Week 2- Midweek Blog

First of all my digital experment is not going well in England. Suprisingly very few wireless networks to jump onto. There are far less than I saw in Greece a few months ago, which surpises me. Also, I appologize for any incorrect capitilizations and symbols, the differences between the US and UK keyboards are killing me.
Today, I'll look at the impression I had from reading the "Always On", chapter two reading. The first thought I had was that companies need to be very careful today when creating a recognizable slogan. These slogans used to be unavoidable due to advertising, but now that consumers have the ability to avoid advertising and express annoyance with slogans, these companies are treading a very thin line. If these slogans are not popular or are annoying, the back lash could be far worse than if the company had got no attention at all.
The idea of media multi=tasking is also interesting due to the fact that despite being a large proponent of trying this, I realize that my level of production decreases dramatically when I do this. Perhaps younger generations are more successful at this than I am, but even this blog is taking me awhile to do while I watch a movie at the same time. My experience shows that when I am attempting to media multi=task something has to fall aside. If the advertisements are not engaging, they will not even register.
I also found it interesting to conside the untapped markets which arise due to the focus of most advertising on youth. The fragmented nature of hte internet seems like an easier place to address this than primetime TV where more market sements are most likely watching the same shows. On the internet the increased options make it easier to specialize to reach a specific market segment.
The only thing I am questioning is the increased need for customer involvement and feedback. Consumers expect this today and companies are working to make this possible, but it feels like this will create information overload and a large increase in funding in order to process this information.

Week 2- Beginning of the week post

Due to some international travel, I went ahead and read all of the required and suggested articles and watched the podcasts and videos. A full day on day on Delta gave me the time to do this. The first thought I have this week is how in I’m going to be testing out how connected the digital world is this week. I’m expecting to be doing most of my Twitter and blog posts via wireless internet networks that I can pick up on my Iphone in England instead of on my computer like normal.

This week I am planning on looking at the articles and readings which I found most interesting and putting up my thoughts throughout the week. For this post, I’ll look at the article “The Dawn of the Human Network “ about crowdsourcing. My initial thoughts on the article were that it is interesting how this trend is taking pedigree out of the picture and moving it to talent. In the past schooling was used as the basis for hiring since it was the highest indicator of training, knowledge and, therefore, talent. Now companies can hire on actual talent instead of the prediction of it. This could have interesting affects in the future.

Crowdsourcing seems to have the potential to redesign the modern company in terms of structure and funding due to the reduced need for internal marketing and R&D. The active customer involvement is also noteworthy. The use of customer troubleshooting on websites was interesting to me since I dealt with this trend for the first time last week on Twitter. Initially I was annoyed because it seemed to be a big list of person after person saying “Yea, I have that same problem also”, but in the end I found the answer quicker than I would have expected to through a standard question tree online. It’s also important that people can do the jobs they like. This does seem to create better work and to better fit the nature of a least a significant portion of the population. These are the people who were already coaching sports for free or volunteering for jobs which they feel are meaningful.

Finally, this article made me think of three other corporations, one national and two local which I feel do a good job embodying the community concept. The first is REI. I feel that they have branded their experience to create a community both online and in the “outside” world. This leads the members who are willing to pay more for the experience and actually be happy about buying the same gear at higher prices. The other two companies are local to San Diego. VAVI is a local sports and social club that, mainly through word of mouth and the web, has gone from sponsoring a few sporting events to organizing 25 plus leagues, tailgaters, charity events, and so forth throughout the city. The second is Stay Classy. This is a company which markets exclusively to local charities. It works off the premise that once you attend one event you are on their mailing list. This works out great for the charities whose events are now being broadcast to a huge number of people who otherwise would not know about them. It also takes advantage of the fact that when an average person on their mailing list is going out to a bar they will be happier spending their money at the bar which is sponsoring a charity event than the one next door. Both of these websites/companies have done a great job of going from unknown names a year ago to being everywhere in the city today. This was accomplished mainly through word of mouth and the local Gen X community. They understood what this generation wanted and took advantage of huge holes in the local market.

Week One- Final Update

A couple final thoughts on this week.
1. I finally looked into Tremor, P&G's teen based marketing structure. The program worked by offering teens coupons, samples, and downloads for promoting their products through word of mouth advertising. The program had 225,000 kids involved in 2006. The downside of the program was that P&G's products mainly focus on adults. This led to most of the Tremor products belonging to other companies using P&G's program. This says alot about the different relationships that are developing recently between non competitive corporations. It also makes me wonder if P&G was also working on building future customers. The negative of the program is a current charge with the federal trade commission based on the fact that the teens do not identify themselves as being biased in discussions. (Businessweek 2006- www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=procter%26_gamble)
2. I was given the following link by a friend which looks at how LinkedIn users use/integrate with Twitter: http://www.linkedin.com/answers/using-linkedIn/ULI/411935-3621908?searchIdx=2&sik=1248129468628&goback=%2Easr_1_1248129468628.
3. Finally, overall I think I learned alot about how marketing has changed through community/social media/the digital move. Its also interesting to see how issues are arising such as privacy invasions and questionable practices like Tremor that have no historical basis to work off of. It should be interesting to see what comes up next as these trends grow.

Week One- Midweek Update

I finished all the readings/videos I wanted to do this week. Here is what I did:
Always On- Chap 1
Podcast- Gil and Frank on the Newspaper Industry: Part 1
Video- Conversation with Reid HOffman of LinkedIn
Article: Do you Trust This Face
Video- The Web and TV, a sibling rivalry.
Here are some initial thoughts:
Always on got me interested about Tremor. I still want to look into that more.
The Newspaper industry made me wonder how newspapers currently rate their online v paper presses, among younger generations the online forums seem to be the most popular, this seems to be where they should be trying to attract advertisers. I know traditionally studies showed that users ignored online adds more than TV and paper adds, but I feel that may be changing as more shopping is done online, and more time spent there, curiosity should lead to increases in the use of these adds. Marketers also need to recognize that different adds may work for online than did in the paper media.
The facebook article. I felt it was interesting that it failed to mention the slew of recent facebook groups that are aimed to protect this information. These groups seem to show that users are not become as lax about privacy as the article implies. Examples of groups:
We will not pay for facebook, Against the new facebook, facebook shouldnt own your pictures, facebook shouldnt own your phone numbers.
On the note of general advertising, I also wondered about how much advertising money is lost on TV now due to DVR. As DVR useage increases, more and more people fast forward through adds and never see the medium that used to be the best access to consumers.
Finally, I found the following article interesting. It shows how attitudes have changed on social networking sites so that coporations are now welcome if they add a good service/information:
http://www.mpdailyfix.com/2009/07/the_key_to_marketing_in_an_onl.html

learning goals for this week- 19 July

Honestly, this week, I'd just like to start thinking about and learning about how the digital world is changing marketing. Clearly it is a totally different "game" than it was in the past and the old ideals don't work anymore, but I've never really put any thought into it. I'm finding the whole idea actually pretty interesting.
Three specific things that I want to look into, beyond the assignments are:
1. I was intrigued by the "Tremor" idea mentioned in the book.
2. Looking at Christopher Penn's blog this morning I found two different concepts interesting: One respondent put that he feels that marketing need to provide an experience to be successful, and another put that it is necessary to engage the customers. This is very different than the traditional approach where brand awareness was the goal.
3. When I was whining about having to join Twitter for this class, (Sorry, but I was really avoiding it until this point, but am actually liking some of the news sites and so forth that you can follow.) a friend of mine in the recruiting industry told me that the social networking sites are majorly changing their field. This makes a lot of sense but he said he does have some interesting articles I can look at on the topic.