Uma imagem vale mais que mil palavras. Isso é bem verdade, mas claro, quando se consegue ver algo na imagem. Quando comprei a minha Sony DSC-s650 esperava isso. Mas não foi bem assim.

Depois da minha ida ao melhor lugar para se tirar fotos legais, Chapada Diamantina, tive minha decepção.  Imagens com manchas, muitas manchas, quando estava um pouco mais escuro. Um flash com alcance bem pequeno, vídeo ruim, para não dizer péssimo, e inexistência de modo manual. Além disso, já era um modelo ultrapassado.

Então decidi, depois de uma semana de intensas pesquisas, lidas no DPReview, no CameraLabs e no Digital Versus, comprar a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ28 por 980,00 luletas, aqui. Quando comprei, a Panasonic já havia anunciado sua sucessora: a Lumix DMC-FZ35, que estava por míseros R$1230,00, aqui. Claro que a diferença de custo é relativamente baixa, contudo, para mim, não cabia no orçamento que, por acaso, começou com R$600,00.

O que eu queria na câmera:

• Mais que 5MP;
• Zoom grande;
• Que parecesse ou lembrasse uma DLSR;
• Display grande e móvel;
• Visor ocular;
• Imagens boas no escuro;
• Modo manual completo;
• Bom vídeo.

Depois das lidas nos sites ditos acima, e de conversas com pessoal mais experiente, fiquei na dúvida entre a Nikon P90 e a Lumix FZ28. A P90 é um bom aparelho e impressionou nas fotos escuras. Contudo, nada de vídeos “assistíveis”. Quando digo isso, me refiro a qualidade inferior ao YouTube não HD, e fotos com boa luz com qualidade bem inferior. Então fiquei com a Lumix mesmo.

Indo ao que vos interessa: Gostei bastante da FZ28, considero uma compra bem feita, mesmo tendo comprado com uma sucessora já à venda. Vamos falar da câmera em geral.

Sua carcaça é feita toda em plástico fosco (isso para a preta, não sei a prata). A única parte de metal é a borda da lente, o que a deixa mais leve. Há uma área, para a pegada, em que o material é meio emborrachado e texturizado, como o couro. Isso ajuda na hora de segurar; dá estabilidade e conforto.

Os botões são todos ao alcance dos dedos. Me agradou muito o fato de ter um joystick, isso facilita e agiliza na hora de fazer ajustes. Sua tela é de bom tamanho, 2.7”, e comporta o menu sem encobrir toda a foto.

Portas? Ela tem algumas. São elas a usb/AV, DC, componente e, claro, a do cartão de memória SD ou SDHC. Falta uma HDMI, mas sua sucessora já tem uma.

A roda de modos é bem completa e com opções bastante interessantes. Seu modo point and shot (automático) faz bonito. As cores são bem balanceadas; não reparei o excesso de vermelho, como é visivel no Digital Versus. O ISO também é muito bom, digo, relativamente bom. Depois do ISO 800 a imagem já fica meio ruim:

O zoom ótico de 18x é bem grande, mas se você não ficar feliz com ele, é possivel chegar ao zoom de 128 vezes com fotos com tamanho de até 3Mp e no modo manual. Isso é util para tirar belas fotos da lua, porém, para sair de 18 e chegar a 128, a câmera faz um recorte da imagem. O resultado é como dar zoom em uma foto já tirada. Isso resulta em queda de qualidade e aberrações cromáticas.

SÃO JORGE, CADÊ VOCÊ?!

Com tanto zoom, é de se esperar que a captura saia tremida, borrada, arrastada, o que preferir. E saem mesmo, isso se o estabilizador não estiver ativado. Com velocidades de captura altas, o estabilizador é dispensável. Contudo, quando a velocidade é lenta, é irrefutável a necessidade de utilizar o estabilizador. Esse é muito bom. Ele possui 3 modos, “Modo 1″, “Modo 2″ e “Auto”. Entretanto, se o tempo de exposição for entre 1/30 e 1, nem o estabilizador resolve… o jeito é aumentar o ISO.

Macros bem perto, cheguei a tirar fotos em que o objeto em questão encostava na lente. O quebra sol que acompanha a câmera também é bastante útil. É possivel também colocar alguns acessórios, como filtros.

Para vocês não dizerem que o review foi inútil pois a câmera já tem substituta, aqui tem as especificações das duas. O que escrevi vale tanto para a FZ28 quanto para a FZ35. Na verdade, se você gostou dessa câmera, então e certo que irá gostar da FZ35.

O post está em aberto para dúvidas. É impossível abordar tudo sobre a câmera. Portanto sintam-se à vontade. Mais fotos daFZ28 aqui:

by nathan jurgenson

Following PJ Rey’s excellent summary of the Internet as Playground and Factory yesterday, I offer a few additional observations from the conference this past weekend, focusing on Web 2.0 capitalism, and Google as the primary target. The roughly 100 presenters were not joined by Google, as the company said that the conference content seemed “slightly anti-capitalist.” Much of the content, indeed, took the corporate ownership of our productive labor online to task.

A common theme was how to discuss Marx’s Labor Theory of Value with respect to Web 2.0. Clearly, companies are exploiting our free labor, but they do not have to coerce us. Julian Kucklich argued that we now have exploitation without alienation. That is, our unpaid labor is used for corporate surveillance and profit, even if the labor is not alienating or “foreign to ourselves.” Simply, we like using Facebook, Twitter and so on. However, Kucklich further argues that we are taught to think Facebook is fun, that companies use the “ideology of play” to seduce us into producing (or better, prosuming). Martin Roberts, in, ironically, perhaps the conference’s most entertaining presentation, also took to task the culture of “fun”, arguing that we have been trained to see our work as “fun”, making us more productive for the capitalist system. Christian Fuchs most forcefully argued for a communist Internet, stating that exploitation on Web 2.0 is infinite because users are not being paid material wages. A good Marxian, he downplayed the importance of immaterial value gained through sites like Facebook because we live in a capitalism system based on the material. And Ulises Mejias takes Web 2.0 to task for the creation of corporate Monopsonies, where we have seen Facebook, Amazon, eBay, YouTube, Google and so on become corporate titans of Web 2.0 capitalism. He argues that using these corporate Monopsonies is dangerous and irresponsible, calling for open-source and public versions of these types of services.

Thus, it is clear to see why Google was reluctant to join this conference. Frank Pasquale forcefully called on Google to be more transparent. Given what was discussed above, as well as Google’s central status in our day-to-day knowledge-seeking life, Pasquale leaves us with questions to ponder: should its page-rank algorithm be public? Should Google be allowed to up-rank or down-rank links based their relationship to the company? Should Google be able to simply remove pages from its listings? Should Google be forced to let us know when they do these things? ~nathan

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by nathan jurgenson

Following PJ Rey’s excellent summary of the Internet as Playground and Factory yesterday, I offer a few additional observations from the conference this past weekend, focusing on Web 2.0 capitalism, and Google as the primary target. The roughly 100 presenters were not joined by Google, as the company said that the conference content seemed “slightly anti-capitalist.” Much of the content, indeed, took the corporate ownership of our productive labor online to task.

A common theme was how to discuss Marx’s Labor Theory of Value with respect to Web 2.0. Clearly, companies are exploiting our free labor, but they do not have to coerce us. Julian Kucklich argued that we now have exploitation without alienation. That is, our unpaid labor is used for corporate surveillance and profit, even if the labor is not alienating or “foreign to ourselves.” Simply, we like using Facebook, Twitter and so on. However, Kucklich further argues that we are taught to think Facebook is fun, that companies use the “ideology of play” to seduce us into producing (or better, prosuming). Martin Roberts, in, ironically, perhaps the conference’s most entertaining presentation, also took to task the culture of “fun”, arguing that we have been trained to see our work as “fun”, making us more productive for the capitalist system. Christian Fuchs most forcefully argued for a communist Internet, stating that exploitation on Web 2.0 is infinite because users are not being paid material wages. A good Marxian, he downplayed the importance of immaterial value gained through sites like Facebook because we live in a capitalism system based on the material. And Ulises Mejias takes Web 2.0 to task for the creation of corporate Monopsonies, where we have seen Facebook, Amazon, eBay, YouTube, Google and so on become corporate titans of Web 2.0 capitalism. He argues that using these corporate Monopsonies is dangerous and irresponsible, calling for open-source and public versions of these types of services.

Thus, it is clear to see why Google was reluctant to join this conference. Frank Pasquale forcefully called on Google to be more transparent. Given what was discussed above, as well as Google’s central status in our day-to-day knowledge-seeking life, Pasquale leaves us with questions to ponder: should its page-rank algorithm be public? Should Google be allowed to up-rank or down-rank links based their relationship to the company? Should Google be able to simply remove pages from its listings? Should Google be forced to let us know when they do these things? ~nathan

The Googlization of Everything

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More recently, our class was asked to split into groups and form a visualization that depicted an overarching concept of interactive media and the World Wide Web.

Although most of us had thought of similar general concepts, such as choice and control or design and function, our group focused on one aspect that we feel was of high importance.

Value is a huge factor and large portion of the Internet’s foundation. Any type of prosumer will not visit a website or even go onto the Internet if it wasn’t considered valuable. This idea can be tied into the communication theory of uses and gratification.

The following layout describes, in depth, the details of our visualization that portrays the importance of value and its connection to interactive media.

Visualization – Architectural Columns

The six different types of prosumers: Creators, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators, Critics and Inactives, are structurally important when it comes to the architecture of the Internet.  We felt that they uphold and formed the value of the content that is presented online.

To visually depict this, there are six columns that are each labeled as one of the prosumer types. These columns then connect and support the top of the structure (or triangle) that would be labeled as Value.  The space or section between the columns and triangle will contain overarching concepts that relate to that particular prosumer.

For example:

Creators (Column) and its relation to the Value (Triangle)

- Content is determined by the creator

- Usability, Design and Function – determined in part by creators

- Control – making content, crafting presentation

Joiners (Column) and its relation to Value (Triangle)

- Content is seen as something to bookmark or be a part of

- Connectivity- they want to be a part of it

- Choice- decided to join

Critics (Column) and its relation to the Value (Triangle)

- Feedback- to make it more valuable

- Choice – decide to voice opinion, participate in discussion

- Connectivity – feel like contributing to site, part of the content

Collectors (Column) and its relation to the Value (Triangle)

-Quantity over quality – amassing content for value

-Choice – choosing which to “collect”

-Attachment/connection to the pieces by having them in a “collection”

Spectators (column) and its relation to the Value (Triangle)

-Choice – choosing to “watch and learn”

-Time – time spent watching gives value, done passively w/ little effort (doesn’t require large time investment)

-Silent participation – connecting vicariously through others

Inactives (column) and its relation to the Value (Triangle)

-Choice – ultimate choice, choose to reject, not participate at all

-Learning why adds value – why inactive to change to an active prosumer

-Can diminish value if number is too great, not enough “adding value”

by pj.rey

While the term “augmented reality” uttered in a sexual context might immediately conjure the perennial problematic of the boozed, buzzed, and befuddled (commonly referred to as “beer goggles”), more nuanced analysis may prove fruitful.  Fellow Sociology Lens news editor, nathan jurgenson, recently argued in “towards theorizing an augmented reality” that we need to anticipate an ascending paradigm where “digital and material realities dialectically co-construct each other.”

To anticipate this new reality, I argue that we ought to turn to another trend in consumer culture that has prevailed for several decades.  Pornography and the sex industry have consistently been a bellwether for future technology adoption in the population writ large.  Remember polaroids, VCRs, camcorders, DVDs, and high definition television?  Sure you do.  Ever wonder why so many of our parents and grandparents bought these items so early on, even though they were expensive and still largely untested?  They were probably producing and consuming pornography.  Yep, that’s right: porn.  Okay, so, some people had other motivations.  The conspicuous consumption of such commodities certainly confers a form of social capital which appeals to many.  Yet, ample evidence exists indicating that the pornography industry has influenced the adoption of a wide range of technologies (see citations below).  Even the founder of Wikipedia and one of Time Magazine’s most influential people, Jimmy Wales, began his entrepreneurial career leveraging user-generated content for profit by hosting a series of user-generated porn web rings.

Porn is generally cheaper and easier to make than other content in a given media.  It can be distributed quickly and has always been a very prosumptive industry, meaning consumers like to produce and producers like to consume.  For these reasons, the porn industry is incredibly prolific.  Being such a fecund sector of the economy, pornographers are quick to capitalize on new possibilities.  So, it’s no surprise that the implosion of the material and digital worlds is happening early and visibly in the sex industry.

For example, a company named OhMiBod released a vibrator which converts the music from your iPod into motion.  Various virtual dolls, strippers, and dancers can be conjured onto different surfaces of your home with a combination of new programming and a webcam.  Mutsogoto is a technology which allows distant partners to interact by drawing on each other with rays of light.

Probably the most significant realization of augmented reality in the world of pornography is, however, a cyborgian line of technology known as teledildonics.  To understand this term, force your memory back to the “sex scene” in the 1993 film, Demolition Man, where Sandra Bullock and Sylvester Stallone don helmets to do the “wild mambo.”  Current technology might not send erotic signals directly to your brain, as in the film, but teledildonics are characterized by digital communication that results in physical stimulation.   For example, a product shamelessly named “the virtual hole” interfaces with a computer via usb and has several motors, mimicking various motions in specially coded videos.  It can also work in tandem across a network with a “virtual stick” connected to another computer.  The Wiibrator, a similar hack for the Wiimote is being demoed.  A “kissphone” is also in the developmental stage.  Finally, 3Feel is a massive multiplayer online game (currently in beta), where adults can create 3D avatars and engage in sexual activity with one another (with or without the use of teledildonics).

Of course, the more important (if less titulating) overarching question, here, is not what these technologies do for sex, but how these kinds of technologies—once integrated into various other facets of our lives—are likely change social interaction and organization.  Pornography is a window to the future.

For more examples of how pornography has driven the adoption of technology, see the 2002 NPR report, “Is Pornography Driving Technology?;” Jonathan Coopersmiths’s papers “Pornography, Technology, and Progress” and “Sex, Vibes,  Videotape: Sexuality and Electrical Technology in the 20th Century;” The Ideas with Wings broadcast, “Sex Drive;” and the American Heritage Magazine article, “When Sex Drives Technological Innovation.”

“Consumer teledildonics update: HighJoy alive, Sinulator dead; plus, Virtual Sex Machine and RealTouch,” by Regina Lynn

“The Cyborg’s Dilemma: Progressive Embodiment in Virtual Environments,” by Frank Biocca

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ERROR DE PARALAJE: Ese fenómeno se presenta cuando lo captado por el fotógrafo no corresponde con lo que salió en la foto. Es decir, que el visor ve una cosa y el objetivo (lente) otra Por ejemplo al tomar una pintura en un museo, puede que la imagen que tengamos en el visor está en el limite, si nos movemos un poco a la izquierda o derecha la pintura sale de cuadro… disparamos y nos damos cuenta que a la foto le hace falta un pedazo, eso es un error de paralaje. Entre mayor sea la distancia a la que se encuentre el sujeto, menos notorio será este problema. Este error se presenta principalmente en las cámaras compactas, y no en las réflex, donde vemos exactamente lo que tomamos.

POINT AND SHUT: (Apunta y dispara) esta categoría de cámaras es la más común en el mercado, en su mayoría son completamente automáticas y no permiten regular ni tiempo ni diafragma, pueden presentar error de paralaje.

PRASOL: Es un accesorio que se monta al frente de nuestro lente, tiene forma de tubo y sirve para evitar que la luz lateral entre en la toma. Esta luz lateral puede crear haces de luz o manchas muy molestas. Entre más corto sea el lente (menos milímetros) más corto y abierto y entre más largo sea el lente (más milímetros) más largo y estrecho será el parasol.

PROSUMER: (prosumidor) esta es otra clasificación de cámaras, una intermedia entre las point and shut y las DSLR. En estas cámaras si podemos manipular el tiempo de la exposición, o la velocidad, incluso nos puede dar archivos RAW, sin embargo no podemos cambiar los lentes o agregarle más accesorios, como flashes o filtros (salvo aquellas a las que se le puede integrar un anillo adaptador). Son dirigidas a aficionados con cierta experiencia, pero que no están interesados en gastar en un equipo más caro o complejo.

Hello world!

From now on, I shall start doing random searches on the word communication on the web (Youtube, specifically), and see just how many people have discussed about this very significant, yet often neglected, topic.

I was personally engrossed in this video since it tackled the very essence of what we’ve been discussing in our Orcom 152 class: Organizational Communication Trends and Styles, the role and evolution of the new social media in the lives of human beings all over the world.

This video began by tracking down the beginning of this new social media era, dated back in the latter part of the last century.

Traditional media was overthrown chiefly because this isn’t where the people are hanging out any longer.  Plus, with all the sanctions that the government has placed on the violation of copyright of books, songs, articles, and the like, these internet-savvy persons seem to have grown tired of the very restricting traditional media.  Hence the birth of TIVO, online newspapers, Flickr and Youtube.

This video also introduced to us the Prosumer identity.  A prosumer is both a producer and/or consumer of information, the kind of people that we now have online.  And the good news is, anyone can absolutely be a prosumer! Great!

I personally agree with the benefits that of the online virus mentioned in this short video, however two of the things that troubled me a bit were (1) the much importance given to the Wikipedia, and (2) the nightmare that may happen once we reach the ultimate point of this click revolution in which anyone, yes anyone, will instantly be able to find you whenever, wherever–it’s like belonging to a universal ID owned by, of course, the powerful movers of this online era.

Indeed, no one really knows what will happen tomorrow, much less in the following day, all that one can expect is the popular prediction that in a few years time, everything that we experience in reality will also be reflected in the world wide web.

“Experience is the new reality.” –lifted from the attached video

Gartner’s L. Frank Kenney speaks with Melissa Dress.

Like the latest fad in fashion, Conversational and Community Marketing is all the rage in marketing today. So what’s so special about it? Do you really need to be bothered, or can you happily go about your business and ignore it?

None of us can escape the fact that the Internet has changed many things for businesses. In my earlier post, I talked about the growing importance for total transparency in everything from a company’s behavior to their pricing and profit margins. Guiding this need is the every growing Internet population of ‘Prosumers’, or rather ‘empowered shoppers.’ Although the size of the prosumer population has never been officially measured, we can figure it out by looking at people’s online behaviors.

For instance, if you look at the last years results from Forrester’s Technographics surveys, you see that:
•    10% of the UK online population read blogs
•    17% watch user generated videos
•    12% participate in discussion forums
•    and 20% read online reviews.
These are all behaviors of empowered shoppers. Let’s focus on the last point, the 20% who read reviews, which is the most common indicator of an empowered consumer.

Related US study by Forrester shows a similar breakdown of behaviors.

Nielson Netview estimates that there are 34,151,628 online Brits. So 20% of that figure is roughly 6.83 million Brits who we can classify as acting like prosumers. Granted, that still means there are still a good 27.3 million other online shoppers you could target. But consider this. If every one of the 6.83 million empowered shoppers talks to just 3 other people, your ‘informed shopper-base’ suddenly grows to 20.49 million shoppers! Suddenly, that 27.3 million has shrunk significantly. So it’s probably safest to treat everybody like a prosumer and get on with business.

Let’s look at it from another angle. What if 80% of your prosumer base doesn’t like your brand and trashes your products online? You have a serious problem on your hands, even if that 80% represents just 1% of your customer base. Because that 80% will promote their negative opinions to the rest of your customer base, encouraging them to flee in droves. On top of that, the percentage of the prosumer population is actually growing. So by next year, that 1% will increase to 2% and so on.

So what can you do about it? Well, first you can start by listening to your customers and take their pulse of how they feel about your brand. There are a number of buzz trackers and listening platforms out there, but the one I prefer, both for cost efficiency and for their ability to scan in multiple languages is that offered by Attentio. To get a quick idea of what the Attentio Brand Dashboard can do, check out their website at Attentio.com or give it a go at their public buzz monitoring site, Trendpedia.com. For some sample results, check out this review I made for Lexus a few years back while I was working at Lateral.

Excerpt from the Lexus Hybrid Debate

The Brand Dashboard continuously trawls a wide range of online sources, from blogs to forums, newsgroups and social networks, looking for certain keywords that you define, which act as flags of potentially relevant conversations. As there are literally millions of sources to scan, most listening tools work as a “present to forward” looking information source. In other words, to get the most accurate results, you need to set it up in advance and let it run for several months. Backward looking scans with Attentio are possible but are typically limited by the length of time articles and comments remain online, currently between 3-6 months on average. With Lexus, I scanned a number of keywords related to the brand, but also the names of competitor’s brands and common words used around hybrid technology. This allowed us to get a good feel for what people really thought of Lexus’ Hybrid cars.

Some companies I know, now utilize this type of data to complement their ongoing qualitative and quantitative research as it provides a higher level of reliability than what they get through focus groups and panels. After all, people are far more likely to tell what they really think in sites like TripAdvisor than in any focus group you run.

Listening however, is only the first step. You also need to be able to respond to opinions online. The most effective way of doing this is to empower and encourage every employee in your company to participate in social networks, forums and blogs where the conversations are happening (which you can also identify using your Brand Dashboard). The advantage here is that your employees are typically your best advocates. So let them talk and share their opinions and knowledge. There are examples of companies who have done this to remarkable advantage.

The first is Microsoft, where practically every employee blogs about something, most related to their specific profession. There are currently 262 officially tracked blogs in their directory across a mind-boggling array of subjects. These blogs are effectively are helping Microsoft to redefine their approach to be more “customer focus” through one on one interaction with customers. In many cases, this ability to have real conversations with customers is helping Microsoft to fix errors and improve products at a faster pace than ever before.

Another great example is Redfin, a US based estate agency. Redfin’s CEO, Glenn Kelman took the US real-estate market by storm last November when he decided to be completely transparent about the US real-estate industry. As such, he publicly exposed every dirty trick estate agencies use to sell you a property. His blog was almost a “how-to” in avoiding the cons that most British still face when trying to purchase property. With 300+% year-over-year growth in unique visitors, Redfin has been the fastest-growing major real estate website in the U.S Redfin has also increased its market-share significantly as a result of its game-changing approach.

Redfin and Microsoft are both examples of companies who have mastered Conversational Marketing.

Another surprising example was McDonald’s in New Zealand. Selling burgers is easy. Selling McDonald’s to a group of cynics and non-believers is a different proposition altogether. In 2006 this was the situation McDonald’s found itself in. No matter what it had been doing and saying over the previous years around its health, quality and nutrition initiatives, people were still viewing McDonald’s food with wariness and mistrust. Nothing seemed to stick, sink in or sway public opinion in favor of a company that was trying to break free of its past. This was hurting the organization, not only from an image standpoint, but also with regards to the bottom line. McDonald’s decided it was time to get on the front foot and set the record straight about its food and they way it behaves once and for all.

Peter Bush, the CEO of McDonald’s Australasia had the right idea. ‘If we could sit down for just five minutes and tell our story one to one with the consumer, McDonald’s wouldn’t have the brand issues we have today.’ His conversational approach become the seed to their Take a Closer Look campaign, in which people’s conversations and concerns were displayed in the ads against McDonald’s irrefutable facts. Essentially, McDonald’s leveraged conversations around its own myths as the basis to start conversations with its customers.  The result was that 70% of people who had seen the campaign believed what McDonald’s was saying. Ultimately, people reported that the ads made them feel better about eating at McDonald’s.

The New Zealand campaign was eventually followed by a larger, online initiative called Make Up Your Own Mind, in which consumers could literally ask any question to McDonald’s and they would answer it with facts. Unfortunately, when I challenged them on their continued decline of their food quality in many restaurants I visited, their answers were cut and pasted from other questions people asked, word for word, making it sound like the work of PR people. When further questioned about their support of aspartame in their Cola’s, their answer was literally right from the official apartame website: hardly a non-biased, credible source of information. The lesson here, always assume that your consumers already have done their online research. Brand sites like these are typically the last resort, not the first port of call.

Community and Conversation are often mixed in today’s marketing lingo, however they shouldn’t be. Although they are linked, they aren’t exactly the same. The McDonald’s campaign used Conversational Marketing, but it didn’t create a community. In contrast, Bugaboo strollers clearly has created a community of involved like-minded parents on its site, effectively leveraging people’s real conversations and stories within its communications to foster a sense of participation and brand ownership. When you link Conversation and Community to brand strategy, you get a robust brand platform from which you can engage today’s growing base of consumers who want to be involved in the shaping of the brand.

The resulting benefits of participation and ownership can add significant value to the brand, seeding it with real human experiences and emotion that reaches the long tail of your consumer base. Considering that 49 % of people made a purchase based on friends recommendations on social media property (Razorfish, 2008), social media can be viewed as an important channel and tool to interact, manage and enable these brand communities.

If this strategy appeals, does this mean you should run out and create a community? Not at all. What most digital agencies won’t tell you is that you actually don’t need to build your own community. In fact, unless there is a clearly unmet nascent consumer need for your community, you are much better off partnering with an existing community than building your own. Start by looking to see which fan created communities already exists around your brand. You may be surprised to find a few. Brands such as Apple, Nokia, Saab, Ford, Harley Davidson, Suzuki, Asus and many more all have dozens of fan created brand communities that you can interact and partner with. On top of this, there are thousands of niche, vertical communities around every passion you can imagine. Many of which could very well serve your existing customer’s interest and needs. And most of these verticals are heavily under-funded and some corporate partners could be very welcomed.

by nathan jurgenson

There has been recent news coverage on the relationship between social status and social networking site usage. CNN asked “Does your social class determine your online social network?”

“Is there a class divide online? Research suggests yes. A recent study by market research firm Nielsen Claritas found that people in more affluent demographics are 25 percent more likely to be found friending on Facebook, while the less affluent are 37 percent more likely to connect on MySpace.”

And NPR reports that “Facebook, MySpace Divide Along Social Lines.”

“Social media researcher danah boyd [has] spoken to teens all over the country about their use of social media. She thinks the online social world is dividing up — just like the real world — into neighborhoods.”

I choose these quotes purposely to illustrate that CNN decided to report on this issue when a market research firm found what was already known to social scientists, such as danah boyd or Eszter Hargittai. NPR correctly focuses on boyd’s research, however, their story comes after CNN’s, and well after social scientists identified the trend.

Beyond this point, an argument that I previously made on this blog is that we are seeing a more post-structural, new-media, digital divide. In addition to the problematic of access to the internet, there is the issue of how different groups learn to use the web. Boyd states in the NPR story,

“Young people — and for the most part adults as well — don’t really interact online with strangers. They talk to people they already know. You have environments in which people are divided by race, divided by class, divided by lifestyle. When they go online they are going to interact in the same way.”

Thus, the wealthy are more likely to network with others of higher status, creating a situation where digital socialization mirrors, perpetuates and solidifies old status hierarchies. Following sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, it might be the case that those of high status are learning to network with each other, making themselves distinct in the way they use new media. Does this serve as a counter-argument to those that proclaim the democratizing potential of the internet? ~nathan

Facebook, MySpace Divide Along Social Lines

The Intersecting Roles of Consumer and Producer: A Critical Perspective on Co-production, Co-creation and Prosumption

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by nathan jurgenson

There has been recent news coverage on the relationship between social status and social networking site usage. CNN asked “Does your social class determine your online social network?”

“Is there a class divide online? Research suggests yes. A recent study by market research firm Nielsen Claritas found that people in more affluent demographics are 25 percent more likely to be found friending on Facebook, while the less affluent are 37 percent more likely to connect on MySpace.”

And NPR reports that “Facebook, MySpace Divide Along Social Lines.”

“Social media researcher danah boyd [has] spoken to teens all over the country about their use of social media. She thinks the online social world is dividing up — just like the real world — into neighborhoods.”

I choose these quotes purposely to illustrate that CNN decided to report on this issue when a market research firm found what was already known to social scientists, such as danah boyd or Eszter Hargittai. NPR correctly focuses on boyd’s research, however, their story comes after CNN’s, and well after social scientists identified the trend.

Beyond this point, an argument that I previously made on this blog is that we are seeing a more post-structural, new-media, digital divide. In addition to the problematic of access to the internet, there is the issue of how different groups learn to use the web. Boyd states in the NPR story,

“Young people — and for the most part adults as well — don’t really interact online with strangers. They talk to people they already know. You have environments in which people are divided by race, divided by class, divided by lifestyle. When they go online they are going to interact in the same way.”

Thus, the wealthy are more likely to network with others of higher status, creating a situation where digital socialization mirrors, perpetuates and solidifies old status hierarchies. Following sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, it might be the case that those of high status are learning to network with each other, making themselves distinct in the way they use new media. Does this serve as a counter-argument to those that proclaim the democratizing potential of the internet? ~nathan

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En el periodo compreso entre el 19 y el 27 de Octubre una delegación formada por empresarios y miembros de las instituciones Chinas visitarán la Cámara de Comercio de Valencia. Dentro de los diferentes actos y ponencias Synergo va a tener un espacio para poder ilustrar los “Nuevos Valores para los Turistas 2.0”. En poco más de una hora Michele Iurillo va a intentar trasmitir a los asistentes “los nuevos valores de los turistas que buscan nuevas experiencias y emociones gracias al desarrollo de las nuevas tecnologías y que van más allá de la diversión tradicional”.

Será un momento para reflexionar sobre los nuevos perfiles de turistas y como adaptar los colaboradores a estas nuevas exigencias. Se hablará de la “Calidad Emocional” y de los nuevos modelos emergentes para cumplir las expectativas de los clientes y en su búsqueda de experiencias. La sesión esta programada Jueves 22 de octubre, con horario de 12:00 a 13:30 h. en las instalaciones de la Escuela de Negocios, en la C/ Poeta Querol, nº 15 – Valencia.

Más informaciones http://formacion.camaravalencia.com

by pj.rey

Smokers, if I told you that I could get you high-quality cigarettes for half the usual price, you’d probably smartly ask, “What’s the catch?”  “The catch,” I might respond, “is that I need five minutes of your labor-time per pack.”  This is precisely the bargain customers are making with a Brookline, New Hampshire store called Tobacco Haven – a bargain we social theorists might call prosumption.  The shop houses a roll-your-own cigarette machine into which customers feed piles of loose tobacco and assemble their own packs.

The prosumer (who combines consumption and production into a single activity) has been discussed widely on this blog (see, for, example: prosumers of the world unite, Light capitalism, prize economics, and the prosumer, Out of Print: Prosumption and the Triumph of New Media, the prosumer and intimate profit).  Most analysis has focused on examples connected to the digital world.  A recent story, however, illustrates how relevant this concept is even offline.

Customers are happy to spend a few extra minutes to get dirt cheap cigarettes, and Tobacco Haven is happy with the tidy little profits it sweeps up facilitating the work of the consumer.  The state of New Hampshire, on the other hand, isn’t amused and is suing the tobacco shop.  New Hampshire claims that regardless of who does the production – company or consumer – the place where cigarettes are assembled should be considered a “cigarette manufacturer” and thus be bound by the decade-old tobacco industry settlement as well as obliged to pay state and local taxes.

The ruling on this issue, however, has broader implications than the price of cigarettes in Brookline.  Essentially, the courts are going to rule whether or not the labor a consumer performs to obtain a commodity for personal use is taxable as if it were manufacturing activity.  If we start down this path, what’s next?  Pumping one’s own gas?  Filling one’s own fountain drinks?  Assembling Ikea furniture?  Updating a Facebook profile?

Hard to tell where to draw the line, but one thing is clear: prosumption will be a significant issue for the courts of the 21st Century.

“Roll-It-Yourself Tobacco Shop Under Fire” by Sheryl Rich-Kern

“The Intersecting Roles of Consumer and Producer: A Critical Perspective on Co-production, Co-creation and Prosumption,” By Ashlee Humphreys and Kent Grayson

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Esté video resume muy bien el futuro de la comunicación diaria que tendremos en… no se cuanto tiempo. Lo mejor del video: el concepto de “Man is God”, está en todos lados, puede ser cualquiera, sabe cualquier cosa… Ah bueno! y que Wikipedia, es la enciclopedia más completa del mundo!

Todo se integrará de tal manera, que la comunicación será para el ciudadano, producida por el propio ciudadano, o lo que es lo mismo: Prosumers. Ya están aquí!

by nathan jurgenson

Tim O’Reilly coined the phrase “Web 2.0”, and while the term has been differently used, I have boiled it down to the recent explosion of user-generated content (thus the focus on prosumption). This past summer, O’Reilly has declared another new era, what he calls “Web Squared”:

“There’s [...] a qualitative change happening as the Web becomes more closely integrated with the real world via sensor-based smart phone applications. Web Squared is another way of saying “Web meets World.”

We can boil this phrase (if one wants to even preserve it) down to a fundamentally important trend: the increased blurring of the digital and material worlds. This trend has been discussed in some of my previous posts on “geotagging” and “location awareness”. These tools, often used via “smart”, GPS-enabled mobile phones, track and display users’ geographic locations in many different ways, such as on one’s Facebook or Twitter accounts. I have argued that (1-macro) these technologies are the further intrusion of capitalism into increasingly intimate aspects of our selves and lives, and (2-micro) the documentation of one’s location is a new task of performing the self and identity, fueling the ‘digital culture of narcissism’.

In addition to “geotagging” and “location awareness”, another important trend is that of “augmented reality”: the merging of material reality with digital information, as well as the augmentation of digitality with materiality (note that this later trend is not focused on by either O’Reilly or the Wikipedia article). Google’s Street View gives us this implosion (real-time versions of this already exist [video]) and Google’s Picasa can now recognize billions of people’s faces and tag them automatically. Video games have been trending towards the addition of materiality, most dramatically when the Nintendo Wii took the market by storm by making the digital game play less about pushing buttons, and more about traditional material-world movements. Sony has announced that it will also release a “motion controller” for the Playstation 3 system and Microsoft is creating a motion controller for the Xbox 360 that will also incorporate a camera, depth sensor and a microphone, creating a video game experience where one does not have to push any buttons at all.

This speaks to a fundamental way of conceptualizing and theorizing the Internet specifically, and spaces and places generally: that digital and material realities dialectically co-construct each other. For example, social networking sites (e.g., MySpace, Facebook) are not separate from the physical world, but rather they have everything to do with it, and the physical world has much to do with digital socializing. No longer can we think of a “real” world opposed to being “online”. Instead, we need to think with a paradigm that centers on the implosion of the worlds of bits and atoms into the augmented reality that has seemingly become ascendant. ~nathan

The ‘Web Squared’ Era

The Intersecting Roles of Consumer and Producer: A Critical Perspective on Co-production, Co-creation and Prosumption

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Bueno por fin vamos a arrancar!
Acabo de volver del IABNow y tengo que decir que el transporte público es de lo peor en la ciudad de buenos aires!

Un momento… Acá esta el tema.
Hoy en dia, algunas personas cuando llegan a sus PC, tienen la manía de conectarse a cualquiera de las redes sociales, y contar alguna anécdota que tuvieron en el día. En la mayoría, porque así es nuestra vida, siempre aparece una marca o industria. A veces solo la nombran, a veces comparten una idea genial, otras veces recriminan a las empresas por algún error.

Actualmente gracias a las redes sociales y la web 2.0, las personas se sienten más libres de realizar sus opiniones sobre el tema que sea. Para ser exactos 3 millones de personas hacen comentarios sobre marcas a nivel mundial en todas las redes. Y para que se den una idea en promedio los Argentinos están conectados 23 horas por semana, siendo el 2do puesto en Latinoamérica.
El boca a boca tan anhelado por las compañías se da continuamente gracias a estas herramientas, y al alcance de todos. Otro dato interesantísimo es que el 61% de los consumidores creen en las opiniones Online. Sabemos lo que dicen de nosotros?

Hace unos meses atrás, en el Día del Consumidor, organizado por la Asociación Argentina de Marketing (AAM), en la charla de Eduardo Sebriano, Gerente de Sensplus, mostro un ejemplo muy claro de lo que el consumidor le cuenta a la marca y la marca no lo escucha: Un nuevo posicionamiento para Pico Dulce.

Como hoy se nombraba en el IAB now, Lamentablemente aun la inversión online es la más baja del mundo en Argentina.
En este contexto podemos decir que los consumidores o Prosumers como se los llama ahora por toda esta movida, son los que hacen la comunicación de la empresa en estas redes, el secreto, y es donde queremos apuntar nosotras, es Cómo hacer que esta red de Prosumers sea rentable para mi negocio?

Ieri (16 novembre 2009) pomeriggio ho assistito via streaming al convegno “Comunicare è facile, farsi capire è un’impresa”, tenutosi al Centro Tamarin di Marcianise. Titolo accattivante per i miei interessi in materia di comunicazione d’impresa, così decido di iscrivermi alla sessione on-line. Purtroppo ho potuto partecipare solo alle prime due ore di confernza, i cui temi principali essenzialmente sono stati: Internet come nuovo strumento di comunicazione, il “nuovo” utente e il comportamento delle imprese. Sono argomenti che sto approfondendo nella mia tesi di laurea e, ad eccezione di qualche intervento, purtroppo non ho trovato nessuno spunto di discussione che potesse “illuminarmi” ulteriormente. Ho apprezzato il discorso sui prosumer, in quanto si sta cercando di sensibilizzare le imprese al fatto che i consumatori sono attivi nelle loro scelte e decisioni di acquisto, grazie anche alla possibilità di utilizzare dei mezzi di comunicazione (Internet) in grado di coinvolgerli maggiormente nei processi di relazione con le imprese e con gli stakeholder di riferimento. In particolare mi ha incuriosito il paragone che uno dei Relatori (mi si perdoni l’omissione del nominativo, ma la diretta streaming aveva qualche problemino di connessione) ha fatto affermando che i social media hanno “lo stesso potenziale dirompente dei movimenti punk”, soffermandosi su 3 parole-chiave: voice; notice; represented. Di seguito riprongo il video:

L’importante, e non mi stancherò mai di ripeterlo, è che le imprese devono comprendere che gli utenti attivi non sono dei nemici da cui difendersi, ma degli stakeholder di vitale importanza con i quali costruire un dialogo basato sull’empatia e la fiducia. Purtroppo si è parlato poco di cultura d’impresa. A mio parere le imprese che hanno ancora un atteggiamento legato al concetto di consumatore inteso come obiettivo-da-colpire non potranno mai comprendere fino in fondo quali sono le potenzialità di un mezzo come Internet,  perché non hanno ancora nel DNA questo nuovo approccio comunicativo. Bisognerà quindi sensibilizzare e formare le imprese, prima di proporre loro nuovi strumenti, facili da usare in apparenza, ma difficili da comprendere veramente senza le giuste “istruzioni”. LISTEN!!!