How to market?

Being an intern at the creative agency gives a good inside look at the marketing and advertising process through use of the media. Today besides websites, banners, posters, video commercials, promo events and marketing plans company’s reputation heavily depends on social media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Vines and Instagram. Social networks and picture/video sharing websites create certain connection between companies. So far I’ve seen a couple different ways of relating product to the customer: show product in use by the client and make product have its own character and personality. To explain these two concepts I want to use examples of the products we advertise at the company I’m currently interning at. For a couple of our clients – Dunking Donuts and Argus (craft beer brewery in downtown Chicago) - we are doing all sorts of Facebook posts and Vine videos. These use of a social media helps to grow popularity of the brands and be closer to consumers. However, we choose a different approach to represent these products to the customer. For Dunking Donuts we make our posts and vines look like they were made by consumers themselves. For example, we make picture of a donut and writing utilities somewhere on the table making it look like some office worker has left it there, shot a quick picture of that and posted it on Facebook during the afternoon coffee break. On the other hand, for Argus, we give its beer a personality and certain character. For instance, bottles of vine are playing with the first snow in the winter or walk downtown Chicago while having a great time being a “Chicago beer that you should be drinking”. These different approaches work well because they target two complete different groups of potential customers and clients. Dunking Donuts is targeted at the office workers or college students that make their hard working days a bit sweeter with a fresh donut and a cup of coffee as they are doing a daily routine, while brutal Argus beer demonstrates a character of the real Chicagoan for people to relax after the long week on a Friday night.

Intenret - Happiness?

The World Internet Report of 2013 summarizes all of the recent changes that have been happened in certain countries from all over the world. This report, however, touches upon another topic that interested me personally. According to the article one of the findings proclaim s that internet uses tend to be happier than non-users of the web. I found it interesting due the argument affirming connection between happiness of a human and once use of internet. First question that came to my mind is “how do you measure happiness of a person?”; is there an accurate way to determine a happiness level? Alright, let’s say there is a way that relatively accurate identifies the level of happiness of a human. And yet, how can we draw a firm relationship between use of an internet and how happy people feel themselves? I personally think that assumption such as that internet makes its users happier is very vague. There is an enormous amount of factors that contribute to the happiness level of a human. Most likely non-users of internet are complaining on their life simply because of their lack of income or education level. Also, older generation that form the largest percent of non-internet users tend to complain on their life the most, which makes them the unhappiest segment of the population. Content streaming on-line can easily influence people’s life, however a presence of the internet itself should barely affect someone’s happiness level.

Google - new addiction?

Google indeed is a big part of our life today. It’s got almost anything you can imagine, when it comes to the internet-related services and products. If we need to find operations hours of anything we go to Google. To find a way to a new address we go to Google. To make a free phone call within United States we go to Google. To translate or spell check a word we go to Google. You don’t know something or make a bet on a news and your “helpful” friends would shout “Just Google it!” right the way. Are we addicted to Google? Although, it almost seems as we can’t do anything on-line without Google, my opinion is that we are not addicted to Google at all. Internet users and businesses such as other search engines say that Google is or may become a sort of Monopoly in the nearest future. I honestly think that as long as there other search engines such as Bing, Yahoo, Ask and dozens of others we have choice of using any other than Google and therefore there is no monopoly. We use Google because it’s just more comfortable for using with its simple and intuitive layout, it’s the fastest to give you search results while you still typing the word in the search text area, and it’s relatively safe by blocking dangerous content out of its search results’ list. We are not addicted; we are just using what’s the best out there. Competitors just have to work hard now to come up with something more reliable and convenient to use for the majority of population to switch to their product. Power that Google has is deserved and reasonable, Google doesn’t suppress any other search engine by some kind of unfair game; at least I naively believe so. Google simple does its job the best and people like and use it.

Thoughts about the interview with Scott Rosenberg Bloggerson Blogging

What do English/ History/ Theatre majors have to do with computers, web programming or software engineering? I found it personally very interesting that journalist, Scott Rosenberg, with BA in English and history from Harvard wrote the entire book about the software engineering and, more than that, now he writes code himself and creates his own web sites. Today, computers and more particularly World Wide Web play such a huge role in modern society that eventually it forces people with non-computer related education start to learn code and wonder about process of website development. Today, all media seems to be revolving around on-line communities. Writers and journalists start to blog using computers and barely take their pen or pencil to write something on the piece of paper. This tendency seem both scary, and exciting to me. On the one hand it’s frightening that world has been changing so much giving no clue where these changes will take us, however, I think, there is a big chance of world becoming a much better place after all of the innovations in fields like sciences and engineering in the nearest future. I think that our necessity in computers and technologies today forces us to get familiar with them and as a result become more intelligent, innovative and creative people.

Another, completely different from the previous, but not less interesting issue being touched by Rosenberg is the “chess game” in blogging. In his interview he says “Increasingly I see ‘Let's post one side of the story and see if that flushes out the other guys.’ I'm not saying it's unethical; maybe it's even more Web-native and transparent. But it leaves me wondering, when I read a post, ‘Is this something the writer believes to be true? Or is it the opening move in a chess game?" I was not certain about this tactic being used in order to create news in the media. I knew that there are a lot of discrepancies between different media sources. However, I didn’t have a clue that some of the “fake” news are intended only for provoking actions from another source of media. Lesson being learned – do not trust all of the news/blog/articles being posted on the web.