The Digital Future...Is Now!

Hello loyal fans (laughing to self), and welcome back to everyone’s favorite blog about media convergence (or at least everyone’s favorite blog about media convergence written by me). This week, we are talking about this mobile universe we are living in and how to better organize our digital lives. In a world where we rely on technology for nearly everything, this week’s readings proved to be very interesting.

There was a quote by New York Times writer John Markoff that really stuck out to me. He said, “The cell phone is the world’s most ubiquitous computer.”

Still images, audio, and video in mass communications

Here we are again, another week, another blog post. However, today this blog post has an extra special treat for all of you fans (the 2 or 3 classmates that might choose my blog to read). That treat is VIDEO! Yes, you read that right, this blog has a video of me explaining my thoughts on this week’s class readings. For those of you who dislike reading or are illiterate, you can simply watch the video as it will contain mostly the same information as this post you are about to read.



For those of you who chose to continue reading, this week’s blog topic is going to concentrate on the use of images, audio, and video in mass communications. I feel that this topic is only fitting for this week as we are using all three components in addition to the usual written blog.

IKEA: A model of media convergence

IKEA is an international home products Swedish corporation that designs and sells ready to assemble furniture, appliances and home accessories. It is the world’s largest furniture retailer (Wikipedia). In becoming the world’s largest furniture retailer, IKEA has utilized the mass media to reach its target audiences. The most extensively used mass medium has been the Internet. IKEA's website and social media are highly interactive which allows their target audiences to be active. Thus, IKEA has done something right. The following paragraphs discuss this “something right” with some suggestions on how to improve on it.

IKEA’s website (ww.ikea.com) is interactive from the moment the audience enters it. The audience must select which country or location they are in; Europe, North America, Middle East, Asia Pacific and Caribbean. For our purposes, the United States website will be discussed. When the audience selects the United States, they are overwhelmed by the wealth of information and interactivity that displays.

Presentation Overviews

The exciting world of media convergence is always in motion and for this week’s blog post, I am going to reflect on the convergence topics touched on by my class mates from the past couple weeks. Each one of the topics covered was very interesting and the fact that there were no repeating topics or articles throughout the whole class just proves how diverse and extensive the world of media convergence is.

My topic being word-of-mouth advertising in online communities, I felt I needed to checkout a fellow classmate’s blog about word-of-mouth advertising in microblogs. Both the blog post and in-class presentation were very interesting and showed some key differences between WOM advertising in microblogs and that in more intimate online communities.

Word-of-Web: Word-of-Mouth Marketing in Online Communities

For this week’s blog post, I chose to evaluate an article that I found to be very interesting. The article is titled “Networked Narratives: Understanding Word-of-Mouth Marketing in Online Communities” and is a research study done by Rober t V. Kozinets, Kristine de Valck, Andrea C. Wojnicki, and Sarah J.S. Wilner. This study evaluated the impact of seeded word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing in online blogging communities and how WOM marketing can be used and improved in similar communities.

First of all, the article gave a bit of WOM marketing history. The first WOM model, developed in the 1940’s, was called the “Organic Interconsumer Influence Model.” This model said that the buyer-to-buyer conversations were more influential than marketing communications when it came to influencing adoption of a product. It occurred one consumer and another without direct influence of the marketer and was motivated by a consumer’s desire to help, warn, or inform another buyer.