A few years ago, The Coca Cola Company started having a more open business model. Since then, we have all witnessed great advertisements and promotions of the company. Furthermore, a few years ago, The Coca Cola Company, in cooperation with MOFILM, started making contests about making videos, which included the perfect moment with Coca Cola.

I find this example to be one of the most fun one’s considering how good some of the videos from the previous winners were:

But, to get back into the topic of our course: this contest is a very good example of crowdsourcing.

Starting with the fact that The Coca Cola Company made a contest with a monetary reward for the best video. In addition, they added production grants for the videos. From the perspective of the participants and regular people, contests like this one will allow them to have fun and possibly win money for that. And on the other hand, from the company’s perspective, they will gain free advertisement and promotion among the people that are voting and watching the contest and for a small amount of money for such a big company a good video to use for their future marketing.

To conclude, this is just another small part of how Coca Cola sells and promotes its products and how a small investment combined with modern technologies can quickly spread the word about a company and its products.

This week we learned about prediction markets and what I found most interesting is how accurate these predictions are.

In politics, Berg, Nelson & Rietz (2008) found that 74% predictions since 1988 until 2004 were very close to the actual outcome. Now, why does this matter? Well most political campaigns use these numbers to get supporters and in addition this analysis can be used to see where the candidate lacks supporters. For instance, a candidate might have a strong support from a certain neighbourhood, but not from another, which in turn can help the campaign focus their assets on getting supporters from the other neighbourhood. Or, the numbers can show the campaign where the other candidate has the most support from, so that the campaign can either attempt to take away some of that support or focus more on the opposing side for themselves.

When it comes to the stock market, I found an interesting article that explains how Google Trends can be used in predicting the events of the stock market. Preis, Moat & Stanley (2013) argue that when a lot of people Google the terms: “debt” and “inflation” it is very likely that they are concerned about the current market and that they are likely to start selling their shares. When the researchers applied this theory it lead them to a 326% profit within 7 years. However, the article also warned that the more the people use this strategy the less accurate it will be. In addition, in a more modern world new keywords will appear and more research on this topic will be needed.

However, the prediction market is not perfect and it can be manipulated by outside forces. Simple rumours about a company, product or a person can change the stock price temporarily and affect the predictions.

So, its overall accuracy is hard to determine and aside from just using prediction market the researcher should be aware of its flaws.

References:

Berg, J. E., Nelson, F. D., & Rietz, T. A. (2008). Prediction market accuracy in the long run. International Journal of Forecasting, 24(2), 285-300.

Preis, T., Moat, H. S., & Stanley, H. E. (2013). Quantifying trading behavior in financial markets using Google Trends. Scientific reports, 3.

I believe many of you are familiar with the website theoatmeal.com. Well, the artist of these comics, aside from his creativity and humour, is known for his devotion to one of the greatest scientists who ever lived, namely, Nikola Tesla. His devotion to Tesla went up to the point that he started a crowd-funding project in through which he wanted to purchase the land of the former laboratory of Nikola Tesla (http://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla). And as he said “This campaign wasn’t about crowd-funding a video-game or financing a start-up or creating a new gadget. It was about righting a wrong.” Now I know most people will not be able to visit this museum and would have more benefits from a new gadget, but a museum devoted to one of the biggest inventors that ever lived will teach the future generations about what our generation was not aware of.

As the author stated again:”Mr Tesla, we’re sorry humanity forgot about you for a little while. We still love you lots. Here’s a Goddamn Museum”.

Well, his project worked and in November 2013 the land, which originally was for sale for 1.6 M$, was bought by a non profit organisation, funded by the crowd-funding project of theoatmeal.com. (http://theoatmeal.com/blog/tesla_museum_saved). However, the project money that was collected was only enough to buy the land. Building the museum would take an additional 8 M$.

Furthermore, his contribution was not ended here. The author of theoatmeal.com asked Elon Musk, one of the major stock holders of Tesla Motors, to donate money to the new project of building a museum, to which Elon Musk replied that he would help and he donated 1 M$ to building the museum and promised to build a Tesla supercharging station at the parking lot for the cars. However, the museum needed more money and the supporters and the author created a new crowd-funding project (https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/buy-a-brick-for-the-nikola-tesla-museum). In this project, however, people can buy and personalise their own bricks which will be used to build the new museum. This is not all, supporters can also buy shirts and hoodies to support the new project.

To conclude, the power of the Internet can be used for many things and I believe that this example is one of the best because it shows us how the creativity of a comic artist can build a museum devoted to Nikola Tesla.

So, in your opinion, is it the support and creativity of a famous comic artist that made this project successful? Or is it the historical value and righteousness of the project that made it successful?

In this short essay I discussed about the current value of the articles from week 2. With this I mean that, in terms of technology and media usage, the years 2010 and 2011 were much different than they are now. I discussed in what ways their theories still apply to modern media usage and in what ways they were right. All of the articles, in a way, talked about implementing new technologies into one’s business in order to achieve the most possible with modern technology. However, at first I thought that all electronic businesses are aware of this until I found an infographic that proved me a bit wrong. The US Social commerce – Statistics and Trend infographic showed that there are still businesses that do not implement social media buttons to their websites, namely, 14% of top 25 companies, which I found very interesting.

So, to go more into depth, I found more modern articles, such as Jaconi (2014) in which I found that many modern businesses are turning more to the side of “uberification” or on- demand economy, which is another new way of selling your products to the end customer using the modern tools. The importance and power of using such tools is shown through articles such as this one. Especially, because it is a more revolutionary way of thinking. This article explains how businesses have reached high and quick success due to the implementation of modern tools.

For my cases I have used AirBNB and Lolly Wolly Doodle, in both cases the businesses use modern technologies and the on demand economy to further advance their businesses. In the case of Lolly Wolly Doodle, its a small-town manufacturer, who became one of the hottest seller on social media because of their collaboration with the consumers. The manufacturer did not only talk to the customer before the sale but also afterwards to improve their experience of her products. Although, her job is not as easy as it sounds considering that all customers have all kinds of different needs. On the other hand, AirBNB implemented modern technologies to create a medium for people that want to rent their place to the end customer for a cheaper price than regular hotels. So, AirBNB found a way through the house-owners to meet the end customers needs by involving other customers and using their reviews to adjust and or improve the places that they rent.

To conclude I found that the three articles have made some mistakes in their predictions, but they have made one of the most important predictions and that is that modern technologies are evolving on very fast pace and that the businesses should keep up with that to their on benefit.

Reference:

Jaconi, M. (2014, Jul 13). The ‘On-Demand Economy’ Is Revolutionizing Consumer Behavior — Here’s How. The Business Insider. Retrieved from: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-on-demand-economy-2014-7