lot more emphasis on jokes, opening discussion, responding to people, and maybe even communicating with other communities.
I think that featuring projects is a great idea on both platforms.

The thing about facebook is that for a lot of people, liking or sharing a smwcentral post isn't going to happen. Because I mean ilu guys and the awesome work we do, doesn't mean i need my entire family and all my friends knowing what I do in my spare time, and I'm sure I'm not alone in that regard. Twitter is more anonymous, which helps, but that could also be a concern for people using personal accounts. This isn't entirely relevant, just something to keep in mind when gauging the activity of a social media platform in a hobbyist community.

Youtube is a lot trickier to manage, but that mostly depends on the kind of schedule you want. You already said you want a weekly port show, but I think 1-2 more kinds of shows would be nice.

I think hack features are a great idea! It could be a series focused on checking out random hacks and playing them and getting your first impressions. If it'd be possible to get some sort of roulette connected to the hack section, you would spin the wheel and play whatever hack (or number I guess) that it lands on. From there the LP'er can play the hack for maybe 10 minutes, and if they like it they can keep playing. That way people will know how good or bad a hack will be by the video length, and possibly be excited to check out a random hack found that turns out to be good.

There definitely needs to be something related to SMW hacking. If any of the currently working hack moderators feel comfortable doing so, it would be great for them to let's play their moderations and upload them. If they dont have a mic or their english is lol they could always go the SomeGuy route and provide commentary through annotations on screen. But that might be too similar and clearly copying. But there are a lot of people out there that would be interested in watching a hack get moderated to see what kinds of things hack moderators look for, and could double as a tutorial of sorts for good designing.

Speaking of tutorials, yes. yes yes yes. I cant think of a better use for the channel than a series of videos that help explain the ins and outs of smw hacking! That kind of thing would be a bit tougher to schedule, as breaking up topics could get confusing (one week level design, then asm part 1, then music part 1, then exanimation, then asm part 2, etc), but at the same time teaching each subject one at a time leaves a lot of important tutorials on a back burner for long periods of time before they can finally be uploaded. I think the channel shouldn't have to worry about running out of content and be ok with maybe uploading tutorial series simultaneously.

Finally, I dont know if smwc news as it existed should ever come back. I think an idea like it could work during events and stuff, but on weeks where there is nothing to actually talk about it probably shouldn't, lol.

I think it would work better to have each entry in a contest be an unlisted video and upload a public "Hub World" video with an annotation / link in description to a playlist of all the entrants, and / or separate annotations for each entrant on the video. I'm less likely to watch a 40 minute video than I am to watch 10 separate videos that end up being that length.

e: this may or may not be an application
e2: alright so now that im not the lone applicant I'll give it a shot. I'd love to help out with the youtube channel, designing thumbnails, minor editing, and maybe even Let's Playing. I cant draw and I dont currently have a recording mic for PC (though I'd get one if I had an excuse), but I'm a pretty charming guy and can pump up the enthusiasm for the kiddies.
In terms of social media, I don't think I'd be all that useful for twitter or facebook because i'm kind of neglectful of that stuff, but if I had an obligation to i dont think i would be. I have a good understanding of what kinds of things people are interested in, but my sense of humour might be too obtuse for something more official.

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ask me if i give a f*ck...

I can actually work on the Facebook one, as I know quite an amount of people wanting to learn more about hacking. One stumbling block I see is the language barrier, as SMWC is more open towards English-speaking users. Otherwise the Facebook roll is good.

I wouldn't mind helping with the Twitter if possible.

I use it daily to chat with people and shitpost (and I've recently also made a Mastodon account, which I need to use more), so getting the hang of it shouldn't be tough.
I'd probably try to handle it how a lot of game companies handle their English twitters (laidback, tongue-in-cheek), so just warning in advance lol

I'd have to find a way to not sound too forced though, ahaha!

Rest assured, no politics or idiotic shitposting will be on there.

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Hack・Ports・ASM・"Uploader"

DaiaNerd and I could help with Facebook, too. From job, I can access SMWC, and I'm always taking a look at WIP hack threads (even Kaizo which I'm not really into). Daia has access from her home, which makes stuff a lot easier. We'd assist each other, especially to keep the media active.
Would be nice to link some tutorials and videos there, too, as well as hack releases in a weekly interval. We barely use Facebook, but that would be good for us, as we can focus on the page exclusively, keeping things organized in there if we're picked for that role.


Might be convenient for me to get internet access from home if it's demanded, lol.

having one person take care of both twitter n facebook kinda sux.

i use twitter a lot and running the account would be no problem, but i don't use facebook really so lol.

OK so I figured that this kinda role would be something that would get me back interested in this place.

Admitedly, I've been out of the loop with this place for a while since I left SMW Graphics, so I made need to catch up on the goings on and happenings with this place, but that's easy enough I guess. YouTube isn't my thing but the Facebook and Twitter accounts are something I would definately be interested in.

Currently I manage a couple of organisation's Facbeook pages I am involved promoting their causes etc. While I've never really used Twitter myself for any long-term thing, I know how it works and all and know my way around it. The organisations don't really have much in the way I can promote tho, so I sort of end up looping over the same things, but this place has got so much content to use to promote the hell out of it on social media - hacks, resources, collabs, news, competitions and more!

I think you've gotta make the most though of your users' contents and promote them to get them noticed. After all, if you're users make a site work - a site with no users is just uh, pointless? If people see you promoting them, they'll want to make more content because they know they're being noticed by people outside the site. Outsiders will see SMWC content and come and look. Ultimately, this could lead to them making their own, knowing that they'll get noticed too. Obvs you've gotta work with the YouTube guy too to promote their content to get more people over there too.

Gotta agree with Hobz in that you really shouldn't sync Twitter and Facebook though - you've got two completely different platforms there. OK yes it seems like the easiest thing to do but let's not be lazy hey. Twitter you need to be short and punchy with, you've got 140 whatever characters so you gotta make the most of them.

To be fair, I am never active on personal social media due to anxiety and stuff and I might like someones post every decade or something. But I love doing social media behind a mask as no one knows who I am so it's all safe and cool. IRC is no issue, I can get there.

Also I can promise I won't die on you (after all, with the help of my crew I saw the graphics remod to the end ). I've left the staff team, came back, left again and now I wanna post your Facebook and tweets. Things change I guess. It makes me sad to see these things neglected.

Maybe some highlights videos either monthly or weekly for Youtube videos?

Like Sprite/Block etc. of the week. Just a suggestion.

I've done quite a lot on YouTube over the past few years, and while most of my old work may not be available anymore, my experience and knowledge on it strongly remains.

MY OPINION ON THE CHANNEL AS OF NOW

What SMWC's YouTube channel needs more than anything right now is consistency, and as of this post it seems to have a rather unorganized schedule where people just record a video and upload it, without doing much else, whenever necessary. There's nothing that really drives people to come to the channel and necessarily get them into hacking SMW as of now. The way I like to look at a YouTube channel is that it should entertain people, but also be somewhat educational. I really think it should mainly lay its focus on getting people in touch with SMW hacking, and a good way to do that is by showing more SMW hacking related content. The reason I'm saying this is because some of the videos uploaded as of late don't represent SMW hacking in any way, take the Smash Wii U tournament videos for example; it doesn't explain anything about the community nor does it explain what the community does, these videos would be better off unlisted and directly linked in the appropriate thread.

IDEAS, SUGGESTIONS AND THOUGHTS

• Promotion of lesser known full hacks in our section in the form of quick playthrough videos describing the hack.

I'm all for this idea, these types of videos can be short, yet powerful, and 30 to 60 seconds per video should suffice. You could see it as some sort of review where you'd tell the viewer what the hack is all about, how it's played, if there's a unique storyline attached to it, etc. There's a lot of well made hacks on the site that aren't getting the attention they deserve, so this is definitely something that needs to be presented. The only question I got regarding this is how would we pick which hack to promote? Should people vote for specific hacks to be promoted? Should they request their own hack to be promoted? Or does it all get decided by the people leading the channel?

• Helpful, standardized tutorials for SMW hacking and perhaps even hacking of other games.

Tutorials are a must, especially seeing that the channel doesn't even have any to begin with. (I seriously couldn't find any, please do point it out to me if I'm wrong.)
I was baffled when I couldn't find anything important in terms of tutorials. I can understand not everyone has a microphone in their possession, but video tutorials can also be made without the use of a microphone, so why this was never done beats me. To show some of my work, though, I have a video that I recently created to explain the process on applying and creating .bps patches, mainly because plenty of people in the YouTube and Twitch scene have a difficult time figuring out how it works.
I'm against the idea of providing tutorials for other games, but this however depends on what you understand out of "other games". If that statement is pointed towards Yoshi's Island, Super Mario 64, Mario All-Stars or Super Mario RPG, then yes, I can see it working out seeing as you're hosting sections and forums for these games, but then again, that's not where the main focus should go to. The YouTube channel wouldn't really live up to its name if a lot of the videos were meant for, let's say, hacking Super Mario 64.

• Upload of user-made hack trailers (with quality control, of course).

This is something I personally miss seeing on the channel, it's been well over a year ago, almost two, since a trailer has been uploaded on the channel (July 20th, 2015 to be exact). I do strongly agree with the quality control part, it becomes way to messy if there's a mix of videos with either good or bad video quality. Seeing as not everyone is capable of recording in a decent quality due to bad computers, maybe the people in charge of the channel could create a trailer for them if they request one. I think this idea would be best for the channel, and I personally do prefer quality over quantity myself.

• Put more life into visuals / Short animations

If you take a look at the latest idol or SMWCentral's Greatest Hits videos, you would notice there's a still image on the video with a song playing. While this is good enough, it'd be a nice bonus to add some extra visuals. After all, it's not an image you're looking at, it's a video, so why not do something with it? I've created an example of what could be done for these types of videos.
Which leads me to another idea I'd like to bring up, and that being animations. Now I know animations wouldn't really represent SMWCentral like it should, but it can. Animations can be applied to anything such as promotional videos where the site itself is pretty much in the spotlight, the idol/SMWC's Greatest Hits videos I've mentioned earlier could do with some fancy visuals, and perhaps a three second intro could prove as a good addition to each video. Now I know that animating takes quite a bit of time, but it's a task I'm willing to do.

• SMWCentral News

I very much agree with most of the users here that SMWCentral News doesn't really work the way it was intended, but it doesn't mean that SMWC News should be a weekly thing. A new episode could come out every two weeks, or perhaps once a month. The new Member of the Month could be announced in a single episode, whereas Staff Spotlight would also be brought up, this meaning however that every episode would be uploaded on the 15th of the month for example. Taking a look at this years Event Calendar, almost every month seems to have some sort of major event planned. Information about this specific event could be shared in the video, such as what the event is all about and how you can participate in it.
Apart from that, how about throwing in some bonus material, such as "Best SMW hacking screenshot/video of the month?", where the channel managers pick their favorite screenshot and/or video from this thread and tell the viewers why it was picked, and what makes it so unique. This is also a nice to way to promote someones work and get more people to pay attention to the thread on its own.

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I am very eager to work on this channel, with multiple people even, to provide solid, entertaining and educative content. The YouTube channel has been "neglected" for way too long now and I'm extremely happy this thread came forward. While I've been editing videos for a pretty long time now, I started doing proper let's play type of videos since late 2012/early 2013 and my voice has since then become a lot better and praised by many (I often get a lot of compliments on how clear my voice is, I'm not trying to brag here lol). Talking through a microphone has pretty much become a part of my life as it is something I genuinely enjoy doing (moreso on Twitch than on YouTube), and wish to keep doing.
I think the YouTube channel should be managed by multiple people, not just one. Having everything thrown on your plate at once can cause quite a lot of stress, frustration and possibly you ending up getting demotivated, not to mention that some people still go to school or have a job. A good example of this being tutorials, not everyone knows the ins and outs of music porting or ASM, so there would need to be people willing to create videos like that, too.
I'm currently in college studying motion graphics, heavily focussed on the animation and video editing side of things where we get to work with Adobe Animate, Premiere Pro, After Effects, etc. It's also worth mentioning that I've had experience with Macromedia Flash (known today as Adobe Animate) since 2006, my specialty being sprite animation.

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I'd like to include some of my work that I've created purely for the sake of this thread.
Starting off with thumbnails. I went ahead and created three different types of thumbnails, you can find them all right here. You can hover over the images for a preview on how it could be used, the images could take a while to load, though, so please keep that in mind.
I've got an older Let's Play of mine from late October, where you can hear the quality of my microphone properly and determine for yourself how talkative I am.

If you've got any questions, please do hit me up. I'll be more than happy to answer them.

In Fortaleza Reznor we use the chanel mainly for two things: Voiced Tutorials and LPs of contest levels. Sometimes we upload other stuff, but those two things are the main source of activity.

Let's plays for contest is somehting that could be done for the channel, it's not hard to do and it's a good source of activity. Maybe not all the levels can be uploaded since the constests here are bigger than in FR, but showing like the top ten entries of VLDCX after the results are published would be enough.

I can do LPs for the channel, be it contest levels or for promoting hacks. My spoken English is not perfect, but it's understandable, and I've got enough experience with the videos I've made for FR.

I'm happy with the amount of interest so far!

I've been convinced that Facebook and Twitter would rather not be in sync indeed, so one person for each may be picked after all.

Keep your posts coming, I'm reading through all of them.

I'd be nice if some videos could be commentated by two people (or more as long as it doesn't get too crazy) kinda like some other news channels do to keep it more laid-back and talkative here and there. Just an idea.

Of those thumbnails Dan, I personally liked #3 better, #1 has a nice frame but the Mario font on the bottom-right is way too overused everywhere. If using any Super Mario font I'd recommend New Super Mario Font U. But then again, that only really applies to #1...

Tutorials would be great, beginning at the more basic and starting stuff is always important but maybe it could develop into side-series with more in-depth tricks for music, ASM, graphics, etc later on (with people specialized on those areas to help of course).

Member/Staff of the month interviews could appear too, but I think that might be more difficult on some cases since there's a higher probability of 'bad microphone' or 'not-well versed in english'. Maybe instead of that just videos talking about random things? Dunno, definetily don't exaggerate on it but one every once in a while could be neat.

I would have liked to volunteer to help with the YouTube channel since I would be dedicated to it buuuuuuuuuuuuuut let's be honest I kinda suck with commentary. I'd need a bit more training and the situation over here where I live limits the amount of silence I have during the day, plus I need to sleep at night for school, a lot of time to edit but not a lot of time to record a voice. tl;dr probably not happening unless you guys end up really short on people

I agree with all suggested ideas for the YouTube channel in the first post though and I feel like Dan is a great choice to help with the channel, his videos looked well organized.

I know my way around Japanese and we have a shitton of Portuguese speakers here already.

However, Japanese netizens prefer to use Twitter as social media due to its simplicity and due to Facebook being too revealing.

It'd be nice if we could attract more members not from North America or Western Europe with these accounts.

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Hack・Ports・ASM・"Uploader"

I would love to do Facebook (since I'm always on there) and YouTube. I wouldn't really do twitter since I have never used it before.

Here is my submission for YouTube role. This is a current Let's Play I'm doing on a collab channel called Stream Riders....and the game is Super Mario World. I took my friends' audio and edited it into my recording of the game. (Note: There is some adult language/content in this, but I can totally be professional for SMWCentral). Hope you enjoy it.

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My 2014 Summer C3 and Winter C3 Thread is open for your viewing pleasures.
Open for music porting with MIDIs.
Click here for all my SMW ports.

This totally depends on how the person in question uses twitter though? If they don't follow super active people on twitter, or, you know, if they just check the SMWC twitter page for updates, that kind of information wouldn't be lost. However, it wouuuuld be lost if it was submerged under unrelated tweets.


Not that either direction is particularly wrong.

I think it's fair to assume that the kinds of people that use twitter to only follow a handful of people aren't the kinds of people that check it all that often, nor would they go out of their way to like pages for websites they enjoy.

HOWEVER, the one thing I twitter does that I think to allow advertising on twitter to be possible is the "While you were away" feature, that typically shows the most popular tweets from accounts you regularly check. While it isn't necessarily impossible to advertise on twitter, it's still not a very productive way of doing so. Most people really dont want to use twitter for news, they use it to keep up with their friends and whatnot. But eh

I'd rather have an engaging, active, fun twitter than a boring news-focused one.

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ask me if i give a f*ck...