I separated the tablet and the shadow more (also raised the tablet) and changed the angle on the motion blur to make it look a bit more like it was falling. Also added a grey border and did full left to right text on the “Calm Down.” Also came up with a generic company and product name (yes, I know Motorola made a phone called the Defy a while back, but my teacher doesn’t.)
This one, on the other hand, I love. I had a lot of fun writing this one and feel like it was pretty well done. It’s a longer read on the state of advertising in a world of social media, and talks essentially about what I’ve always loved; selling things and technology. Not all the data is current though, otherwise I’d definitely be talking about how genius of a site Pinterest is.
Social media has changed the landscape of human interaction immensely since the advent of the internet in the late 1990’s. Almost all social media sites that have been introduced to the world have been a large part in turning the communication possibilities that the internet presents into an interactive dialogue. The accessibility and reach that social media offers not only presents many opportunities for the average user but also for companies willing to take advantage of the tools that these networks offer. Social media has been integral on changing the marketing landscape from the smallest businesses all the way to enormous corporations, but it is not immediately recognizable as to how these companies used social media to further their businesses. How has the advertising landscape changed? How do companies isolate a target audience from such enormous groups of people? Have other methods of advertising become useless? In this paper I am going give an in depth insight as to how the emergence of social media has changed the marketing industry forever and why social media is only going to become more important in the future. Whether through the juggernauts like Facebook and Twitter or through the up-and-comers like Reddit and Tumblr, marketers and advertisers are having to adapt to these new environments by recognizing specific user bases, acknowledging boundaries, taking advantage of mobile technology, and more so that they can stay successful.
Advertising and marketing have many tried and true methods that have, until now, withstood the test of time. Public posters, billboards, magazine pages, and radio/television ads have been a de facto standard for the advertising industry. Advertisers have been able to use these methods for about fifty years and they have, for the most part, been perfected. A small business could rarely get their name out to large audiences because they couldn’t afford the costs of big name advertising firms. Now however, a song can go viral on Youtube, a fun website can make an appearance on Stumbleupon, or a celebrity can “tweet” about a product that they love and immediately have it appear on millions of computer screens. More and more people are transferring to reading blogs instead of magazines. In the first half of 2010 magazine subscriptions fell 5.6% and then another 7.3% in the second half.[1] Facebook.com, however, has 600 million active users, most logging onto the site at least once a day. Having an audience of 600 million people is an advertiser’s virtual gold mine, but that is not all. Because of Facebook’s accessibility, anybody who owns a business can buy ad space and use Facebook’s technology to only advertise to people who have interests in common with that company’s specific product. Even though the click through of Facebook’s advertisements is under .5%[2], the fact that Facebook has such an amazingly large abundance of users still makes it an extremely effective advertising medium. Facebook is only one instance of social media though, and selling advertisements on an enormously large website is a relatively tame method of marketing. Social media also permits endorsements of all kinds.
“Twitter, among other things, is a premier communications vehicle and, therefore, all marketers should become students of Twitter.” – Hollis Thomases, CEO of Webadvantage.net.[3] Twitter is regarded as one of the most invaluable advertising technologies in the world right now. It has over 200 million users[4] and is easily accessible to anybody with an internet connection. The thing that separates Twitter from Facebook, though, is that they didn’t even introduce advertising to their website until three years after its launch.[5] Twitter relies on what they call “microblogging”, or short bursts of information consisting of 140 characters or less. As soon as you click the “tweet” button, your short burst of information pops up on every single one of your “follower’s” timelines. This allows specific people to be very influential. Celebrities like Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, and Britney Spears all boast over seven million followers. This means that every single “microblog” that they post is instantly read by seven million people. The possibilities that can come from this are astounding. Seven million people are required to see whatever the specific person posts, and because they already opted to follow that individual it means that they will consider what they have to say. Lady Gaga can announce that she has a new single available on iTunes and instantly generate millions of dollars in sales. A product can immediately go viral through Twitter, from a funny video like “David After Dentist” to an announcement of Apple Inc.’s newest product. The most important thing that Twitter does is that it somewhat reverses the roles of the consumer and the marketer. Instead of the marketer doing work to find their target market, the target market flocks to the advertiser.
Blogs of all different kinds are also an extremely valuable type of new media for advertising. They are something of a new type of magazine; more focused on delivering specific type of information to a smaller group of people than on getting as much information to as many people as possible. The ability of the blog writers to convey information to their readers is in a more professional than on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, but the fact that the community that reads the blog is a lot more active with each other on a single topic is very important. Technology blogs like Gizmodo and Engadget both boast extremely active communities who check the blog multiple times a day. They report huge stories, like Gizmodo’s discovery of an iPhone 4 Prototype during March 2010. Nick Denton, founder of Gawker Media, has said “I can see us getting to $100 million in revenue.”[6] Advertising on blogs like these have made it very easy for companies to find their target markets. As of April 11, 2011, Engadget.com currently has banner ads for Blackberry and Gizmodo.com has video ads for Alienware, a subsidy of Dell Inc. Both Blackberries and Alienware computers are used heavily by the readers of Engadget and Gizmodo, so the choice of advertisers to market their products here are easy ones. The same principle applies for all different kinds of blogs; Splitsider, a blog focused on comedy, advertises TV shows like MTV’s The Hard Times of RJ Berger and movies like Little Fockers. Barstool Sports, a sports blog, advertises sports gambling websites like BetUs.com and sportswear companies like Champion. Readers of these blogs assume that the authors are knowledgable on the subjects that they are writing about, so they are more likely to trust advertisements that are on these sites.
The increasingly widespread use of mobile data on cellular phones has helped social media play an even larger role in the lives of many of its users. Users of social media no longer have to wait to get back home to their computers to check their Facebook or tweet their friends; they now get all of their notifications instantly on their smartphones. This makes reaching the average consumer an even easier task for marketers and advertisers. Smartphones are also becoming more and more common among the general population; in fact, smartphones now have higher sales than personal computers, with 101 million smartphones sold in Q4 2010 compared to 92 million personal computers.[7] Sales of smartphones are increasing at an almost alarming rate as well; 2011’s smartphone sales are projected to increase to 468 million units, a 58% increase from 2010’s smartphone sales.[8] Marketing can be pushed through to smartphones in many different ways. The constant accessibility to Twitter and Facebook means that information is constantly being given to you and advertisers have a constant accessibility to you. You can even be given more advertisements by way of smartphone applications. The ad-supported version of the popular game Angry Birds has been downloaded over 30 million times[9] on Google’s Android platform. This means that 30 million people are being supplied advertisements through just this one game.
Even though the possibilities of the internet may seem limitless to advertisers and marketers, there are also a few rules that they have to follow or else their campaign might fail completely. The internet was not invented as a marketing and advertising medium, but as a method of communication to people and connection to information. Oversaturation is very easy to do and that runs the risk of annoying your target market to the point where they don’t want to associate themselves with your product. Social media also gives the company the opportunity to react on a far more intimate level with their customer, and in this age if a company is not accessible by the consumer it can hurt their image. Companies like Verizon Wireless, Google, and Mashable all have active Twitter accounts that update their customers on what is going on inside of the company as well as respond to questions that are asked. Studies show that customers are 62% more likely to read information from a company if it is presented in an electronic form.[10] This new intimacy and familiarity with these enormous corporations can make then seem more approachable to a consumer and more likely to use their products.
My findings concerning the relation between social media and how companies can use it to their advantage have been very interesting. Ironically, I had to use social media myself to find a great deal of information because of the fact that social media is such a new topic. The online journals that I used, like JStor, didn’t have very current articles about social media on them. I wish that I could have found a larger amount of scholarly journals on the uses of social media, but because of it being such a new topic I realized that I had a limited pool of work to choose from and just relied on finding other resources. Being able to use social media to find my information was actually quite helpful though because I became more familiar with it and now have a better understanding of its functionalities. For instance, I now recognize the amazing possibilities that a mass communication device like Twitter has beyond just being able to talk to all of your friends in a short and convenient manner. I also noticed that technology itself seems to evolve faster than a person’s ability to utilize technology. Social media has been around since the advent of the internet with things like primitive blogs and message boards, but they hadn’t been fully tapped as a marketing tool until the past five years. The creative uses of social media that companies are coming up with are a whole new area of expertise for marketing. From search optimization to viral experts, new careers are being made in the industry that are not going away any time soon. Social media is evolving rapidly, and being able to keep up with specific trends in the area is becoming increasingly difficult.
Citations!
I feel like this is one of the most pretentious pieces of writing I’ve ever done. I really don’t like it, but the concept of flash fiction interests me.
Kevin looked up at the foreman as he walked by. He refused to give anybody a break, they needed this bridge done in just two weeks’ more time. Kevin looked at Leonard, and without any exchange of words, Kevin knew he should stand up for the workers and demand break. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the asphalt crack. “Of course.” There was nobody near it, they could fix it later. He yelled over to the foreman, but the ground underneath Kevin’s crew gave way. The bridge was suddenly crumbling above him, collapsing from the center out. Time didn’t slow down. His life never flashed before his eyes (“didn’t they say it would flash?”) and there was no epiphany to have. No thoughts concerning his family and friends crossed his mind. All he thought of was his impending death. As he lay on the ground, body trapped under fallen concrete, he thought, “shit.”
I’ve recently been listening to Snowmine’s debut album, Laminate Pet Animal and just thought that I would share it. A psychedelic/indie band hailing from Brooklyn, LPA is beautifully colored and mooded with a varying but controlled instrumentation including unique string arrangements, synthesizers, and spacey, heavily reverberated guitar riffs.
Vocalist Grayson Sanders’ has a surprisingly large vocal range and sounds somewhat reminiscent of a more relaxed, less emotional Win Butler of Arcade Fire. His voice compliments the album’s arrangements extremely well.
You can pay what you want for Laminate Pet Animal on Snowmine’s Bandcamp or check it out on most music streaming services.
