This project has never been about building an audience or developing a social media campaign, but one think I have learned through the Oklahoma77 Project has been that influence opens doors. My goal audience for creating this content is a viewer who may not be born yet. This project is about posterity. But I am one guy with a camera and recently when making a series of short videos for TikTok, a few posts started going viral. I realize that I’m going to need a large pool of Oklahoman’s to really do justice to telling the story of some of these parts of the state I know little about. So for now, I’m going to focus on the short form content, hopefully building up a library of footage I can later use for long form content while I’m traveling to remote areas. But for now, this is providing a lot of valuable feedback and information.
Although there are some down sides to TikTok, one thing it does well is connect people through the algorithm. People interested in exploring Oklahoma seem to be finding my page and following. As I’m writing this update this project gained 15,000 followers within the last week. I imagine as I continue creating these one minute videos, I will be able to extend that audience and then begin to engage with them more to make the connections I need to setup interviews and work on the longer projects.