The Digital Effect

Image Sourced @LinkedIn: http://bit.ly/1Q35neA

Social media use across the globe is ripe, and although some countries have limitations, usage remains high. Whether it is due to poor Internet accessibility in Africa and South America, or because of government regulations and sanctions placed on site throughout China, social media is a part of the 21st century.

It’s long been known that China’s government has control of the internet and other forms of media, which could be one reason for social media’s success within the country. I went to an Australia China Business Week conference late last year which spoke about Chinese consumers use of social media and the impact it had on retailers, one surprisingly logical insight was that consumers were aware of the government’s media control and as such, relied heavily on social media reviews and commentary to guide their purchasing and sometimes political decisions. I say surprising because as a marketer/communications professional, I understand that now more than ever, consumers are more educated and more aware of the world around them thanks largely in part to the internet and ease of access to information. Further emphasising this, Chiu, Lin and Silverman's (2013) insights outline Chinese consumers high value placed on peer-to-peer recommendations because they are more skeptic of formal institutions.

Chiu, Lin and Silverman's (2014) insights also established six groups of users based on their social media motivations and behaviours:

Social enthusiasts spend a large portion of their time maintaining friendship networks; they account for about 15 percent of social-media users.

Resenders, who account for 15 percent of participants, actively repost messages, such as jokes, from other sources. Although they do not post original material, they often have large numbers of followers.

Readers generally do not participate but read what others have posted. They make up about 14 percent of users.

Opinionated users, comprising about 14 percent of participants on social-media sites, express their own (often strong) opinions and build large personal followings.

QQ spillovers gain access to social-media sites through their use of Tencent’s QQ instant-messaging service. While this group accounts for 21 percent of the audience for social media, participation from these users is minimal.

Inactives belong to social-media sites but do not participate in a meaningful way.

This information is important to understand as the sample size of users is quite large in comparison to that of other countries, giving it greater merit on its accuracy. With this we can then begin to understand some of the potential user personas of Australian social media users, cross sectioning them to find similarities and differences.

One differing factor however is China’s choice of social media networks. As highlighted in week 11’s content (Bishop 2016), platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are not used in China, instead WeChat and Weibo are, along with others.

So whilst there may be similarities in the usage of social media, political, economical and social factors also contribute the varying ways in which social media is used throughout the globe.

References

Social gaming refers to the way in which communities are established, networked and communicate through the use of gaming (Bishop 2015). In context with our topic thus far, we will focus on the digital aspects of social gaming opposed to the inclusion of gaming in the ‘real-life’ presence of others. Firstly, we need understand that there are various form of social gaming available, some of which operate with avatars, and others more competitively amongst digital citizens and friends. For example World of Warcraft would be seen as an avatar based game, where Candy Crush would be seen as more competitive. Every game is different and with it, different sets of codes, rules, norms and law apply (de Zwart & Humphreys 2014).

When a digital citizen enters one of these social gaming communities they will most always agree to an end user licence agreement (EULA), otherwise they may be unable to play. These agreements are an attempt by the developer to establish governance within the game. However once the individual enters the game, additional rules may be established by the participating game members; this may involve the way in which the game is played, interactions with other players, or as de Zwart & Humphreys (2014) pointed to, the development of in-game governance. Unfortunately there are ways in which these communities – established on agreed rules and modes of conduct – break down. These reasons may be that not all citizens choose to comply with the newly discovered rules, or it may be due to scammers and fraudsters looking to take advantage of the communities. It could also be a result of cyber bullying within the game.

Unfortunately within the gaming environment the controlling government may not have the time nor the resourcing to manage all citizen actions accordingly, resulting in some members of the communities dissatisfaction and potential exit. However there are some communities in which the community itself become self-governing; the example from de Zwart & Humphreys (2014) being the creation of the Council of Stellar Management. Who serve to provide a channel between the game world and the developer with the aim of policing and governing the game.

Like intercultural interactions within our real world experiences, the game world also has its own set of norms, rules and modes of behaviour. From a communications perspective, it is important to understand these audiences will differ and to engage with them, one must learn to understand the culture established within the community.

References

They say images are worth a thousand words. If this is true, then social media is allowing an more then 1.8 trillion words to be communicated each and every day.

We are now uploading an enormous volume of images everyday, in fact more than 1.8 BILION images are uploaded every single day across social media websites… What’s influenced this? We could probably put this down in part to advancements in technology, well; actually that’s pretty much exactly what we can put it down to. Technology has allowed us to have easier access to creating digital images, given us channels such as Instagram and Snapchat to share them, and created the need for individuals to establish their identity through visual self-expression (Martin Hand, 2012, p. 5).

That later in these is the most important factor for us to understand in this post, largely because we are trying to understand the role social imagery plays in communities and communications. One way of looking at this is through the term, networked visuality (Bishop 2015). Instagram and other social channels like Snapchat were created with the imagery as their primary content source, allowing users to community or express their identity through highly visual forms of content. Take for example the foodie culture in Melbourne, there are literally hundreds of food bloggers using social imagery to grow their influence demonstrate their brand and communicate their passion for food.

YouTube also did this, but rather than still imagery, utilised video format. In week nine’s content (Bishop 2015), the idea that videos can are used as a form of visual affinity was discussed; mainly that the use of video as been taken up and adapted with digital communication in a way as to coordinate membership within social groups, rather than for memory aids (pg.74, Lange 2009).

It is clear through this content that visual imagery has become the norm of digital communications, and a key tool for self expression. With the rise of new channels constantly happening, what will be the next format for our self-expressionistic ways? And how will we use digital to communicate our identity?

References

Firstly as we want to understand the role of crowdsourcing in times of a crisis, we need to understand what crowdsourcing is, who takes part, where it happens and why there is a need for it.

As noted in the Digital Communications week nine content (Bishop 2015), crowdsourcing is the effort of digital citizens coming together to fulfil a purpose, and in terms of examples, Wikipedia was mentioned. However I’d like to expand on this idea and look at other examples of crowdsourcing. One of which that comes to mind is Australia Post’s National Conversation Platform. The platform encourages Australians to comment on the Australia Post business, it’s service and offerings with the intent that the information will influence enterprise policies, procedures and operations. Another crowdsourcing platform with slightly a different nature would be that of 99 Designs. Their crowdsourcing platform allows businesses to place a call out of design work, which is then sent out to numerous designers with options then being presented to the business for purchase.

The citizens involved in crowdsourcing are going to vary depending on the objective, but largely they are a unified community. One in which all knows their purpose, and with that, action easily follows. Social media plays a strong role in this process; allowing citizens to engage and interact with one and another to develop the content. Heather Ford (2012) wrote on crowdsourcing platform, Ushahidi, which enabled Kenyans to start their own mapping of events and post reports to it, creating greater visibility to users who may not be where the crisis is unfolding. In 2011, Twitter hashtags were used as a way to keep the wider community aware of the flooding in Queensland, Australia (Bruns et al. 2012). Research following this event proved significant, with the final report recommending Twitter’s functionality be used in times of crisis.

For communications professionals, understanding the power of crowdsourcing, tools available, and how to use them effectively can equip them to inform, persuade and manage various situations. One of which might mean that a message needs to be communicated with minimal to no budget to a large audience such as a product recall, or it might be helping find an individual such as the KONY 2012 campaign. Which ever the scenario, social media and is proving a valuable tool in times of crisis.

Part of being a digital citizen means that we must face other citizens in the digital landscape, some of whom may not agree with our opinions, values or, are just out to make someone feel bad. These citizens will often be found bullying, trolling, hating, stalking or displaying incivility (Bishop 2015) towards other members of the digital world. dana boyd (2014) highlights teenage usage and cyber bullying in her writing “Bullying: is social media amplifying meanness and cruelty?” and calls out social media’s capability of amplifying such cyber bullying. Take for example the website 4chan, 4chan is an image based bulletin board where anyone can comment or post anonymously, allowing this capability has seen many individuals face the wrath of trolling. This site is well known as a home for trolls and cyberbullies to meet, collaborate and harm other users; amplifying their cruelty on others. As humans, we can understand that in real life situations, this sort of behaviour would be unacceptable, but behind the screens and keyboards of digital citizens, it seems sometimes the human element of communication can be lost, and instead all is left is bitter commentary with no real purpose other than making the aggressor feel superior.

Of course, there are also going to be times when users will disagree with points of view and for the some reasons as above, feel comfortable in approaching the conversation. Depending on the citizens involved, this sort of interaction can easily move into a conflict. From personal experience I can call on a time when I disagreed with a comment made by a teacher that they should not need to care for the students, disagreeing with this view I made a comment which was negatively received by the Twitter user and resulted in a barrage of derogatory comments that didn’t help justify his comment. However, using positive responses and a demonstration of pure interest and honesty, I was able to help the Twitter user explain their comment and the conflict resolved in conversation. It is for this reason I believe that all digital citizens need understand the potential conversations that can unfold on social media and how to handle them.

As digital citizens ourselves, we also need to understand the impact of our content choices. We need to understand that what we post may offend some and be selective in our publications process; similar to the way we select words in real-world conversations. The Australian Government’s Office of the Children’s eSafety Commisioner is a great resource for this, with tools aimed at helping primary and secondary students navigate the digital world of cyber bullying and being safe online.

So whilst social media leads way to conflict, this conflict can be used for good, collaboration and creative ideation. Afterall, if we all thought the same, how would we create anything new? References

In this post we will explore digital citizenship and activism. Firstly, digital citizenship refers to the contributions of a member through use of social media tools, and their ability to participate online within society (Bishop 2015). Within digital citizenship, as there are political members unfolding their agendas, causes and policies, so too are there activists and protests looking to grow their strength in numbers. After all, digital channels including social media are available to the greater public and not limited to few. And it is in this thought we see activists rallying like-minded citizens into their cause and building their communities. Change.org is a perfect example of digital activism (Bishop 2015). Not only does the platform make it simple for individuals to start a petition and rally a cause, but also the social capabilities of the site make it simple to share the campaign across social media sites and rally friends, family and followers. In some ways, this could be seen as influencer marketing, and as we have already discovered, would work well because the individuals would most likely already be connected with like-minded individuals digitally. Personally, I would have to say yes; yes I have clicked on some these petitions myself. Though not a large amount, the ones I have, have meant quite a deal to myself. However I guess, not enough that I would actively go out and perform other acts of activism. This could quite likely be seen as the clicktivism actions we see of digital citizens, that is, the ‘kinds of activism that have now real or lasting effect in the world’ (Bishop 2015). Though I would hope that my support, be it only a digital signature, has helped achieve some type of action. There is also the idea of sub activism, that is, one’s willingness to share personal situations, stories and content via social channels that communicate a form of political activism however less explicitly (Bakardjieva 2009). One example of this in my personal life is the sharing of content from my husband and my wedding overseas. Gay marriage is not legal in Australia yet, however is in some states of America, as such, the sharing of content/images from our overseas gay wedding, has a sense of political activism though not intended. It is the choice of sharing precious moments and extending an image of ourselves that lead to sub activism, and in a way, rally others to political action and discourse.

Looking deeper into this concept of clicktivism (Bakardjieva 2009), I become quite sceptic of the term, largely given that many other things consume my life, of which, do not allow me to devote the necessary time to act on causes I believe in; for acting on these causes in my eyes requires as much passion, commitment and dedication as I dedicate to my work, business, family and friends. Perhaps in the future I would have the time to be more active, but in the immediate future the actions I can give are but a signature, click and email address or upload of a filtered profile picture to help send a message to political members.

References

We’ve discussed individuals and bloggers being able to use social media to grow communities, but in a time where there are high levels of political action and thoughts amongst the general public of media buyouts from political parties and members, is there a place for politicians on social media?

It is believed that the use of social media can help spread the message of political members and their initiatives, and if we look at Ferdinand Tonnies theory of societies from my last post, we could say that the formation of a community could be developed with the strengthening factor being societal, that is, individuals coming together as a community to support a shared cause, or in the political sense, party/legislation/act.

However a majority of social media users are of the younger generation where social media usage differs to traditional media. Largely used for connecting with friends and entertainment opposed to news, individuals looking to captivate a younger audience need to align their message and approach with the younger generations content and platform of choice. One political personality who understands how to do this well would be Michelle Obama. As part of Mrs Obama’s Let’sMove! campaign – aimed at fighting childhood obesity, she released a Vine video featuring a top-40 music clip and using slang to help communicate her health message. You can check out the video here: http://eonli.ne/1PE6gbV

What is Vine? Vine is a video sharing social media platform designed for short, six-second videos popular amongst teens – some great insight on this platform can be found with the Hootesuite team (http://bit.ly/1NXYuqF). These videos are continually looped and have launched a number of stars across comedy and music, including Zach King and Shawn Mendes.

In Australia, one recent example would be the Stoner Sloth campaign (http://bit.ly/1VxwpJV). Aimed at tackling teen use of the illicit drug, marijuana, the campaign featured a range of videos that were aimed at relating to teenage use of the drug and sparked a tremendous amount of social media attention. It resulted in an additional 25 parodies cumulating in excess of 100K views. Though a number of complaints had been made, the campaign, from a social media perspective, did well. It was able to raise awareness of the campaign message in great numbers.

In a previous post, I discussed the use of social media to develop individual identity, establish presence within a community and the way in which we shift communities using social media. Now I want to look at forms of expression through content such as blogs and their importance within communities.

Although you may already be aware, I think it is important to briefly describe what blogs are. Blogs are generally long-form and can be accessed through a range of sites such as this one, they could also be found on websites of individuals and businesses. Social platform Twitter is another blogging channel, however is seen to be a form of micro blogging. Check out this article from Sprout Social to find out a bit more on blogging and micro blogging - http://bit.ly/1ZFrBEH.

Blogs will generally centralise content around a key theme/s such as fashion and can be a starting point for many communities to grow. However for the community to grow, the blogger needs to actively engage with external communities through linking and participating in conversation – this could even be responding to someone else’s blog, developing their blog’s identity, much in the same way an individual will establish theirs. Mary Cross argues in Bloggerati, Twitterati that blogs were once counterculture – meaning they went against typical cultures – but since the 1990s have grown in influence. The rise of their influence can largely be attributed to the idea of each piece being authentic and from a peer’s perspective – the new word of mouth – and give smaller publics a voice, vocalising the experiences of many and cultivating communities within the blog comments and using social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to grow further.

Companies are seeking bloggers out more-and-more with the hope of helping them convey messages as a result of their ability to speak with influence to various networked publics. dana boyd explores the term publics in Social Network Sites and Networked Publics and although her description is that of a networked public being one who have been restructured through technology, I’d like to use another term, digital community. I do this because although a network has been restructured through technology, I feel digital community describes them to a better effect. The refined approach of marking certain digital communities makes it easier for communications professionals as the targeting of messages can be better refined and produce greater commercial results to corporations, brands and celebrities.

In a nutshell, bloggers have been on the rise since the 1990s as result of their perceived unbiased yet relatable views. They network with likeminded others to form connected communities using various forms of social media, who share similar values and are being seen by businesses as more lucrative opportunities to market/communicate to digital communities as a result of their influence.

Everyone belongs to one (or more) and have since the dawn of humanity, possibly even further back. They are the societal groups we live and immerse ourselves in; the communities in which we associate and establish our personal identity. In modern times, communities have become more readily available through the use of digital tools such as social media, and throughout the course of this blog, my aim will be to explore the world of digital communities including key theories and ideas, and the use of social media.

Firstly, I think it’s important to understand the use of social media. To give it perspective, I’d encourage you to watch the following Buzzz Social Media video (http://bit.ly/1PC7OB5). In it the growth and use of social media is highlighted with the key question needing to be taken away being, how and why do we use social media?

Rowen Wilken and Anthony McCosker, who wrote a chapter in ‘The media and communications in Australia’ book, talk of social media being used to disclose our ‘social selves’, which can be important when we are attempting to find and join in-groups – a collective of individuals who share similar values and/or interests. They go on to argue that social media has allowed society to present themselves through a various forms of content, however referencing danah boyd’s 2012 work ‘Always-On Lifestyle’, they also present some of the challenges associated with having an always-on lifestyle to maintain a level of ‘self-presentation’ amongst their communities/in-groups. With this we begin to understand why individuals may need to use social media more frequently and at higher rates to maintain levels of connection within their communities.

However interestingly pointed out and articulated by Sherry Turkle in her TED 2103 video ‘Connected but alone?’(http://bit.ly/1PC7OB5) users of social media seem to be accessing and engaging these communities whilst participating whenever and wherever it suits them. This can sometimes be in situations amongst other communities and raises the question, are we neglecting the needs of one community in place for another? Or is it that we are looking for self-fulfilment and use social media as a tool to enable our own gratification?

In either case, it is clear that with the rise of digital technologies, we have been able to gain greater control of our community involvement, both participating in and establishing our identity. So why doe we make these decisions?

Looking at this with Ferdinand Tonnies’ theory on sociality in which he explains two terms that he believed held societies together, those being: community – formed by associations of affection, and society – formed through rational will, we can begin to understand it is the need of the community and individual at the time that influences this decision. This brings us full circle to the development of our individual identity and how we are portraying ourselves in our communities.

With this in mind I have created a four step community participation lifecycle in the image following.