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It was October 14th 2012, a regular Sunday evening. Why would this day become so incredibly special? I was just at home, dining with my friends and suddenly I got a message from another friend who texted: OMYGOD, in a few minutes some SICK-dude will jump from 39 kilometres (128.000 ft.), you can watch it live on YouTube, TUNE IN TUNE IN! At first, we were not that surprised. OK, someone will jump, but whatever he must be out of control right? She then mentioned: No really, you have to watch it on YouTube, this is not normal!
So we grabbed my laptop and watched it together online. Suddenly, we were aware that this was a media stunt of Red Bull. Within a few minutes we were all silent watching him jump. It was amazing, never seen such thing before.

In case you have not seen the jump on YouTube or another live stream, here it is:

After the jump, we discussed: why would Red Bull put so much money into one jump? Before the jump, there were so many checklists, and people working ‘behind’ the jump. Why would Red Bull do this? Apparently, this media stunt of Red Bull really worked. Social Media was up side down because of the free-fall of Felix Baumgartner. But why was this stunt not hyped all over the news worldwide?
Today I did some research on how Social Media was influenced by this free-fall. I found a remarkable blog post of someone who did some research before the jump (thus, creating the buzz). She researched whether Red Bull got more exposure or Felix Baumgartner since he is an popular skydiver, Dare-devil and Base-Jumper. He already did some amazing jumps and broke many world-records.

Of course, Red Bull was hoping to get more popularity, since they are the sponsors and it is all about their brand (energy drink with slogan: “Gives you wings”). Therefore I guessed Red Bull would win the ‘popularity contest’. She did some comparisons before the jump (from 7 October till 10 October) with some keywords such as “Livejump” (official hashtag of the Stratos Project) and “Baumgartner” for Felix Baumgartner, and the keywords “Livejump” and “Red Bull” for Red Bull.

These are some statistics found by her:

Clearly, Baumgartner is the winner when it comes to Blogs, News, Forums and, Twitter. His name reached a higher amount of mentions than Red Bull.

After these comparisons she broke her research down by researching tweets on Twitter. This is only the comparison for Twitter (of course, this is one of the biggest social network sites of today). Here is the graph for that comparison:

You can see that Baumgartner has more popularity, since he had 17,136 tweets and Red Bull only had 12,381 tweets. This is a significant difference.

Her final comparison was the popularity difference of these two between countries.

As for popularity of these two in the United States and Mexico, Red Bull is more popular than Felix Baumgartner (however, these differences are not that big). In the United Kingdom and Spain, Felix Baumgartner is more popular than Red Bull. Next to that, Felix Baumgartner is slightly more popular in ‘other countries’.

After here calculations and comparisons, Felix Baumgartner became the absolute winner of the ‘popularity test’. He won with 58% share of voice.
What do these outcomes mean? So far, as for these comparisons, Felix Baumgartner is more popular than Red Bull. I think that the promotion of Red Bull, for their own brand, was not enough. For example, my friend was watching the live stream already and did not even mentioned Red Bull when she texted that we should watch (two times). Besides that, before her text message, I had no clue Red Bull was even preparing the jump. I think, Red Bull needs to put more effort in promoting these ‘crazy’ media stunts. There were so many people ‘behind’ the jump working for the best results. Felix risked his life for this jump. So why was this media stunt not hyped all over the world? Normally Red Bull is a promoter and sponsor of such extreme sports. We should have known that this was a new media stunt of Red Bull. However, in this case it did not worked. In addition, YouTube had approximately 8 million viewers (Telegraph.com). The amount of viewers could have been much higher.

So what do you think were the mistakes Red Bull made before the stunt?

Isabel Beijers 335155

References:

Blogpost and comparisons by Renee (including graphs): http://blog.sysomos.com/2012/10/10/felix-baumgartner-vs-red-bull-who-got-more-exposure/

Telegraph.com: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/9608815/Felix-Baumgartners-record-skydive-millions-watch-and-follow-on-social-media.html

Information Red Bull and Stratos project jump: http://www.redbull.com/cs/Satellite/en_INT/Red-Bull.com/001242745950125

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Television has been a remarkable (traditional) medium over the past decades. Since its introduction it is constantly changing. Around 1928 the first commercial sets of televisions were sold to the public and nowadays, everyone has one or even more television sets in their homes. Television has changed over time from huge black-and-white ‘boxes’ into flat LCD/LED-TV’s with HD and 3D. TV was seen as the most isolating and antisocial medium while watching since it requires no interaction, however it has always served as a social tool whereby TV provided topics for conversation, interaction and promoted feelings of togetherness after watching (Lull, 1990). In this blog I will discuss how traditional media and new media come together and how Television will not be replaced in the future.

Source: https://www.smpte.org/sections/hollywood/meeting-announcement-feb-17-2009

Unfortunately, I am not always up to date regarding the newest technologies. For example, I found out around a year ago that you could even use your iPhone as a remote control (Apple). But now, a few months ago, while surfing on the Internet, I found out that there was something new called “Social TV”. During the MIT Technology Review in 2010, Social TV was mentioned as one of the biggest newest trends, which will develop in the upcoming years (TechnologyReview, 2010). Social TV refers to a technology which supports social interactions among viewers. It is a different and new way for people to connect with each other. Of course, I was well aware that you were already able to connect your laptop to your TV-screen and use your TV-screen as your laptop. But as of today, people own not only laptops anymore – they as well use smartphones and tablets. All these devices could now be incorporated into your TV. Just like these devices, Social Media (such as Twitter, Facebook and much more) are being used by most of the people worldwide. If you combine these with each other (second-screen and social media), you get Social TV. People can now communicate with each other or state their opinion while viewing TV. You could be virtually connected with people from all over the world and discuss about the programs you see on your TV. As for now, we update tweets or comments on Facebook while watching TV via our smartphone or laptop. But with Social TV you are able to tweet or comment directly on your TV to your fellow viewers.

This video clip is an exiting clip about how Social TV will look like in the future. In the clip you can see many different options of what we will be able of doing in the future. For example; you can play at the same time a ‘virtual game’, which is equal to the program you are watching or even click on clothes you see on TV and buy them directly on your tablet.

GOAB. A TV Experience Concept from SYZYGY Deutschland GmbH on Vimeo.

So after watching this videoclip, what do you guys think of these new technologies? Will you use in the future all the features of Social TV or will you keep using TV and Social Media apart from each other? And will this be eventually the biggest trend for the upcoming years?

Isabel Beijers 335155

References:

Lull, J.: The social uses of television. In: Inside Family Viewing, Routledge, New York (1990) 28–48

http://www.technologyreview.com/article/418541/tr10-social-tv/

http://www.whatissocialtelevision.com/How-Does-It-Work.html

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Hi everyone!

For me, the topic of this week was quite difficult since I had really no clue of what peer production and open source was. Luckily, the guest lectures by Mr van Baalen and Mr Zhang last Wednesday helped me to understand the articles of this week a bit more.

The four articles of this week were slightly overlapping, so I will discuss in this blog post the main objectives of the articles and will already give you some information of the two open source development organizations of my presentation tomorrow.

In the guest lecture, Mr van Baalen asked whether there will be a new type of organization in the future, which will result into a new productive system, whereby there are no prices or bosses? This system will consist of only open source software, which will be available to anyone online via the peer production. So, in the future, will there be a CONTROL-SHIFT? Unfortunately, there is still a battle between private and peer-2-peer organizations. Private organizations keep their property safe and controlled by implementing patents and copyright laws. Many more binary versions of software existed, and Richard Stallman viewed this as morally wrong thus came up with the idea to create a basic license called “General Public License (GPL)”, whereby the source code is again open and could be modified and exchanged for free (von Hippel & Von Krogh, 2003:210). This brings us to Linus Law, with the use of metaphors of a Cathedral (e.g. Microsoft) and a Bazaar (e.g. Linux). Why should we invest a lot of money in hunting bugs in the “Cathedral” (with only a few) when we are also able to work with thousands of people on projects (OSS), whereby bugs will be quickly discovered (“given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”) (van Baalen)?

OK, so we are able to work with thousands of people on these open source projects. But then again, open source projects are mostly not rewarding, so what keeps people motivated to actually design new software and exchange it for free? Apparently, people have the need to contribute online (Wikipedia, Zhang & Zhu, 2011). Thousands of people are creating software/content online (von Hippel & Kogh). And, according to Osterloh & Rota (2007:164) this has to do with the intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. With intrinsic motivation people enjoy creating and editing the projects (satisfaction of needs) where, on the other hand, with extrinsic motivation contributors get money rewards or compensations. And explanation of why so many people are contributing online, is because of the chance a good contributor could get a great job offer.

Thus, will open source projects survive? Will contributors remain editing, designing and modifying? This questions was also coined to Mr Mickos (Hyatt, 2008:19). His reaction is that innovation is nothing new, so no, people will not get sick of open sourcing. And because of the highly interaction between contributors, innovation will continue, and thus new open source projects will…

The two open source development organizations which I will present tomorrow are SourceForge.net and LaunchPad. Possibly, one of you may know these websites. The two sites consists of making, adding, editing and exchanging software (such as Linux).  However there are some slight differences between the two, similar looking, organizations. I will elaborate more on the two organizations tomorrow during my poster presentation.

See you all tomorrow!

Isabel Beijers, 335155

References

Zhang, M. and Zhu, F. 2011. Group size and incentives to contribute: A natural experiment at Chinese Wikipedia. American Economic Review 101(4) 1601-1615.

von Hippel, E., and von Krogh, G. 2003. Open source software and the “private-collective” innovation model: Issues for organization science. Organization Science 14(2) 209-223.

Osterloh, M., and Rota, S. 2007. Open source software development – Just another case of collective invention. Research Policy 36 157-171.

Hyatt, J. 2008. The oh-so-practical magic of open-source innovation.  MIT Sloan Management Review 50(1) 15-19.

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Ooono, Jad, you posted your blog about Project X Haren a bit faster. I was working on the blog already, so decided to upload it as well (since its more about WOM).

One of the topics the week was Word-of-Mouth (WOM), and how many companies are using this communication strategy as one of their newest marketing tools (Trusov, Bucklin & Pauwels, 2009). They as well describe how founders of social networking sites began to invite people online and how more and more people became members of one group because of Word-of-Mouth: “Invitations have been the foremost driving force for sites to acquire new members”. (Trusov, Bucklin & Pauwels, 2009:90).  Now, with the use of creating your own ‘event’ on Facebook, things could get a little out of hand…

To discuss this whole other different kind of Word-Of-Mouth, I would like to use an example of what happened in the Netherlands this week. This WOM strategy is different from company strategies, since now members/users of Social Networking Sites are using Social Media to promote something else – a hype created by them, namely the Biggest Project X Facebook Party ever.

I guess we have all seen the wild Project X movie (2012). This party was initially just a party organized by some friends. However, the party escalated into a huge chaos since thousands of people went to celebrate. This movie was a hit in many countries, and now in real-life people are trying to create their own Project X parties (even this year in Houston a teenager died after such a party!).

Source: http://www.sevendays.nl/artikel/188312

In the Netherlands this week, a 15-year-old girl created her own ‘event’ on Facebook for her birthday party for friends and family. Unfortunately by accident, she allowed other people to attend her party, since her party was ‘public’, not ‘private’. Friends of friends were inviting their own friend to come to her party. Of course, she removed her event the day after. However, many people were already aware of her birthday, and people were creating their own events. One of these events became extreme popular. The event, called Project X Haren, contained her real name and address. Within ten days, the amount of invitations exploded, and on the actual ‘party’ day 250.000 invitations were sent out, and 33.000 people supposed to ‘attend’. To avoid drama in the small town Haren, her parents, the police, and the National media were informing people to stay home. Unfortunately, the party was massive. The hype around Project X Haren was huge; people created their own t-shirts, there were busses, promotions for after parties and even a live stream to follow the party online.  The party started in the afternoon and ended around midnight. Thousands of people came to destroy Haren. Even the Riot Control and 500 other policemen were not able to control the situation.

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2jdg5Rr09U

As Jad already mentioned in his blog post below, that traditional media (TV, radio, newspapers) should be blamed as well (and not only Social media). I guess that the Internet was only the starting point of this hype and afterwards the traditional media made this hype even worse.

So to conclude, one small mistake whilst creating an ordinary ‘event’ for you own birthday went completely out of control. The media turned out to be an extremely powerful tool considering this event and people were making use of this. I think in this case it was wrong of the people to misuse Social Networking Sites by spreading the hype – by making the party extremely interesting by people themselves (WOM).

Isabel Beijers, 335155

References:

Information Project X Haren: www.nu.nl

Trusov, M., Bucklin, R. E., Pauwels, K. 2009. Effects of word-of-mouth versus traditional marketing: Findings from an Internet social networking site,” Journal of Marketing (73) 90-102.