Final Session: Looking at Impact of New Media Technologies on Marketing.

For marketers, last decade has ushered in the largest change in the media/marketing space as compared to previous decades. This is partially due to technological changes, but much more so because of changes in people’s behavior in response to these technologies. These changes have also affected marketers and their work and careers in big ways. Biggest change has been the explosion in new channels to connect with consumers and marketers’ expertise in these platforms (using them, evaluating them, etc.) is now not as sophisticated as with traditional “advertising” platforms.

Google, Twitter and MySpace panelists:

Media 1.0 was very disruptive ads that took you out of the activity that you were doing. Media 2.0 improves in this by engaging and entertaining at the same time (serving ads and brands while you deliver content).

With Twitter, they found that people were not using their technology directly for advertisements, but rather to come in to a customer service relationship (eg. Technical support conversations). Lesson: ‘the more genuine and human an organization looks, the better the relationship’.

Part 3: Interview with Paula Kerger – CEO of PBS

How has new media impacted traditional broadcasters like PBS?
• Audience for TV portion has declined – no longer a monopoly for a few broadcasting stations.
• Now have multiple channels to distribute your content – TV, web, on-demand. This can be good b/c you can distribute it virally and through other means.
• Much of their content is “evergreen” - can sit around for long time and still have demand.
• Television audience: above 50. Online audience: under 35.
• People don’t consume content through multiple channels. Rather, it is different demographics that are split across different channels (older people on TV, younger people primarily through web, etc.).
• Online content: creating a different experience compared to television. Allows users to click through different pieces of a story rather than presenting a linear stream of content.
• Challenge for news organization: interviewees don’t know where their content will be used (in some specific program or as content in some other challenge), which creates challenges when getting them to acquiesce to providing interviews or insight.

The Social Media Phenomenon: Branding Success (Panel Discussion with members of Starbucks, Best Buy, Samsung)

Companies (like Starbucks with MyStarbucks) using customer generated ideas to drive how they create and deliver products. Got tens of thousands of ideas through a social networking approach to getting customer ideas, a small number of which were actually implemented in stores. Also used social networks as a way to communicate with customers about corporate priorities.

Best Buy: using twitter as a forum for customers to come and ask questions for both sales and support.

Samsung: social media no longer a PC phenomenon, but now a phenomenon that is driven by different types of devices (televisions, mobile phones, etc.).

Organizational changes theme: need to put new human resources in place to handle social networking work aimed at taking advantage of these new platforms. Need to have personnel who participate actively (for support, participating in user discussions, etc.).

Hi Everyone,

I had a chance to attend the Economist magazine's Media Convergence Forum. It was primarily geared towards a marketing audience, but contained a lot of useful information relevant to education technologies (especially personalizing content for the learner).

I'll post several entries from different sessions that I thought were useful for the lab's work.

Part1: Understanding Consumer Behavior: The Moment of Truth

This session focuses on strategies that different firms are using to understand consumer behavior and customize sales strategies accordingly. There seem to be three schools of thought:

- Minimial “high tech” approach that emphasizes using people’s feedback or observations to drive the process of understanding the consumer.
- A “high tech” approach that uses statistics and artificial intelligence to mine consumer data
- An approach that is hybrid.

Where has this worked and what have been the results?

Here's an interesting article from the NYTimes about digital immigrants - people who are not familiar with the virtual space from childhood and who often rely on a younger generation for things like help with using facebook effectively. This article seems to break down internet savvy along another demographic in the same way Ting's recent post highlights class differences.

It would be interesting to think about how one could tailor online tools and environments to different subpopulations more effectively. For example, I wonder what such insights mean for tools like NetPosse and the article recommendation work we're doing in D&R - how would we change the heuristics for these tools to use generational or socioeconomic factors in guiding users? Would there be practical barriers to such approaches? I can already think of some ethical barriers that may come up.

Here's an opportunity that doesn't come along every day: reimagining the future of online learning environments. Chingfu, Hui Soo and I decided to build upon some classic work here at the Edlab as well as our experience with LMS's like Moodle to initiate a project around new online learning environments. Our 2.5 page proposal is attached and we would love your feedback. With all the new Web 2.0 concepts that have popped up, this is a really opportune time to think about how online learning systems can involve. You can participate in the following ways:

- Give us direct feedback on the proposal and what we intend to accomplish this semester (which is all the implementation stuff in the proposal).
- Let us know if you're interested in participating more regularly in any parts of the project. We would especially love to get people involved who have experience with UI and interaction design as well as those with some research background relevant to online education.

NYTimes is sure picking up on the obvious ... higher ed just costs too much :). After everyone is done bashing healthcare, it seems education could be next in terms of a collective realization about "why does this cost so much, and even more next year?".

This certainly helps make the case for new models like online education and new forms of credentialing that don't end up costing an arm and a leg. More generally, I'm hoping people use this to return innovation in education to a more sensible pattern: one where new tools and technologies actually help reduce the cost of attending school (as opposed to raising it).

Panel Session: Advice on setting up social platforms for school environments

o What lessons for someone who wants to change platforms, try a new social technology and work within the confines of a school administration.
+ Decision to go to Elgg at Harvard Extension class --> need for portfolios and lack of support for it on a traditional LMS motivated adoption. When you want to try something, do it small scale and see if it works.
+ Think about what will get people hooked on to a particular platform?
o What is the right technology strategy in terms of deploying in the school
+ Depends on technical staff inside of the school --> public schools usually don't have high technical staff inside.
+ Want as much as possible to go down a path where you own the data.
+ Try to look for things that you can do initially yourself and try to do them to show success. Especially if IT resources are limited.

Ning Session

* What is Ning
o Tools are ever-changing and we have to be willing to adapt to and adopt to new tools that are constantly emerging.
o You create a group and your identity changes to apply to the group that you are in. You create a social group that is specifically tailored to a particular use and manage it as you like. Your identity and preferences can then also be tailored to each different group.
o The privacy and enforcement issue comes up again - specific Ning policies discussed about removing offensive content and what age groups it is targeted to.
* So What?
o Teacher and administrator create public Ning group where students sign up and then the group is made private so that approval doesn't need to be made for each individual student.
o "We the People" Ning Group -- people join as if they're individuals in history and play that role.
+ Front page is public, but the rest of the page is private.

Jo, Arianna and I are attending a unique conference on social networking in education . We'll be blogging about it all day, so look out for updates.

Below are some notes from an initial session in the morning. The focus was on looking at different social networks, comparing their benefits and drawbacks, and providing heuristics for different organizations or groups to pick a social networking platform.

# Criteria for comparing platforms: extensibility, popularity, trustworthiness, cost of startup, system integration, ease of setup, etc.
# Ultimately, the value of these depend on the type of use you expect:

* Political party --> popularity, cost, features,
* University --> features, trust, system integration (link to other university systems).

# When there are trade-offs, you want to optimize for the student experience.
# Big problems with social tools: adoption is very low. Need to address this with good student experience and strategy for building up the network.