Kate's IMS voice

Not as bad as telephones though...

2007-02-18T15:27:00.000-08:00

I just wanted to add to the last entry that email automated responses aren't as bad as when you're stuck on the telephone with automated messages.

And I think this feeling spreads accross all generations. Apparently telephone calling is also the most intrusive so this goes hand in hand I guess.

(on that note too, I'm not a total cold caller at work, which I don't think I could do EVER)

Automated bloody responses!

2007-02-18T15:15:00.000-08:00

So how annoying is it when companies send through automated responses?! Personally, I think VERY annoying.

From doing the task this week I actually got a suprisingly painless response from BT when I emailed (via a form) the simple question 'when is the next bill due?'. It took them two days to reply, firstly with a response saying someone will be in touch and then finally with a fairly personalised brief response with the exact information I needed. Great!

Why was I so suprised at this though? I think we have all had our share of awful responses from companies, following on from my phishing experience with PayPal and me leaving a long complaint style feedback comment on closing my account... I have heard nothing. How rude I feel! Also not impressed such a big company doesn't have a UK office.

Anyway all this though regarding automated responses from companies fell on a week where at work (a telesales person at a financial company) I had a customer request I send through the pdfs of the savings plan information via email because after having sent it in the post for the 4th time, it had still not reached him!

So there I was having to write an email to this customer, something we haven't really done before probably down to lack of initiative and not wanting to hand over any kind of power from the marketing manager. Anywho, I crafted a fairly striaght forward email referring to the conversation we had had and attaching all the information required (which thankfully had only just come in). I also added a bit of sarcasm in there about the reliable postal service, but asked me team leader if it was appropriate and she thought so. Obivously being a financial service I had to include some note about the fact I couldnt give advice etc but overall I was pleased with the email and actually felt like I was delivering a bit more of a service to someone.

Let's hope I go in tomorrow and he has emailed back asking me to call him so I can set up loads of savings plans for him and all his family! Wonder if being personalised and able to respond to individual requests will pay off?

I'll let you know...

Blogs on the run!

2007-02-12T05:29:00.000-08:00

Quote from article in Brand Republic - Blogs on the run!

"it's likely that millions of users will prefer to "blog on the run" from a mobile phone rather than sit patiently at a computer terminal in order to share their thoughts with the outside world."

Judging by my last two blog entries posted here via my mobile phone, I agree with the comment above and can see how people will be more inclined to blog in this way as they adopt newer mobile phones with the capabilities of shortcuts to blogging.

I also think that personally as I spend the majority of my day in front of the computer doing work, and expect this is what my job will entail, I won't want to come home at the end of the day and think 'oh quick, I must blog my thoughts and feelings from today'.

Being interested in photography as well, I much prefer capturing images on my phone when I'm on the go and sending them to my blog.

Snow!

2007-02-08T14:46:00.000-08:00

When in doubt make a snow man!

Gran's garden

2007-02-08T14:42:00.000-08:00

Blessed with snow!

Interesting fact on UGC - 1% rule

2007-02-01T05:18:00.000-08:00

Thought this could also be applied to the forum for IMC perhaps... hate to admit that I'm one of the passive consumers of it.

The "One per cent Rule" is a concept derived from usage behaviour analysis of user-generated content (UGC) and social networking websites where one per cent of the audience will actively create and submit content, nine per cent will moderate it editorially, and the rest are happy simply to passively consume it.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/13/iptv_vod_briefing/page3.html

End of the road with eBay for time being!

2007-01-31T08:49:00.000-08:00

Well my reflections on eBay after having read my emails today have gone right down.

To my shock I had an email from PayPal today asking me to confirm I wanted to pay the $699 to Dell Inc someone in America had registered! A little bit concerning to say the least seeing as I had not been on either eBay or PayPay since November 2006 so as a result I immediately cancelled my PayPal account which leaves me in difficult position to purchase things from eBay.

Interesting that I immediately associate PayPal with eBay as I guess it could have come from somewhere else? There is no activity on my eBay account related to any Dell computers but either way I would rather not hang around and then have to sort out trying to claim the $699 back etc.

I also feel that now I am not at all likely to purchase things from eBay as it seems like a lot of effort to have to send a cheque etc to the seller and from the bits of experience I have had on the site, I imagine sellers would not be that much inclined to sell this way? I would also then run the risk of not getting the items etc and not being able to cancel the cheque in time.

Suddenly it seems like eBay has gone all complicated on me and not so trust worthy anymore!

Snakes on a plane quote for the weekend and perhaps this term...

2007-01-21T11:35:00.000-08:00

Time is tissue people!

Rocky Balboa quote...

2007-01-21T11:33:00.001-08:00

Let me tell you something you already know.

The world ain't all sunshine and rainbows. It is a very mean and nasty place and it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it.

You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life.

But it ain't how hard you hit; it's about how hard you can get hit, and keep moving forward. How much you can take, and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done.

Now, if you know what you're worth, then go out and get what you're worth.

But you gotta be willing to take the hit, and not pointing fingers saying you ain't where you are because of him, or her, or anybody. Cowards do that and that ain't you.

You're better than that!

I love this! Reflection on MySpace

2007-01-08T06:42:00.000-08:00

Well, whilst reading relentlessly for my dissertation which is about current attitudes towards advertising as an institution, I came accross the following quote which is from the view that advertising is perhaps a negative thing inducing materialistic values in society.

On first reading of this, I immediately thought of MySpace... see what you think....

'The objectification of self has been explicitly described in personality theory as a "marketing orientation", where a person is mannered for mercenary motivations and has a detatched view of self as a commodity.

'In this orientation, man experiences himself as a thing to be employed successfully on the market. He does not experience himself as an active agent, as the bearer of human powers. He is alienated from these powers. His aim is to sell himself successfully on the market... His body, his mind, and his soul are his captial, and his task in life is to invest it favourably, to make a profit of himself. Human qualities like friendliness, courtesy, kindness, are transformed into commodities, into assets of the "personality package", conducive to a higher price on the personality market'."

And the most interesting thing I find about this... it was written in 1955!

Source - Fromm, 1955, p140 cited in Pollay, 1986, p25.

Xmas tree star

2006-12-29T03:31:00.000-08:00

Xmas tree

2006-12-29T03:29:00.000-08:00

Thinking about the blog even over xmas. Maybe its the guilt of not having sent anything for a while...? Merry xmas tho x

Blogging from my mobile!

2006-12-15T03:06:00.001-08:00

Well, have been sent a new upgrade phone from my mobile provider - 3 - and whilst playing around with it have discovered I can send things straight to a blog.

Great! Now I can blog on the go! Woohoo. Not sure if this will make me more prone to blog but as you can see I can send pictures to it for free (I think/hope) so will try and post some more interesting posts.

Here's my first picture - windows - my view as I wake up in the morning. Let the light shine through!!!

Now I can see more of a use for blogs. I take a lot of photos on my mobile and having just got the new phone I have finally been able to transfer them to the computer whereas before it just wouldn't work. To be able to blog photos directly onto the net will mean I can share them more readliy which is a plus for me.

So look forward to some more photos...

BOOK: LASN, K - Culture Jam

2006-11-30T08:14:00.000-08:00

An interesting quote about the post modern family and their realisation of reliance on technology when presented with 'real':

'The post modern family, out there in the woods trying to bond, can't adapt to real time, real trees and real conversation, because real life has become alien landscape. Mom and Dad can't navigate in it. No one really feels they belong. No one feels any sense of purpose. The spaced-out daughter is alive when she is in front of the TV, and the mopey son is alive when he is surfing the net, and Mom and Dad are alive when they're at work. Meanwhile, in real, hairy-ass nature, concrete things keep intruding on their consciousness, breaking their media trance: the rumble of the nearby creek, the prick of mosquitoes on their ankles, the subsequent sight of their blood.

Living inside the postmodern spectacle has changed people. Figuratively, most of us spend the majority of our time in some etheral place created from fantasy and want. After a while, the hypperreality of this place comes to seem normal. Garishness, volume, glitz, sleazy excess - "the libido of the ugly" - becomes second nature. 'The environment consists of what you see around you - the ambient spectacle. Occasionally, you'll bump into an outsider bearing tales of that other environment, the one you may have known.

The moment you fail to understand why the natural world might have relevance in the day-to-day lives of human beings, you become 'a lost ball in the high weeds.' Abandon nature and you abandon your sense of the divine. More than that, you lose track of who you are.'

Is this perhaps why our course leader has challenged us to the '3 peak challenge'.... I wonder?!

My online behaviour

2006-11-26T10:27:00.000-08:00

[This is a post I made to the IMS forum on the CEMP website following on from a lecture on online behaviour]

So what have I been doing online this week?

Well, for a start, Sunday seems to be the day that I spend the longest continual time on the internet, so apologies I am only just getting round to posting now. I have to say that perhaps the time I spend on the internet has slightly decreased this year, at least for personal surfing. I seem to spend more time now using the online databases for looking up journals etc and even when I do find a journal I want to read, I will almost always opt to print it out instead of read it on the computer screen.

Although I seem to go online mainly for uni research purposes, I will go through the same sort of routine before getting to what I actually intended to do. This basically includes checking my two email accounts - hotmail and the uni one - which is really the main personal purpose I have for the net. I used to always automatically log in to messenger when my computer started but I changed this as I found it caused too much distraction and although I quite enjoy talking online, it would take up soooo much time.

I have recently joined a whole load of social networking sites, which has been prompted by the 'course requirements'. I don't think I would have landed at the sites otherwise unless perhaps recommended by friends (WOM again). 3 of my housemates are currently obsessed with Facebook and have used the words 'I'm addicted' when refering to it. I have joined Facebook and yeh, it's interesting but I do find it odd that you have to send out requests to get people to be your 'friend'. I also struggle with the fact that mostly people's friend on there are people you see every day - so why not just ask them something face to face instead of posting comments? Whatever happened to conversation? Oh, also someone who has the same name as me asked me to be thier friend, which I found a little odd.

Another thing that has annoyed me lately is the number of passwords I have to remember as a result of being on all these various sites. The number of times I have had to send requests asking the sites to re-send my password is just getting annoying. But then, I also think that if write them down somewhere then someone else could get hold of them, log in and vandalise my spaces! Perhaps a little cynical?! With these kind of sites as well, I find that mostly people from school contact you, and it's usually all the people you don't really want to talk and I wonder if they do it just so they can say 'I now have 56 friends on myspace'. Does it make people feel better to have this kind of benchmark?

I do use online banking quite a lot and probably check my accounts once a week online. I find the service pretty good and trust that all the reporting is correct. This service is really useful to me and I am more than happy to pay bills online etc. Although saying that I tried to renew my car tax online this week and after trying three times and getting a 'technical fault' message, I had to revert to calling up the automated telephone service which for some reason I am more dubious about when giving card details etc.

In conclusion, I really only use the internet for communication purposes and have been known to download the odd music track for free. I am comfortable using the internet for services such as banking or buying insurance and will occasionally shop online for clothes or shoes.

JOURNAL - Corporate blogging strategies

2006-11-13T12:42:00.000-08:00

LEE, S., HWANG, T., & LEE, H. (2006) Coporate blogging strategies of the Fortune 500 companies. Management Decision 44 (3) p316-334.

So in the last post I summarised my own feelings about blogging and what I think I can use it for but perhaps more interestingly, this journal investigates how companies are using blogs to capture and engage with consumers and employees.

A corporate blog might be defined as a web site where an organisation publishes and manages content to attain its goals.

"A "blog" - short for "web log" - is a web page that serves as a publicly accessible personal journal for an individual (Blood, 2002). Because the blog can be used to convey various types of information, such as personal, public, commercial, and political, it has become an effective communication tool over the internet."

There are a lack of rules that govern the blogsphere and it has been termed as today's 'Wild West' (Jones, 2005).

If an organisation adopts employee blogs then this automatically raises the issue of control - but then if control is present on a blog is this really the true voice of the employees and does this acutally add anything to the business? In the worst case scenario however, some employees have been fired over blogs they have written eg: a Delta Air Lines flight attendant lost her job because she posted photos of herself in her uniform on her blog which the airline felt were 'inappropriate and an unauthorised use of Delta branding'.

Types of corporate blogs
The authors of this article suggest 5 types of different corporate blogs:

(1) Employee blog - a personal blog that is maintained by a single rank-and-file employee. Can be hosted on commercial sites or (as is the case increasingly now) can be hosted on company-owned domains as more companies are officially sponsoring employee blogging.

(2) Group blog - written be several people, this type of blog is also known as a collaborative blog. Usually focus on a specific topic and contributors are experts on the topic.

(3) Executive blog - 'when top executives appear in the blogsphere, thier blogs generate instant traffic and can be an effective tool to establish a direct connection with stakeholders'. In the current business environment it is believed that top-level executives should be more transparent and disclose more information than ever before.

(4) Promotional blog - purpose is to generate buzz about products and events. This type can be controversial largely due to the lack of an authentic human voice. One of the first attempts of this type of blogs was for Dr Pepper/Seven Up's Raging Cow blog, which was supposedly written by its cow mascot. The company hired several young bloggers and aksed them to promote its new milk beverage "Raging Cow" via thier personal blogs. This strategy was severly criticised as being deceptive and one blogger even proposed a product boycott (Gallagher, 2003).

(5) Newsletter blog - some organisations have launched a newsletter type blog that officially represents their positions. They cover a variety of news such as company news and product information.

Where's all the blogging gone?

2006-11-13T12:34:00.000-08:00

Ooops! Almost 4 weeks later, here I am back again to write the second entry for my blog. Not quite 'every week' as intended. So why haven't I been blogging?

Well for a start I wasn't entirely sure what a blog was until I started this course. Yes, I have heard of them, but haven't had the drive or opportunity to embrace the blogging hemisphere and therefore haven't grasped what they are all about. So making this a course requirement is definitely a good thing and perhaps one of the reasons I haven't been on here blogging regularly is because I have been off reading, reading and reading. Anyway, now is as good a time as ever to stop thinking and actually start doing ('think - feel - do' right?).

So the purpose of a blog is to act as an online journal or diary of events. I have been thinking about this quite a bit over the past few weeks and have been trying to figure out if I would actually find a use for blogs outside of the course requirement. I have thought of at least two situations that I could use a blog for;

a) to diarise a holiday or gap year. I am going to Australia in December 2007 and I would definitely like to keep a blog along the journey so that family and friends can keep updated about what we are up to.

b) to log useful information I learn on the course that could be used when I enter the world of working. I was thinking that if I made a conscious effort to blog all the notes I have made over the length of the course then this could act as a great source of information for when I am out working and need to refresh on theory or learnings.

So, in sum I can see this blogging lark becoming something that will be of use to me in a personal context. Whether I would find the time to blog on a weekly basis or whether I had the need to is a different matter. I guess what is important for this blog is that it is going to be a learning curve for me and it will give me a voice (which I still don't make the most of in lesson time, an alergy I seem to always have had) where I can express my views on the subject of IMS and what I see happening with the digital landscape which is actually of real interest to me.

Introduction to my blog

2006-10-19T03:58:00.000-07:00

Well hello!

You have found my IMS blog which I intend to update weekly and relay any information I have learnt about IMS.

Just to clarify at this point that IMS is not some horrible disease! It is an acronym for Interactive Media Strategies, one of the units I am studying in my third and final year on the Advertising and Marketing Communications degree at Bournemouth university.

Effectively this blog will be a diary for me to log important and interesting pieces of information I pick up along the way. It will include both academic points of interest as well as industry and personal views on the area of interactive media strategies.

I hope you enjoy!

Kate