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Presidents used to shake hands, kiss babies and have lunch at small restaurants to win the hearts of voters. This no longer makes the cut. With the new generation hooked to their devices (mobile phones, tablets, computers, etc.) they need to change their campaign strategies and go online.  Never has the battle been fiercer to win over voters via online campaigning than now during the US presidential election 2012!

Here is a quick overview of the social media campaign battle between Barrack Obama and Mitt Romney on the many different social media platforms:

 

 

(all images retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/10/08/technology/campaign-social-media.html)

“The more people you talk to, the more likely you are to win” is whats edging on the online campaign. Their goal is to reach as many people as possible and hope that it will increase their amount of votes. Both camps have large internet-adept teams that are specialized on social media platforms trying to coordinate their strategy and message across the net.

Both Obama and Romney rely heavily on Facebook and Twitter to solicit donations, put up reminders of events and share articles and other news items that support their ideals. Flickr and Instagram are used as a scrapbook of the campaign tour and all the dinners and lunches at the small town diners. Tumblr and Pinterest are used to highlight photos and share the material of their supporters. Although Obama and Romney don’t actually have a Pinterest account themselves their wives do, sharing their favorite hobbies and recipes.

Reasons why both Obama and Romney use the social media platforms above can mostly be seen as self-explanatory but why would they both share their Spotify playlists with the public? It doesn’t really have anything to do with the election and it does not really seem like taste in music should encourage a person to vote for Obama instead of Romney or the other way around. The truth is they don’t really know what the effects are of sharing Spotify playlists but they don’t want to miss out on anything. So basically if it’s not hurting the campaign they may as well try it!

“What’s the return on putting your pants on in the morning? We don’t know,” said Jan Rezab, the chief executive of Socialbakers, a social media analytics firm. “But we just know it’s bad if you don’t do it.”  (Wortham, J. 2012).

 

 

Sophie de Jong 341927

References:

Wortham, J. (2012) Campaigns use social media to lure younger voters. Published: October 7, 2012.

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All over the world people are outraged by the fact that their personal messages from the past years have been exposed on their timeline. Many articles have appeared on the Internet addressing this problem. After stumbling upon one of these articles I decided to check it out myself and indeed after scrolling through my timeline it seemed that there were a lot of messages on my timeline that were of pretty private nature and I can’t image that I would post these things on my facebook ‘wall’ for everyone to see. I quickly deleted all these posts from my timeline and hope nobody has read them yet.

However according to Facebook there wasn’t a glitch in the system and they deny exposing any private messages on facebook timelines. Facebook claims that people are now easier able to scroll through their timelines and then come across messages, when this happens they can’t believe they ever posted certain messages in public.

“A Facebook spokesman told TechCrunch that users are confusing old public Wall posts as old private messages because “before 2009 there were no likes and no comments on wall posts. People went back and forth with wall posts instead of having a conversation [in the comments of single wall post].” The issues appear to have stemmed from the global rollout of Timeline. Facebook says it has conducted its own investigation and “is satisfied that there has been no breach of user privacy.” Despite Facebook’s official statements denying the reports, users are still reporting that their old messages are being exposed for all their friends to see.”  

(Raymond Wong, BGR News, Tue, Sept 25, 2012)

Whether or not facebook really is exposing our old private messages and making them available for all your friends and family to see I would advise everyone to scroll through their own timeline and make sure there aren’t any messages on their that you wouldn’t want others to see!

Do you think Facebook might have exposed our private messages on Timeline and are denying all claims or are we really just that dumbfounded about how we used to use Faecbook?

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Even though we discussed social commerce a couple weeks back, i stumbled upon an article related to this topic that was too interesting to not mention.

The article is about a new app called Verisize, developed by a group of students from the Computer Vision Centre in Barcelona (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona), with which you can find out your size for any piece of clothing and brand when purchasing online. Any online store can make use of this app to allow customers to easily estimate their sizes.

The app would be so helpful for so many online shoppers since finding the right size for clothing is hard enough but when sizing varies for every brand it becomes a nightmare for a lot of online shoppers. This causes a lot of people to stay away from online shopping or frequently buying the wrong size and ending up having to go through a lot of effort of returning the garment.

The app works by estimating your size after you have inserted your height, weight, age and choosing a body shape out of six possible profiles that the system provides. These body profiles were developed after researchers studied the ‘anthropomorphic’ characteristics of 50,000 people with different body types. This allowed for the statical modeling of the human body. The model used works in a way that when the user inserts basic data, such as age, weight and height, a virtual mannequin that looks like the user is created. This mannequin provides the best fit and thus size of a garment that a user has picked out at an online store.

The main objective of the app is to reduce the return rate and increase customer satisfaction. This can be a revolutionary app for e-commerce, as it would make online shopping so much easier for so many people.

The app is available to all online stores at verisize.com. In my opinion every store should really take a closer look at this app, it could be incredibly beneficial in terms of online shopping.

Verify your size at http://www.verisize.com/en/

 

Article available at: http://news.discovery.com/tech/attention-online-shoppers-app-knows-your-size-120926.html#mkcpgn=rssnws1

Verisize website: http://www.verisize.com/en/

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The home assignment topic this week is about exploring peer productions and Open Source. I’ll give you a brief summary and my findings about the readings this week and then continue with two examples, Wikipedia and Apache.

The readings for this week focused on peer production and Open Source. Not the easiest subject I found on my part. However the guest lectures last Wednesday did shed a little light on the matter. All four articles had something in common; they question what motivates people to contribute to open source software and peer production platforms and why this way of working has ‘survived’ and not being taken advantage of. From the readings I think we can conclude that the main reasons people contribute to open source software and peer production platforms is due to social benefits, these being benefiting from extended functionality catered to own needs, creating a reputation for oneself, pure enjoyment, or the feeling of giving something back (Hyatt 2008). The reason open source software works even after the emergence of a dominant design is due to the self rewarding benefits which people find great enough to continue contributing. Another reason is the invention of the OSS licenses, “Copyleft,” and the fact that a sufficient number of contributors enforce the rules. This also ensures that software will continue to remain a public good and can thus not be taken advantage of.

 

As examples I chose Wikipedia, a website that not only I but I am pretty sure a lot of you use really often, and a more challenging example which is Apache, an open source platform which before this week I had never heard of. Wikipedia is probably one of the most well known peer production platforms. Its goal is through collaboration being a free and complete online encyclopedia Wikipedia contains 23 millions articles and over 4 million in the English Wikipedia alone. All of these articles have been written collaboratively with volunteers from all over the world and its currently estimated 100,000 active contributors. However the question a lot of people ask themselves is why do people contribute to Wikipedia? After a lot of research it mainly came down to credit and claim of authorship. Active contributors actually have their own pages on Wikipedia with resumes with all the work they have contributed. This credit is their self-rewarding benefit, which encourages them to contribute.

Apache took a lot more research to figure out what is was all about. Apache is generally recognized as the world’s most popular web server. “Apache server software is use on Web server computers that host Web pages and provide appropriate content as requested by Internet browsers” (Hippel & Krogh 2003, P.211). It differs from Wikipedia greatly in the way that it is technology based and thus has a completely different type of contributing group. Not just everyone van contribute to Apache like Wikipedia since it is a lot less user-friendly and you really have to know what your doing if you want to contribute. This can be seen as a strength and at the same time a weakness since you make it harder for people to contribute, since not everybody knows how Apache works, yet at the same time they can make sure that only specialized people can contribute and they don’t get a lot of nonsense to deal with.

 

Well I guess that pretty much briefly summarizes the main findings of my assignment! See you all tomorrow!

 

Sophie de Jong, 341927

 

References:

Hippel von, E. & Krogh von, G. (2003) Open source software and the “private-collective” innovation Model: Issues for organization Science. Organization science/Vol. 14, No. 2, March-April 2003

Hyatt, J. (2008) The oh-so-practical Magic of Open source Innovation. MIT sloan management review Fall 2008

 

 

 

 

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In class on Friday we talked about a company called Target and how they were able to gather so much information about their customers that they were able to figure out whether one of their customers was pregnant and approximately how far along they were. I looked it up on Google and came across an interesting article in the New York Times, “How companies know your secrets”, by Charles Duhigg. The article outlines how Target was able to figure out such personal information and how they profited from this information.

How it works is that Target assigns each individual a Guest ID number, which not only keeps tabs on everything a customer buys but also whether you used a credit card, coupons, have ever called customer service, filled out a survey or visited the company website. This is the basic data that Target can personally collect however there is also a lot of information about individuals up for sale such as your age, marital status, where you live, what you earn and what web sites you visit, your ethnicity, job history, and much more. Basically a store like Target wants to know everything they can.

They use all this information to run tests and analysis and see emerging patterns of certain products pregnant women buy such as larger quantities of unscented lotion and load up on supplements such as calcium, magnesium and zinc. Target used these emerging patterns to figure out how close a customer was getting to her due date and to send these customers unique coupons depending on how far along they were.

However they stumbled across a problem once they started freaking out women by letting on that they know about their pregnancy by sending them unique pregnancy related coupons. People were really uncomfortable by the information Target had on them, so Target decided to become sneakier and when creating the customized coupon booklets by including a bunch of random coupons as well as the pregnancy related coupons, to make it seem like it was completely random. This way the women would not feel like they were spied on and still use the coupons.

The article explains many other interesting things about customer data mining and analysis and is definitely worth a read!