A recent example I heard highlighting some of these assumptions we have of this shared language of user interfaces was a helpdesk technician asking a caller to “right click and tell him what happened”.
The response was “Nothing. I’ve written click, and nothing’s changed. What now?”

I saw this fantastic example of how you could change how we interact with computers a couple of years ago, and the site’s still live, and still feels very relevant. It’s called Don’t Click It.

E-communication can be divided in two different types: e-business and e-commerce. The latter covers all the forms of electronic business across an enterprise whilst the former is a wider concept that includes all types of use of information technology in business. Although there are several aspects of e-commerce and e-business that affect many different sectors, there are also significant differences on the e-business’s impact on specific market sectors. E-commerce on the other hand has four different stages regarding service development: contact, interaction, transaction and relation. These four phases describe the process that an organization follows to build a long-term with the consumers.

E-business objectives are closely linked to marketing communications objectives and thus include all the main goals an organization has to reach in order to succeed. However, e-communications contribute more to the fulfillment of certain marketing objectives. Finally, in terms of tactics e-communications focus on attracting attention and measuring advertising success in e-marketplace.

• Paid advertising
• Publicity and word of mouth
• Domain name and brand
• Portals and search engines
• Site and search design
• Return visits

–Measuring success
The inherent measurability of many sources of traffic, and the ease of recording whether transactions take place suggest that there is an opportunity to gather more detailed information about consumer behaviour than was possible in other environments.
On the other hand, these measures are less easy to collect and interpret than they might first appear.

She begins by distinguishing between “e-commerce” (doing business online – more transactional) and “e-business” (any aspect of your business that you extend online – this is where marketing would fit in).

She continues by outlining the four stages of online business: Contact, Interact, Transact and Relate (see p.2-3). However, it is important when reading this to remember that this article was written in 2001, before social media had reached its peak. The closest stage to what we now know as online social networking would be Relate – Rowley describes this stage as allowing customers (B2C or B2B) to utilize your website as a portal of information. For example: order tracking or allowing customers to access up-to-date information about stock-level.

Rowley also looks at the different stages of the communication process (cognitive, affective and behavior) and how they affect a person’s web usage. For example: if a consumer is in the cognitive stage – they may use a website as an introduction to a product or brand but as they move into the affective stage, use the web to form opinions and attitudes.

Rowley emphasizes the importance of strategizing for online activities as one would for any other marketing activity. She further reinforces the importance of clear objectives and evaluation.

Overall this article offers a wide range of practical advice for integrating the web into a firm’s corporate strategy and looks at how online marketing tools are changing the face of business.

In the early 80s, when the metallurgical industry in the Lorraine region entered its final crisis, the public powers had the idea to make up for this collapse by creating a European leisure zone, an “intelligent” theme park which could jumpstart the economy of the region. This park was called Smurfland. The managing director of the dead metallurgy naturally became the manager of the theme park, and the unemployed workers were rehired as “smurfmen” in the context of this new Smurfland. Unfortunately, the park itself, for several reasons, had to be closed, and the former factory workers turned “smurfmen” once again found themselves on the dole. It is a somber destiny which, after making them the real victims of the job market, transformed them into the ghostly workers of leisure time, and finally turned them into the unemployed of both.

But Smurfland was only a miniature universe. The Disney enterprise is much bigger. To illustrate, it should be known that Disney “Unlimited,” having taken over one of the major US television networks, is about to purchase 42nd Street in New York, the “hot” section of 42nd Street, to transform it into an erotic theme park, with the intention of changing hardly anything of the street itself. The idea would be simply to transform, in situ, one of the high centers of pornography into a branch of Disney World. Transforming the pornographers and the prostitutes, like the factory workers in Smurfland, into extras [figurants] in their own world, metamorphosed into identical figures, museumified, disneyfied.

At Disney World in Orlando, they are even building an identical replica of the Los Angeles Disneyland, as a sort of historical attraction to the second degree, a simulacrum to the second power. It is the same thing that CNN did with the Gulf War: a prototypical event which did not take place, because it took place in real time, in CNN’s instantaneous mode. Today, Disney could easily revisit the Gulf War as a worldwide show.

Copyright © 1997–2010. European Graduate School EGS.

The original model concerning the influence of  digital interaction on marketing predicted that it would allow marketers to gain a deeper understanding of consumers and their responses. This model envisioned digital interaction as a more in-depth version of direct marketing and databases. However, it did not anticipate the way in which technology nowadays allows consumers to interact with each other in ways uncontrollable to marketers. Deighton and Kornfield (2007) argue digital media has led to consumers’ “counterargument, information sharing, rebuttal, parody, reproach, and though more rarely, fandom” (p.2). Hence, there has been a major shift from meaning-making, marketer controlled (one-way) marketing to one that is controlled by consumers. The present environment portrays the “diminution of marketing’s power relative to the consumer” (Deighton and Kornfield 2007, p.8).

Deighton and Kornfield (2007) touch on five paradigms to describe digital interactive advertising in relation to marketing. These are:

1. Thought tracing: Searches conducted by consumers on pages like Google are available to marketers and lead to search-led advertising.

2. Ubiquitous connectivity: With technologies like mobile phones, netbooks, etc, consumers can be reached not only when they search on the Internet, but at all times. “The person is by default always in the market, always available to be communicated with, and always an audience” (p.12).

3. Property exchanges: Interactive technologies allow people to share and exchange goods or services.

4. Social exchange: Social interaction between consumers are “communal, instrumental, or voyeuristic” (p. 15). Online communities and groups create word-of-mouth communication.

5. Cultural exchanges: Through digital interaction, marketers can become cultural producers in their relevant consumers’ space. An example is buzz marketing, where people pass on marketing messages because they are entertaining/interesting and not for actual advertising purposes.

Deighton and Kornfield employ these five paradigms to create a new model that rates these on two separate scales: one, in their ability to make meaning, and two, on their power to mobilise identity. Based on this model, the most powerful form of new media is the one that creates cultural exchange (eg. Youtube/Facebook).

Despite the growing popularity of using Internet and media technology in marketing communications, it would be more imperative for companies to know their customer well, to establish relevant product offerings and communications, to maintain as a strong brand, to design creative that stands out amongst competitors, as well as encouraging consumers to communicate through word of mouth. In this sense, the essence of customer-driven concept can be intertwined with online media applications, achieving ultimate success for their marketing campaigns.

Remember to post your summary of one of the papers from Blackboard here before Friday 19th March (and add them to the Critical Perspectives category). If you have any issues posting, please drop me an email on the @geecologist.org address.

This is the video we’ll watch the second half of in either the lecture or seminar (depending on how we do for time).

Who is the hero of the world? http://en.tackfilm.se/?id=1266185003043RA69

Here’s a great example of taking some fairly dry data and turning it into something of interest:

Also, here’s a big graphical representation of average internet usage patterns as another lovely data visualisation.

We’ll be looking further at how much data people are putting online, and what and whom that is useful to. There are plenty of examples of worrying trends in young people posting extremely revealing information and even pictures about themselves available to the world, but for a second, lets stay on the marginly more positive. With all this information being gather about our lives, there are some really stunning examples of data visualisation available, like Lee Byron’s Last.FM listening history stream graphs, this visual RSS reader called Voyage, there are 50 great examples of other data visualisations here, so remember that even though the man may know everything about you, he might also be looking at it using some of these fantastic graphics.

Looking at this recent vote on Lifehacker, the majority of people think the internet should be ‘private’ by default, so why aren’t people changing their privacy settings to protect that privacy, especially on social media?

So what do you think this site knows about you already? It knows you’re in , . It might be able to guess your postcode… . Also it knows your IP Number is 38.107.179.244 which is a unique identifier. With different software you could easily pick up other details like who your ISP is, etc. That’s all before you’ve even volunteered any information. In the class we’ll look at Google Analytics, and maybe Google Adwords to see the power of what they have to offer. Speaking of Google, they’ve just announced they’ll be crowd-sourcing live traffic data for their ever popular Google Maps service.

This week’s lecture is suitably at the end of Safer Internet Week. Have a look to see what they’ve isolated as the key issues.

Just before you despair too much in what the internet means for data, there are some very clever things it can do. There have been some fantastic projects using distributed computing (and some zombie disasters), but here’s a nice example. Stanford are running a project where as your computer goes into screen saver mode, it can start helping them process data in an effort to understand folding proteins and ultimately, hopefully cure Alzheimers, ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s, and many cancers. Similarly boffins at Harvard University have developed data mining software that analyses people’s medical records for signs of domestic violence.

Here’s a neat explanation of the relationship between Web 1.0 through to Web 3.0, although the definition of Web 3.0 is still up for debate as you can see from the difference between Berners-Lee and this account.

Wired Magazine have a whole report on Dan Woolley who used his iPhone to get information on how to treat wounds, used the alarm to prevent himself slipping into shock, recorded messages to his family in case he wasn’t rescued, and listened to music to lift his spirits. To delve beyond the testimony to human endurance, marcoms people have to see this as an example of a product being good enough to generate marketing from the user, given such unfortunate circumstances.

With the advent of citizen reporters, and so much commentary online, the traditional institutions delivering coverage of world events are having to kick that much harder as competition for audience escalates exponentially.

Given the current situation in Haiti, have a look at this use of technology that puts you in the thick of the situation. With 3D TV just around the corner, you can only assume more and more news news will be going this way as well.

CCN’s 360 Haiti report

Technology is playing a huge part in the relief effort as you would expect, here’s an interesting piece about efforts incorporating open source technologies, Reuters, Google News and Open Street Map. You can report incidents, like people requiring medical attention or missing persons, and they’ll be mapped for aid workers to then use as a guide.

Other examples of the genre: All Your Base Are Belong To Us, Rickrolling, Lolcats, the Algorithm Dance and more recently Rollercoaster Chess, 241543903, ShitMyDadSays, Sleep Talkin’ Man, Garfield Minus Garfield, Real Ultimate Power and it’s copycats.

YouTube has always been very fruitful ground for memes. Specific memes that have done well to be continually reinterpreted on this platform include the Kersal Massive (phenomenal numbers of remixes were made, here’s two of the more famous examples: The Cure, Slayer, etc). Similarly as with so many things online, Nazis seem to prove quite fertile ground, this scene from Downfall has been remixed to show Hitler responding to all kind of news, like last week’s iPad announcement.

The concept of a meme goes back to Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene (1976) and you should read his paper from 1991 called Viruses of the Mind.

• Think about where these memes may have originated.
• Why they propagate across different media, and which media they do make it onto.
• What are the challenges and opportunities these present to traditional forms of word of mouth advertising.
• This Tango advert from 1992 (video below) gained a similarly ‘cultish’ following and was pulled as a result of so many children aping the behaviour. It also coined the phrase ‘you’ve been tangoed’ which is still used in print and broadcast media today – a massive coup for any agency. What is the path that leads from this to our modern day internet meme?

• Are there any examples of a deliberate attempt to transfer a meme from one medium to another with successful marketing campaign results?

You can already see, traditional forms of campaigning are being taken apart online. The one-way broadcast style of disseminating comms via a billboard message is immediately dismissed and mocked as people now have online forums to provide ‘feedback’.