Wednesday 2 December 2015

Strategic take on the web (Hakola, Hiila 2012)

Strategic take on the web (2012) is a great book by Iida Hakola and Ilona Hiila, the founders of Vapamedia (Finland), where they give smoothly running guidance on content marketing on the web. Strategic take on the web gives the reader an easily understandable frame work to how companies should formulate their web strategy on the basis of their business needs on the whole (what are we trying to do?) and on the other hand, how content marketing can help them to achieve their business goals (how can we do what we're trying to do?).


Strategic take on the web is very practical in its advise. Content marketing is essentially very much of a dialogue between the examination of the functions of an organization (commercial or not) and of the functions of the different target groups and audiences. To put it in layman's terms: what is the organization doing in the digital sphere and what are the multitude of layers of the public doing there.

To enable this dialogue, Hakola and Hiila encourage content strategists to analyze their own content with ROT-analysis (redundant, outdated, trivial) with which one mechanically assesses each piece of their content rating it as per the three given categories. The results of the analysis should guide you towards steering the content you put out towards the right direction, whether that be in terms of the themes used in the content or the platform used for it.

In addition to looking at your own doings on the web, it's equally important to be following on what the different target groups are doing there. With big data and web analytics there is no need to guestimate stuff any longer. Instead you can follow what people are doing pretty precisely and create content accordingly.  By following on what the audiences are talking about your organization, brand or product  you gain knowledge of how you're perceived, what to utilize in your content and observe what perhaps needs steering away from.

Essentially, everything boils down to the question of how to create great, interesting content. Sure, this is a question virtually impossible to answer to, but Hakola and Hiila remind to look beyond the obvious. Far too often content is too advert-like (solely about the product) meaning that it doesn't interest anyone, not really. And therefore, content marketers should find larger, but still related, themes to their products providing an angle from which they can be discussed and displayed. 

OK then, the concept of content marketing well in hand now, but lacking the tools? No probs! I found an excellent listing of current content tools available from Digital Information World.


Sunday 20 September 2015

School of Disobedience @ Kiasma

Feeling a little stressed, I decided to head down to Kiasma this Saturday to see what the artist Jani Leinonen has got up to with his School of Disobedience. Jani Leinonen is the dude, who a couple of years back stole Ronald McDonald from McDonald's and then beheaded him in an Al-Qaeda style video, and what do you know, there poor Ronald is, right at the start of the exhibition.


Leinonen re-appropriates logos and brand identities that are already familiar to us to criticise consumerism and draws attention to global products' functionalities and marketing strategies. "There are products for all ideologies... Products and the brands that represent them have an amazingly large part in our lives, and that is why it is interesting to use them in art. To tell the kind of stories with them that the global conglomerates don't want to tell, says Leinonen" (www.kiasma.fi/nayttelyt-ja-ohjelmisto/jani-leinonen/). 


Leinonen's art is great precisely for the fact that it forces us to think about our every day companions (the brands) in the true context of their consequences; for example, Hunger King counter imitating a real burger joint reminding us about the repercussions of cheap fast food catering for the poorer part of the society. 


In the School of Disobedience the brand characters aren't just marketing marionettes, though. Leinonen re-appropriates them to be activists teaching the audience about being critical of the media and becoming aware of the unconscious  mechanisms of marketing as well as the cultural catalogue (stereotypes) marketing draws on to describe the world to us. 


Jani Leinonen's art definitely has its place. In fact, I'd go as far as saying that School of Disobedience should be a compulsory part of kids' education today. But pop art is somewhat hollow, there's no escaping that. The common problem with it using images already so known to us is that they very easily become cliches that we pass by just like we pass by advertising or the million different products available to us in an any given grocery store every day. In comparison to many of the art pieces in Face to Face, the other exhibition at Kiasma at the moment, Leinonen's work lacks the "air of mystery" or humanity of the portraits there have, but then, I guess that is making a point, too. And it sure is interesting to see how Jani Leinonen's art evolves in the future! Where can he go from Ronald, Tony "the frosty sugar flake" Tiger and the other buddies?

Friday 31 July 2015

Post-MJ Era Institute of Counsciousness NEVERLAND at URB2015

The end of my parental leave and return to work looming just around the corner, I decided to cheer myself up with an arts show and what better way to do it than Post-MJ Era Institute of Counciousness NEVERLAND, which premiered at Kiasma Theatre last night as part of the opening of URB2015 festival. URB is an annual arts festival in Helsinki for everything under the umbrella term of "urban".

In the beginning we were told that the performance was to be a spiritual seminar on the legacy and dimensions of Michael Jackson. For the first half of the show this meant rather long winded "academic presentations" on how Jackson can be conceptualized from the cultural studies perspective, the most interesting being how Jackson's figure embodies several different "bodies" ranging from the angry body (Jackson clearly uses dancing as a way to express anger through his art) to the "messiah" body, through which Jackson can be viewed as being portrayed as some kind of a world healing saviour figure.


The latter part of the performance featured more dancing, which was called for after all that lecturing. I personally liked the fact that Jackson's music was remixed with electronic beats giving it all new, "clubby" look & feel. That just goes to show how universal and versatile Jackson's music is and that is why we all were there for. The music continues to live on, even if the man himself has gone.

Of all the different speakers and performers, the best bits were a very personal declaration of love for Michael Jackson from a guy, who re-performed a Jackson inspired song he'd written as a kid. He still had the C-casette from those days with the original on it. And when they had the tape on playing an interview with a Finnish MJ lookalike, where he was talking about the abuse he gets when he's in character and dressed up. You get a harrowing sense of what it must be like when you've become a public figure for the people to rip apart. Maybe even a sense of what life must've been like for Michael? This is sad considering what he died of in the end.

The seminar ends with a silent moment respecting Michael and by this point it has become very clear just how much of an icon MJ is. The finishing song written by Michael's sister Janet Jackson leaves the audience with a spiritual feeling and injects a little bit of, what Michael Jackson essentially was about, hope, into us. This is exactly what we need in today's dystopia. And this is why Michael continues to inspire so many of us.


Thursday 28 May 2015

Meltwater & Digitalist: The Future of Communications

Yesterday I was lucky to be included in a bunch of people participating in an event organized by Meltwater and Digitalist. It was a morning seminar called The Future of Communications and it featured several speakers at Bio Rex, Helsinki. I will now summarize and evaluate the main points of three very different speakers.



Mikael Jungner is a well known public character in Finland for both his professional and private life. Whilst he's a very confident presenter, the content of his speech left much to desire for. Mainly due to incoherency and jumping from point to point with no apparent logic. The basic gist was that the business environment has changed drastically and what's required of companies now is agility, involvement (both organization members and customers) and new strategic thinking in that what works is being tested on the market first, as opposed to putting something out there and concluding whether it worked or not afterwards.

I can't really agree with the above generalization, because I don't see that nearly all companies have gone or will go the way Junger envisioned. It simply works for some type of products (mainly consumer) and for others not so (industrial), but that's not to say that all companies shouldn't think about finding a way to apply the values (agility, involvement, new strategy) put forward here.



Next up was Niklas de Besche, the Executive Director of Meltwater in Sweden giving an overview of marketing communication from Meltwater point of view. Meltwater was not know to me in advance (I'm ashamed to admit), but now I'm all the more wiser. Meltwater offers real-time analytics as to what's happening to brands on the internet, how customers behave and what's trending to enable companies to take real-time action to these factors. The main point being that media intelligence has become strategic and this is where marketing communications can move from being a mere support function to a truly value-adding business partner.



The third speaker of the day, Elina Ämmälä from Aalto University, was by far the favourite of mine. She delivered with coherence and interesting themes for the future of communications. To summarize, the communication profession is moving from content production to enabling communication through offering tools and channels for it. This means that communications cannot be controlled, traditional power structures are eroding and organizations no longer stand somewhere up the hill as authorities, but are on the same level with all the communicators out there. It's important to realize that an organization exists in communications and the whole existence of corporate life effectively happens through interaction. She also shed light onto some new and exciting product innovations coming through research conducted at Aalto University. Apparently the next big thing might be haptic devices in corporating different senses into product experiences!

Wednesday 29 April 2015

Promotional Cultures (Davis, Aeron 2010)

Aeron Davis' book Promotional Cultures (2010) is one of the books for my last exam in just less than a week. It's an easy read without long sentence structures so familiar to most academic books and at first, it seems to be stating the obvious that we us consumers already know.

Davis explains the history of the rise of promotional activities to coincide with the industrialization of societies and draws on familiar examples from the fashion and film industries to demonstrate how it has become vital to its functioning. This includes top fashion designers designing affordable lines to global chains like H&M or the selling of McDonald's fast food with plastic toy characters from films aimed at children. In many cases, the side products are taking in much more revenue than the cultural text itself.

...but this we already know fully well, so what's new? Davis also covers the use of promotional activities in politics and in civil society, and considering that we've just gone through the parliament elections here in Finland, that makes it the more interesting part of the book.

Some say that promotional activities have increased communication between citizenry and politics (e.g thanks to internet, much more government data is easily available to people), whilst others argue that it has been used to divert the public's attention and to manage public opinion (e.g the infamous weapons of mass destruction and the Bush Administration in the US/New Labour in the UK). Both true to a large extent, I'm sure.

An interesting question relating to the mediatization of societies in general is how it impacts politics. Effectively, since much of what is going is now mediated to us via social media or the more traditional channels, how does it impact political content and communications? Not in a good way, if one talks about simplifying complex issues or the forever diminishing attention span of the typical media consumer, but hey, if more people are aware of the political issues brought to the attention of media than ever before, is it such a bad thing after all? One can only wonder.

In the chapter concerning the recipients of the promotional activity (audiences) Davis' book draws on familiar fellows: Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding, Barthes' mythic signs, Hebdige's bricolage and Bordieu's habitus to name a few. If one is already familiar with these concepts, the book makes an easy-going read with the pages just swooshing by. In addition, Davis backs his stuff up with loads of statistics on just about anything, which is great for the argument but a bit hard to take in, when it's written down (and not put in a table, for example).


Tuesday 14 April 2015

Organization Theory (Hatch, Mary 2006)

Enough of the cat videos and here I go again with theory! In preparation to my next exam in May, I'm getting familiar with ways to approach researching an organization from mainly three theoretical frame works: modern, symbolic and post-modern.



There's no doubt in my mind that all these approaches are at work at any given organization. Whilst the modern way of measuring an organization through facts provides concrete knowledge about an organization, every organization at least tries to stand for something in a way of symbolizing the values it has chosen to represent. Take Fazer as an example for an organization, which would have to be tightly measured due to producing foodstuffs in a manufacturing environment while, at the same time, being an organization which is perceived to be classy and refined. One point to note here, though, is to separate the marketing of the products from the company specific organizational culture, which is, of course, hard to assess from the outside and that is where research comes into the picture.

Postmodern paradigm looks at things like power and control critically via methods of deconstruction and precisely because of that, it is difficult to see how it would prove to be useful to the organizations themselves. I mean it's all very well pointing out the inequality within an organization, but who can and truly wants to do something about it? There are, however, some tones of postmodernity which have found their way into the public discourse. Take the discussion over gender quotas in listed companies for an example. Or looking at things from an different angle, Google, which has become one of the global conglomerates in commodifying information.

I believe that to be successful, an organization has to work on several levels, not just one. The production and the processes have to be optimized, the organization has to speak to people, both employees and customers, in symbolic values (trustworthy, forward-thinking and so on), but every organization can also be critically evaluated using the concepts of gender, power and such.

With this in mind, I will continue reading for my final test of the spring...

Monday 23 March 2015

Where do all the cat videos come from?


Cute cat videos that bring comfort to our otherwise brutal and hectic lives are everywhere. But where do they actually come from?

Bisness on social media is all about the clicks, so we need a never-ending supply of content that generate those. It is websites such as Viralnova and Fiidi who provide us with, what I'd like call, the spectacle of the obscure. Take an example from Tadar Sauce, the Grumpy Cat, who has been made famous through social media. He is that weird downward mouthed cat you might know.  

The spectacle of the obscure brings with it the chance to gawp at things which are slightly peculiar, a bit nuts and most definitely crazy as hell. Examples include a squirrel eating civilized with a fork and 25 freaky islands of the world!

What's important to note, though, is that in the world before web 2.0 and its gadgets, this kind of content would've never made it over the threshold of the traditional media like television and the newspapers. What has changed is that we're now endlessly consuming content through our mobile devices, and cat videos and the like is what we're being fed.

This losely reminds me of the concept of "the society of spectacle" that I came across on one of last autumn's uni courses. Many (media) theorists, such as Baudrillard and Focault, indicate that masses (audiences) share some kind of collective conscientiousness through media contents. In other words, media content is in a way a representation of the society at large to itself. This begs the question: is the collective space that exists in social media channels, for example, just a depressing way of dumbing down the receiver with cute cats?

Put in that light, watching cute cat videos doesn't seem such a delightful thing, but they're fun. And that is all that counts on a Monday with crappy weather like it is here in Helsinki today. Funny cat memes shall keep me warm in the winter backlash we're experiencing here!


Wednesday 11 March 2015

How to Blog, That Is The Question!

This week I decided to check what kind of media related blogs there are, aside from the great Media Hawk of course, and boy oh boy did I learn a lot!


Googling the words "media bloggers" brings up results mainly from the U.S and they mainly concern marketing on social media. I was amazed as to how accessible information rich and professional they are.

Take Peg Fitzpatrick for one of the best examples. Her website not only looks good, but also covers a whole array of issues relating to content creation and brand identity on social media. Rebekah Radice is an equally good contributor giving loads of handy advice on social strategies.

There are also blogs more specialized in niche topics such as visual content, like the Australian Socially Sorted, or improving your ranking in Google search results from Buffer Social.

Strangely enough I wasn't able to find any European counterparts (well, in English anyway), at least not with the time I had to use for the search. The Media Blog from UK deals with mainly the politically motivated shenanigans of the British media landscape.

The lessons learnt for the Media Hawk:

1. Get strategic - plan more, be more topic specific

2. Invest to visual - create more visual elements

3. Cross Platforms - utilize other platforms

Friday 20 February 2015

Photojournalism - Now You Get It

When reading or listening to the news at more or less any given time, and realizing the world is basically as horrid as ever, still the events of the world can seem a bit intangible through text only. What one reads is left, not necessarily vague, since the things described in a context of, say, a war, are usually extremely graphic, but the effect is nevertheless distant. Something terrible happening over there, more injustices going around here...take Ukraine, Syria or the forever ongoing bashing of Palestine as current examples. But to someone who can't even begin to understand those kinds of environments, the intended message of a textual item is not received. Not really.

And that's when I have great respect for photojournalist, who are able to translate the human experience of these inhuman conditions to the recipient and convey something by far emotionally stronger than just reading a description of happenings in a magazine or events in a newspaper. Being in the middle of revising for my next exam and looking to relax for a while, I checked what kind of photo journalistic sites I could find for this week's post in The Media Hawk.

Here's a couple that feature beautiful and effective photographic stories of the word on versatile topics:

FOTO8

Great Photojournalism


Tuesday 3 February 2015

Evaluate and Improve - Guide to Communication Metrics (Juholin 2010)

Elisa Juholin has written a timely book on how to measure and improve communication within a corporate and business environment. I will now jot down a couple of thoughts that reading this book evoked in me to summarize the main points of it.

The first interesting point that Evaluate and Improve - Guide to Communication Metrics (Arvioi ja paranna! Viestinnän mittaamisen opas, 2010)  starts off with is how the landscape of communications has changed from the process like thinking of (uninterrupted) information flows to the 2.0 digital nation, where we create meaning for ourselves through participation and share information freely. In today's working environment concerning communications it is important to try to combine the need for the effectiveness and accountability of communication with the new shades of self-expression and sociability.

To conduct a basic assessment of communications is common sense: start by evaluating your input -  are we doing the right things with the resources we have?, consider your output - did we manage to do what we set out to do (numerical targets)?, how about the outcome of communicating -  did our communication achieve the desired impact (qualitative targets)? and finally the outflow - what are the (long-term) effects of our communications? Depending on context, there is a different answer to these questions.

Whilst Juholin places a lot of emphasis on making communications an area to be taken seriously by setting up metrics which are measurable in money. I liked her idea of moving from ROI (return on investment) to ROC (return on communication, because some of communications' impact is immaterial and hard to define in value. Take reputation, for example. KPIs (key performance indicators) are many, again depending on context, and they
can variate from the number of clicks or increase in sales when launching an advertising campaign in social media to the number of job applicants to a company or increase/decrease in work satisfaction after a change in an organization, to name a few. The problem with setting up these metrics is, of course, the fact that there are factors other than communications activities playing a part in the formation of them. Despite an awesome presence in the media, an initiative can fail miserably due to large scale economic factors or other "force major" external circumstances.

Besides giving the reader concrete tools for evaluating and improving communications activities and process as well as for formulating communications metrics and collecting information from an organization or a "field", Juholin makes a good point regarding (communications) trainings that companies organize and the feedback that they collect from them; is the immediate feedback concerning the quality of the training/trainer really what we're looking for or should we really be asking what kind of an impact the earning has had in the environment the person functions? I think this is the kind of "long sight" we need to know that what we do at work actually is worth while.
 
In any case, whether working in a commercial advertising environment, civil association of some description or in a corporate organization, Juholin's Evaluate and Improve! is a good read for doing and improving things in practice. A far cry from the conceptual bullshit of the world of academia, which normally has nothing to do with the real life.

Monday 2 February 2015

Back on the horse with Jonathan Hobin

It's been long enough since my last blog post and it's time to get back on the horse now. The end of 2014 was mostly consumed by completing assignments for my university courses and unfortunately that didn't allow any time for blogging. That and the "small" matter of my daughter... The new year has started rather good with the course grades all coming in at 4 (on the scale of 1 to 5) for which I'm really pleased as I can give myself credit for doing everything that I set my mind to, and doing it well, whilst looking after and raising a small child. Well done me, even if I say so myself!

One of my favourite freebie publications in Helsinki is without a doubt Six Degrees magazine. It never fails to entertain and I always read the column of David Brown, which always has poignant points about our culture in the eyes of an originally non-native.

What caught my eye in the January's edition of Six Degrees though, was the interview with Photographer Jonathan Hobin, whose exhibition "In The Playroom" has just closed at the Finnish Photography Museum. Gutted! Absolutely gutted that I didn't make it there on time, as this is the kind of photography that inspires me.



In his interview Jonathan Hobin explains that it is his way of exploring our society and attempting to show what the kids of current times learn from it through the act of play. His topics deal mainly with violence in its different forms and the different narratives surrounding that. Like the good cop-bad cop set up witnessed widely in our cultural texts, for example. Jonathan says that when staging his settings the kids get it straight away: "You want me to kill that person? No problem". So you see, the concept is familiar from very early on.


Jonathan encounters a lot of critique towards his work when people question his motives to go into the last sanctuary of innocence, the childhood, but he hopes for a proper discussion on what our "problem" is and finding out if there's something we can do about it. Well, I think that it's an topic that should definitely be looked at and one that I will get in touch with through following my child learning the rules of play of our society in the years to come. And should I ever have a second chance of checking out Jonathan Hobin's work, I will most certainly use it!