Digital Frontiers

Leonardo's Pepperoni Pizza

A quick look at Leonardo’s Pizza By The Slice shows their menu and lists all the pizzas they make, and when I clicked the pepperoni pizza link, a picture of a slice sent me back to my freshman year, when I had my first slice of Leonardo’s Pizza. I remembered how crispy and crunchy the crust was, how salty the pepperoni tasted, and washing it all down with an ice cold Sierra Mist, and it made my mouth water.

For the term project, our objective is to create an online marketing plan for Leonardo’s Pizza. A quick Google search for “Leonardo’s Pizza Gainesville” yields a simplistic website that is basically Leonardo’s only online presence, aside from reviews on Yelp (which was probably not done by Leonardo’s themselves). What I hope to accomplish through this term project is to make Leonardo’s more well known throughout the Gainesville community, especially for the prospective and incoming freshman and their families. I want them to have the same mouth-watering experience I had in my freshman year.

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What The F**k Is Social Media

This presentation uses statistics and analogies to show how social media has penetrated our society and culture. Some of the more interesting facts were Obama’s supporters who used social networks, and if Facebook were a country it would be the 8th largest in the world. Social media is becoming so engrained into our culture and is rapidly changing everything we thought used to be. Marketers can no longer rely on one-way communication to advertise their products, and that peer reviews and word of mouth are so much more valuable to a company than traditional advertising.

I think that in the next years we will see a Darwin’s Theory of Evolution type of change, where the old-thinking companies and organizations die out, and the strong will remain. Those companies and organizations who realize that social media is here to stay, and adapt and modify their marketing strategies, will survive.

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Digital Strangelove

This presentation shows how social media and the internet is changing everything about our culture, from how we interact, how we find new products to buy, how we express ourselves through new mediums. Though telephones, cameras, and gramophones were invented years ago, we did not come up with real uses for them until many years later. The Internet is only 40 years old, and 15 years as we know it; there is no way we have come up with all possible and useful uses for the Internet, and more uses will come as we go. The strictly one-way communication from marketers to consumers is changing to two-way communication between marketers and consumers, and amongst consumers themselves.

I think that marketers will have to realize that they cannot rely on the old model: telling customers what products they should buy. They will have to instead create a community around their product, and use word of mouth and social media to advertise their products.

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What I think that the lesson to take away from both of these presentations is that what we thought marketing was (television advertisements, magazine full-pages, etc) has moved to an online-centered discussion. Word of mouth and peer reviews are more important to consumers than any television ad can be. Personally, I trust reviews of products on YouTube more than I would a TV ad.

We are quickly moving from a “Paid+Later” model to a “Free+Now” model, where things such as streaming music with Pandora have become highly popular as opposed  to pirating music with sites such as ThePirateBay.org. Companies are now offering their products for free, and building a case for a product with “premium” features, such as Pandora, who offers free streaming with ads, with the option to pay to remove ads. Traditional media companies are being forced to rethink their entire marketing strategies, as content moves to the “cloud.” It is no longer the writer reporting on a story and there be no discussion, but now news stories and editorials are able to be commented on, creating an exchange between writer and reader.

It will be interesting to see how social media will rapidly change the way we interact with each other. Only time will tell.

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