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.