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.
The key difference between the effects of WOM marketing in microblogs and regular blogs is the length of the messages that consumers can put out there for their friends to see. In microblogs, there is very limited space to write a message that has much information, such as in Twitter where only 140 characters are allowed per post whereas other social networks, like regular blogs, allow for more in-depth posting. This can sometimes lead to unfavorable results in WOM marketing. Because people are more influenced by negative WOM, they might be more inclined to listen to a Twitter post that does not elaborate but says something negative about a product, while a regular blog can go into more depth and give reasons as to why that person thought that product was bad.

In order to get away from my usual topic of advertising, I also looked at the blog post/presentation that was about security issues with the program, Skype. I was interested in this topic because I have used, and have enjoyed using, Skype for a year or two, but I have never really called into question how secure the program was. Although the conclusion of this presentation seemed to say that Skype was, in fact, a mostly secure network, there were still some issues that were a bit scary. The one I found the most disturbing was the fact that “Skype's security depends on the good will of their programmers and organizations running Skype's back-end servers.” The fact that I have to trust a third party with where the information that I send goes is a bit unsettling, but since I only use Skype to talk to friends, I will not really worry about it and continue to use the program.