Week 2 - Groundswell

Wow! Slightly out of date article, but it really shows you the power of the interactive web. I had heard of a few of the news stories that were referenced in this reading, but the opening story about Digg and the HD DVD code was incredible. I might be a couple years behind but ...

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That was some excellent writing, "Digg this: ..." I think these types of cat-and-mouse games played between the consumer and the industry (music, HD-DVD, etc.) is probably due to a lack of connection / marketing with the true customers. I am sure you will always get the few people who find this as a challenge or do not connect with your product, but there are successful stories. Look at iTunes. I never thought I would pay for music after the late 90s, but here I am buying songs here and there on iTunes. It's convenient, fast, and easy to get the music I want and enjoy it. I am sure this code leak helped bring down the HD-DVD, but exposing the code alone did not take it down. It was a combination of the technology and companies trying to cover this up. I recall the cracked DVD code being printed on t-shirts and posted on websites. Sure there was/still is DVD burning, but the DVD still is selling strong.

I guess the biggest take-away from this reading was to accommodate the masses and use the "groundswell" to your company's advantage. "If you can't beat 'em ..."

Week 2 - Brand Communities Podcast

This is an interesting class. I thought it was funny to think about the professors possibly being less educated in a topic that they lecture about than some of the students. This thought came to me at the end of the podcast when Professor Frisbie admitted reluctance to joining facebook. But overall this was a neat topic to talk about. I thought it was a little slow at first when discussing the two groups the HOGs and the Deadheads. I guess it was a little background information, or a brief history of how we got here.

By the end of this podcast, I did not believe how many brand communities I was apart of without even realizing it. I love to do online contests and sweepstakes. For a lot of them now days you have to become a fan of them on facebook, or register on their website, etc. I try to avoid registering with any brand's site unless I might get something more out of it (i.e. I cannot just get a shot at winning $10,000 to get a ton of emails from a company and brand I don't care about). I laughed when I saw the Pamper's online community in the podcast. I am apart of the community. I joined it because they had some high dollar value contest, plus my sister-in-law was pregnant at the time and thought it might benefit her. I get coupons from them all the time and they send me updates telling me "my baby" is now X months old. I forward on the coupons to my sister-in-law and we have a good laugh.

I can see how powerful these brand communities are as I look at some of them I am actively involved in, like Minnesota Public Radio (solely because of The Current radio station) and Vibram Five Finger shoes. I give money to MPR to support the radio programming I love and they continue to give back to me every day with not only great music and DJs, but exclusive concert events, memorabilia, and more. I bought a pair of Vibram's Five Finger shoes last fall and fell in love with them instantly, so I have become a fan of them on Facebook and follow them on Twitter. I love talking about the shoes to anyone and I really understand brand communities better after writing this paragraph. I am actually a little bit excited right now.

Overall, I really enjoyed this podcast and liked to see the connection with Harley Davidson throughout the lecture. I think that helped put the brand community concept into prospective for me. Now it is time to go off and see what other brand communities are out there that I might join!

Week 2 - Kick off / Crowdsourcing

Week 2 objectives:

-Read / View the required media (Crowdsourcing reading and Brand Communities podcast)

-Read ch. 1 of Groundswell

-Read ch. 6 of Digital Engagement

-View Alma Whitten video about Google's approach to security

-Skim The Social Marketing Playbook

I believe viewing all the content for this week will be doable. I did a quick look at the Social Marketing Playbook and it looks long, so I am going to try and skim through it and see what interesting learning it has in store for our class. I have not heard of the term "

crowdsourcing" before, but I can imagine it is engaging the masses to help solve computing, marketing, and other problems using the internet and other social media we learned about in Week 1. I like listening

to all the videos and podcasts so far so the Brand communities will be interesting. I am also involved with some online brands via social sites and discussion forums so I would like to hear what has to be said about them. I am not sure what the term groundswell is or means, so I hope that is an interesting topic. The web video reading from Digital Engagement sound

s like it won't have many new topics that I don't know about, but all of the content so far has had one new story, website, or section that was new to me. I am sure I will get something out of it. I am a big fan of Google and love to read / hear anything about them. They are so innovative and simple at the same time. I am looking forward to that video. The Social Medi

a Playbook sounds like it might come in handy after the course. I hope to get enough out of it this week, but it looks like a long read and I might not get to all of it.

Crowdsourcing Reading

This term was new to me, but after reading only a few paragraphs I understood (and also have participated in) crowdsourcing. The fascinating story is always the young

entrepreneurs who take a simple idea that they love to do and turn it into a multi-million dollar business. After reading about the Two Jakes and threadless.com, I immediately checked out their website. Their shirts are fun and very trendy. All of a sudden I feel like I am a teenager again. I am somewhat in the know. (Side note: the Diabolical Hot Dog T-shirt that I saw on the front page was pretty funny, see below)

Threadless.com is a perfect example of letting the customers choose what they want. What a perfect business model! You don't really need to forecast when your demand comes prior to the final vote of the top t-shirts. Your marketing is all viral and is based of the success of the previous week(s). How do you lose? I must be missing something, but for a simple product that doesn't need physical revisions and adaptations this works so well. The customers don't have to be educated in T-shirt making or design to create a great t-shirt.

Contrast that business with the shared computing or user forums also talked about in the reading and you would expect a failing business model, but this is not the case. The SETI@Home project is brilliant. If you are passionate about Sci-Fi, you don't have to be a scientific wizard to help the real scientists find signs of extraterrestrial life. I myself have participated from time to time in the Folding@Home project through Stanford which helps map the human genome by using your computer's process

ing power when you aren't using your computer.

I loved the comment from the Crowdsourcing reading about Toffler being right that people want to be apart of something and help create their products and help others. I didn't even realize I was really apart of this type of sharing when I use some specific car websites, discussion forums, etc. to get help with replacing items on my car or even offering tips to how to get something fixed after I have done it. I figure I should help because someone helped me get to where I was with the car. I am not even that big of a car buff or a good mechanic, but I like to save some cash and find it fun at times. I think we will see more and more of this in the future. Especially as the teens get older. The older generation now are not used to this type of help and resource availability. We will see more people using open source software and helping build the next best "whatever" because they are passionate about it and have built a community around it. This was a very eye-opening reading.

Week 1 - New Media & Wrap up

The new media article gave me insight to the origins of computers and media as well as their convergence. It was a quick read that became more interesting as it went on, but I didn't feel like it added much to my learning from a digital marketing perspective. Some of the stories I had heard before, but a lot of it was new. It makes you think how much you take modern computing and the internet, in all its glory, for granted. Nothing written was very eye-opening or thought provoking to me.

Week 1 Wrap up

I thought this class was going to be a lot of work after seeing all the content that is posted. It does take a long time to go through it all, but many of the videos, lectures, and readings are interesting, or at least bearable. The only technical problem I encountered was trying to figure out how to get the Charlie Rose clips to full screen. I never did figure it out, but it was still fine for viewing. I was able to read/view all the required media as well as the additional content I planned to read/view. I feel good about this course and hopefully it continues to be enjoyable.

Week 1 - Most Engaged Brands

This was a pretty interesting article. I was surprised at which companies were on top and which companies I thought would be on top, but were not. I was very surprised to see Starbucks at number 1, but after reading the reasoning, it made sense. It was impressive that they took a facebook page that was run by consumers with 200,000 fans and turned it into a facebook page that has over 3.5 million fans. Very impressive from a social media perspective. I liked how Dell engages its employees and allows them to have social website interactions with its customers on a daily basis. This brings a lot of credibility to the brand. What all the companies who scored well did was focus on the customer. They interacted with them as peers, took suggestions, helped them out, learned and taught, etc. This is similar to Amazon's Jef Bezos was discussing about what the Kindle is and what it needs to be to consumers to be successful.

I was surprised that Coke and McDonalds were so low. I guess I don't follow that many brands through social media, but I would have just assumed they would be higher. I had a difficult time with the statistical significance of the financial link to social media. The report only looked at 66 of the top 100 companies (yes it is over 30 and could be called a representative sample), and the financial data was only from the last 12 months of financial performance that was available. We have a major recession going on here. I know social websites and media are a relatively new concept, but I am not sure if you can truly link connectedness with financial performance yet from a statistical perspective. Don't get me wrong. It makes perfect sense that the more connected you are to your customers, the more they want to interact and buy from you, so the more financial success you will have, but I just think you can manipulate the numbers at this point to say what you want (or at least draw a loose conclusion).

Week 1 - Amazon CEO J. Bezos video

If you watch this video with following the Newspaper podcasts, you see the solution in Amazon's Kindle. I guess I didn't understand why these Kindles weren't in color and now it makes more sense. I love how customer focused Amazon is. You see that in this video as Jeff Bezos preaches it numerous times throughout the conversation. He truly wants to keep the Kindle as an object that the customer doesn't notice as they immerse themselves in a book.

I liked hearing that you could subscribe to newspapers and magazines for equal or less than subscriptions currently out there. I still think it will be a hard sell because you can get those same newspapers for free online, but maybe it will catch on and keep some revenues for the newspapers. I had to disagree with Mr. Bezos on the simplicity part of the conversation. Yes, consumers want simplicity in ease of access and use, but I think everyone would rather have the one device that does it all versus ten different objects they carry around. People want a one stop shop. Marketing still will be difficult with a one stop shop because that one stop shop device will still be interacting with the internet and thus not solve the marketer's dilemma of "place" and "promotion." Overall, I enjoyed the video and think that we are just on the forefront of turning the Kindle (or more likely its technology) into everyone's daily media.

Also, I don't get why Amazon doesn't want to share its sales numbers. It just was an odd part of the conversation.

Week 1 - R. Hoffman LinkedIn

The biggest thing I took away from the Reid Hoffman video was his vision of the two separate profiles (a professional and a social profile). Obviously that was the entire reason for LinkedIn or Facebook and MySpace could fill the void. I liked his vision of everyone having at least two profiles, but it makes more sense to me to keep it to two profiles. I felt the description of MySpace was poor (the "customizable" profile). Maybe that is a reason I feel like MySpace is on its way out. I think there needs to be a way to link all your profiles or at least filter them into one account. Who would want to manage all the different profiles or even have the time to do it?

Overall, I felt this video was interesting to listen to, but it jumped around a lot and wasn't relevant to the class for large portions of the video.

Additional comment: Three cell phones?! Looks like there is a huge opportunity to increase our overall productivity and ways we connect with others and to other companies.

Week 1 - Newspapers

Fascinating topic. My conclusion after listening to all three parts of the discussion is to get rid of newspapers all together. Why try to stick with newspapers? I think there should be news companies, but what a waste of time, effort, money, environmental resources, etc.

The point about not having the media available to view the internet articles like a newspaper, although true at this point, does not phase me from a technology standpoint. I am assuming this lecture was made before the release of the ipad. I just see the computer screen being created on any surface in the future. Obviously this could be created with expensive touchscreen surfaces or something like this discussion from ted.com.

http://www.ted.com/talks/pattie_maes_demos_the_sixth_sense.html

We will be reading news anywhere and everywhere.

As for the subscription debate, I think this cat and mouse game is going to take a long time to play out. You could argue that pirating music is on the same wavelength as getting free news via the internet. If it isn't profitable to gather the news and report it, we will lose many sources of news. Eventually someone will get a good business process in place to make money from people reading the news, but until then I think we will see these news sources continue to fall. From a marketing perspective, companies need to find the niche websites and areas where their customers are going to retrieve their news/information. Even if people aren't clicking on the ads, they see the information and might view the site at a later time.

Overall, if the average age of the newspaper reader is 55, we won't see as fast of a change to digital news in the US as we should because the population bubble is right at that age. Newspapers will go at the wayside, but I think it will be another 10 years unless something major happens (i.e. law passes to reduce paper usage, highly limiting newspaper distribution).

Week 1 - 1st Post

So far I have read the required reading (Ch. 1 of The Age of Engage) and watched the required video ("Welcome and Course Introduction").

My learning goals for the week are to try and read/view the following:

-LinkedIn Video

-Amazon.com CEO video

-The newspaper industry podcasts

-The most valuable brands report

-What is new media?

If I can get to more, I will, but these topics looked the most interesting, plus I do a lot better viewing something than reading it. I am interested in what Reid Hoffman thinks about LinkedIn and how it really sets itself apart from the rest of the social networking available besides the obvious "work/company" niche. Anything about Am

azon I am interested in because I absolutely love the website and use it to purchase many items all the time. After reading chapter 1 of The Age of Engage I am curious what the CEO has to say about the tagging and branding Amazon has and what will it do in the future to remain relevant and cutting edge. I am fascinated in what the heck the newspaper industry will look like in 5-10 years, so hopefully there are some insights with the lectures. The other articles just seemed interesting and I would like to try and read them and blog about them.

Chapter 1 of The Age of Engage review:

Published in the first quarter of 2008, I could not believe how behind the times this first chapter seemed. It took awhile for me to find something that I hadn't really heard about or didn't know much about. I chuckled when I read the section about how user content from websites like MySpace and youtube are shaping the individual Marketing efforts of companies. Youtube is still alive and kicking in my mind, but in my opinion, MySpace has fallen quite a bit and many people are using Facebook and other social networking sites, like LinkedIn and Twitter.

One new term that was new to me was Ajax. From reading the description, it appears we encounter this type of web content every day, but I just didn't know or understand the technical term at first. The funny thing about the Ajax section was that I had not even thought about never seeing the counters at the bottom of websites now days. I didn't realize websites stopped tracking the page hits information because of all this embedded content which does not report accurate website use.

I liked reading about the "new" technologies and how we are using them to market better to customers, and not just groups of customers, but specific individuals. I found the six Vs very interesting and how the author claimed the Live Web rendered the Four Ps obsolete. Very thought provoking and an interesting concept. I still think you can apply the Four Ps to the Live Web because we aren't in "The Matrix" yet and we all still interact with the world around us as living breathing humans. But I do agree that the Live Web is morphing into our lives and routines, so Marketers need to adapt to this highly dynamic environment.

I will watch some of the other videos and read some of the other articles and post something by the end of this week.