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.