NEW IDEA OF THE DIGITAL DIVISION

Our times are surely shaped by ICT, partly because such technologies carry the essence of what is commonly referred to as the age of globalization: global reaches, fast pace, and knowledge as the main commodity. (Drori, 2010)

We as a society strive to develop, communicate with like-minded individuals, discuss things that facilitate decision-making and generate offline activism. US and Japan are the major contributors when it comes to digital technology innovations and communications. Japan has the latest technology; US has the latest global social networking publications and Apple. Due to these countries’ innovations, this time around smartphones have particularly opened a new window to accessing the Internet. When concentrating on the mobile networking, Americans in general are accessing the Internet through mobile devices in increasing numbers, with 59 percent (Brustein, 2010) of those surveyed saying they accessed the mobile Web, compared with 51 percent in the previous year.

Smartphones have been established as a bridge between the digital divide in the world. As the US smartphone user stats increase, this has been argued to show the slow evanescing of the divide. Selwyn (2004) describes digital divide as a gap between people with effective access to digital technology and those with very limited or no access at all. Some scholars describe it as a cause of socioeconomic status, where resulting in being able to have an access to the Internet.

On one hand, living in a developed country and having the great technology, which allows instant access to the Internet does not necessarily describe the digital divide. Whereas, if we look at the offline accentuation online- this could be the next level of establishment the meaning of the digital divide.

As an example, the diagram shows that even though England has the largest population of Twitter users compared to Egyptian population, they do not influence each other as much and there is fewer exchange of information occurs. Egyptian Twitters on the other hand have a bigger influence in their say and actively follow one another.

The larger population of Twitters in UK could be described as the country is so economically stable unlike Egypt, where in UK for example, there is a more likely chance of a teenager owning a smart phone and “Twit”. Looking at it from the new digital divide idea, those individuals have no constant participation in the society and at the end of the day, their opinions would not be heard.

A 26-year-old woman worried about the state of her country wrote on Facebook: "People, I am going to Tahrir Square". (ibnlive, 2011)

In the case with Egypt, where government shut off 93% of the nation’s Internet access due to online participation getting too influential on the public. (Hatamoto, 2011) This proves how great the digital divide can be. Facebook, Youtube and Twitter users started an online revolution in the country, which was in the name of freedom of speech and standing up for their rights (Hauslohner, 2011). Due to the online activists- the protest movements were formed, snowballing more viral activity than ever.

Internet World Stats (2010) show the highest growth of Internet users from 2000 to 2010 by 2, 357% in Africa. This compared to Asia being second, growing by 621%, whereas Europe has only grown by 352%.

When particularly looking at Facebook, it penetrated the Egypt Internet user market by 8% since 2009, comparing it with the World Total Facebook penetration by 9.3%. These statistics relate to the fact that when digital communication devices are used, they generate a community of active and non-active participants. Active participants are the once that use those tools in the benefit of their opinions being heard and acknowledged; those take the great advantage of the tools of reaching people quicker on the global scale.  

It seems like social network is the only way where control can be put in the hands of the public, i.e the Egypt case. However, in some countries/societies it should be argued that people may thus have technical access, but they may still continue to lack effective access in the knowledge of how to extract information for their needs from the material available on the Web. (Hargittai, 2002)

As it has been learned by the companies, having a Facebook page or a Twitter account, doesn’t necessarily mean that it would bring profit to companies as “digital is the future of companies’ success”. Clear objectives for having a Facebook page have to be provided by the brand and responsive mechanism to its clients’ engagement. Transparency of a brand is another point of going socially active online. A brand should connect its meaning and what it stands for through the web. In the case of Egypt, those individuals were using Facebook and Twitter to arrange protests and meetings. They were transparent in their reasons behind the actions. The same principle should be applied to a brand, as when it starts participating online, it should develop a relationship with its consumers by bridging that digital divide of not just being online but start conversing, encouraging purchases and engaging.

In the social media, SOCIAL is what is important and everyone has a part in it. This is where the digital divide occurs; individuals/brands have an access to the media tools, but do not know how to interact and connect with the audiences and it does not become so social any more. Marketers job is to make sure that consumers and brands understand the social side of media. In future, when the divide is bridged- both sides will benefit from being online. Brands would become more personal and consumers would become more engaging and responsive. To conclude, perhaps the next buzz of promotional marketing channel for a brand would be the use of mobile messaging. (Shields, 2011)    

21st Century Panoptical

“To participate in online social networking is also about the act of sharing yourself- or your constructed identity- with others” (Albrechtslund, 2008)

                       

Most of the big brands now days use social media as a tool to build their customer profiling and for dataveillance. The main crisis for brands when using social tools is that brands should know their identity first to communicate what they really stand for in a far more consistent, strategic and global way. The brands have to be transparent of what they are representing online. This is where trust is created between a brand and a consumer, but what responsibilities should a brand have to protect consumers’ privacy?

Well, if privacy does not exist any more, where Facebook for example is known as a platform of self-expression or a means of identification, where anyone has an access to it; individuals are not taking a great concern of their personal information by creating Facebook profiles on the first place. It would not be an ethical issue for a brand such as Starbucks to become “friends” with their consumers, as it is consumers’ choice to accept the request.

Facebook creates a unique community for Starbucks, where consumers engage with the brand.

Starbucks based the latest online campaign around community service projects in London run on April the 5th. Volunteers had to be involved in literacy, refurbishing schools, neighborhood renovations, as well as technology, gardening and painting projects. After words the experience were allowed to be shared on the Facebook profile by uploading photos and videos.

Starbucks does not only use Facebook to engage with their consumers, but to elaborate Corporate Social Responsobility into the online activist society. What company does is transparent and whether consumers support the brand’s identity depends on the active followers.

Facebook is a panoptical, however there is a choice from both parties (from an individual consumer side and from a brand’s side) to be a part of it. In this case, both would have an impact on a companies/ brand’s PR structure. When brands become a part of that panoptical, they become observed by the bigger media, where crisis are identified faster and exposed much efficient. This time everyone is being “watched”. 
   

Obama+Facebook=...

Having become an important feature of many citizens’ daily lives, the Internet increasingly used as a focal point for protests. The whole idea of being anonymous allows us to express our thoughts freely. However, there is a connection between actively participating online and having offline ramifications.  

Especially, it became increasingly important in campaign politics, developing digital activism. (Herrnson et al, 2007)

 Barack Obama case study with Facebook identifies the beginning of the digital public sphere formation. During the times of US president elections, Barack Obama dominated the social networking site by hiring Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes in the early 2007, who was Mark Zuckerberg's Harvard roommate. As a result, in 2008, it has been identified that Obama had 17million Facebook supporters, compare to Sarah Palin only having 2million (whereas McCain did not have Facebook at all as he was taking more traditional campaigning methods). This is not a coincidence, this is due to Obama tacking the right way to win publics’ voices; allowing the politics to directly get involved in the social networking medium.

At first, it was Rupert Murdoch owning most of the media; this time around Obama is shown a definite influence on Facebook. Latest news state that Facebook wants to offer a potential media relations chief job to Robert Gibbs (former press secretary for President Barack Obama) however the final conclusions are not made yet whether he would take the job. (The Independent, 2011)

There is a question to whether those bodies should get involved with social media at all, as they will try to limit the freedom of speech and information. We live in the democratic society; therefore, it is a big issue. On the other hand, Obama possibly tries to get closer to the public sphere and the generated online discussions for the benefit of improving the USA.      

Group ON, or more like Group Off

There is no way a student like me would walk away from a deal! Group on is a web site that offers daily deals at different UK locations, wherever you are. I have only discovered this site recently as a friend has recommended it to me, and therefore not fully involved in it yet. Some of the deals are definitely not student orientated “£89 Night Stay for 2 at Best Western Hotel” and some focus around pleasure- seeking, dreams fulfilling experience “£36 Warm Chocolate Mud Back Therapy”. The huge buzz of this site is around the price cut, as it is ridiculously high.

It has a similar process to eBay, but geographically targeting. The thing about this kind of web sites is that you have to snap off the deals, as there is a count down to when they expire.

This generates an excitement in purchase as it attracts you with the added information such as “discount rate”, how much you save, time count down and how many deals have been purchased so far. This is something that makes you act quick, reinforces visits and becomes addictive as the deals made up to be highly worth buying. A clever Marketing strategy of “Recommend to friends” is a word of mouth tactic, which is to me is the main reason organisations advertise deals on this website- in the hope to attract as many local consumers.

The website allows to pursue 100% “Have it now culture”. In this case, consumer daydreaming is pleasurable, it seeks actualisation, where Group On allows them to “have” what they desire.  

This is all promising Marketing, but on the other hand I am not an active user of the website, but once I visited the site; pop ups, Facebook ads, junk mail would appear with the daily promotions in Bournemouth. The idea of crossing that line of privacy has been dissolved and there is a question of control over knowledge about oneself. (Charles Fried, 1968) From a Marketers perspective, I could say, “The more information I know about a consumer, the better profile I could build, and the more effective targeting could be”. However, from a possible client perspective- Group On should back off and focus on the “Recommending friends” tactic and the continuation of offering daydreaming actualisations to active members.

  

GOOGLE WEEK

When specifically concentrating on Google SEO, we focus on how website publishers could be used to specifically be targeted at the right consumers.

According to “Google creating campaign”, there are 5 key things that a company could do to effectively target those customers and use Adwords effectively.

The 5 stages are:

1.      Target your ads to the right location. Deciding specifically what products or services a company should focus on and where those customers might be

2.      Budget. Choosing the maximum amount the company is willing to pay when a customer clicks on the ad. Google can set a budget for you, but it can also be done manually. Also, the company has to decide how many clicks it can afford per day (daily budget). The ads will stop appearing once the budget is reached, allowing total control of the costs.

3.      Focus on one product at a time. Deciding what product should be advertised first, to make sure the ads are very specific.

4.      Write an engaging ad. The ad text should be specific to the product the company is advertising; not to forgetting to include any unique offers or USPs. These would make the ad to stand out from the competitors.

5.      KEY WORDS. Creating a list of key words in the ad text can trigger the Google search to show the ad. 

Reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oz0V1Tqi7Wk

This is a great opportunity to be used by small, local businesses to beat the competition, however those companies need to know how to use it right!

As an example, I will take my dad’s business, Slough Mortgage Centre in Slough. There are other mortgage companies in Slough, however his website comes up on the top of the list when typing in “slough mortgage centre”.

This is due to his company’s name, as it is very specific to the service he provides and where, which means consumer search is targeted specifically at his business. Also, the web site text includes a lot of key words such as “Slough” and “mortgages”. Therefore even when typing in “Mortgages in Slough”, his website will come up at the top. 

However, if the other Mortgage companies will decide to challenge my dad’s position, they could pay Google to advertise their ad to be on top of the search every time some one would be looking for “mortgages in Slough”. This is where a company would have to consider stage 2 of the “Google creating campaign”.  

Living a computer-generated fantasy

There are more and more implications made on virtuality integrated into every day life. Up to the moment the Wii was introduced, game consoles considered entertainment gadgets for children who were great at moving their thumbs; however, the Wii overturned this meaning of virtual reality and adopted a new method of social interaction.

Wii Fit Plus was in UK’s top 10 video games chart this year. Wii Fit worked best when it came to balancing and yoga moves; skateboarding and golf were also seen as fun.

The Wii was almost a window to virtual reality experience.

However, the more up to date version of the experience was commented on by Ian Sample (2010) from the guardian.com. The virtual reality has been used in an experiment to transfer men’s minds into a woman’s body. The "body-swapping" effect was so convincing that the men's sense of self was transferred into the virtual woman, causing them to react reflexively to events in the virtual world in which they were immersed.

In this case, both of those virtual experiences have been developed for positive reasons: social interaction and to stop people being prejudice. However, they could also be argued to having great negative impacts. Gergen (1991) argues that the various social (e.g. work, home, personal) and mediated (e.g., computer, phone, television) environments in which we interact are eroding our sense of self and destroying community attachment and moral development.

One of the main problems with the “out of body experience” is that after having a “virtual perfect body”, it could potentially lead to low self-esteem, feelings of worthlessness and insignificance, even self-destructive acts. 

For us as marketers, a compute-generated experience can be a great way of communicating the emotional side of what a service or a brand is about. This is what making intangible service- tangible is at the end of the day.  

Apple has nothing on it!

Japan has been one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world, where companies producing smart phone applications get 100% return on their investment. This is where Apple has screwed up by introducing the Apple Tax, which unfortunately has had a negative impact on subscribers. In this case, the advanced ICT and independent app subscribers are the reasons Japanese phone market is very stable and hugely growing.

The Telegraph (Skipworth, 2009) have commented on Japanese culture saying that phone as a device has integrated with its user so much that it actually became a part of everyday life. For example, paying for a drink in a local shop can be done with a phone thanks to its integrated Felica system (essentially an electronic wallet). Japanese can board the train by tapping through barriers with thier phone and then watch morning TV on the handsets hi-def screen. Friends exchange details by infra-red business cards transferred between phones and shopping can be done by scanning barcodes from adverts on the train.

The apps level is absolutely way beyond any Western competition; a 4G stuff that has not reached the West and the US.

This is where UK companies have a completely advantaged opportunity to play with so that the country could finally start developing into the real “haves” country. (Stump, R et al, 2008)

Things like Travel cards on your phone (Oyster) or even a Starbucks Reward card for all those Starbucks lovers out there- would make a life so much more convenient! However, there are of course limitations to using this kind of advanced technology in this country. One of them is support by the government: 3G service in England is paid to be used; however in Japan it is free. On the other hand, it could possibly be that the app subscribers are not willing to pay 30% to Apple, when there are cheaper, traditional versions of providing their services.

So I guess for now we would just have to dream of the fact what could possibly be otherwise- having an Oyster card on your phone would save you queuing on a rush hour morning in London Underground; meaning that you could still have time for a Starbucks without the mad queue waiting to pay for their coffee. 

The truth is: It is predicted that by 2015 mobiles will replace PC as the most used method of access to the Internet. However, my point is that by 2015, the mobiles will replace PCs AND half of the manual services, which will convert into a mobile digital services. Hopefully, this hypothesis would not be affected by the Apple TAX.

References:

Skipworth, H, 2009. Five Japanese phones we’ll never see in the West [online]. Available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/mobile-phones/6537395/Five-Japanese-mobile-phones-well-never-see-in-the-West.html [Accessed 18^th February, 2011]