As briefly discussed in my presentation, I used a variety of marketing activities to promote my blog– Mid-South Coonhounds. I started out by creating a Facebook page and a Twitter account for my blog. These two sites were live after I had around 4-5 posts, so I immediately started linking my blog pages to these accounts for exposure. After doing so, I  invited friends from my personal Facebook page to my Mid-South Coonhounds Facebook page. I got 28 likes from that, mostly from friends of mine who have dogs. Then I basically did the same thing with Twitter. I started following friends of mine who I thought might be interested in my blog. I didn’t get any follow backs from that. So I started doing searches on both Twitter and Facebook for users and groups that were talking about coonhounds as well as local pet adoption agencies and vet clinics. I found several groups on Facebook for coonhounds, and I joined them under my Mid-South Coonhounds Facebook page as well as my personal Facebook page. After interacting and promoting my page on the group pages, I got 21 additional likes on my page. Most importantly though, engagement increased on the Mid-South Coonhound Facebook page which featured blog posts and additional coonhound related posts and information. Below is a brief summary of all Facebook interaction on my 35 posts.

• Cover Photo- 1 like
• Frankenhound- 1 like, 2 comments
• Combating and Upset Stomach- 1 like, 1 comment
• Maddie Book Tour- 2 likes
• Coonhound Ghost Video- 1 like, 1 comment
• National Dog Show- 1 like
• Starry Nights- 2 likes
• Teaser- 2 likes
• Coonhound Puppies Video- 1 like
• Maple Photo Album- 5 likes, 1 comment
• Annabelle Photo Album- 1 like
• Laundry Question- 3 likes, 3 comments
• Maple Photo- 3 likes, 2 comments
• Santa Paws Village- 1 like
• Profile Picture- 1 like
• Buster Photo- 1 like
• Maple Photo- 1 like
• General Comments- 1

You can visit my blog pages for my project using the links below. Thanks!

• Mid-South Coonhounds Blog
• Mid-South Coonhounds Facebook
• Mid-South Coonhounds Twitter

Before this class, I could have cared less about editing a Wikipedia article or writing a blog. But today, I see the value in both.

For one thing, I’ve always been thankful that Wikipedia exists. Without it, I would probably have no clue where to start with my research papers, and I would be lost if I had to look something up quickly on my smartphone. But being a content creator and editor of an article (a produser) is a completely different thing. I felt massive responsibility to provide accurate, unbiased, and complete information about my topic. However, I knew that anyone could easily come into my article and alter it for better or for worse. I have yet to see any major changes to my article, which leaves me feeling a little weird about the whole foundation of Wikipedia. Obviously, it works on a large scale, but maybe for smaller subjects, it doesn’t really get the job done in regards to building a collective intelligence. Nevertheless, I do understand how important and valuable a website like this can be. I think we read it earlier in the semester, but Clay Shirky’s idea of cognitive surplus being used for good via social media really made this entire concept stand out for me.

As for writing a blog, I have openly admitted that I have been the owner of a few blogs in the past that I tended to neglect and at some point in time left hanging in the middle of cyberspace. Blogs are another creation of the Internet that I am thankful for, but I just personally haven’t been motivated to take advantage of. That’s why I opted to create two blogs this semester– one for this class and one for my social media theory class. The two blogs are completely different, and I think that has helped me find different voices for each of them and really focus on branding, positioning, and targeting specific audiences. I actually feel pretty good about my Media 2.0 blog at this stage. I’ve been more successful than I thought I could be. Though my numbers aren’t very high, I have been engaging with a lot of people especially on Facebook, which turned out to be the best avenue for attracting viewers. I haven’t had very much success with Twitter, but I am continuing to work on it. One problem that I still have though is feeling like what I’m writing is just a lot of hot air. I want my content to be great if it has my name on it, so I limited the number of posts I made to ones that I thought would be valuable to my audience. I plan on keeping this blog up as long as I still receive interest from what appears to be a thriving community on Facebook.

Last but not least, my favorite topic in this class has been the long tail. As I said before, this whole concept was one of those things where we all knew it existed, but we didn’t know what it was called. This really put a name on it, and I think this is going to play a pivotal role in the development of new businesses from now on. I actually took a class in entrepreneurial journalism last semester, and this concept would have been great to know in order to back up our chosen business model.

So as of now, I think I am pretty familiar with media 2.0 as discussed in this class, including peer production, open source software, the creative commons, 1,000 true fans, pro-ams, etc. This was a great course, and I have definitely learned a lot from it. Thank you!

The readings from this week have really made me think about new media’s role in politics. I actually thought about something we talked about in my other social media class earlier in the semester. We were basically questioning whether or not Twitter and other social media really lead to action for causes. In order to answer this question, though, I thought back to some basic principles that I learned in my advertising, marketing, and public relations courses. It is commonly taught that you can change a person’s awareness, attitude, and actions. However, making a person aware of something is a lot easier than changing or neutralizing a person’s attitude or getting him to actually do something. So taking that into consideration, I came to the conclusion that not everyone is going to be motivated enough to turn his online support into offline support. I do think some people convert their support for a cause online to offline, but I think that new media is best used for creating awareness of causes and potentially changing people’s attitudes. But achieving action is still going to be hard no matter what. I think this would hold true for the election as well. I mean, it’s one thing to like a candidate on Facebook or even tweet “#voteObama,” but unless you actually go out and vote, your support doesn’t convert from online to offline. The only thing that doing either of the two things above would possibly do is encourage someone else to vote either for or against Obama. One other reference that I thought about when reading this week was one of the papers that was presented at the social media conference I attended at Howard University. The paper looked social media in the 08 presidential election in relation to African American support online and offline. This study concluded that online support did not equal offline support. This was on a micro level though, so perhaps on a macro level it would. I haven’t ventured into any other research involving this, so I don’t know offhand. But regardless, I think new media is commonplace in politics now, but whether it is pivotal in motivating people to action is a different thing all itself.

As I mentioned in class earlier today, I believe that mass and niche media both fill different needs for people, so they will both continue to co-exist. I believe that it is in our human nature to want to feel connected with other people based on our generic interests, such as weather, sports, and popular music and movies. Mass media allow us to do this on a large scale. For instance, everyone has been able to talk to one another about Hurricane Sandy, even those of us that have no direct connection with the storm. We do this to feel a sense of community, a shared “social glue.” But on the opposite side of this are niche media. Niche media cater to our specific interests that might not be commonly shared by many other people that we know. For instance, I’ve been really into biking for the past two years. While the population of bike enthusiasts in Memphis has grown because of the Shelby Farms Greenline, this interest area still isn’t one that I could use to connect with nearly every single person walking down the street. So I am left with using niche media to connect with people who share my interest. Because of the availability of niches like this (which are fragmented), consumers like myself have become fragmented as well. This has created a problem for advertising-based businesses because advertisers no longer completely know where target audiences are and how to best reach them. In the readings, it is also mentioned that the traditional approaches to measuring audience attention no longer work in this era of new media, which is a key problem derived from fragmentation. But I think this disruption allows for a time of opportunity. There is now a definite need for new development and rethinking.

Is the Internet good or bad for the music industry?

This is the question that the Planet Money podcast posed. However, the hosts really left it unanswered.

It was obvious that the two music industry experts were not in favor of the Internet for musicians. Below are just a few of the problems they said musicians face because of the Internet.

• The Internet makes it so easy to steal music.
• It makes it incredibly hard to sell records.
• It devalues music.
• The Internet business model (referring to Coulton’s “business model”) cannot replicate huge success like record label artists.
• It can only work for niche groups.
• It will work for only a few people, not all.
• It’s easier for artists to make music and promote their products with a record label.

They basically said that Jonathan Coulton’s success was “the perfect storm” to rise to music success and fame on the Internet; he started making music for software engineers like himself who were avid Internet users. What it boiled down to was that Jonathan Coulton and his niche music was like a Snuggie: people didn’t know that they wanted it until they were given it.

But Coulton argued that this was not the case. He felt like the experts on the Planet Money podcast did not actually talk about his business model– make good music and sell it to people who want it. Coulton believes that his success is replicable. He owns his music 100%, and because of the Internet, it has allowed him to communicate with his public. He said that he can reach fewer people more directly, and that’s what’s so beneficial about using the Internet as a musician.

And I would have to agree. I don’t think that everyone can have a six figure income like Coulton, but I do think success on some level can be achieved by people who are dedicated to their work and reach the right target audience with their work. I don’t think that the record label is going to disappear anytime soon, but I do think the number of people who rise to music stardom through the Internet will undoubtedly increase.

I will be writing about The Gregory Brothers for the artist profile paper. Most of you probably know this group for its viral YouTube series, Auto-Tune the News, which featured the famous Bed Intruder video. The group has two YouTube channels: schmoyoho and The Gregory Brothers. The group is also on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and all four members have individual accounts as well. From what I have seen so far, the group makes money from songs on iTunes, live events, merchandise, advertising on YouTube, and donations. This group is somewhere between an Internet sensation and a mainstream band, as Bed Intruder landed the group on the Billboard Hot 100. The members have worked with mainstream artists as well, but they primarily became famous because of the group’s music/video distribution online.

For my Wikipedia project, I altered a stub article– Forehead Advertising. When I first found the article it included a definition of forehead advertising and a few sentences about its history. Basically, the post was nearly useless for anyone who wanted more information about this type of advertising.

Another major problem beyond the brevity of the article was the Wikipedia disclaimer at the top of the article. It stated, “A major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with its subject. It may require cleanup to comply with Wikipedia’s content policies, particularly neutral point of view. Please, discuss further on the talk page.”

So I looked back over the article, and I noticed that the “creator” of forehead advertising was the focus of the article entry. It turned out that the article was in fact written by the “creator” of forehead advertising as recorded on the history page of the article. This called for further exploration.

I did a lot of research on this topic, and I found out some interesting information, especially regarding forehead advertising’s origin.

First, forehead advertising started popping up around the same time in many different ways. This made finding the “creator” of forehead advertising challenging. But thanks to the Internet I was able to confirm what I believe to be the beginning of forehead advertising.

It turns out that the guy who posted the Forehead Advertising article on Wikipedia was one of the “creators” of forehead advertising. However, he failed to mention that he had a business partner who helped him with the creation of their business, Headvertise. I added this information to the article along with several famous instances of forehead advertising.

Although I did a lot of work on this article, I didn’t receive any feedback or edits. I just recently added the Forehead Advertising article to Wikipedia’s Advertising and Guerilla Marketing articles hoping that would attract more people to the article for collaboration. I think that this is just one of those instances where collaboration on a micro level might not be as significant as collaboration on a macro level.

I plan to watch my article beyond this project, especially now that I’ve added the link to  a few other pages. I am interested to see if any changes are made over a longer period of time. Hopefully, I will be able to post any changes made before the class ends this semester.

I just set up my blog for my Media 2.0 project– Mid-South Coonhounds. You can check it out here. I only have two posts as of now, but there will be more to come soon.

I am also working on another blog for my journalism class– Advertising Intermediaries. I’m using this one for part of my thesis research on Shazam for TV and Google Goggles + QR codes. You can check it out here.

The remainder of this week’s readings were mostly concerned with the new world of Free. Anderson states the following in chapter 8 of The Long Tail:

“So bottom line: Human attention is more expandable than money. The primary effect of the Long Tail is to shift our taste toward niches, but to the extent we’re more satisfied by what we’re finding, we may well consume more of it. We just won’t necessarily pay a lot more for the privilege.”

And he’s right. The digital landscape has made it acceptable and even an expectation for things online to be free of charge. Based on the Anderson and Coulton readings, I personally think that the biggest factor that has led to this notion is the lack of a physical product. Why should people feel obligated to pay for something that isn’t even tangible?

Coulton gave a great example of this in his post. He basically said that a person wouldn’t be likely to go into an Apple store and steal a Macbook. BUT if you could somehow download a MacBook online for free, even he would do it.

And even the industries have taken note of this. They are in the process of trying to figure out how to continue making money from content that exists in this Free world. It seems like advertising-supported business models will continue to exist; however, in no way does that limit advertisers to come up with new ways to market products to consumers.

An interesting anecdote from The Long Tail was the Radiohead case where the band allowed a pay-what-you-can download of one of its albums. Surprisingly, the album was the band’s top selling album. A lot of people downloaded the album for free, but some people paid up to $20 to support the band. The average amount paid was $6.

A similar case involving an author was also examined. The author allowed a free download of his new book for four weeks. In this instance, the book became a best seller, as people who enjoyed reading some of the digital version wanted to have a physical copy of the book. This also goes back to the idea of paying for a physical item.

So in this world of Free, the big question remains: how do industries keep making money? I think experimentation is key here. I think ads will persist, but I have no doubt that some groundbreaking business model will appear in the near future.

In case anyone is interested, here is a Storify I created of my tweets from the Social Media Technology Conference & Workshop at Howard University. These tweets were from my first day only, as I presented the following day and was not able to really focus on tweeting.

Also, my presentation received coverage from DMV CEO and CEO Blog Nation. It’s just a brief write-up, but it was cool none the less!

Feel free to ask me any questions about my experience. It was my first conference, so I learned a lot. 🙂