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dialogue, Hakola and Hiila encourage content strategists to analyze their own content with ROT-analysis (redundant, outdated, trivial) with which one mechanically assesses each piece of their content rating it as per the three given categories.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.

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?

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.

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!

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).

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...

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!

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

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

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.

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!

Selfie licking and the life in the media

Being crazy busy preparing for my first exam on Monday, which hopefully will earn me my first 5 study points, I've not been able to write that much lately, but this morning I'm thinking about the social conventions surrounding social media, where, I've come to the conclusion, being critical of anyone or anything is a taboo.

The unwritten rule of Facebook is that if you don't have anything good to say, don't say it all. Is this like it should be or should we be able to take a little critique, too? One thing is for sure, the arenas of social media full of cute cat videos are a far cry from the idea of these public places being (virtual) stages for advocating democracy and intelligent conversation that Jurgen Habermas was harbouring in his mind. Quite simply: people just don't wanna know.

Instead, people, especially women, post selfies to receive that self-affirmation in the form of positive comments of admiration from their peers over and over again. According to an article from Huffington Post on a study published in an online journal Psychology of Popular Media Culture the peers do, however, prefer a person who portrays herself in a slightly less provocative way rating her "prettier, more likely to be a good friend, and more competent". To put it frankly: people lie.

From the point of view media research and theory, it's interesting note how the "subject" of media has changed over the course of time. Back in the days (1930s) of the sociological starting point of Karl Lazarsfeld and his fellow researchers was to assume that the media audience was at the receiving end of influences from the media content, then along came the Frankfurt School who claimed that we were (unjustly) formed in the media texts to the advantage of the scary Capitalist, but I claim that these days our selves live through the media. So it's not like the lefties say that we're predetermined by ideology or that we're just helpless receivers of intended messages, but that the human life has taken form through the media in that we live in the media nowadays. We can be more of whatever we want to be online than we can outside it. People know what we're doing through Facebook without even being there.

To conclude: Whilst the Habermassian ideal still hasn't realized itself and the narcissistic self is on a digital rampage, we now have two co-existing realities (material/electronic) to manage and that is a mine field of research topics to be discovered!

Should a Disaster Strike...

When human tragedy strikes and somebody ends up committing a horrific act, such as woman crashes a car into a bus killing her children on Sunday in the North East of Finland, the news media always have a field day. Finally something happens and there are plenty of things to write about. This is naturally problematic from the perspective of the individuals whom are concerned with the real and actual events and their privacy. Through bits of available information, like what Ilta-Sanomat (Finland's biggest daily yellow press) has been able to put together on the case, is constructed a narrative of sad, unfortunate events created by a very sad,unfortunate person. And yet, it doesn't help us to understand it any better, so the question to ask is, is it justifiable to publish all this information?

Finland's Council for Mass Media (CMM) in its guidelines for journalists states that "highly delicate matters concerning people's personal lives" should not be shared without their consent, especially concerning minors, but the dirty laundry is often being washed at full speed already, taking this piece related to this horrific intentional car crash from another daily in Finland, Iltalehti, as an example. The CMM guidelines also emphasize the significance as an issue concerning the society as a whole, when determining the rights of privacy. Well, in Finland it typically seems to be important to ask the question "whose fault is this?" To know which part of the social system failed.

Besides the aspects of personal privacy and interpreting societal significance, over time disaster reporting on "iconic traumas", such as the 9/11, take on a life of their own. They become the tales of our times to explain why the world is the way it is. The antagonistic storyline of the struggle between the West and the Middle East has been repeated in countless films and the public anxiety created by potential terrorism has fully been utilized by governing bodies to introduce further measures of control in society.

Management Practices in Finland (2008)

Management Practices in Finland (Johtamisopit Suomessa, 2008) by Helen Seeck doesn't seemingly have much to do with media. However, spotting it on the reading list for my open university courses, I decided to have a look at it because I'm keen to focus on what will be useful to me  in practical working life.

Management Practices in Finland includes thorough coverage on five management paradigms ranging from the historical days of Taylorism and the scientific management  practices to the current day discourse on innovation. In between, there are the alternative views from the humanistic and cultural schools of thought as well as a point of view of the structural analysis approach.

The basic idea behind all of these paradigms is how to best manage an organization as a result of their research into whatever any of them happen to emphasize. The scientific management paid attention to the work tasks and the processes conducting the work was tied to, being clearly a product of its time (mass production). The humanistic school naturally saw well functioning human relations as a key to success, where as the cultural strand emphasized organizational cultures. What's more of today's world are the last two of Seeck's management paradigms; the structural analysis meaning constant evaluation and renewal of the organizational structure and the need for continuous innovation to compete on the market. 

So, so far nothing new. Obviously all of these paradigms have something to offer and all of them are in existence in any given organization and/or company. I would go as far as saying that Seeck's book verges on being boring. Whilst certainly academically convincing, it just functions as a good source for references if you're looking for names and research in any of these topic areas. What's missing, in my opinion, are the real life examples of organizations which have either successfully or unsuccessfully applied these paradigms and the research into what kind of results they have yielded with placing emphasis on specific matters, say human relations exclusively. 

That said, I did enjoy (skip) reading Management Practices in Finland, probably because I haven't read that much management related material before. It provides a thorough overview of the different management trends over the recent decades and in the final chapter on innovation, finally a pragmatic approach is adopted, when Seeck outlines some practical guidance for achieving an innovative working environment that her own research has produced.

The Lego War

Coming across an alternative news platform the VICE News, which provides socially aware information under the headings of Environment, War & Conflict and so on for the "connected generation", I took notice of an interesting piece on how Lego has ended its partnership with Shell due to consumer pressure that stems from the opposition to Shell's oil drilling activities in the Arctic Region.

Besides the fact that this is a clear example of consumer impact and how it has been achieved via spreading content via social media, the most compelling thing about it is that the Youtube video "Everything is NOT Awesome" Greenpeace made is not of true real life material. It's a cleverly targeted animation made with Legos of events yet to come, which is successful in not only delivering the message but with also delivering the end result; an actual change in corporate relations for the benefit of the environment.

What's great about the Greenpeace animation, too, is that it's not based on something that has already happened, which I think people find empowering. I remember seeing the horrendous images of the so-called BP oil disaster in 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico, which is referred to by Wikipedia as the world's largest marine oil spill accident so far, and whilst they made me feel sick to my stomach I ended up doing nothing, because after all, there was nothing to be done at that point. It was just easier to shut the browser done and move onto topics a lot more pleasant. What Greenpeace achieved with their Lego animation is "shareable" online content which has led to something that makes a difference.

The Like Economy

Having set myself on a somewhat solid ground in terms of present day theoretical framework with the little help from Manuel Castells (see my previous post), I was delighted to find a practical guide to the world social media and e-commerce on a trip to my local library. “The Like Economy” (Tykkäämistalous, 2012) was written by two Finnish guys Petteri Kankkunen and Pär Österlund with the entrepreneurial take on the current media landscape in mind.

The basic gist of their message is what Google's Country Manager for Finland Anni Ronkainen also says in Kymen Sanomat which is that companies must develop their e-commerce and mobile services, because that is where the business is and will be. Traditional places of consumption, like Stockmann, on the other hand, are gasping for oxygen like fish on dry ground.

Business on the web through social media channels is, in short, based on sharing. Whether that be sharing of a Groupon deal, sharing of product information or sharing of a poor review of service. That is a double ended sword in that whilst the social media enable simultaneous and cheap interaction with a large customer base, it can also ruin everything should vicious stories of bad experiences start running wild on the web.

Social capital is what Kankkunen and Österlund call the social networks of people through which there is endless potential to reach new prospects and equally the power of showing what our friends or like-minded people have purchased, thus convincing us that our money will be well spent. After all, we know these people and are likely to trust what they say.

Conducting successful e-commerce, however, requires so much more than simple transactions of trading. Presence in the social media means providing interesting content related to one's product or services free of charge. It means following up on what people say about you and getting back to them. Yes, even to the nasty ones. It means being omnipresent at all times.

Whilst the book authors offer many a tip on advocating commerce via social media channels and the book serves as a great starting point for anyone thinking about doing that, by now, some two years after the publishing of “The Like Economy”, everyone knows the stuff in principle. What remains difficult is the clever content production. Being creative is not easy.

Manuel Castells: Communication Power (2009)

What a better way to return to media studies after close enough to ten years than to read Manuel Castells' Communication Power (2009) in which he provides us with an overview of, what he has dubbed as, the Network Society. The Network Society is that of a techno-Marxist functioning principle, where the all-familiar divide between oppressors and the oppressed from the Marxist tradition exists in the form of inclusion/exclusion in the electric spider web that now surrounds us virtually at all corners of the world and to which we're connected through our mobile devices. As a curiosity to this, the World Bank declared on its website in 2012 that 75% of the earth inhabitants have access to a mobile phone.  What would be even more interesting to know or to calculate is the rate at which this coverage is growing on an annual basis.

Fortunately Castell's take on the labour market is more from today's world than the Marxist era's industrial time miseries. That take is more positive for those who participate in the production as self-programmable agents since they're the ones who effectively determine what is valuable, what is to be desired by us, to the rest of us. OK true, we live in a relative value economy, where commodities are exchanged for value and indeed those commodities need to be manufactured by some people. Those in generic labour do that, but they're reduced to hapless gaming chips to be spat on by global corporations whenever the advancements of digitalization has erased their work tasks excluding them from the System. Well, partially at least.

I guess you could say then that the new ruling class doesn't just own (in the sense of owning, say, a shoe factory in Britain in the Victorian times), it designs (and then it goes out to buy things and owns them). The designer of things create that relativism in the value and therefore express power over the rest of us. This power is in existence through, what Castells calls, the Network Enterprise which I see iconic companies of our times like Google and Facebook to be, as they actively direct our minds and construct the world to us.

Another bone that Castells' throws us relates to the issue of influence over audiences. According to Castells, audiences interactively partake in the production of meaning. Thus, in the digital age, the oppressor is schizophrenically also the oppressed, as we all are, first and foremost, the consumers of commodities regardless of our status in employment. The world view on offer here is nice, I like it. Simple enough to recognize and complicated enough to apply to our multi-layered realities of existence. And though we've not escaped the cruelties of the free market that Marx couldn't have even dreamt of, we can still have an impact to what meaning we give to things. Castells says that “meaning determines action so communicating meaning becomes the source of social power” and convinces me to believe there's room for improving the world through that.