Here we are at the end of the semester after what seems like a very short few months. I have written a lot about all kinds of things relating to media convergence and I hope my audience and fellow classmates have learned as much as I have. This week, with my final blog for my Comm 404 class, I am going to run through the semester and revisit our journey through the wonderful world of media convergence.
One of the first things we talked about was Clay Shirky’s book, Here Comes Everybody. The most interesting part of Shirky’s book, for me, was this quote:
"Communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. The invention of a tool doesn't create change; it has to have been around long enough that most of society is using it. It's when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen."
Basically, advances in technology do not bring about improvements to society until they are used by enough people for a significant change to occur. Think about the Internet that is so ubiquitous today. The first stages of the Internet were being developed back in the 1960’s, but the Internet we know and love today was not widespread or influential until relatively recently.
Another highlight of this semester was the individual articles that we all read and presented. For those of you who have forgotten (all of you) the article I analyzed was “Networked Narratives: Understanding Word-of-Mouth Marketing in Online Communities.” To give a quick synopsis of the article, it first looks at the history of WOM marketing and the three models of WOM that have been developed over the years. The model studied in the article, and the model that is utilized in today’s media, is known as the “Network Coproduction Model.” This model recognizes the influential consumers, but it is also interested in managing and measuring the effectiveness of WOM. Basically marketers attempt to directly target influential, opinion leading consumers in order to get them talking about their products. However, the marketers acknowledge the fact that people make their own meanings to messages instead of simply taking the marketers’ meanings. What this study found was that WOM marketing campaigns can be incredibly effective if executed properly. Conversely, WOM marketing campaigns can have a negative effect if the influential consumer is seen as a “sell-out.” I found this study to be incredibly interesting and if you would like to read a bit more in-depth into this topic, you can find it here.
One of the other more defining moments of the semester was the section when groups researched the media convergence practices of different companies. My group happened to look at IKEA, and I thought that IKEA was doing quite a good job with its media convergence. Their main website is incredibly interactive and helpful to its customers. IKEA has a very good handle on the Facebook and Twitter scene, having multiple profiles in different languages and answering customers’ comments and concerns. IKEA is so popular that it even has a supporting website that helps personalize the IKEA experience, which is not even affiliated with the company.
One thing that is quite interesting to me about this is that it has caused me to look at other businesses’ online presence. On the NSAC team and in another Comm class, I have looked at JCPenney’s Facebook and Twitter accounts many times, and I find myself judging the company’s online performance more than I normally would.
Overall, I have enjoyed my time in this class. My eyes have been opened to a whole new world of media tools and I feel that it will help me a lot in the future. Not only have I started using the tools that I never used before such as blogs, Twitter, and LinkedIn, but I also have learned to integrate them all together in order to use them to their full potential. The only questions for me now are, what will the main topic of this blog become and how many more episodes of The Chris Wagner Blog Show will be made before YouTube cancels it?
The media convergence presentations were also a favorite of mine. I really enjoyed seeing how various companies used media. There were different levels of usage as we say, but you are right IKEA really does have a strong presence. They definitely make sure to have part of their site to aid customers and make sure that their shopping goes as smoothly as possible.
ReplyDeleteAfter those presentations, I found myself paying more attention to what businesses do with their social media. It is interesting to see what is working for them and what isn't for other companies.
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