Have you ever notice that the adverting on supermarket trolleys and toilet walls or floors? Can you remember any one of them? I can not.

Ambient media are unconventional and unorthodox media and these media strategies are quite new. A key element in using ambient media is that surprise getting at the consumer attention when least expected and cost (shimp, 2007). As a result, the new way and new locations are constantly being invented or reinvented.

Today many communication strategic approaches involve finding ways of blending brand messages into the target audience’s lifestyle or mind by selection of formats and locations carefully that get close to the audience (Fill, 2005).

I think ambient media are usually connecting with public relations, and they are very sufficiently to generate public relations coverage and reduce the adverting cost. There is an example in Leeds Met University library, about lest week some of my friends told me in Leeds Met library we can use photocopying for free. However, one condition is that we need to use the specific paper to copying which has a full advertisement in the back of the paper. From my point of view, this is a quite clever way to advertising, the company use ambient media strategy to generate students attention and than student might help them to spread the message by word of mouth to increase their public relations coverage. 

Reading list

Shimp, T. A.(2007) Integrated marketing communication in advertising and promotion U.S.A., Thomson

Corporation.  Fill, C. (2005) Marketing communication – engagement, strategies and practice London, Pearson Education Limited.

 

New information and communications technology are allowing people to become creators as well as consumers, and providing them with the platform for everyone to exchange their information and messages between people and or ganizations. This chance to demonstrate individual creativity is resonating with people. The growth of blogging in the UK shows the popularity of using new technology to express personal views, experiences and beliefs. However, this situation is seeing a blurring of the lines between the “creator” and the “consumer”, because people take something form it and they also create something back.

My personal feel, the best way to understand this sharing behaviour is through the open source thinking. A director opinion leader in Market Research Society, Graeme Trayner said, the open source thinking comes from the sphere of information technology and computer programming. In contrast to a computer programme where the designers hold tightly to control of the source code, open source programmes are open to everyone test, check and to add to (Trayner, n.d).  

IT thinker Eric Raymond compares the difference between open source and close source (e.g. library) as a cathedral and a bazaar. He said: “a cathedral relies on central command and control, a bazaar operates on the basis of a myriad of conversations, discussions and dealings (Raymond, 1999).”

 

(source: TheOpenForce.com)

Open source is about everyone having the potential and right to create, and to be recognized for that creativity. In addition, successful open source initiatives are based on “communities of co-creation” (Cottam and Leadbeater, 2004). From an organizational point of view, it is about giving up of control in order to achieve better results than the organization could achieve on its own. The Wikipedia has operating on an open source basis is a good example of open source thinking.

New techniques have continuing to reflect this new open source world. From business man point of view, as Zuboff and Maxmin (2002) claim that “for business to succeed in the future, they must meet people’s need for their identity to be recognized, their voices to be heard, and for respect to be given”.

To me, as a marketing student I would suggest that we should constantly seek out the ways to meet these needs, and use people’s imagination and creativity to make profit for the company. In my mind, open source (thinking) is no longer refer to “you have got to set your ideas free, but you can not control your content”.

  (←press me)    This is an online questionnaire for this article which is relate to ”Wiki”. After you read my article, please do not hesitate to join this little exercise. I believe that when the result come out, we can understand more peoples’ opinion and learn something together through this little activity.

( I do know some of  Marketing students are hate  questionnaire, but in here just only 6 questions in this exercise, again please do try.)

PS: If you are interesting, you can look at reading list below! 

Reading List 

Hilary, C. & Charles, L.(2004) Red Paper 01: Health: Co-Creating Services. London: Design Council. 

Raymond, S. (1999) The Cathedral and The Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media. 

Shoshana, Z. & James, M. (2002) The Support Economy: Why Corporations are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism. London: Penguin.. 

Trayner, G. (n.d.)[omline] From Passive Consumers to Active Creators- Market Research Society Annual Conference, 2006 Available at: http://www.warc.com/Search/WordSearch/Results.asp [Accessed 24 Feb, 2008]

 

The global managing director for Nielsen’s Customized Research Services said, “Advertisers around the world are able to reach consumers across an increasingly diverse range of media platforms.” The vast majority of people are still looking for the most effective media channels to reach thier target audience, TV or internet? 

According to a globe recent survey done by the Nielsen company shows, today the most powerful selling tool is “word of mouth” communication. In general, consumers trust other consumers! 78% of respondents said they trusted-either completely or somewhat–the recommendation of other consumers (compare with newspaper 63%, consumer options posted online 61%). Traditional media fare reasonably well, but online and mobile phone advertisers are not to be trusted (The Nielsen company). This survey also shows us the average level of consumers’ trust in advertising in UK was 49%. It seems to be advertising is dying, because less and less people are trusted in advertising. Today, using PR to build up a relationship between companies and consumers is unavoidable. 

Maybe someone think that PR just only one part of marketing promotion, but I would say public relations has already become a powerful communication tool in today, people will know that PR not just only about how to build up a relationship, is about a management function, interactive, planned and public interest. Indeed, PR is about long term relationships rather than short term. 

 

Webblogs and home pages have provided a place to people exchange their opinions or information across the world, in all languages from English to Mandarin. In 1996 the world’s first blog (Xanga) was launched. By the following year it had 100 diaries. Today, 80% of home pages and blogs are in English, with the next largest language, German, totaling 4.5% and Japanese third with 3.1%. But the stats cannot capture adequately the dynamic in today. Mandarin (837 million speakers) and Hindi (182 million speakers), are already having a significant impact on globe internet network (The World Advertising Research Center, WARC).

Manuel Zebeida is the founder and managing director of Press Index. Inc. said:“While it might be expected that English will consolidate its position as the lingua franca of the internet, it also seems clear that a concurrent explosion in the amount of information and data will be expressed in other languages. By 2020, English may no longer be dominant language on the internet.”

Today web 2.0 also challenges the traditionally accepted notion on the English language dominates and governs the internet. From my point of view, internet and webblog are so globally, it can not be dominant by one specific language, besides because natural instincts people are more likely to read and search information in their first language. As a result, it will be necessary for many companies to serious about building up PR to have the capacity to go through in different cultures and languages.

It just my opinion, what is yours……………………?

There is one intersting article in BusinessWeek.

 

I quite enjoy blogging and I love sharing my personal opinions and what I’ve learned so far. But how can we use public relations to work in the blog? When I start to write somethings down in my blog, I found this is difficult to spread the messages and let people know your opinions or ideas. Even they know, are you sure that those conversations on your blog are honest and truthful? Would you willing to help strangers to answer the questions they had made in your blog, even you want to help them and try to maintain the relationship between you and your influencers, and how can we deal with the problems like, how should we deal with negative posts? How do we measure how we influence the influencers?

Tom Foremski former news reporters think that the best way to build up a good relationship with people in your blogosphere is to get involved in the online conversations either by blogging, monitoring, or commenting (Silicon Valley Watcher).

 I agree with his opinion, because before I try to making online conversations with different bloggers, I have to understand the context of each blog and how it fits into its online communities. And I can only do that by being involved in those communities, online and offline.  

 

Public relations (PR) is often confused to me with advertising, merchandising, promotion, or any of a dozen other buzz words in the marketing communications vocabulary. Now I just begin to study this area and starting to know the power of public relations is much more than that……..

In 1976, Rex Harlow scoured through 472 definitions of public relations and come out with this, “Public Relations is a distinctive management function which establish and maintain mutual lines of communication, understanding, acceptance and co-operation between an organization and its publics.”(Theaker, A. 2004) 

It would seem to me, “Public Relations” is about doing something newsworthy that you want to communicate, and then telling your audience what you have done. And, that is a field devoted to the study and development of communication in nowadays society. It has always been with us, in some form or another. Wherever people have sought to understand and improve the ways in which they communicate.  

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