Blog Advertising

When we were discussing the facebook case, in particular the part about advertising, a interresting thought came up. The UnME jeans case for example showed that the ads on facebook had a relatively low clickthough rate, without even considering the fact whether people actually bought things. This makes the use of advertisements rather debatable, since it’s hard to measure the total profit created by a advertisement.

I also heard that the system of advertising on blogs is totally different. If you have a personal blog, you can also ask companies to put ads on display on you’re blog. Though for a company it’s not always that interestring to be visible on every blog, especially if you have to pay for it. Though for the blogger point of few you’re not going to put an ad on your blog if you wont recieve something in return, since it wil offtenly only bother your readers.
The system blogs use is explaned in the link, posted with this post. A blogger can ask a company to put a ad on his or her blog, and if a reader clicks on it, and performs an action like buying something, the companie pays the blogger. This on one hand makes sure companies only pay when they know for sure that they get something in return, and the bloggers get stimulated to keep their blog updated and interresting in order to attract more readers, so they earn more money through advertisements.

I think this system is better, since nobody gets disadvantaged. The interresting thing is that the customer and producer roles are swaped. With facebook, the advertisers are the customers, buying for example space for a certain time from facebook, though with blogging, the blogger is the producer, attracting readers, and the company is the customers, getting the readers, and paying for that if the reader actually buyes things.

So I was talking to my aunt this evening, who flied over from America this week, about the social media course, and we discussed this week’s case. So when I told her about his guitar being damaged, and that he was being told off for countless times by the airport, she mentioned this video. It’s about the leading Belgian telephone operator, Mobistar, which is known for it’s terrible customers service. A television program called Basta thought of a prank to confront the company with their own flaws. It’s hilarious, so I had to show you. Sorry Ting, it’s Belgian, though if you enable the youtube text bubble, the English subtitles show. Enjoy!

last week when I was taking the train towards our lovely class from Ting, I couldn’t help but notice an article in the Spits about the use of social media at festivals, or you can better say lack of use of social media. It’s about the fact that their has been a lot of research done about festivals in terms of management, organisation and marketing, but not about customers experience. In a article by Van Vliet this is futher explained, and a few research directions are given including social media. Festivals only use social media to distribute information like ticket sales, time tables, and maps. Lowlands on the other hand does spend time to create a community on the web by lancing a playlist of the artist on spotify, though they could do much more. For example they could create a platform which allows people to post/exchange pictures and video’s. This keeps the festival spirit alive, so you don’t have to warm up the crowd each year.

If you’ll like to have more information, the link of the article in Spits is bellow (warning, it’s in Dutch ;p)

Maybe a opportunity for some of us to write a strategy for a festival after this course 😉 ?

http://www.spitsnieuws.nl/archives/entertainment/2012/10/festival-mist-kansen

When I was writing my case write-up about wikipedia, I happend to notice that wikipedia has more than four million articles in english! You can’t make me believe they store all these articles on one server, which made me remember an article I read around a year ago. A new hype in web 2.0 next to social networks is Cloud computing. Cloud computing means that you can pay a cloud provider to manage your information flows of your company, and storing it in a ‘cloud’. This means the cloud provider puts the information on a server of a third party. The question you ask of course, is why should you do that? It is very simple. First, since you don’t have to buy and maintain the hardware that you need in order to store your information. Second, that you don’t have to worry about your security not being up to date, since the cloud provider takes care of that. Conclusion, it saves a lot of money. The disadvantage however is the privacy. for example if the information of around a 1000 people is on one server, how do you make sure only the owner of the information is allowed to see it? If you want to read more about this topic, you can read the following article:

Zhang, Q. & Cheng, L. & Boutaba, R. (2010) Cloud computing: state-of-the-art and      research challenges. Journal of internet services and applications, 1(1), 7-18.       Doi: 10.1007/s13174-010-0007-6