Week 2

List of materials to watch/listen/read

Introduction: The Dawn of the Human Network

Chapter 1: “Why the Groundswell and Why Now?”

Chapter 6: “Web Video: The New, New Thing”

The social marketing playbook

Brand Communities podcast

“Star Search”

Alma Whitten on “Lessons from Googles Approach to Internet Security, Privacy and Encryption

Learning goals/questions

·      What is customer empowerment?

·      How has customer empowerment changed the marketing scene?

·      How has social media impacted customer empowerment?

Accomplished

Read:

Introduction: The Dawn of the Human Network

Chapter 1: “Why the Groundswell and Why Now?”

Chapter 6: “Web Video: The New, New Thing”

The social marketing playbook

Watched:

Brand Communities podcast

Portion of Alma Whitten on “Lessons from Googles Approach to Internet Security, Privacy and Encryption

Listened:

 “Star Search”

Comment on Progress

The only item I did not complete was Alma’s video. The speaker’s presentation style made it more difficult to watch and the content was not what I expected. I chose to spend time scanning and sharing additional social media links via Twitter rather than complete this video. Social Media enables this learning flexibility!

Thoughts

There were a number of common themes across the items I covered this week. One trend is the identification of a shift from consumers to “prosumers”. The power of product brands is increasingly in the hands of consumers as social media provides a number of outlets and opportunities for connection. Content, once added to the web, is irreversible – unable to be removed. To be successful, companies need to be engaged in dialogues about their products online through nurtured communities or any number of social media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter or You Tube. More than damage control or prevention, marketers can develop or increase brand perception. This introduces a new issue around metrics to assess impact or ROI for this new and rapidly changing arena.  

Before launching into “New Marketing”, it is useful to assess the landscape, determine a social media architecture and establish a unifying theme to launch a social media presence. New and old media are not mutually exclusive, but “need to become catalysts for one another.”

Groundswell and Crowdsourcing both leverage virtual communities to help individuals and organizations achieve success through collaboration. I participated in Seti@Home in high school and had forgotten about it until coming across it here; I was excited to consider it in this context.

Neoterics made me wonder why we don’t try, fail and adapt more, knowing the positive results and increased rate of improvement if we embraced this.

The “secret formula” to web video utilization made me laugh because of the focus on metadata. While authenticity is an important facet of organizations and personal brand marketing, I recently had a horrible concert experience with an arrogant artist and added the tag “Justin Bieber” to the video metadata upon uploading to YouTube. While Justin Bieber had nothing to do with the video, as a top trending topic on Twitter, I received a number of hits on my video for those searching this tag. I wanted to expose the horrific behavior of the artist to a broad audience, but this would be a terrible approach for any organization seeking relationship or community building to increase brand perception.

In light of these discoveries, I feel empowered to be a prosumer and take full advantage of the opportunity to wield marketing power and be a part of an interactive online dialogue.