This paper talks about the definition of community for Boyd and what friendship means and how is affected by both social processes and technological limitations.  Social Networks such as My Space and Facebook are sites which construct and require people to indicate relationship with other members. In other words people say that they are friends on these sites, they must be friends in other contexts as well.  Participants are able to express who they are and locate themselves culturally.  How do you define who is your friend? Normally friendship involves some degree of mutual love, support and admiration that are expected to provide a shoulder to cry on. But this definition in social networks is not always applied.

When people login to a social network, face book or My Space for example, and they want to “add” someone as a friend. A profile picture with your demographic information will pop out. Below your picture there is a box where you have to click saying “add as a friend” and directly it will send a message to the other participant.  Some people click “accept friend” and directly you join their network or community. However you can “decline;” expecting significant social cost by rejecting someone. (Boyd 2004)         “

Investigating Friendship in Live Journal, Kate Raynes- Goldie and Fono found that there was much inconsistency in why people are friends with others. The most common reasons for friendship were”

• They are actual friends
• Acquaintances, family members, colleagues
• It would be socially inappropriate to say no because you know them
• Having lots of friends makes you look popular
• It’s a way of indicating that you are a fan of that person, band or product.

While the first 3 reasons all concern people that you know, the rest can explain why people connect to a lot of people they do not know. For example if someone seems interesting or you want to get to know them better, what’s the loss in Friending them. As far as most participant concern, friendship doesn’t mean anything really, so why not?  

Connection and Collecting friends: Your actual list of friends not only consist in true friends, but friends such as: fellow partygoers, family, people they knew and people you thought you knew them. Still you can edit your profile with your top friends, allowing and showing connections that really say something about what they are.  Not only groups like 8 top friends exist. For example you can join any community such as tennis fan of Federek, join your favourite soccer team, scuba diving, favourite artists, products etc.

2009 Facebook Demographics and Statistics Report:

• The 35-54 years old demo is growing fastest with a 276.4 %.
• The 25-34 year population on Facebook is doubling every 6 months
• There are more females ( 55.7) than males ( 42.2) on Facebook
• Advertising Campaigns for Tobacco are 27912480 users

People are regularly projecting themselves into the Internet so that other may view their presence and interact with them .As mentioned  before, whenever you join any group or community , it goes directly to your profile wall so people can see and join too. Social networks sites take this to the next level since members there write their community into being through the process of friending

For marketers and Advertisers I new world is opening.  In the last couple of years, Facebook has gone from a college photo-sharing site to a business- networking platform for self-promotion, advertising and multimedia interaction. Now you can host events, advertise your businesses services and products through social ads, and more.  For example application for both blackberry and I phone you can find in these social networks. .  What it matters is that you can identify, whenever you support of your friends for example they are there for you. It has become the new way of reaching mass users in a short period of time. The old and traditional strategy for marketers are been change. Due to the impact of the introduction of the Facebook as a “big thing” Platform, As a result, many of these companies have been forced to change their strategy to stay in the business. Today social technologies are rewriting all the rules. The function of all marketers is to adapt as soon as possible to implement new plans to sell gain customers.  As Ivy Brown director of Splenda says:

” Facebook offered us the opportunity not only to advertise with a brand message and a product message but also the opportunity to solicit feedback and to have our target raise their hand and say, ‘I want to sample this product,’”

As a conclusion the meaning of the world community does not change for marketers. As Boyd discuss facebook or my Space communities are growing each time more and more. From been just a social network, as said before its becoming a business network.

Reference:

Boyd, Danah, H. (2006). Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8: Writing community into being on social network sites. First Monday, volume 11, number 12

The Facebook Marketing Toolbox: 100 Tools and Tips to Tap the Facebook

Smith, C. (2009). Facebook Is the Future of CRM. CRM Magazine, 13(11), 12. Retrieved from Academic Search Complete database.

Zmuda, N. (2009). Facebook turns focus group with Splenda product-sampling app. Advertising Age, 80(25), 18. Retrieved from Academic Search Complete database.

Public Good can be defined as “goods or services that can be consumed by several individuals at the same time without losing the value of consumption. (Berkeley University).  One’s the product is been produced, it may be consumed by all the clients with no additional cost.  However there are problems with the application of public goods when it comes to government regulations and justifications. First,   many public goods are produced in the private sector, so government production is not necessary.  However not all products are freely produced, government prohibition is essential.

Common examples regarding security with the new media (internet) include: national defence and law enforcement.  For example, copy right; the balance between author rights and public benefit.  Copyright and Intellectual law has become, in many ways the crucible     for many of the issues and challenges presented by the new media for the problems with law and policy.  The internet results out a convergent space between computing, telecommunications, and the media.  The status of a public good may change over time. In fact Technological progress is having a significant impact on traditional public goods.   The future is often seen as a basic with the internet becoming very big economic industries for the whole world.  The internet has exploited in scale, participants have increase, and it has become a very big economic engine.  Followed by knowledge economy term  which is introduces as developing issues like: the balance between public good and private benefit criteria for use of, and access to, information.  Individual rights of ownership and social use of common good, as last the nature of knowledge as both a commodity for commercial exploitation and as a public good for common use.

Concerning with my profession, marketers have to start adapting to the new technology and the new media in order to develop new ways to advertise different products and services.  The question is into what extent all the information is free, being that everyone is able to consume? As internet has developed as a global, is essential to expand and develop entire new methods as benefit this entirely new set of circumstances (Barlow 1966b: 10). As we know , now everyone can publish any type of information  and uploaded in the internet ,   commercial interest  saw their domain  name to grow  their branding  and marketing strategies,  Ensuring , that their “ brand” , as personified in their domain name, was protected in cyberspace. However many problems concerning “ Cybersquatting”: people would buy up potentially popular domain names, and maybe they could use it as culture jamming ( Lasn 2000)  so then they could profitably on- sell.  This can affect marketers a lot, for the reason that people can pretend they work for this “known” companies and create false information, and consumer will believe and then the reputation of the company will be in bad faith. . For example both the Brisbane City Council and the government of South Africa were surprised to find that the domain names Brisbane.com and southafrica.com had already been bought by online speculators, who then wanted to sell the domain name at an very expensive price ( Froomkin 2003; Rimmer 2003a).  The ICANN, which is a private, non- profit agency which intend to represent both the global “internet community” and the global “internet business community”, that includes both domain name registration and those seeking to register online domain in order to pursue electronic commerce.  This represents the big issue when it comes to “new media.” For advertisers and Marketers there has to be a huge involving on making people belief that the service or product that they are selling is real.  There are going to be so many similar names, that people won’t know who and what to belief.   Both Advantages and Disadvantages of public good exist. New Media has developed huge advantages for everybody, for example information these days is very easy to obtain.  But in the other side if we look at the music and movies industry, the legal business is not respected any more, everything is “cheaper” or “free” is a disadvantages.  Small franchises more than big one is going to be affected since the lack of trust is huge. Who is going to belief in advertisers or marketers these days, given that everyone has the right to upload any type of information in the web for the public good?  .  As a solution the war that is been held with tensions that exist between information and creative content as both public and private property, they have to be considerers to avoid being overly drawn into the new media publicity.

Reference:

• Lecture notes on public goods from University of California, Berkeley
• Randall G. Holcombe is Devoe Moore Professor of Economics at Florida State University and wishes to gratefully acknowledge comments from James Cobbe, Anthony Carilli, and Russell Sobel. Review ofAustrian Economics 10, no. 1 (1997): 1-22
• Flew, T. (2008). New Media: An Introduction (3rd Ed.). Melbourne: Oxford University Press.

´Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system in a global embrace, abolishing  both space and time as far as our planet is concerned’ ( McLu1964: p.3).  Global Village can be described as how the globe has been changing into a village of technology. In the present day you can send immediate information to the other part of the world, and it will take just seconds to be reader.  This technology brings the idea of having a global community, due to the velocity we communicate online and the ability for people to spread   and react to international news. This involves human to keep in touch   and be aware of global issues. Internet been the fastest communication device today, links together people from the same village (same physical space) as well as people at the other side of the world.  This leads to a situation where we have to be aware and take responsibilities on a global level rather than just in our bubble.

Today we are talking about how networking allows information and knowledge to be free from the oppression of the individual.  Networks allow interaction, participation and this leads to the concept collective intelligence.  As more people use this service, the more it grows up. Face book for example: “Helps you connect and share with the people in your life”. Before its target market was teen now the fastest growing rate are 35 years old and others. Same with twitter, each time more and more people are joining bringing groups together to discover and create value.  So this two concepts global village and collective intelligence, what does they tell us?  Working together and collaborating for the same issue for the result of   something?  Eventually the sum of the parts is greater than the parts themselves.  

Focusing on my profession marketing and corporate communication I thought it could be an interesting idea to see how both terms have and are going to influence my field.  . For example in the company I am aiming to work back in Ecuador, I have seen how the internal and external communication has changed. Confiteca  was the first chewing gun factory with exclusive patents trademark from USA.  Their vision is not only producing to Ecuador, thus Europe and the States. With the help of the new applications which facilitate interact with other users or to change website for example Skype, face book, hotmail etc the communication it’s easier. These days, there is no need to fly and have a conference for example in Germany, because with the technology communication is faster and efficient. In the future while corporations expand, the opportunity to facilitate workers, so they can perform their jobs as more active decision maker is going to be huge.  Vast number of people all over the planet are working together and coming with new ideas. This show how confiteca is going to change in many ways, people will start behaving as a global village, trying to help each other, rather than working for their own country. Implementing new internal and external communications is the key for the good performance.

Digital convergence is all about gaining consumer recognition and selling; it’s all about new marketing, my profession of seeling products and services to people.  “Consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content “(Jenkins 1992).  While more people go online, more marketers place ads online.  Marketer’s goal is also to find new ways of targeting our services and products in the internet.  Looking at some statistics:

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (2006) announced that Internet advertising revenue totalled close to $12 billion in 2005, up 51% from 2000 revenue. At the same time, traditional media are losing revenue to the Internet. Broadcast television networks, down25% from 2000 revenue, suffered the most; whereas newspapers made 7% less than in 2000. ((Fetscherin & Knolmayer, 2004). The new digital media is growing up very strong, its time to encourage different ways to target consumers through the internet.  Even tough there has been many criticism about portion of online news is its content. 58% of the stories under study were wire copy without any editing, secondly, one third of the stories, produced by the Web staff, were largely second-hand materials borrowed from their traditional media counterparts. Finally online new still has not taken advantage of multimedia components and interactive functions. (Porter, 2001).  It is important to understand traditional marketing and its objectives to operate the 4 P’s. Product, price, promotion and placement and sell later your service or product to the market.  As new media has also continued in both the business-to-business and the business-to-consumer sectors using the Internet for online marketing. Online marketing may either replace or increase traditional marketing modes, which include the use of other media and direct contact with potential or already identified customers (Pride & Ferrell, 1987, p. 111).  It is vital to understand the importance of the traditional media marketing so the new media can be introduces properly in the new market.  As Hirst & Harrison said Convergence, of course, means that instead of going to the movies, the movies can come to you (Jeffrey E. Brand 2009). Now whatever service or product that you need to purchase, you don’t have to wait until marketers advertise and sell it to you, with the new convergence media, you just go online and most likely the information will be already there.

It is important to understand the evolution of new media in society. But I think it’s not a matter of picking the best between traditional vs new media.  Understanding how to implement both in different occasion its what is valid.

Reference List

Flew, T. (2008). New Media: An Introduction (3rd. Ed.). Melbourne: Oxford University Press.

Fetscherin, M., & Knolmayer, G. (2004). Business models for content delivery: An empirical analysis of the newspaper and magazine industry. The International Journal on Media Management, 6, 4–11.

Huang J, Heider D. Media Convergence: A Case Study of a Cable News Station. JMM: the International Journal on Media Management [serial online]. July 2007;9(3):105-115. Available from: Communication & Mass Media Complete, Ipswich, MA. Accessed October 6, 2009.

Kurpius, D. D. (2002). Sources and civic journalism: Changing

patterns of reporting? Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly,

79, 853–866.

Porter, M. E. (2001). Strategy and the Internet. Harvard BusinessReview, 79(3), 62–78.