Media & Economy Assignment

For this assignment I got inspired by my design group work for the same course, so I decided to make my web-based mini-enterprise assignment a continuous mock-up for the debate community offering debaters for both sides of the environment related debate for a good bargain, so that they can focus their own resources elsewhere.
The general business idea is to offer a social media platform for individuals and companies involved or interested in participation in the everlasting environment debate.
The target audience for my made-up business consists of two major categories: the counterparts of the environment debate, and the freelance debaters, protesters and on-demand rally teams.
Technical platform consists of forums, newsstands, catalogue of members and advertising spaces and the IRC based chat embed to the platform. E-payment options are added and the portal also accepts all major credit cards to its secure link banking formula.
Basic admission to the portal is free, but charges apply for debater marketing and merchandising for the freelance individual debaters and for recruiting and employer promotion services for the companies and interest groups from both sides of the debate.
During high seasons, such as elections, WTO and G7 meetings extra rates apply and ad hoc services for both sides of the debate are provided, including deals with vegetable wholesalers for rotten tomatoes and spike wire for the companies.
Company legal responsibility claim is that it takes no responsibility whatsoever for the content and messages provided by its customers and their respective action. In a really fine print is added, that in case of a conflict a paying customer is always right.

The author of this mock-up takes no legal responsibility if the business logic is too similar to any existing company.

You are welcome to join by going to Think Green today!

Business Intelligence - Finding Out Today What People Will Want Tomorrow

Many of us have seen the James Bond movies about the intelligence community trying always to take the upper hand on their opponents. Though there are some similarities in the business world, the main task of business intelligence is to find out what will the stakeholders want tomorrow.
Finding out what other people think has always been an important piece of information during decision making and it usually determines whether your business shall emaciate or prosper. But on digital era it’s even more crucial since all the processes have speeded up and it’s constantly becoming harder and harder to achieve a breakthrough.
In this situation Opinion mining and sentiment analysis by Bo Pang and Lilian Lee seems more than useful book to read and to post a blog entry about.
The authors point out the new aspects brought forth by the emerging information society and how it influences the public opinion as there is different levels of content, relevance and prominence.
Prior to social media once opinion was formed based on mass media, immediate opinion leaders and ones physical socials network but today ones mindset is largely manipulated by a number of unacquainted opinion leaders who reach the person through internet and social media alongside with the opinion leaders and the mass media. But as I already pointed out in my post about the Blogosphere, people tend to go for an “honest opinion” of a fellow member of an information society rather than to believe an advertisement. Thus it is of utmost importance to the interested party to find out what is the public opinion regarding the brand, product, political idea in question and how to manipulate the brand/product or public opinion for a maximal overlap and the book gives you a fair hint how.

A Draft Design for an Online Community

Every beginning is hard, even if it takes place in such a constructivist environment as our IMKE course.
Thus our group work for the design for an online community resulted in a number of designs and in chronological order is as follows:
Design assignment posted by Ilya
Mock-up assignment posted by Kirke
Mock-Up Assignment (updated) posted by Jakob

Looking at the development one may recognize that our team made a long way since the initial idea suffered the communication cap in the beginning that lead into rivaling solutions and reached the consensus at the end that built us into a stronger team. Perhaps that was the real assignment after all.

The Power and Politics of Blogs – Virtual Reality of Civic Initiative

The Power and Politics of Blogs by Daniel Drezner and Henry Farrell is a good, though a bit outdated in terms of data on blogs, introduction to social media aimed for politicians and business people that are not familiar with the blogging and social media concepts as it gives a good and thorough overview of blogs, the blogosphere and how it interacts with the “regular pulling of the strings”.
I agree with the authors that an average blogger is a mediocre Jack that reaches a very limited audience and does not know nor care much about the politics and economy but it is the vast social media network and the tendency to link and repeat the prominent message within this network that generates the resonance that can have a superior impact on economy, politics and any given policy at hand.

Things That Every Social Media Course Should Start With – Know What You Put On-Line

Like Jeff Cain I came out quite empty when I searched Internet for e-professionalism, save references to Jeff Cain and to his article Online Social Networking Issues Within Academia and Pharmacy Education in American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education that states all the basics, I presume all social media related studies should began with.
To quote the obvious: one should think before one acts, for Facebook pages, blogs and other social medium are not only viewed by ones private life friends but also employers, relatives (yes, somebody can actually print out your post and hand it to your mom), marketers trying to sell one something and possibly also criminals and con artists, that can use this information for questionable deeds that can cause one serious harm. The conclusions drawn for pharmacy students hold true for social media and any other faculty as well.
For example a HR executive from TeliaSonera related company told the press quite openly that they search online forums and social media for background information prior even considering one for the post. The whine about ones employer, a blog post on a conned vacation, when company thinks one is at a sick leave, a picture of somebody intoxicated or sleeping with a face in a plate can seem funny at present but probably will destroy every good career option for ever.
Thus I strongly agree with dr. Cain that all students using social networks should do it cautiously for besides the obvious gain in social capital that these networks give they also possess a danger to ones imago if used carelessly and without guided me 2.0 building in sense that one only posts what one knows one will benefit from in the future.

A Portal to Media Literacy by Michael Wesch

Thanks to useful link in Kaja Tampere’s blog I just finished watching Prof. Wesch video lecture A Portal to Media Literacy.
I really like his approach to learning, and his concept of making up ones own mind and seeing the connections out there, that brings education back to good old Jesuit principles nowadays followed only in a handful of private schools that educate a few elected thousand students. But then again, if one just follows it blindly, then in my opinion he renders his own suggestions by pointing students toward the Wikipedia and similar places as a source because irrelevant the discussion behind the wiki articles they are and remain PR writings merely mirroring the necessary public opinion on the matter and not the financial and political ties behind. But if one possesses the capability to think on ones’ own then Weshe’s guidelines are the best on learning I have heard through formal education system yet and his data gathering and connection making suggestions are essential to prosper on every walk of life.
To conclude I would not limit this video to e-learning but would expand it to every other 2.0 field, especially enterprise 2.0 and me 2.0.

Second Chance for Crowdsourcing

As I received some well deserved critics from my course mates for not being constructive about the crowdsourcing in my earlier post I decided to read some more on the subject to become more adapt to the concept and that led me to a wonderful book Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World by Prof. Alex Pentland.

The book turned out to be a very interesting reading material and though I got to it by searching for crowdsourcing materials it covered a lot more. The aim of Pentland's study is to reveal and distinguish the biological honest signals in human communication and to study the effects of subconscious signals to the outcome and the effectiveness of the communication, resulting in so called “reality mining”, giving off the true intent of the communication parties and the means used to achieve them.

The book also has some very good explanations why the crowdsourcing does not appear to be so effective, calling the prime obstacles that crowdsourcing or any other collaborative tool meets the idiots and the gossip.
The idiots in Prof. Pentland’s book represents the phenomena that not the best but most prominent idea gets the most of support and the gossip means that this idea gets repeated again and again by subtle groups that try to sound smart by mimicking the already approved idea. In turn the book also claims that individual are not necessarily better as humans do not make rational, logical decisions and tend to be social in thinking anyway so my opinion is that if one wants to call follow a leader a crowdsourcing then it’s ok, as long as we acknowledge and harvest it accordingly.

A Policy Paper on the Youth Perspective on e-Society

Just came from the final drafting meeting for the policy paper on the Youth Perspective on e-Society. If all goes well and the paper passes there will be hopefully some additional EU wide means to help the youth to build a bridge over the digital divide.
Estonia has the leading position in e-governance and e-society so far but it seems as if the old Europe has finally started to catch up. If we want to remain on the forefront the “Tiger” has to wake up and soon.

Siemens Goes Bat Sign

Just landed in Frankfurt and was greeted by a large Siemens sign next to an airfield put up to greet the passengers on a landing plane. Clever move and a good example to all of us- nothing says thank you for visiting Estonia better than a Kalev chocolate bar on a departing flight but what is there to say hello and welcome to Estonia on incoming flights or around the airfield. My connecting flight to Torino will be leaving soon but a food for thought: what would be similar welcoming sign to our blogs, web pages and services?

Searching for Hot-Spots Ended with Hot Shots

Search for hot-spot WiFi areas in Tallinn began with a small group of three but after awhile the small group grow into noisy, takeaway late loving lot. My Nokia N95 8GB became our WiFi detector and camera for the photo proof.
We found our first and the most loved WiFi area before even leaving for the journey from just outside our campus.
Our destination was Kumu in Kadriorg, as we felt an urge for that special “culture shock” to scare off our International student/s and perhaps for some also to enjoy the “art”.
On the way we passed Methodist Church, Weizenbergi cafe and had some nice time in Kadrioru Park and a little cafeteria there. My Nokia spotted rather few wifi free areas on our way but that was mainly due to off-season as Tallinn city has so far provided free public WiFi in Kadrioru park for every summer for the last three years.
The grand finale of our hunt was Kumu. For some it was the first time to visit the art museum and they decided to go for the exhibition. The others, more familiar with the place, cut their culture experience short and disappeared to the coffee shop downstairs.
One thing led to another and courageous search for hot spots ended with hot shots. But here are the hot-spots we found on the Google map.

Does Social Media Connect or Isolate?

Prof. Haamer held a lecture on student convention about the impact of urbanization to human interaction and pointed out a peculiar find from a study on the Victorian society: a research indicated that while people lived in the farms they visited their neighbors roughly five times a week but when the same families moved to settle in barracks and work in the factory they visited their neighbors roughly five times in two months. Then the professor asked: was a distance a connector or separator and offered his view that sometimes a bit of distance supports the human interaction. I came across a similar theme in the paper by the scholars from the University of Pennsylvania and the Pew Internet Project called “Social Isolation and New Technology” that tries to challenge that theory and claims that Internet has no or but a little-positive impact on human interaction.
The study does not cover the quality of those interactions but claims amongst else that the ones who maintain a blog are more adapt to confide in someone who is of another race and that the social network of the Facebook users in particular is broader. I personally do not see the interaction between the maintaining a blog (unidirectional communication) and social dialogue but who am I to argue ;)
The findings support the claim that Internet and ICT in general enlarges ones social networking quality and scope but there was also some evidence that the use of social networking services (e.g., Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn) substitutes for some level of neighborhood involvement e.g. the users of social networking services are 30% less likely to know at least some neighbors.
In my opinion this was an interesting study and I do agree with the authors that while ICT solutions strengthen and help to maintain our social network one can not solely rely on the Internet based social networking services.

Wikinomics - Thoughts and Reflections

Having finished reading Wikinomics I can definitely understand why the book sells - it pleases all parties of the food chain from big corporations looking out for cheaper R&D to independent thinkers in search of fame.
For me it was so inspirational that I already wrote a post on some aspects of the book: Crowdsourcing is like group sex – somebody does all the work and everybody gets the credit that covers pretty much my opinion on the collaboration side of the book.
In no way does it mean that I do not value collaboration or teamwork software. During the past 4 years of my work-life, Lotus Domino Smiley was my constant companion and a very useful platform to keep updated data on customers, servers, events etc. The important feature that made the collaboration tool work was appointed personal responsibility- each server and topic had an appointed person responsible for updating and reviewing the posts on it and in my opinion that single feature made the source viable as there was a number of alternate info sources on the same topics on stick its, memos and spreadsheets on my office desk with similar information but only the online source was validated.
Wikipedia as a source on the other hand serves a totally different but similarly important task for me as well. It represents the restroom wall with all its vices and virtues. There is no better source for the current community opinion on the topic at hand and it is usually due to change pretty fast when the circumstances change. So that one may even think that the job, which Orwell’s 1984 protagonists held, really does exist in our world.
For scientific facts I prefer scientific source e.g. Encyclopedia Britannica

Crowdsourcing is Like Group Sex – Somebody does All the Work and Everybody Gets the Credit

Amy Gahran’s blog pointed me to this wonderful article in Forbes about Crowdsourcing and to be honest there is not much to add to it but only to agree with Dan Woods: Crowds don't innovate--individuals do.
And as I am a firm believer of grassroot initiative and strong supporter of civic movements it makes me sad to see how very often the same crowdsourcing tools are used to render useless the good initiatives by the people as described by Pete Peterson in Techpresident.
The illusion of crowdsourcing in my opinion serves two main coals: it renders a personalized outcome of somebody’s work or thought impersonal leaving also the praise or critics for it impersonal and second it leaves the ownership of the outcome open to be claimed by the crowdsourcing master or a group with enough (legal, PR) power to claim it.

However companies love it or as Businessweek put it: Crowdsourcing - Milk the masses for inspiration

Misusing the social media- TV series should come with a warning sign- do not try this at home

Just finished watching House M.D. season 6 episode 2 that got me thinking on the misuse of social media. I do understand that it is hip to write social media and virtual gaming to the script. Presumably the production dinosaurs believe that as long as the characters in the show use internet forums and try out VR gaming it helps to attract new viewers and to show that the producers are on top of the current social trends.
However as long as there is an incredible bunch of viewers with the mentality that everything on screen is pure gospel the scenes showing that proper medical advice comes from the internet forums instead of doctors should be used cautiously. The situation kind of reminded me of the incident where a shrink consulted her new age doctor friend telling her to send all the patients with the real illness to seek proper medical care.

Regarding House MD- probably a banner declining any legal responsibility for medical advice from the show at the end of every episode shouldn’t hurt.

Own It – Use the Power of Social Media

To celebrate its 150th anniversary, YWCA released a massive campaign in the USA called OWN IT. Rolling from the White House to the Puerto Rican huts the campaign was aimed at ordinary women to make them realize the challenges they are facing every day - to wake them up and to strive them to start transforming the society they live in. The centerpiece for the campaign was an online hub that was used to co-ordinate online actions in Youtube, blogs, Facebook, MSN and Twitter with the real-life events at the UN, Washington DC and local communities all across the USA bringing change to the society.

Building up a Presence

I usually never stop at the self-aid corner at the bookstore but I needed a gift for my customer and by some odd mistake all HR related internal communication guidebooks were piled at the same shelf with the do-it-yourself handbooks and one of them caught my eye.
4-hour Workweek by Timothy Ferris proved to be a very good reading material. Although I do not condone all his time management tips and leaving aside an exemplary case of Me 2.0 the book has some very good new- and social media related suggestions (in fact most of the third chapter A- is for automation) that prove very useful. Since some of those services are not that familiar in Estonia I will share with you a few local ones I’ve suggested to my customers:

• Make sure you and your company have a respectful e-mail address. sexykitty@hot.ee can steam up your private life but not your business - well at least not the business you’d tell your grandma about. As long as you are a student you can use university e-mail and when you want to start a business I suggest you read through the next paragraph on how to obtain your own e-mail.
• Get your own internet domain. A private domain is a foundation of your company’s e-life and it’s easier to achieve than you think. You do not need a private server for your own domain – just fill in an e-formula and get a virtual server that provides you with more than a hundred personal e-mail accounts, a space for your web page, blog and much more.
• Get yourself a fixed landline number. Though everybody has a cell phone business call from and to landline prefixed number adds credibility. If you do not have a landline or actually live in another country, you have two options: register with Skype-in or join a House mobile plan that provides you with two phone numbers- with the cell phone and fixed phone number prefix.
• You do not need a permanent office. There are number of companies that offer post address forwarding services and for business meetings and conferences you can use business lounges at the hotels or business centers.
• If you need a secretary to answer calls for you but there are not that many of them, you can either employ your grandma or outsource for virtual office.

If you have additional questions or need further assistance on setting up your presence do not hesitate to make an appointment.

Out-game Marketing

For years, every Christmas I have been concerned with finding the best present for my partner. A few years back “Santa” got unambiguously guided to the computer store and directed toward the special offer on a USB-gamepad with a computer game attached to it – or so I thought. Never before had Santa’s bag been raided so keenly at the store exit and to my big disappointment I was advised that it was not the gamepad but the attached GTA III game that had to be there and he was really after. A few days after Christmas the game ended up on my laptop as my partner was still busy with GTA Vice City and I wanted to know what the big fuss was all about. And that was my introduction to the world of computer games.
Thus Ilya Vedrashko's thesis on advertising and merchandising in computer games from MIT was a really interesting article that got me thinking on Grant Theft Auto games that at first glance seem to be full of advertising but there are actually no real brands present at the GTA fictional universe. On the contrary there are some GTA “fake brands” present in the real world.
I would call the marketing of those fictional brands the back-merchandising. The fabulous web sites of in-game top brands such as Cluckin’ Bell – the proud sponsor of Beat the Cock challenge, the web page and hotline of counselor Darius Fontaine, and a working hotline for Crimson Executive Wife Removal (to be used at your own discretion) all serve as the appetizers for the GTA fictional universe. Thus in-game and real life merchandising works both ways.
In fact, Rockstar Games believed in it so much that GTA San Andreas was first advertised through the introduction of a new religion- Epsilon program.

A Must for All New Media Students

During the academic writing class today I came across one of my course mates blog posts So what are we learning here? Oh yeah, Social Media! that I believe every IMKE student should take a good look at, then take a look at the mirror and look back at the post again. At least I found a couple of things familiar and had a really good laugh ;)

Is 2+2 Four or as We Choose to Decide

When I was little there was a cartoon on TV, where a little donkey was teased by fellow animals for his ability to count to ten, as other animals were not so good with numbers and opinion leaders among them made others think that counting was not important. But as the children’s programs of that era had to be educational, the cartoon ends with the donkey’s ability to count saving them all, when the raft they all boarded was built only for ten. When everybody else argued and tried to find a constructive group solution, the little donkey became the affirmed leader who took the headcount and called the rest of the animals on the raft to order. Of course that cartoon was from Soviet times, when critical thinking ruled and children were simply told that ten is ten (comes after 9 and is followed by 11). However today the animals on the raft might not have been so lucky because the donkey would have taken the math course with social constructivism, where each student is right- the one that says that after nine comes seven and the one that says that ten is followed by thirteen and the final decision would have been found on the number based on the class consensus, irrelevant to the empirical facts .
Luckily it does not yet occur in most of our math classes but we have come awfully close to it in other classes, where we are encouraged to think that everybody is right and the community’s decision on it is supreme.
Each time we give up our individuality for the sake of the group we endanger ourselves to group think more common to the religious sects than to free academic thinking.
This post is based on the book by Irving Janis and Leon Mann: Decision Making: A Psychological Analysis of Conflict, Choice, and Commitment.

Dan Mayton from Lewis-Clark State College has produced an educational slideshow that sums up the theory on group think.

My Thoughts on Blogosphere

Joseph Goebbels claimed nearly a century ago that it is the absolute right of the state to supervise the formation of public opinion, to attract followers and to keep them in line but today it seems as if it is the privilege of every computer-literate individual. The publishing of one’s opinion has never before been as simple as it is today as even a monkey can do it and I believe that at least a few monkeys ought to have a blog somewhere in the cyber-jungle called the blogosphere.

According to Technorati approximately 184 million Internet users have started a blog and 77 % of active Internet users follow blogs. Bloggers vary from professional marketing writers to independent journalists and from academic opinion leaders to narcissists and their blogs vary alike. There are blogs for every theme and every area from everyday life to rocket science and from politics to porn. The majority of people blog from the comfort of their homes while many use various mobile devices from netbooks to smartphones. For example, I follow a number of general blogs of friends to keep track of their activities and thematic blogs on ICT, human resources, marketing and religion in order to stay atop of my career. Even though, I do not have a personal blog, I manage blogs for the European YWCA and contribute regularly through the European Youth Forum's blog-based working environment.
In my opinion, the impact of blogosphere today can be compared in many ways to the role of radio at the beginning of the twentieth century: they both can be considered the novelty media of their time, as they cover a vast scope of interests, their main usage boost comes from war and people’s urge to hear news about the course of it, as they both bring fresher and more accurate news more instantly and with less interference from censorship than the media channels dominant in their era and also in the beginning they both were led by independent enthusiasts doing it for the sake of their medium, being later discovered by the corporations and taken to the masses.

As a social medium, the blog carries many unique characteristics that can be successfully used by various interest groups and stakeholders for their own ends. Irrelevantly, the blog viewers tend to correspond to the message similar to P2P relations, as the origin of the message is not questioned, while the news media gets a more filtered approach. The bloggers, compared to journalists, are considered as one among us vs them and the merchandising via blogs is far more tolerated and successful than merchandising in e.g. a soap opera . That has led to a phenomena called Me 2.0 - mainly web and new media based successful self-merchandising, with strong emphasis placed on a personal blog, trackbacks in right places and comments to and from the right audience. As can be seen for example from the success stories of Cece Lee Simmons and Petra Epp Petrone.

That said, I still prefer to use blogs as an HR and training management tool rather than public medium, as it provides me the unique ability to hold minutes or discussions on given topics and to keep track of events and opinions me and my co-workers, with embedded videos, audio files and feedbacks and post study materials and to hold discussions with the trainees. However, if the events and occasions should demand a news medium, a blog would be the new medium of choice.

To conclude: I believe that the blogosphere is a miniature but growing image of our society, with the scent of wonderland and Byronian hero mindset where each and everyone can create a small private world that reflects life through their eyes. But the secret here lies in getting the others to mind – the question is whether there is a reflection at all if nobody sees it?

Bed + Book, a Really Bad Combination!

Yesterday evening I tried to read about Wikinomics. I woke about 7 in the morning, wondering was it the book or just a really bad dream!

Dear Wanderer,

The good book says that there is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the Sun. Today the time has come for me to begin my blog about my studies and research on social media and IT management.
Hopefully, you will find here some of my ideas, my reflections on other people’s thoughts I have come across and found useful, and last but not least everything else that makes my academic life worth a while.
I bid you welcome and I promise to do my best not to kill you with yet another boring read.

Welcome

Welcome! I hope you all will enjoy blogging and this course!