Strategic take on the web (Hakola, Hiila 2012)

Strategic take on the web (2012) is a great book by Iida Hakola and Ilona Hiila, the founders of Vapamedia (Finland), where they give smoothly running guidance on content marketing on the web. Strategic take on the web gives the reader an easily understandable frame work to how companies should formulate their web strategy on the basis of their business needs on the whole (what are we trying to do?) and on the other hand, how content marketing can help them to achieve their business goals (how can we do what we're trying to do?).

Strategic take on the web is very practical in its advise. Content marketing is essentially very much of a dialogue between the examination of the functions of an organization (commercial or not) and of the functions of the different target groups and audiences. To put it in layman's terms: what is the organization doing in the digital sphere and what are the multitude of layers of the public doing there.

To enable this dialogue, Hakola and Hiila encourage content strategists to analyze their own content with ROT-analysis (redundant, outdated, trivial) with which one mechanically assesses each piece of their content rating it as per the three given categories. The results of the analysis should guide you towards steering the content you put out towards the right direction, whether that be in terms of the themes used in the content or the platform used for it.

In addition to looking at your own doings on the web, it's equally important to be following on what the different target groups are doing there. With big data and web analytics there is no need to guestimate stuff any longer. Instead you can follow what people are doing pretty precisely and create content accordingly.  By following on what the audiences are talking about your organization, brand or product  you gain knowledge of how you're perceived, what to utilize in your content and observe what perhaps needs steering away from.

Essentially, everything boils down to the question of how to create great, interesting content. Sure, this is a question virtually impossible to answer to, but Hakola and Hiila remind to look beyond the obvious. Far too often content is too advert-like (solely about the product) meaning that it doesn't interest anyone, not really. And therefore, content marketers should find larger, but still related, themes to their products providing an angle from which they can be discussed and displayed. 

OK then, the concept of content marketing well in hand now, but lacking the tools? No probs! I found an excellent listing of current content tools available from Digital Information World.

School of Disobedience @ Kiasma

Feeling a little stressed, I decided to head down to Kiasma this Saturday to see what the artist Jani Leinonen has got up to with his School of Disobedience. Jani Leinonen is the dude, who a couple of years back stole Ronald McDonald from McDonald's and then beheaded him in an Al-Qaeda style video, and what do you know, there poor Ronald is, right at the start of the exhibition.

Leinonen re-appropriates logos and brand identities that are already familiar to us to criticise consumerism and draws attention to global products' functionalities and marketing strategies. "There are products for all ideologies... Products and the brands that represent them have an amazingly large part in our lives, and that is why it is interesting to use them in art. To tell the kind of stories with them that the global conglomerates don't want to tell, says Leinonen" (www.kiasma.fi/nayttelyt-ja-ohjelmisto/jani-leinonen/). 

Leinonen's art is great precisely for the fact that it forces us to think about our every day companions (the brands) in the true context of their consequences; for example, Hunger King counter imitating a real burger joint reminding us about the repercussions of cheap fast food catering for the poorer part of the society. 

In the School of Disobedience the brand characters aren't just marketing marionettes, though. Leinonen re-appropriates them to be activists teaching the audience about being critical of the media and becoming aware of the unconscious  mechanisms of marketing as well as the cultural catalogue (stereotypes) marketing draws on to describe the world to us. 

Jani Leinonen's art definitely has its place. In fact, I'd go as far as saying that School of Disobedience should be a compulsory part of kids' education today. But pop art is somewhat hollow, there's no escaping that. The common problem with it using images already so known to us is that they very easily become cliches that we pass by just like we pass by advertising or the million different products available to us in an any given grocery store every day. In comparison to many of the art pieces in Face to Face, the other exhibition at Kiasma at the moment, Leinonen's work lacks the "air of mystery" or humanity of the portraits there have, but then, I guess that is making a point, too. And it sure is interesting to see how Jani Leinonen's art evolves in the future! Where can he go from Ronald, Tony "the frosty sugar flake" Tiger and the other buddies?

Post-MJ Era Institute of Counsciousness NEVERLAND at URB2015

The end of my parental leave and return to work looming just around the corner, I decided to cheer myself up with an arts show and what better way to do it than Post-MJ Era Institute of Counciousness NEVERLAND, which premiered at Kiasma Theatre last night as part of the opening of URB2015 festival. URB is an annual arts festival in Helsinki for everything under the umbrella term of "urban".

In the beginning we were told that the performance was to be a spiritual seminar on the legacy and dimensions of Michael Jackson. For the first half of the show this meant rather long winded "academic presentations" on how Jackson can be conceptualized from the cultural studies perspective, the most interesting being how Jackson's figure embodies several different "bodies" ranging from the angry body (Jackson clearly uses dancing as a way to express anger through his art) to the "messiah" body, through which Jackson can be viewed as being portrayed as some kind of a world healing saviour figure.

The latter part of the performance featured more dancing, which was called for after all that lecturing. I personally liked the fact that Jackson's music was remixed with electronic beats giving it all new, "clubby" look & feel. That just goes to show how universal and versatile Jackson's music is and that is why we all were there for. The music continues to live on, even if the man himself has gone.

Of all the different speakers and performers, the best bits were a very personal declaration of love for Michael Jackson from a guy, who re-performed a Jackson inspired song he'd written as a kid. He still had the C-casette from those days with the original on it. And when they had the tape on playing an interview with a Finnish MJ lookalike, where he was talking about the abuse he gets when he's in character and dressed up. You get a harrowing sense of what it must be like when you've become a public figure for the people to rip apart. Maybe even a sense of what life must've been like for Michael? This is sad considering what he died of in the end.

The seminar ends with a silent moment respecting Michael and by this point it has become very clear just how much of an icon MJ is. The finishing song written by Michael's sister Janet Jackson leaves the audience with a spiritual feeling and injects a little bit of, what Michael Jackson essentially was about, hope, into us. This is exactly what we need in today's dystopia. And this is why Michael continues to inspire so many of us.

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!