October 2012 – Cyberspace Surfing

The brave new world of future election campaigns

President election is the huge event in the life of nation, isn’t it? Especially now, when there are so many opportunities to follow and to get involved. 2012 elections in the U.S. are intensively discussed on the news portals, in social networks, blogs etc. New media give so many possibilities! At the beginning of the year Google launched the elections hub for people to watch, learn and discuss the upcoming event, President Obama runs his own twitter under @BarackObama, Mashable discusses the possibility of voting on-line in its report , while U.S. government is already implementing this option for military or overseas voters.

Technologies create the brave new world of inexhaustible opportunities. According to Techcrunch, the 2008 election was about Facebook, while this year elections shifted to Twitter. What will come next? And how will new media change the nature of election campaign? Another article of Mashable is discussing the possible portrait of the candidate to the President in digital world of 2040. Let’s have a look at the problems he might face:

According to the video, if any potential candidate to 2040 presidential race uses Facebook as a place to socialize and share his thoughts, he automatically becomes unelectable. Because each careless comment or status post, each easy-going photo of his/her students’ years entertainment activities will be found and brought to the light during the possible election campaign of the future. Does it mean that everyone should be really attentive to the content he shares in the web, that it is important to carefully monitor all the digital movements of yourself. Well…it would certainly do no harm. But apparently Facebook and Twitter won’t have such a great influence in 28 years? First of all, they can simply retire till that time, or people will become social-media averse and sick of sharing. Another scenario, proposed by Mashable, is a new hypersocial media, where all the data (from foot size till real-time pulse rate) would be available. Also social norms and value can change completely, and things unacceptable nowadays will become usual in future.

No doubts, world is changing. And this digital “improvements” will touch every side of our life, including politics and election campaigns. There is no chance to control the information anymore, but smart political engineers will find the way to convert the danger of new media influence into the benefits for their candidates. For sure, on-line political campaigns will replace the more expensive TV advertising. Possibly, we will be able to watch the reality show describing the life of candidate in all the detail. Or, maybe, politicians will seek for the funds for their campaigns through projects like Kickstarter. Electorate is getting smarter. So who will win in 2040? The one who can provide the proper and up-to date communication.

Facebook new ad: is it shouting or talking?

It’s not a secret that relationship between customers and companies during recent years shifted significantly from companies’ dictatorship to customer control power. “Groundswell” the book made by Forrester Research describes a bunch of new methods, which are supposed to involve the company in qualitative relationship with customer. Talking is one of them. According to it, companies, instead of advertising, should use creative ways to approach the clients and to involve them into the communication. One of the popular approaches can be posting to blogs, creating videos or participation in social networks. But what if the social network itself needs to talk to the users? What method of communication should it use? And is it possible nowadays to convert a simple advertasing message into the instrument of two-sides communication? Through this post I want to show a bit different approach to Talking as one of the tactics of “new communication”.

Recently Facebook started the advertising campaign to approach the target market in 13 countries (Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Philippines etc), where it is not popular because of the technology gap or existence of local powerful social networks (for example, “Vkontakte” in Russia). Facebook released the video ad, aimed to show the things connecting people throughout the world. What can it be?

Chairs…Strange choice, isn’t it? But it actually works. Just a week passed, but Facebook already got feedbacks of different kinds, starting from the Are Chairs Like Facebook? web-page till the parody reply ad of the following content:

One could say that the original ad is just a shouting, unpopular technics of the past, which is aimed to deliver the message to as many people as possible. Nevertheless, though it is just an advertising video, it seems to be talking method, because talking creates conversation. And these re-posting, web-page response creations, video parodies are the conversation. Is it the good one – this is a question. But people talk about, people exchange the information and express opinion, though for now mostly negative.
Next step should be made by Facebook. It is interesting to see how it will respond to continue this conversation or to turn it to another, more favorable way.